Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(79)

“I’m going to leave the Nutcracker downstairs to defend you, my dear. That’s why I brought him. You’re in the finest hands. He’s a very capable soldier.”

“He is an old man with a white beard.”

“He is a young man inside, and strong.”

“Fritz broke his jaw.” She began to cry a little. “The Nutcracker might have helped, but nothing can help.”

“Nonsense. He merely needs to be bolstered. He needs a token to remind him what he is fighting for. That’s why I came up. A soldier or a knight always likes to have a memento of his beloved when he goes into battle. I wanted to borrow a ribbon of yours. I will bind up his jaw with it, as we do when we have a bad tooth. Tomorrow morning I will come back with a pot of glue and make him all better. And you will be better, too. I insist.”

Klara didn’t say anything for a long time. Drosselmeier thought she might have fallen back to sleep. But then she said, “A pink tape came off one of my dancing slippers. If you think that would do, you will find it on the chest of drawers with a bobbin of thread. No one has had the time to fix it yet.”

“This will do nicely,” he said. It was cool and smooth, and in the half-light of the lowered gas lamp the pink ribbon took on the color of a French-German child’s inner forearm. He coiled it in his palm. “Klara.”

She didn’t speak, but opened her eyes.

“I hope Fritz doesn’t ever touch you.”

“Of course he touches me. We fight all the time.”

“But never more than that. Don’t ever let him. Will you promise me that?”

“What are you asking her to promise?” asked Clothilde, appearing at the doorway. “I thought you’d be here. This won’t do at all. You must leave at once.”





93.


His workshop looked cold and abandoned. He passed through it without turning a Teutonic knight on his horse to face a different damsel, without rearranging a wood-and-plaster set of the Brementown musicians. It was as if all figures of play were frozen if there wasn’t to be a child like Klara to inspire them to life.

The building was chillier than usual because he’d been out most of the afternoon and evening and let the fire die down. He dressed for sleeping and he piled extra blankets and an old coat on top of the bed. Sometimes at night he read by the light of a candle—he had the new tales of Andersen in translation, and something called A Christmas Carol by that Englishman everyone went on about. But he had set the book aside at the Ghost of Christmas Past. It wasn’t the ghost that was improbable, but the possibility of a happy past.

He blew out the candle.

Klara has my childhood, he thought. She is my childhood brought forward, the one that died in me.

And he enjoyed at last a small spasm of something he’d rarely noticed in himself: understanding.

So that’s why I’ve spent my life making toys.

He tossed and turned to keep warm. He thought of the girl’s clever imagination, its readiness to receive a serving of story. It isn’t only Klara, of course, but that fine-grained soil of childhood itself that can receive a seed of mystery and recognize when it starts to flower.

Midnight bells announcing the sacred day. Somewhere, a skirmish of mice and toys raged back and forth across a parlor floor.

If he did sleep, he didn’t mark the passage by dreaming. Dream may be many other things besides, but at its heart it is the primary proof of sleep. In dreams, as he had heard people say over and over, the world is rearranged. Battles are fought, and refought; the terms of life are overturned, reinterpreted; the columns of figures add up to new answers.

Klara could walk along the coast at Meritor hand in hand with her godfather and with Fritz and chatter for twenty minutes about where she had been in her dreams the night before, until Fritz got bored and began to pitch stones at the seagulls, and Klara’s recitation eventually trailed off. The dreams never seemed to crest to a finale, like an opera. They failed, perhaps for lack of energy or, perhaps, due to Klara’s inability to remember.

Admittedly, Drosselmeier had rarely had a dream in his life worth remembering upon waking. All his visions, were they visions, had visited him on some flooring other than ordinary sleep. Yet across that floor rolled a walnut, containing a secret vision sacred to some child or other.





94.


As invited, Godfather Drosselmeier arrived at the Stahlbaum residence shortly before luncheon on Christmas Day.

“Ach, things went from bad to worse in the middle of the night, but they’ve stabilized this morning,” said Sebastian, pouring a cup of whipped eggnog for the old man. “Fritz is glazed with greed and pleasure, and Klara’s fever seems to have broken overnight, despite her misadventures.”

“Oh?” Drosselmeier tried not to bolt from the parlor and head up the stairs. Though in any case he wasn’t much for bolting these ways. The word would have to be creak or toddle.

He turned, studying Sebastian to distract himself from the curiosity about Klara’s evening. He noted the way Sebastian’s chin and lower lip seemed newly segmented—in fact, just the way the jaw of a wooden Nutcracker slips into the casing of its cheeks. Those lines running from the corners of his nostrils along the sides of his mouth. Worry was aging Sebastian. And if he is aging, though Drosselmeier, remembering the first time he himself had been brought to this house by Felix, and met that galloping boy in these rooms, the same is true for me. Elderly, but not wise. An old fool.