Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(82)

“Who mourns a toy maker? Toys get broken, and so do their makers.”

Sebastian was silent. They sat alone in the chapel. “I’m not quite sure a Protestant burial is the right thing,” he said finally. “But I never heard him profess any sort of faith, really.”

“He was raised by a minister somewhere south of here, wasn’t he? That’s evidence enough. Besides, he was godfather to our children.”

“Yes. But what god or gods did he represent to them?”

Clothilde had no answer for that. “Klara will be distraught to hear about this when she is back from her honeymoon.”

“I’m glad there’s no way to reach her for another week. Let us see the old man to his grave. It is something we can do for our young bride.”

As the minister entered for the service, the side door opened and Fritz slipped in, too. He knelt upon the stone floor for a moment and his shoulders shook with a wretched sort of abandon. Then he took a seat next to his mother. The stone walls of the chapel closed them all in, a prelude to mausoleum finality, though the eternal sky through colorless panes appeared to make an argument otherwise. Exalting, if ultimately unpersuasive.





Coda





Hiddensee




All her life Klara was gifted with dreams and pestered by them, too.

She enjoyed a full-throated if perhaps innocuous life. She outlived her own children and lost several of her grandsons in the Great War, by which point her daytime memory failed her completely. She used to sit and look out at the few remaining linden trees next to the third-hand Daimler that belonged to the upstairs tenants. She was too deaf to hear the occasional ruckus of brownshirts in the streets.

When she was failing and needed removal to an asylum for the elderly, her surviving grandchildren cleared out the several ground-floor rooms in the old family house in Munich to which she had been reduced.

There were too many copies of her stories, printed in German journals and also translated into English. Those of Klara’s tales that had been collected and published in fine gift editions at the turn of the century were set aside for younger generations of the family. They were children’s stuff. Sweet gingery old pfeffernusse that she was, Klara had had a life, after all, and someday someone might want to read through the nicer volumes of what remained of Gro?mutter Klara’s work and see if there was anything worth remembering. The rest was tinder.

If you were standing on the landing of the stairs, you could see the grandchildren—Felix’s great-great-grandchildren!—bringing the literature to the flame. The stacks of old St. Nicholas magazines made a glorious bloom in the bonfire. That bookburning was also going on that season in the Konigsplatz was a coincidence upon which no one remarked.

The night before she died, her last night on earth, Klara had a particularly vivid dream. It was like a dream she’d had before, though maybe in different form. It seemed familiar. It began in the yellow parlor of her childhood. Mice, and a grotesque huge ugly doll-child, and small carved figurines, Citizens from Around the World, some set or other. The dream included toy soldiers, and a rampage of wild mice that were more like wolves, really. And a nutcracker. The battle was joined and won, and Klara went on to visit a serenely peculiar and fitting land in which food and drink, music and dance, love and laughter were cunningly made all of a single piece, somehow.

This part of the dream Klara had had before, but the next part was new.

She understood this much, that she would have no words to tell anyone about it when she woke up. She’d been beyond words for some time now. She didn’t know that, in fact, she would never entirely wake up after this.

Still, the dream.

She was a child at her grandfather’s house up at the sea. Meritor. In actuality she hadn’t been there in over half a century, and who knew if it even still stood or if it had fallen down the battered bluffs. In her dream she wasn’t tall enough to reach the handle to the front door. She couldn’t get out. The house was growing spooky, dark as a tomb, and she needed to go out into the open, but she couldn’t get out.

Then she realized she had the Nutcracker crooked in her arm. She held him up as high as she could, and he reached up and worked the latch and turned the knob. The door swung open, and they both stepped over the sill.

A stiff wind was howling around the corner of the house. The sky was bright and cloudless but not quite blue—rather more like mother-of-pearl. She could stand and look one way and then the other, to see if anyone was coming along the strand. No one was.

She saw the spit of Rügen descending from the north, on the right-hand side of the horizon. After a stretch of open water, she saw the island of Hiddensee on her left. She had always meant to go there, but it had never yet happened.

She walked to the edge of the water. The Nutcracker looked up at her with a quizzical expression. She took out a key and inserted it into a buttonhole on his fancy red coat, and his breastplate opened in two halves like a severed walnut falling apart at the seam. It was empty as a drawer at the end of summer when she was all packed to return from Meritor and go to school.

She took Godfather Drosselmeier out of her apron pocket and said, I guess this is where you go. He was very small, like the toys she used to have when she was little. Only three or four inches. She could tell it was her godfather because of his eye-patch. But the visible eye was closed.