Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(83)
She laid him into the breast of the Nutcracker and closed the two halves of the red coat. She didn’t lock the coat closed in case he ever wanted to come out.
The waves pressed into the shore in long rocking motions—gentle swipes against the world.
She set the Nutcracker on his back to float in the foam by her feet. One of her feet was clad in a pink dancing slipper and the other was bare. With her bare foot she nudged the Nutcracker away from the shore, as if he were a little boat like the kind Fritz used to play with in tidal pools.
Fritz would be coming soon. She missed him and wanted to see him but she didn’t want him to wreck everything as usual, so she pushed the Nutcracker a little harder. She wanted it to float beyond easy reach.
She thought she heard Fritz shout for her. She did hear him. She turned to see. He must be beyond the bluff, he was calling her, he would be here soon, around that barrage of stranded rocks, but she couldn’t see him yet. She turned back to watch the Nutcracker float away.
He had moved out onto the busy foam as if on another military campaign—this one naval. Who knew he would be so clever at sea?
Of course he would be that clever.
She expected to lose sight of him as more and more ranks of waves drew their white parallel lines from left to right between the Nutcracker out to sea and Klara left on shore. But his red coat remained visible, a dot on the blue-black steel of the waves and the glass-green of the waves and the white lips of the waves.
Then he was beyond the pounding of the tide and going farther out, and still through the spray she could see him on his back, that old Nutcracker. His head was facing one way and his feet the other, so he was long and low like the spit of Rügen, like Hiddensee.
She realized with a glad clasp of her heart in her chest that he wasn’t drowning, he wasn’t sinking. He wasn’t even diminishing. He broke the laws of perspective, holding his own shape and size the farther out to sea he went.
He was on the horizon now. A broad swath of red on the horizon like a sunset, only he was as large as Hiddensee. He was a bridge between Rügen Island and Hiddensee. He was an island, he was a land unto himself, he was a whole place. He was that other place, the Nutcracker: It was he, himself, a sovereign kingdom built of himself.
She rubbed her eyes against the grit of the wind and the smudge of atmosphere, for finally the mists that always collect around horizons at sea were blurring the edges of the Nutcracker. She peered again. He had separated from Rügen and begun to drift behind Hiddensee. She might never see him again. She rubbed and rubbed, and it seemed to her that the red of his coat and the black of his hat and the white furze of his beard had gone green and black and bristled like a forested nation, a refuge out on its own on the high water.
Over the sound of the waves and despite that distance, some sounds rose that made Klara’s heart feel bright and yearning, itself rising in accord. She heard some music, pipes perhaps, a stringed instrument, a tambour, and the sound of children at play—not the high shrieking of school-yard mayhem, but the quieter murmur of children in small groups, working, reading, thinking, laughing. With the kind of sobriety, so often forgotten, that children possess. The trees hid the children from view—maybe toys were playing there, maybe even mice. In any case, above that ground-level murmur of children in the sacred grove, she could make out the threaded notes of a thrush’s song. Perhaps all the sweeter for being so long delayed.
DAS ENDE