Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(9)

As Torsten fussed with the rope that tied the gate, Dirk squatted down among the ferns. When he found a smooth stone the size of a robin’s egg, he threw it at the boy to get his attention.

At the impact, the boy whipped around. It seemed to Dirk that Torsten was staring straight at him. “Who’s there?” he cried.

Another stone to speak with. Dirk threw it.

The boy fled, leaving the gate wide open. The cow followed through without complaint.

Again Dirk paced beside the boy’s path, keeping deep enough in the cover of woods that he couldn’t be seen. By the time Torsten was in his father’s arms, the little lad was weeping. Blood made a prettiness on his cheek.

“Did you fall?” asked the father.

“What’s wrong with the child?” asked the grandmother.

“Something in the woods!” cried Torsten. “I was struck five times with stones! I turned and looked.”

“What was there?” asked the grandmother. “What did you see?”

“I saw a gnome, a little schwarzkopf, staring at me with an evil grin!”

“Nonsense,” said his father. “There is no such goblin in these woods, Torsten.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said the grandmother. “Torsten knows what he knows.”

“It was a hateful creature, small enough, but fierce and ugly, and it had a hunch on its back and a sack to carry me away in!”

“Stay away from black-caps, stay out of the woods,” said Agathe Mitzelhaupf.

“Don’t talk foolishness to him,” said Hans crossly.

“I know what I know,” said Agathe. “I’ve heard that gnome calling to me from time to time, but my knees are too much like soft cheese to go clock him on the head as he deserves.”

“Supper on the table,” called a woman from inside. Berthe, probably.

“You heard no goblin black-cap, Mutter.” Hans lifted his mother to a standing position. “It’s wicked to mix up your old tales with the truth. All you could hear from the woods was a little evening birdsong. Torsten, wash your face and your hands. Mutter, mind the step or you’ll go off to the devil before he’s ready to receive you.”

“Angels will carry me to Paradise, where I intend to make a lot of trouble.” But she was laughing a little now. Whatever crisis she had been suffering was over.

Dirk stood and watched the door close. The aroma of supper drifted out the open window.

The bird was silent. Indeed, she was nowhere to be seen. Dirk looked at the carved handle on the knife. Its crouching gnarled figure grinned with protuberant eyes at him. It looked as if it had a little woven cap upon its bulbous head, fitted as neatly as the cap of an acorn upon its kernel.





9.


At darktime, Dirk spread out some lengths of burlap on a heap of hay in a stall next to the cow. He lay down. It was too cold, but there was nothing else to use as a blanket. He shouldn’t have abandoned the drowned bearskin. In a cubby with a tin lining he found a sack of milled flour. It was sewn shut. With some effort he hauled it to the hay. He lay down beside it as if it were a person who could keep him warm, and he spread the burlap over both of them. He thought about that little boy, Torsten. He would have liked to have a friend, or a younger brother, if only in his dreams. However, he wasn’t in the practice of having dreams.

A barn mouse, several in fact, climbed the hill of the sack while he slept. Hardly believing their good fortune, they gnawed through the threads. They had a better supper than he did.





10.


He woke before dawn. His shoes in one hand and the staff in the other, he slipped out the side door of the barn. He was intending to tiptoe on the grass, get going and get gone, when he was stopped by a sound from the house.

The father, that Hans, stood in the open door of the kitchen. He was dressed in a long greasy shirt. His legs and feet were bare. He had his pipe in his hand. He had been about to knock it against the doorsill to clear it out. Enjoy a draft of cherry tobacco before the day’s work began.

Dirk and Hans, they stared at one another without speaking.

If Hans would just pick Dirk up the way he had done little Torsten, that would be fine indeed. Dirk was, after all, younger in mood and mind than perhaps he was in years, having been raised an isolate.

The father shifted his foot and kept working at his pipe, but his eyes were trained on Dirk, who stood like a rabbit ready to dash.

“Our Torsten said it was a little dark dwarf with a black cap,” murmured Hans, loud enough for Dirk to hear. “Are you he? Do you darken as the day gets longer? Or are you the dwarf’s counterpart, to bring some sort of a blessing? You’re welcome here, if you promise to do no harm.”

They talk sometimes of l’heure bleue, that segment of evening when the sun has fallen below the horizon but the vegetable world is still visible. Also more intense, as a consoling purple rises beneath every grieving leaf. Pre-dawn has a counterpart. A sort of light is cast from the world itself, before the sun gets to its job. It is beige and yellow, or amber like an ale.

Dirk stood in l’heure bronze, and waited. If his heart trembled, his eye remained unblinking.

Hans stooped to put down the pipe on the doorstep. When he stood up again, to comfort the waifling, the boy was gone. Without a sound.

As Dirk moved through the newborn world, clouds of fine meal puffed from his clothes, rendering him more solid, less an apparent ghost-child than he must have seemed in the barnyard.