Hiddensee

by Gregory Maguire

  “Dirk?” Felix waved a spoon in a nonchalant circle in the air. “Name your request.”

  Nearly anything could raise a blush in Dirk. “This coffee will suffice, Fräulein,” muttered Dirk into its steam. The young miss hurried off to see to a noisy crowd of burghers who stood stomping at the door, chafing their elbows for warmth.

  Dirk said, “How did Nastaran engage you in such folly? You’ve met her, what, twice? You owe her nothing. Besides, I’m a country cabbage compared to your high-flown friends like Kurt von Koenig and those other sharp fellows at university.”

  “I’m easily persuaded to be nice if I think I can get something in return. Like nearly everyone else in Europe.”

  “I have nothing for you.”

  “You don’t see yourself, do you?” For once Felix’s voice lost its playful affect. He leaned over the table and looked sturdily at Dirk. “You only seem to read in yourself what you have not. Didn’t that exercise with Mesmer show you something that I saw right away, the first time my eyes fell upon you? What you do possess? In ample fashion?”

  “Ignorance?”

  “Capacity, maybe. I don’t know what to call it. The Scots might say glamour.”

  “Glamour!” Dirk felt his blush return. Felix laughed.

  “I didn’t say beauty! Though some might. I meant glamour in the sense of . . . enchantment. Otherness. Enticement. Maybe it’s merely the eye-patch.”

  “Nothing more than naïveté. I’m a proper clean-souled Christian, touched by no folk hexes, no matter what else you’ve heard.”

  “Mesmer brought out into words something I had seen in you from the first. Some—attachment—some—sensibility. A genius of . . . of access, maybe? I haven’t the words for it at all. I suppose that’s what attracts me to you. Could I learn it from you, it would benefit my music and perhaps my mind as well.”

  “You’re speaking some tongue I don’t understand.” But despite his intention to warn Felix off the trip, thus canceling it, Dirk grabbed the fork and picked at the pastry. He ate a sloping edge of it. Raspberry, sour cream, crusty torte pastry. The tart and the succulently sweet. By the time he’d marshaled his thoughts about Felix’s plans and was ready to register an objection, Engelbertine or whoever she was returned without her apron. Abandoning the other table now the customers were all served, she sat down in a chair between them. Whether spoken for or not, the young woman seemed eager to address Felix. Dirk couldn’t command his attention again. At length he stood up, and he left them nattering away. There seemed nothing for it but to make this foolish journey to Oberteuringen and be done with it. Get back to Nastaran as quickly as possible.

  56.

  The following morning, the cook having supplied him with a hefty luncheon wrapped in cheesecloth, Dirk commandeered Franz and Moritz in front of the Pfeiffer establishment. “Smarten up, soldiers,” he told them. They threw their heads up and stamped their feet as they had observed soldiers doing.

  Nastaran came out of the street door, an exercise Dirk had never seen happen in the Pfeiffer household; normally the family and servants used the garden entrance. The woman had thrown around herself a black shawl with a mortuary aspect. Below the shawl, Dirk glimpsed some loose and gauzy pantaloons. Her lower calves were bare and not at all pink, but sallow down to the ankles. Her feet, unshod, were stained with a pattern of curling leaves.

  He wanted right then, before everyone, to kneel and to take her foot in his hand again and bring it to his lips. How like a spoon with a razor edge is human need.

  Before he could speak, he heard the trap rattling along the street. Felix had arranged a carriage to take them the first leg of the journey. Out of the steeps of the city and into the more rolling upland meadows. There, it was hoped, the road would continue at a lesser grade of incline, making a trip on foot easier.

  The boys shouted as Felix leapt out, showing off an outrageously cheerful and crimson cape. It whipped about his shoulders. “Brave travelers, prepare to advance to adventure!” he declaimed. “But take farewell of your mother first, don’t be nasty little weevils, go on now.”

  They ran to Nastaran and lifted their cheeks for her kiss. She put one hand on Moritz’s left shoulder and the other on Franz’s right. Her hands were ornamented like her feet. She spoke in what Dirk supposed to be Persian. The boys nodded solemnly, trying to keep from craning to watch the pair of jittery horses, but their eagerness got the better of them and she let them both go.

  “Madame, we shall guard them with our lives.” Felix bowed with a flourish of his silly plumed hat. He was using the voice of pretend with her. She neither scowled at him nor broke the mood in any other way, but made a gentle obeisance in return, at a careful distance.

  “You’ll freeze your feet there, now, Mistress,” said the laundry maid in a voice almost beneath hearing. She chafed her own elbows as she stood at the garden gate and watched the palaver. She had arrived to stay overnight and keep an eye on things just in case Dirk didn’t return in time. But he was determined to be home by evening if he could. He didn’t mention the need to beware of Nastaran’s sleepwalking; it didn’t seem his place to do so.

  “You will take care of yourself,” said Dirk to Nastaran, coming a little nearer, lowering his voice for privacy.

  “That is what you must expect of me,” she replied, turning her face upon him at last. What he’d come to recognize as kohl was smeared about her eyes, lids and lashes alike. The ornamentation made her eyes bigger but seemed much farther away. “You take care of them. That’s all you can do.”

  It was a dismissal and a challenge at once. He lifted his hand to her as she hurriedly fastened the black shawl around hereslf more tightly.

  He unfurled his hand and gave her what he had for her. It wasn’t much.

  “It won’t have a golden key in it,” he said, “but when you open it, it will smell like Persia.”

  She rolled the common walnut in her hand. “I have no way to open the past,” she said.

  “The smell will bring you back,” he told her. “I will open it for you when I come back. I promise. Keep it safe till I return.”

  The horses nickered and paced, Felix made a trumpet voluntary with his lips meant to sound like melodic farting. The boys screamed with joy. The last warm breeze Dirk would feel in some time coiled in from the lane, smelling of baking bread and simmering pork and apples. Nastaran dropped the walnut in the neck of her blouse, between her breasts, it seemed. Dirk could barely get to the carriage on his swoony legs—he had to lean on that old staff he was still hauling about. He had thought it might come in handy while hiking along a high road; here it was being useful already.

  Felix hollered an instruction. Smitten by his antics, the boys didn’t turn to wave good-bye to their mother.

  57.

  But at the edge of Meersburg, when the landscape began to open out into stubbled fields of hops and pastures for oxen, Felix rolled his hand in the air, bidding the driver to continue. Dirk said, “Between us we don’t have coin enough to hire a trap all the way to Oberteuringen.”

  “I received my seasonal allowance. Settle down your nerves,” replied Felix, patting Dirk on the knee and pulling the blanket up around their waists. “I know you by now, Dirk. You won’t want to spend a night on the road worrying about her well-being while you’re gone. We’ll make of this trip as quick an operation as we can. Perhaps even get there and back in one day if we’re lucky.”

  The boys had tired of kneeling up and looking through the muscovite window at the road reversing itself behind them, or leaning out to spit at sentinel dogs. “Tell us more about the Little Lost Forest, Dirk,” said Franz. Moritz put his thumb in his mouth and nodded.

  Easier to do that than talk to Felix, who always seemed to Dirk to contain several identities simultaneously, to go by the evidence of the contradictory emotions displayed by his smile, his eyes, his hands. Felix’s intelligence was one thing, his rapscallion nature another, and his unsolicited affection a third. Too much fo
r Dirk. He leaned forward to clasp both boys’ hands as they slumped in the seat opposite. Felix relaxed with one arm behind his head to pillow it. A smile cousin to a smirk played along his upper lip.

  “I forget what I said before,” said Dirk, looking for a prompt. What sat with them, what made a difference? He himself had never been a child, he now realized; what did he know about what children wanted to hear?

  “The Little Lost Forest was lost,” said Franz.

  “In the forest,” said Moritz.

  “Walking from someplace, Rome or Greece, I forget, one of those places . . .”

  “. . . ultramontane?” supplied Felix.

  “Shhh,” said Dirk, delivering a backhanded slap on Felix’s upraised knee without turning around. “The forest was—it was severed, it was orphaned. It was a place without a home. Does that make sense?”

  Moritz shook his head. Franz nodded. Felix lit a pipe, pretentiously.

  “It was . . . migrating. It was wandering slowly north through Europe. And in the forest were two spirits, who came from ancient times and who were carried away—”

  “Like us,” said Moritz, indicating the carriage.

  “Except they weren’t youngsters. And they weren’t happy.”

  “We’re not happy,” said Franz cheerily enough. “Something has to happen now in the story. It’s stuck.”

  “I forget who the spirits were,” said Moritz.

  “Me, too,” said Felix, elbowing Dirk in the ribs.

  “We have to have names for them,” said Dirk, buying himself a little time. “One is a kind of satyr of sorts—”

  “—I’ll just bet he was,” muttered Felix.

  “Will you let me be? He is an old acquaintance of highland shepherds. He likes to run along meadows and scare the goats into a rush. Like an invisible wolf on the margins. But he’s not intent on hunting them, just having fun. His name is Pan.”

  “Are the goats lost, too?” asked Moritz.

  “No, they’re still keeping the grass shorn around the ancient temples. They’re well behaved now that Pan has stopped panicking them.”

  “No fun for the goats,” said Moritz.

  “He likes to make trouble, that’s true,” said Dirk.

  “Who’s the other one?” asked Franz. “Is it a boy?”

  “No. She’s a beautiful young woman, maybe the ghost of a tree that someone cut down.”

  “A dryad,” supplied Felix.

  “Her name is Dogface,” suggested Moritz.

  “No, it is Pythia,” said Felix. At Dirk’s scowl he put up his palms. “Sorry. Your tale. I’ll be quiet.”

  “Pan and Pythia,” said Franz. “Pythia and Pan. Are they married?”

  “No, they hate each other too much. But they are isolated together in the Little Lost Forest as it slowly sweeps its way north. It was in Bavaria not long ago, I think, and maybe it is in Baden now.”

  “Can we see Pythia?” asked Moritz. “Will she scare us?”

  “She’s beautiful beyond compare,” said Dirk. “She’s like your mother.”

  “Oh, her. Well, what about Pan? Can we see him?”

  “He’s tricksy. Here, look, he’s a little like this.” Dirk fiddled in his coat pocket and withdrew the old knife with the carved figure crouching atop it. What a big head, and bulbous eyes, almost leering.

  “Why does he look like that?”

  “He’s—he’s—” Dirk was stumped. “He’s ancient but he’s not old. He wants to stir up mischief.”

  “He’s not the only one,” interjected Felix. Dirk shot him a look. Felix continued, “I mean, isn’t Pan the mascot of every university boy-scholar since the School of Socrates? Why do he and the Pythia not get along, do you think? Is it simply that she is sacred and he is profane? She is all arbory by the valley stream, and he is the wind in the uplands? They hail from different tribes, like the Montaguesi and the Capuletti?” At Dirk’s bewildered look, Felix said, “Juliet and Romeo of Verona, from families with different interests and allegiances?”

  “Pythia wants—evenness,” said Dirk slowly.

  “Civic order. Civilization,” intoned Felix. “And Pan wants anarchy and riot.”

  “Who wins?” said one of the boys, and the other, “And how do they fight? Do they have swords and cannon?”

  “They don’t fight. They only have each other, whether they like it or not. And their shifting homeland.”

  “Oh no,” said Moritz. “They don’t fall in love, I hope.”

  “Yes!” said Felix, smacking his knee. “Pan uses his knife to open the Pythia’s golden walnut, eh, Dirk?” He raised an eyebrow and licked his lips.

  Dirk snapped, “Why is it always like that for you?”

  “Because I’m young and I’m male and I’m alive. Obviously. Aren’t you?”

  Dirk couldn’t really answer that. The little boys were relieved though that romance wasn’t the sine qua non of the tale. “What they both want, despite themselves, is the same thing,” said Dirk. “They want a place for the Little Lost Forest to grow large enough that they can both live there without being in constant argument. They want it to be a place all its own. Not lost anymore.”

  “The forest is scary though,” said Moritz. “Wolves.”

  “Baby wolves are nice,” said Felix.

  “But their mothers,” said Franz.

  “Mothers can be very nice.” Felix smirked. Franz and Moritz exchanged glances.

  “I hope there isn’t any wolf at all,” said Moritz.

  “There isn’t,” said Dirk, a little desperately. “There’s only a mouse. But he’s the king of the mice, did you know that?”

  They began to look a little more interested despite themselves. A mouse was the right size. Felix closed his eyes and pretended a huge snore, and soon it was no longer pretense.

  58.

  After they’d eaten their lunch and stopped to pee by the side of the road—insisting Dirk get out with them and stand nearby in case of wolves—the boys gradually fell asleep in a heap. Felix finished the crust of one of their loaves and stretched out his legs to rest his calves on Dirk’s lap. Dirk shucked them off.

  “That’s not much of a story,” Felix said. “Is that all you learned about the Pythia from the strategies of the venerable Mesmer?”

  “You used to be nice. Why are you so dismissive?”

  “I want her to be wildly fecund. Louche, licentious, the female equivalent of Zeus, taking whomever she wants. Pan won’t be enough for her, even if he is a satyr of sorts. She needs a god.”

  Dirk grunted. “Do they teach you pagan texts at university? Imagine superstitions having a place of honor there. Are your professors and ministers so flummoxed by Christian thought that they have to relish primitive lore from the childhood of the world?”

  “The old-fashioned stories have always been with us, Dirkie. The cross was planted in the mouth of antiquity so modern faith could begin; but the old beliefs mumble from the ground. Those who halt their incessant prayers can hear the old stories telling themselves out loud. Indeed, I think that is what you do—that is your genius.”

  “Genius!” He felt a hotness rise from his collar. “All this is nonsense meant to amuse the boys. Or stultify them into sleep, as I’ve done.”

  “Don’t feel too elevated, now,” said Felix, kicking Dirk companionably. “These stories belong to Europe and to the world. Like Odysseus on his ten-year magical voyage, amid the likes of Cyclops and mermaids and Circe the witch—Odysseus coming back to Penelope the faithful wife. A world story. You know about all that?”

  “I don’t want you to tell me. I’m more curious about why you even care. Why do your masters at university care. Greece is a long way away and a long time ago.”

  “Ach, it’s not just the German and Prussian states that pay attention! England suffers an advanced state of Hellenophilic tumescence, you understand. Concupiscence. I know, I’ve been there. My uncle took me to the home of a great architect in London who collects artifacts of t
he deep past—stunning marble torsos and intelligent faces, scallops from the rooflines of buildings, pillars and such. Bodies almost too beautiful to be human. Ideas of being human rather than portraits of individuals such as the Dutch and the Venetians give us. The whole building is a mausoleum of ancient faith—or maybe it isn’t faith but trust in human capacity. I’m not sure.”

  “But how does a rage for the raw niceties of Greece infect modern Munich and Berlin?”

  “And London, and Paris, and overseas, too, I’m told. It’s a good question, Dirk. You might be university material after all. Maybe it goes back to the Lutheran rebellion against Rome.”

  “How could that possibly—”

  “Once Gutenberg and his printing device were able to make the Gospels more widely available, not only to bishops and monks but also to the pious everyman sinner, the curious among hoi polloi wanted to know more. Mighty Luther himself worked on a translation of the Holy Book from Latin into German, did you know? So it’s just sensible that the scripture-crazed devotees of the New Testament would need to go back to the original sources to ensure sound theology. And in the rush to learn Attic Greek, Germans discovered more than the foundations of the Christian faith. The Hellenic classics are stuffed with fundamental thought, oh, on government, and philosophy, and aesthetics, and architecture, and drama, too. As well as stories for children.”

  “Hmmm,” said Dirk, but uneasily.

  “You scoff, but really, do you know the Odyssey? Athena argues with the god Zeus for permission to intervene on behalf of Odysseus, as the great warrior struggles home from the Trojan wars. And when Zeus agrees, how does she manage her meddling?”

  He expected Dirk to answer. Dirk shrugged.

  “Athena disguises herself as an old woman. She helps him out with magical interventions. She then transforms him by giving him a disguise so complete that even his son and his wife can’t recognize him. Only his dog. Who does this sound like to you, this Athena?” When Dirk didn’t answer, Felix said, “Who do you think really is the fairy godmother in those tales by the Brothers Grimm, those household märchen that they published to such success, but Athena herself? You must know Aschenputtel, the cinder-girl in the hearth? There’s a French version written up by Perrault—Cinderella, no less—and in that one, the girl is elevated by divine manipulation, she is so glorified and disguised that her own family can’t recognize her. Just like Odysseus, hidden in plain sight. The fairy godmother is Athena brought forward. Who else but Athena at the girl’s side to help with a carriage magicked up from a garden gourd of some sort, with mice for horses, and a rat for a coachman.”