Hiddensee

by Gregory Maguire

  He must feign a deep, deep sleep. He released a breath through his nostrils as slowly, naturally, as he could. His eye-patch was toward Felix, his good eye squeezed shut on the far side.

  “You are dreaming of her, of course,” whispered Felix. “I might have known.”

  So Dirk’s carefully paced breathing compellingly implied sleep. Good. He trained his thoughts on the nutcracker. Perhaps it could have a sword.

  “She is so beautiful, in her fluid pantaloons, her shawls.”

  Why was Felix talking about Nastaran in the middle of the night in the warmth of a barn loft in the teeth of an early snowstorm?

  “Her eyes so warm . . .”

  Yes, but . . .

  “. . . and her breasts, both of them so warm—so full.”

  To keep his breath even, Dirk had to harness every scrap of intention in his human form. It was too late to draw the blanket back up to his waist. His nightshirt clung to his thighs and, rucked beneath his bottom, was pulled tightly across his groin, which was responding to the whispery seduction.

  “She must drop her shawl when the summer evenings are warm, and anoint herself with perfumed attar of roses here, and there, and there.” Felix’s voice was the haunt of a ’cello, and as his voice grew ever fainter, he leaned nearer and nearer to Dirk’s ear. “It must be hard to resist her. You must be hardened to her—you are hardened.” And so he was. If one could blush in the midnight, Dirk would be blushing. Though concealed, his cock was slantwise to the roof-beam, held and articulated by the fabric of his shirt tucked under his hip. Felix, to judge by the location of his hushed voice, must be on an elbow, looking down upon Dirk. It was unbearable. Felix meant to talk Dirk into somnolent ejaculation, and watch all the while. Whatever did they teach at university?

  “If she were to bend down and kiss you—to take you into her Oriental mouth—”

  Dirk rose one shoulder into the air in a pretense of nocturnal stretching, and rolled on his side, back to Felix. His shirt had slid up a little, exposing most of his rump, but at least his cock was now hidden from view. Aching like a pistol readied for the duel, he bore it with such dignity as he had reclaimed for himself. He was shivering not from cold but the shock of such impertinence. Felix flung the red silk cape over them both, and their legs touched once or twice, Felix’s knee indenting into the back of Dirk’s knee, trying to slip between his thighs, but Dirk twitched himself away with as much naturalness as he could. He endured the exhausting moments until Felix, finally, seemed to fall into a genuine sleep.

  All the while the nutcracker and the knife of Pan stood watch over Dirk, the one a protector in roughed-out form, the other a leering lecher. The distant screams continued for a while, every now and then, until they stopped or Dirk fell asleep, or both.

  61.

  In the morning the two young men dressed in haste without speaking to one another. The cows were desperate to be milked but this morning they seemed spooked by Dirk and wouldn’t let him near. Felix grabbed Dirk’s knife and sawed off a small tendril of wool from an inattentive ewe, and pocketed the scrap. “You’ll see why,” he said.

  The farmer met them crossing the snowy yard to the house. He had a hank of bread smeared with butter for each of them.

  Dirk didn’t dare speak, but Felix mumbled through a mouthful of breakfast, “Did she make it?”

  “She did,” said the farmer. “Both of them, daughter and mother. A bit battered this morning, and sleeping the effort away.”

  “Can we see them?”

  “Felix!” said Dirk.

  “Room looks like a surgery on the verges of Waterloo, but sure, if you’re quiet,” replied the farmer. This wasn’t his first child, Dirk remembered.

  The midwife was folding blankets and beginning to rinse rags in water boiled over the hearth. “You’ll not take those gentlemen up the stairs!”

  “Your job was done last night, mine starts this morning,” replied the farmer, and up the stairs they tramped, as quietly as possible.

  The mother lay in damp sheets pulled up to her chin. Her hair was mostly pinned to her head and a night-cap with untied straps had come awry. Next to her on the bed in a wicker basket, swaddled in greyish toweling, a morsel of a face was puckering and squinching. It looked like a bloated, hairless mouse, a raw pink radish. “Isn’t she lovely?” asked the farmer.

  “Where did she come from?” asked Dirk. A question he had asked before in his life, he seemed to imagine.

  “If you don’t know that, your friend can instruct you on the way back to town,” said the farmer, ushering them out. “The weather has broken and the snow was light, for all that wind; you’ll have no trouble keeping to the path.”

  Dirk turned and looked once more before descending the stairs. The mother looked like an angel that had been shot out of the sky with an arrow. He could no longer see the baby over the sides of the basket, but he could feel its presence like a radiant chord, a sweetness of otherness.

  62.

  They stopped for a lunch at a tavern just above Meersburg, open to a view of the great lake, blue and brown and green with the mountain steeps reflected in it. They hadn’t spoken too much on the trip. “Not a very restful night,” Felix had groused as a kind of excuse for his silence. Dirk had not offered an opinion.

  Yet at table on a sunny terrace—for the day was returning to one of those shocking seasonal warmths that the mountains can sometimes boast at autumn noontimes—they each downed a beer and finished a cheese and a half, and four sausages and a pickled onion between them. Felix called for a second tankard. Dirk settled for some sliced apples in honey. Then he picked up his carving and sat in the sun, struggling with the chin.

  “You have a little skill at this,” said Felix.

  “The wood is working with me,” said Dirk. “I think it wants to be a nutcracker.”

  “I know, wood confides in you. How will you stop the chin from dropping out?”

  “Look, I’m trying to keep a pin of wood in each jaw. When someone works this handle, which looks like the back end of a bird, its tail-feathers, maybe, or the drape of an overlong coat, the chin will go up and down, pivoting on these pegs.”

  “Won’t it break?”

  “I’m using this awl I found in the barn last night to gouge out what I can, so the jaw and its handle are detached from the rest of the fellow. Two pieces of interlocking wood carved from the same block. It’s a tricky business but the wood is strong, and the knife is talented.”

  “Your hands are not instruments?”

  Dirk looked up. “Only midwives, I think.” And he smiled. “If one of the pins snap, I could replace it with a nail and it would still move like a hinge. But the jaw will be stronger if I can keep the pieces separate and interlocking.”

  “Your lady love will adore it.” Felix’s voice was uncharacteristically small. “She will hold it in her lap.” He put his finger in the pot of honey and smeared the lower lip of the carven figure. Then he pulled the twist of wool from his pocket and pressed it until it adhered. “There. The beard will hide the lack of a heart.”

  “Is it a flaw to be heartless?” asked Dirk, pointedly.

  A small brown bird came down in the silence and stood on a gatepost at the edge of the terrace. “Hey, where are your mates?” asked Dirk of the bird. “Aren’t you off to Africa or the Levant with them?”

  “She’ll never give you what you want, you know.” Felix seemed in quiet, business-like despair. “Will it be enough, to have made her a present? Will that see you through?”

  “See me through what, Felix? I’ve never been able to imagine three days ahead of myself my whole life. I don’t know any more of life than that infant in the basket does. I’m just doing what I can from day to day. Handholds and landfalls and anything to grasp onto. Nothing gives much purchase, does it?”

  Felix shrugged. His red cape seemed larger today, and he was lost a little inside it.

  The thrush, if that is what she was, hopped from the post to the edge
of the table, and brashly worked at devouring a scatter of crumbs. Her movements were a kind of dance, hop skip hop triple skip. She looked at Dirk, as if trying to see if he was a bread crumb, and then she departed in a flurry of wing-feathers. One fell behind on the stone terrace.

  “Here,” said Felix, picking it up. “Here is your plume for Herr Nutcracker.”

  Using the awl, Dirk routed a pinhole notch, and threaded the feather into it. Now the nutcracker belonged to them both, somehow. Dirk finished the corner of the jaw, and began working the tip of the knife into the back of the throat. “This is the last integument, and then the jaw will have life,” he said. His palm was closed around the black-iron imp, but the knife-head seemed warm to his grasp. “In . . . just this . . . this final bit . . . and, is it presto?”

  “Presto!” said Felix. He reached over and gripped the handle of the nutcracker and lifted it up, before Dirk, using the tip of the knife, could finish clearing out the last of the shavings from the nutcracker’s throat. The mouth swung open on its solid jaw pins. “I sing of the Golden Walnut!” cried Felix in a pretense of triumph. Several other travelers on the terrace turned and looked. Then Felix slapped the handle back into place, and the bulbous lower lip of the wooden nutcracker smacked against his upper lip with a satisfied grin. “It works!” cried Felix as the blade of the knife fell out of the nutcracker’s mouth, broken off of the cold lifeless dwarf-shaped handle that had held it for so long.

  63.

  They parted at Kirchstraße in the center of town. Felix would continue on to the gasthof and the von Koenigs, and make his apologies for having missed the concert last night. And then, he said, he would wander back to university, probably, and rejoin his fellow scholars.

  “That’s a big change from yesterday,” said Dirk, trying to sound interested but eager to hurry home.

  “As you said earlier, who knows what is to happen three days out?” said Felix. “Maybe I’ll suddenly come upon enough of life to be able to play the ’cello with conviction.”

  “Conviction? Is that all it takes?”

  “You mock me. You’ve learned to mock.” A wry grin worked its way forward between Felix’s clamped lips. “Hope for you yet, I suppose.”

  “You’ll be playing for the crowned heads of Austria and France by the time you’re twenty-five,” said Dirk.

  “I’ll be married to Hannelore or Engelbertine or some such goddess,” said Felix, sullenly, “and we’ll have eight of those little pinched newborns like the one we saw this morning. And the screams to make them come out right! . . . Dirk, give me something to remember you by. Please.”

  Dirk had driven his hands into his pockets, feeling for something, so could not resist when Felix gripped him by the shoulders and kissed him so fast and hard his teeth rattled in their sockets. He pulled away. “Here,” Dirk said, opening his hand. Felix caught it. The broken knife-handle, the dead carved little figure, staring up at nothing. “Take it, Pan, it is a thing of the past.”

  They parted, moved to opposite sides of the street without further comment, as the last of the melting snow ran cold and clear in the gutters, and a cart filled with squawking chickens in cages came up the street between them.

  Dirk then turned toward home.

  It was, as he probably ought to have guessed, too late, far too late. In the absence of family and a chaperone with any sort of authority, Nastaran had tried to release her childhood from herself through her own steps, taken in the middle of the night to the edge of the jetty that faced the barrier Alps. To the edge of the lake, and past the edge. Whether this was an accident during somnambulism or clear-eyed suicide, no one could ever say.

  Part Two

  Intermezzo

  64.

  He stayed in Meersburg another eight years, until the boys were more or less grown. Well, Franz, anyway. Perhaps Moritz would never emerge into anything like competence.

  Gerwig Pfeiffer didn’t join the others at the quay to see Dirk off. Whether this was because in his stolid silences Herr Pfeiffer still held Dirk accountable for Nastaran’s death, Dirk didn’t know. Or perhaps the old man just wasn’t interested. The boys came down in the cart with Frau Pfeiffer the Next. She was a hearty proxy of a wife, not so much a pillar of the community as a footstool.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” said the second Frau Pfeiffer. Her Christian name was Cordula. She handed Dirk’s lunch to him, and then assumed her customary stance, her wrists wrapped around her forearms and her elbows angled away from her waist. This, Dirk always assumed, was to air the skin on her upper arms, which tended to a farmwife gloss in the summer. “We’ll miss you, Herr Dirk. You shall always have a home with us.”

  She was everything Nastaran was not, and nothing like how Nastaran had been, except in one way: Cordula kept a lot inside. The slant gleam in her eye was a sign of intelligence and probity.

  Franz was now through school. (The first thing the stepmother did was throw the boys into a rowdy schoolroom with an anarchic teacher who taught them Greek and archery and sums and Psalms. Franz had thrived, Moritz become shriveled.) The older boy was ready to apprentice with his father in the paper trade. Not knowing how to perform a gesture of authority, Franz clasped Dirk’s forearms with both his hands, and then pushed a purse of cash upon him, all sudden, as a bully might land a thump. Dirk allowed only a grunt of thanks, so as not to further discomfit the boy in this shift of authority between them.

  He turned to Moritz, who was kicking the rim of the cartwheel and looking down along the lake into hazy glare. The Persian force in the younger brother was emerging in his plum-like, deep-set eyes. “I don’t know why you have to go now,” said Moritz. His tone suggested a correlative assumption . . . since you didn’t have the nerve to leave eight years ago when you deserted your post and cost us our mother.

  “You’re grown,” said Dirk. “Or nearly. The paper trade is your family work, not mine.”

  “What is your new work to be, then?” They all watched the paddlewheel steamer approach with near noiseless plash from around the promontory, hugging the shore and heading for dock.

  “I don’t know.” Dirk had resolved not to tell the boys or their father that he hoped to find his way to Persia. What he was looking for, he didn’t know. A lost land. A home without the stink of familiarity. He realized this seemed a conundrum impossible to resolve. He might try, though. He, too, had grown up.

  “I want you to have this,” he said to Moritz. He had waited until the last minute to decide, and only now had the courage to reach in his satchel. Franz and his stepmother stood a step away; they understood this transaction was more important than sausage or guilders. Dirk took out the Nutcracker. Once Dirk had finished the figure with a gritted cloth and sand, he had used Nastaran’s paints to color the piece into individuality. He replaced the thrush feather of the plume every year or so, and he had oiled the hinged jaw with linseed and lemon juice to keep it from splitting or drying out or chafing. It had gone from nutcracker to Nutcracker, and, in the stories Dirk used to tell when the boys were younger, to “The Nutcracker,” or “Nutcracker, he . . .” The creature had evolved from it to he.

  He had a touch of Pan about him still, did Nutcracker, but he wasn’t Pan. Maybe he was the bastard son of Pan and Pythia. “Here. For you.”

  Moritz didn’t look at Dirk or at the Nutcracker; he turned his chin and looked back over his shoulder, eager to be done with this. “No.”

  “I want you to have it. Really.”

  “You want a lot of things. Too bad.”

  Dirk was waved away by Franz and Frau Pfeiffer. Moritz hunched in the cart with his back to the lake, his face lifted to the sun, his eyes closed. Not rigor mortis but rigor vitus. Broken as his mother had been broken, and for something like the same reason.

  Is it only in childhood that we are capable of taking in the whole world?

  What does it do to us that we briefly have that privilege? And then, what harm, when the fund of novelty in human experience runs d
ry?

  Dirk didn’t know how long it would take to get to Bregenz at the eastern edge of the Bodensee. The city had once been under Bavarian rule and was now part of the Austrian empire. From there to Vienna, and on to the east. He would work it out.

  He leaned on the rail at the stern of the squat vessel humping its way under summer sunlight, veering toward shore for occasional stops. Somewhere between docking stations, in a sudden fury of anger at Moritz, and maybe a sense of responsibility, Dirk fumbled in his satchel for the Nutcracker. If the Nutcracker could offer no comfort to Moritz, then Dirk had no use for him.

  Something stilled his hand. It was as if the Nutcracker had shivered, trembled. A shudder of life from the corpse of a dead walking stick. Am I only less dead, thought Dirk, or readier to live? He pulled his hand away empty, flaring his fingers open at the water, flinging nothing to its depths.

  Then on he went, to Vienna, to Bucharest, to Constantinople, to Isfahan, and beyond. The Nutcracker, in his satchel, never complained.

  65.

  Baghdad, Samarkand, western Cathay.

  He discovered in himself a talent at languages. It was as if his ears had at last grown keener to compensate for the Cyclopean single eye.

  He almost married a Chinese woman over the objections of her parents, until he realized just in time he had his own objections, too, even if they were hard to name. It wouldn’t be fair to sacrifice the happiness of Wu Min on the mausoleum altar of the memory of Nastaran.

  Though that wasn’t the only reason. Once Wu Min had gotten over a pretty shyness and taciturnity, he’d asked her about her family. She’d gone on for nearly three weeks, roping in the complete histories of such bewildering strands of ancestors, seeming to recall with an ardent and clinical precision every moment of their lives, that he found her close to monstrous. Either she was from an entirely different species or he was. He escaped just in time.