Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

by Gregory Maguire

  Perhaps it was merely her garb, which wasn’t the closely fitted and over-stitched apparel of her fellow goodwives in Meersburg, but a weird and billowy shift and a pair of loose pantaloons below. Maybe a man’s shirt of a sort Dirk had never seen before. Upon her scalp her dark hair was roped, only loosely and off-center, exposing a neck of bleached oak.

  “What are you doing to me?” she asked her sons, in a voice and tone that Dirk couldn’t characterize. A kind of ribboned smokiness. He wasn’t musical enough to think beyond that.

  The boys hung their heads and hung back till Franz said, “He was trying to kill me.”

  “I wasn’t, only hurt him,” insisted Moritz. “Anyway, it was the knife, not me.”

  “Did you open the jar?”

  “Dirk is working on it.”

  “Bring it to me when it’s open. And please don’t shriek. Anything but shrieking. If you must kill one another, do it silently. It’s much more effective that way.”

  The scarf-like clothes rippled as she disappeared. The door closed without the sound of a latch dropping. She had neither spoken to Dirk nor looked at him.

  30.

  And then, as if enough had decided to be enough, the next morning Frau Pfeiffer knocked on the door of the office and entered before her husband had a chance to raise his eyes from the page.

  She stood with her eyes down and hands folded, one upon the other like a pair of nestling doves. “Forgive me for my intrusion,” she said to the floor. Dirk heard in her words what he’d missed earlier. It was accented German. She was from elsewhere.

  By now Dirk had come across polychrome carvings of the Virgin and Child in the Catholic churches. One splendid, fourteen-inch example had sat in a nook in the chapel at the schloss von Koenig. Wood could see what stone could not. Marble eyes were blind, but wooden eyes were only cloaked. Frau Pfeiffer had eyes of polished chestnut that retained a deep gleam of greenwood. Pliability.

  “Never an intrusion,” said her husband, evenly.

  She was done up like a grandee in a roving theatrical troupe. At once a maharani and a hausfrau, a peddler and a djinee. Dirk had never seen the like. Musulman, Ottoman, opera buffa wife? Queen of the harem and Friday night barkeep?

  She wore a proper, kitten-grey Brunswick gown, its waistcoat of contemporary style—just flanking the hips—but beneath its split sleeves spilled a voluminous silk blouse in a pattern of unkempt garden—roses, coiled brambles, irises, narcissi. Several bangles of brass or silver or white gold sloped toward her elbow. A scarf was loosely fastened around her mouth as if to keep her words and expression curtained.

  Her bonnet was simple, even homely, but at her neck was gathered a scarf the colors of water reed and apricot.

  “I feel I should now be introduced,” she said.

  “Oh? Why now?” asked her husband, a wry twist of his lips on the side of his mouth used to accommodating a pipe.

  “He has helped me with my color.”

  Herr Pfeiffer turned to Dirk, who felt himself going pink. “Franz brought me a jug of paint to open.”

  “Well, then, it’s cozy enough already. My dear wife, behold Dirk Drosselmeier. Dirk, Frau Pfeiffer. As you live and breathe.”

  “I am in your debt,” she said to Dirk. “It is not easy to open color.” She rolled her gaze over him at last. In the serene light dropping from the clear high windows of the office at break of business day, he felt almost noticed.

  31.

  Gerwig Pfeiffer often sent Dirk on errands. The young man began to map out Meersburg in his mind as he crossed from Unterstadt to Oberstadt, along the Steigstraße or down the sets of stone steps. Always around a corner or outside a window, the teal or oily-grey waters of the rippling Bodensee—Lake Constance—lurked with a hint of menace. Dirk realized that Meersburg did business across and upon the broad lake as if it were a commercial square. He didn’t like the lake much, though.

  Sometimes Dirk took the boys with him. They held his hands. He wasn’t interested in children, though he did notice them. Despite being younger, Moritz was the keener, the broody anarchist. Franz was paler, more stolid, perhaps more cowed by life. He chuckled, when he chuckled, with closed lips.

  As they hopped and skipped beside him, the boys recited verses from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. With joy I walked in a green wood. Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald. They didn’t know the whole thing. Above and beyond Meersburg, the vineyards and orchards seemed a distant set of flanking angel wings, antithesis to the annihilating lake, which wouldn’t hold color for long, constantly slipping into new disguise as if to hide its elemental nature.

  Glancing above the rooflines, Dirk wished he could spy the steeper hills of Bavaria his homeland. But what was home to him? The only Alps were those of western Switzerland across the lake to the left, looming, when mists didn’t obscure them, like a thundering army in glacial advance. Or a battlement prohibiting passage, padlocking the lake-dwellers into place.

  32.

  He didn’t eat with the family. He didn’t eat with the help. Somehow he didn’t fit in with either. This seemed the usual way in his life, and he didn’t mind.

  The Pfeiffer family lived close to the bone. Their home was large, handed down to them from some forebear, but it was in need of attention. Walls that hadn’t been whitewashed since the turn of the century were mottled with a green rash. Windows with cracked panes were fitted with cedar shakes. Dirk suspected subsidence in one corner of the house, as all the balls and tops that the boys dropped tended to roll toward that quarter.

  In the first month alone, two separate chairs lost their footing and deposited colleagues or family upon the floor.

  Despite the pleasant commotion and daily decay, Herr Pfeiffer managed to run a business. He worked from home many days, dispatching Dirk to deliver a bill or to collect a shipment of supplies. Sometimes the paterfamilias oversaw processes at the rag baths, which were housed in an old fishing shed near the jetty. On these days, Frau Pfeiffer kept to upstairs chambers. She read light fictions and sometimes could be heard weeping over them. The housemaid rolled her eyes and the boys ignored her, and pestered Dirk instead.

  “Are they going off to kindergarten soon?” Dirk asked Herr Pfeiffer one day when a nasty autumn storm looked to be blowing in across the lake—some Alpine drama heading north. The threat was keeping everyone housebound.

  “Oh, no. Mutter wouldn’t have that,” he said.

  “Never?”

  “Never so far. Moritz, he isn’t suitable.”

  “Then they will want a tutor?” Dirk was risking his own employment, as he knew himself to be unequal to the task.

  The Frau chose this moment to appear upon the stairs. She paused, struck by some private consternation. A non sequitur would result, Dirk predicted, and it did. “The moon bowled down the length of the Thurgau slopes last night.”

  “Did it now,” said her husband. “You were up late, to notice that.”

  “Is he questioning the boys’ training?”

  “I mean no harm,” said Dirk, addressing her for the first time.

  She continued looking at Pfeiffer. “You’ve only to move an inch one way, and all the world shifts an inch in the other direction.”

  “I’m afraid it’s coming to that time of the year,” he said, shuffling some papers. “You’ll be all right for a week. Dirk will be here.”

  “Dirk,” she said. Now she turned to look at him, and proceeded to the bottom step. “Is he diligent, Gerwig? Dirk, are you diligent?”

  “I am attentive,” said Dirk, hoping that was the right answer.

  “He’ll do just fine.” Pfeiffer sighed. “It’s only a week, Nastaran.”

  She moved on in a soft whuffing of scarves, and went out into the walled garden. She was framed by the open door. A needling rain was beginning to fall, and winds stirred the leaves of the Russian olive tree, which made behind her a pattern of irregular chevrons, silvery and silky. She opened up her hands as if to collect pearls liquefying from
the sky.

  “I never came across the name Nastaran before,” he said.

  “Persian,” replied Herr Pfeiffer. “I am told that, in the tongue of her homeland, it means ‘wild rose.’”

  “Wild,” said Dirk.

  “Rose,” insisted her husband, and then told Dirk the real reason he had been hired.

  33.

  She couldn’t be left alone overnight, that was the thing. She was a somnambulist. Dirk didn’t know what that meant.

  “She walks in her sleep.”

  “Surely that’s not possible.”

  “It is a rare condition, but a genuine one. She finds herself in a dream, you see, and in a dream she rises and moves. We must always keep the windows locked on the upstairs floors, and we bar the door to the crosswalk to the barn, lest she take it into her vacant mind to sit upon a sill or rail and try to step upon a breeze.”

  Dirk said, “Are her eyes open?”

  “They are open but unseeing.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means,” said the paper merchant, “while I am away, someone must stay near her, to guide her homeward if she goes out of doors.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “It has happened, so.”

  “But surely to keep attentive is the job of—a husband—or a governess—or a lady’s companion of some type—”

  “She won’t tolerate a governess of any sort,” said Pfeiffer, sadly. “She is afraid of losing me to some more capable woman. I know what you’re thinking: Why not some ancient biddy, some cross-eyed housewife needing a personal income? But my wife won’t have it. She admits a sense of her own—particularity. Besides, a certain amount of physical strength could be needed in a crisis.”

  “Is this situation regular?”

  “Annual. It gets worse at this time of year, but in the deep winter her body seems to notice the cold even if her mind doesn’t, and there is little chance she would go barefoot into the snow. So it’s in the autumn that I need help. Her remark about the moon suggests she notices the season is changed. This is also the time I go to the university at Heidelberg and to Munich to collect my orders for the spring, which work keeps me busy all winter. If you become a true apprentice, you can take over that job of travel for me someday. For now, I need you to stay here and keep—what was your word?—attentive.”

  “Where is she going when she is walking in her sleep?”

  “She cannot accept that question.” Pfeiffer sighed. “She only partly believes me when I tell her she has been sleepwalking. She can’t remember her dreams, you see, so if it is something she is dreaming, she can’t learn what it is. We must keep her out of danger.” He leaned forward. “You do not know Nastaran yet, truly, but you must love her enough to keep her out of danger.”

  “I will.”

  34.

  Herr Pfeiffer had taken leave of his wife privately upstairs, it seemed, for when the boys gathered at his hips for final embraces, and Dirk hung back trying to appear responsible, Frau Pfeiffer didn’t emerge.

  “You have your instructions,” said Herr Pfeiffer. “You won’t have any problems.”

  “But if there is a problem?” asked Dirk.

  “Just treat the boys as you were treated yourself, growing up.” At Dirk’s blank look, the man continued. “You’re a good boy, so your parents must have done their job right.”

  I’m not good, I’m just quiet, thought Dirk, but didn’t believe it was sensible to say that aloud. “But what about Frau Pfeiffer? What if she becomes—indisposed? Or needs something I can’t help with? Has she a friend I can call upon?”

  “She has no friends,” said her husband, heaving his leather carryall upon the carriage bench. “The Meersburg merchants and their wives aren’t as open to the stranger among us as I had hoped. But she is used to all that.”

  “A minister she might trust?”

  “She is unprofessed. The cook will be able to advise if it should come to certain womanly matters. But don’t worry. I go away every fall. All part of the pattern. See to the boys, and attend to the Frau as I have instructed you, and I shall be back before you notice I’m gone.” He headed off with a heave-ho, whistling.

  The boys didn’t run off to school. Their mother wouldn’t have it. She thought Moritz too intense, and Franz was needed at home to keep him engaged.

  So the boys plunged about the house and gardens. During the day Dirk kept an eye on them. Neither a hard job nor interesting to him.

  During the nighttime, as agreed, Dirk assembled a pallet for himself in the corridor outside Nastaran’s bedchamber.

  On the third night of Herr Pfeiffer’s absence, Dirk woke to the sound of a piece of furniture being shuffled across the floor. He knew that Herr Pfeiffer had nailed his wife’s windows shut, but for a small inset of glass. Hinged on one side, it could be opened for air. Hardly large enough for a human hand to reach through.

  So the only way Nastaran Pfeiffer could leave the room was to step over Dirk.

  He lay so still in the dark he might have been trying to hear the fall of a shadow. The more he held his breath, however, the more the pounding of his own blood rose in his ears like a sequence of breaking waves. Once he thought he heard the noise of beaten air, as when a bird launches herself in a small wind whipped up by her own startled, urgent wings.

  He might have heard another sound—a chair pulled here or there, and then bed curtains or blankets rustling.

  It’s she who has taken a lover, he thought; and somehow he has managed to come in through the window.

  Herr Pfeiffer would want to know. Or he wouldn’t really want to know. Dirk couldn’t decide.

  He was sure, waking again later in the night, that her door had never opened. She couldn’t have stepped over him in her sleep without his knowing. She’d have bumped into him.

  In the morning she came downstairs more composed than he had seen her so far. She didn’t wear a bonnet today. Upon her brow, like a diadem, rested a stiffened, coiled gold braid. From this soft clamp fell a cloth of pale saffron with Oriental pattern. Her mouth and cheeks and chin were unveiled. As she walked, the head scarf fluttered loosely behind her shoulders. A look of billowing wings. A hawk settling.

  The boys flung themselves at her and she petted them and sat while they ate their bread soaked in warm milk.

  “I trust you slept well,” said Dirk, politely, seeing to the boys’ spills and crumbs.

  “However could I know?” she replied. It was the most direct thing she had ever said to him. “Only a spouse can report on whether one has slept well.”

  He had no answer to that. She pressed her point by saying, “Did you sleep well?”

  Sure enough, he found he couldn’t quite answer with confidence. He lied, perhaps for the first time. “I think so. I may have had a dream—”

  “A dream is only a fancy. But lucky you, to fancify. If it is suitable to share with my family, tell us what your dream was about.”

  “I dreamed I heard furniture walking about in your room, and that you had turned into a bird, and left your room in the middle of the night, returning only as the sun was beginning to rise.”

  “Did you really dream that?” She turned to him with the scrutiny of a physician. Her look was neither alarmed nor suspicious. Her expression seemed to center itself in whorls, as peering down the cup of a peony or a rose toward the golden stamen seems to stabilize the gaze and intensify the act of seeing. Her next sentence was spoken with controlled force. “Do you know where I might have been going?”

  “I don’t,” he said, and then, daringly, “perhaps you do.”

  At this she rose from the table and floated away. As she lifted her hems to clear the step to the passageway, he saw she was not wearing customary leather shoes, but dancing slippers in muskmelon silk.

  35.

  Having received no instruction in the particulars of the necessary entertainments, Dirk was aware he was failing the boys a little. They were becomi
ng more rambunctious. Pottery shattered; language coarsened. It was a relief to hear from the laundry assistant that the harvest festival was about to begin. Dirk wondered about taking Franz and Moritz.

  Franz said loftily, “Papi tells us that our festival is nothing as royal as the celebrations held in Munich for the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig to Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. That was the first Oktoberfest. Papi went and got drunk for only the second time in his life.”

  “When was the first time?”

  “He won’t say.”

  Moritz mumbled, “The day he met Mutti.”

  Franz sat up like a trained poodle. “Can we go to the fair?”

  “Let me ask.”

  Nastaran was in the kitchen. She was arguing with the cook. She wanted, it seemed, a pomegranate, or a few of them. “The harvest market isn’t till tomorrow, and in any case pomegranates aren’t native to our land,” said the cook angrily. It sounded as if this was a conversation they’d had many times before.

  “Pomegranates,” insisted Nastaran, “and walnuts. I have a holy hunger. I need them.”

  “What you need,” muttered the cook under her breath, “is something I can’t easily supply. Oh, the mercy of good fortune, look who’s here,” she said to Dirk. “Lend me those lads as a hedge against unreason from Good Dame Precious Particular here. Boys, I shall set you to carving potatoes, how is that?” Distracted for a moment, the boys fell to, and Dirk turned for a few private moments with their mother, but she had already slipped away, bangles clinking and scarves rustling in the windless volume of the staircase.

  “I want to talk to you about Oktoberfest,” he called. Upstairs, a door closed.