He felt raw and empty—not as if he had voided himself, but been extruded from—from something. From the forest. From life. An all-too-familiar malady.
A hand on his lapel, gripping, shaking it, another touching his face.
“A happenstance such as would delight von Kleist, or that American, Washington Irving. Those who object to the coincidences that drive a romantic novel should think again!” said Stahlbaum.
He was on his hands and knees in the snow, roughing blood back into Dirk’s cheeks. Laughing. Now talking not to Dirk but over his shoulder to someone else, calling something. Now turning back.
“Are you alive?” said Stahlbaum. Stahlbaum—oh, Felix. Yes. Felix.
“What is happening?” muttered Dirk.
“The collapse of Icarus, brought down not by sun but wind and snow. It’s a mercy we weren’t killed. You, too, as we all but ran roughshod over you. Think of the odds!” Felix waved one hand behind him. Now the snow was thinning. The squalling clouds hastened eastward. A wasted light returned through paler, higher clouds. Off to one side of the square lay the remains of a large wickerwork gondola and what looked like gently burning sails subsiding into the snowy gutters.
“We were air-ballooning, Kurt and I. We launched from the von Koenig place outside Überlingen in hopes of crossing to Switzerland, but scarcely had we risen above the roof-beams of the estate barns when a brutal storm rushed in from the Untersee. It pummeled down the valley and caught us sideways, sweeping us into Meersburg—exactly where we didn’t want to go. Then, I don’t know, perhaps we got punctured on a steeple. We could see nothing!—we were twirled about like mad Viennese waltzers!—and we buffeted against cornices and slid down the roofs, ending quite by accident in the square. Catching you on the side of our downed runaway chariot in the bargain. You! It might have been anyone in town, it might have been no one. For all I know you provided a brake in our velocity, though you took quite the thumping for your kindness. Now what do you make of that? Destiny or accident?”
Dirk was sitting up and rubbing his eyes. Irregular rips in the cloth of cloud showed ribbons of mocking blue. He could see the younger von Koenig, that university friend, dashing his boots against the cobbles and tearing at his hair. People were emerging from doorways, laughing and pointing. A white collie raced up to the impromptu bonfire, wagging its tail in delight and leaping like a witch at Walpurgisnacht.
“I thought . . .” said Dirk, and stopped.
“What did you think?” Felix looked at Dirk with the same sort of expression that the dog was giving to the conflagration; there was appeal and puppyishness.
“I thought you were in the basket.”
“But I was. Until it tumbled me out on my hinterbacken. Look, are you really all right? I’m afraid we smacked into you pretty hard. You went over like a tree felled for a ship’s mast. You look in shock.”
Dirk shook his head.
“And I was going to try to run into you—! Though not today. I got a note from the Doktor who said he was looking to talk to you. I was going to alert you.”
“I’ve already been to see him—he was saying things—”
“Oh? You surprise me. He alluded to a surprise or two, and wanted you to come back, but he didn’t know where you lived. He didn’t think you’d come back on your own, as you left so suddenly with Nastaran.”
“I wanted you to pull me up. To take me with you.”
“Too late for that. I’m not going anywhere now. The heated gas has all escaped. Look, Kurt is having a fit. I should help him.”
“Did you ever hear of someone—called—the Pythia?”
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Where is the forest?”
Felix rocked back on his heels, pursed his lips. “Maybe you should see a physician? Or down a stiff cognac?”
“Maybe I should return to Mesmer.” Dirk began to cry. “I left in disarray.”
“It’s being startled, it’s nothing, there now, straighten up, man.”
Dirk stood on weak knees; Felix leapt to support him. “I’ll take you back. Least I can do after smacking into you. Anyway, I’m curious; Mesmer may be Herr Doktor Quack, but he always turns over a bright thought or two despite himself. Wait here, hold on to the wall while I go tell Kurt what I’m doing. He can manage on his own. He’ll hire someone to clear away the mess. What that boy won’t do for a lark! The Baron will beat him silly with a cane. His father meant that hot-air assemblage for a gathering of scientific enthusiasts this weekend, I think. And it was hard to acquire, and dear. It came from Paris. We were taking it on a trial run. Without permission.”
Dirk watched Felix walk away. The young ’cellist was hobbling a little, too; he was hiding his own bruises in the interest of taking care of Dirk. The tears began to seep again; Dirk hid them in his collars two or three at a time, and had dry cheeks by the time Felix returned, offering an arm.
49.
“Are you willing to try again?” asked Mesmer. “If you can attain the proper calm and detachment after your hard knock in the street, I shall interview you.”
“I’d like to stay,” said Felix.
Dirk shook his head. “But don’t go far. Come back in when I say.”
Felix left the room and the Heilig-Geist Spital, looking for a coffeehouse and a broadsheet, and promised to return in an hour. Mesmer again lowered the drapes, and did something with glass balls that made a shimmering sound, like rounded prisms if there were such a thing, and in terrific curiosity and fear Dirk closed his eye.
When he opened it, Felix had returned, and the Doktor was drawing back the drapes with a palsied hand. “Do you want to say what you saw?”
Dirk shook his head. “I have no words for it.”
“You had many words for it half an hour ago, but I don’t know what they mean. I believe you mentioned the Pythia.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
Mesmer glanced at Felix, who obliged. “The Oracle of Delphi,” said Felix. “The famed seer of ancient Greece—”
“I never heard of such a creature—”
Felix rushed on. “She foretold the fates of kings and men, and spoke in riddles or spoke in plain tongue, as her visions allowed. Why did she speak to you? Frankly, I’m cut to the quick.”
“Stop, young man,” said Mesmer. “We must proceed with diligence. Reticence. Which means let him tell us.”
Dirk grimaced. “I’m not sure what an oracle is.”
“Or Pan?” asked Mesmer.
“Pan?”
“A sort of satyr, as you described him, half goat, half youth?”
“He was no youth! Old as a dwarf in the Black Forest.” These words spilled from Dirk’s mouth. They were almost the most definite thing he had ever said aloud. His eye widened at the sound of them.
“You have seen them before,” said Mesmer. “When you died as a child.”
“That’s balderdash.”
“You took something from the Pan. You took his knife.”
“I . . . thought he was the knife?”
“We often mistake the object for its essence. Philosophy will clear that muddle up in time. Do you know why they come to you?”
Felix couldn’t help blurting out, “He’s possessed! Dirk hears voices . . .”
“Shut up,” said Mesmer. “He sees visions. It’s not the same thing. Nor is it the same thing as memory, I think. Not like Nastaran’s vision of her childhood garden. Maybe this begins in memory, but a different sort of transaction is occurring. Do you know why these two come to you in their forest?”
“Their forest,” said Dirk. “Why is it . . . the way it is?”
“Do you want me to tell you what I think you said to me when you were—otherwise? Well, mesmerized?”
Dirk looked at Felix, whose face was beaming—jealousy, pride, curiosity. Dirk shrugged his shoulders, and sighed, and nodded.
So Mesmer told them both.
“The Pythia—the Oracle at Delphi—lived in as
quiet a way as she could manage, given she was the most famous woman in the ancient world. To see her, crews rowed the triremes of kings up the strait of Corinth and anchored at Delphi. Slaves hauled tribute uphill to the temples of Apollo and Poseidon, among others. The visiting kings fasted. They cleansed. They paid out alms. They sometimes forgave debts. Quite a few of them found prostitutes lower down the hill but more of them did not even go looking. Then, usually heavyhearted from a question about some political or military mission, some concern of a royal house, like lines of succession or a proposed military allegiance, the great man of state would go alone into the temple of the Pythia.
“Having spent the previous night in a sacred grove, the priestess would also approach the house of prophecy and settle herself there. A vent of holy smoke roiled from a fissure in the earth below. She would fall into a trance. She would speak as the gods directed her to speak. Often when she awoke she couldn’t recall what prophecy she had made, and when it was told back to her she rarely took pains to decipher it.”
“I said all this to you?” asked Dirk.
“No,” said Mesmer. “This much is known by scholars of the ancient world. I am sketching it out for you to suggest the significance of your experience.”
“Shhh,” said Felix to Dirk, “let him go on.”
Mesmer: “One day, back in those times of Attic glory, I don’t know how long ago, the ludic demi-urge Pan traveled from Arcadia, which is to the south of Delphi, and requested something of the Pythia. I’m not sure what, but does it matter? Who knows what we really ask of one another? Pan may have been in search of sexual favors, perhaps, or word of the prospects of some cunning king or lithe maiden in which Pan had an interest, unseemly or otherwise. Pan is the god of rural heights, with tenderness toward shepherds and their sheep, but his eye strays to mortal maids and the naiads and dryads, too. With his goatish undercarriage he seldom enjoys romantic success—not even with the sheep. Who are not as stupid as they look. I hope not to offend. I shall continue.
“The Pythia refused Pan his suit for reasons of her own. Perhaps he’d propositioned her. I couldn’t make that bit out. But Pan stamped his hoof in anger and started a panic. Panikos, you know: the mischief of Pan. That tremor that causes sheep in a meadow to scatter, that causes human hearts to tremble, and fingers to drop goblets to the floor, that causes Gaia’s seizures. Gaia, the great earth herself, in all her moods and mysteries. Today’s scholars think the Oracle at Delphi was a handmaiden of the ancient goddess Gaia, whom Zeus and his broody, inbred, self-involved cohorts ignored. Gaia, perhaps, took umbrage at the insult to her priestess, the Pythia. Panic: the sense of being in the grip of—something terrific—sometimes terrible, sometimes overwhelmingly sweet and capsizing.”
“I know of panic,” Dirk averred in the quietest voice.
“So what I am telling you is that this has become your story, this is what you have said to me. Are you listening? The Pythia picked up Pan and threw him down with such force he was embedded in the ground. Like a knife. When Pan struck the earth, Gaia shifted and groaned in her hips and breasts, causing an earthquake as dreadful as that of Lisbon sixty, seventy years ago. That bad. The very paling of the hillside at Delphi split. The ground up high separated from its moorings. An entire hill-face of forest slid as one section of soil, one portfolio of many kinds of trees. Severed from the ridge-top, it dashed itself down upon the temple housing the Pythia. The Greeks have always known the trees are full of spirit—the dryads—but when this slice of forest rolled over the great vapors that Gaia sends up to inspire the Pythia, to tell the future and to warn blind humans about their blind behaviors, the severed forest was liberated from its common imprisonment, chained by roots and memories. Though enobled, it was also made migratory by the gusty inspiration of Gaia. It was free, but it was exiled. It couldn’t reclaim its homeland—”
“None of us can get back to childhood,” murmured Felix, “not Nastaran, not you, not I—”
“Hush, you. Or I’ll strike you! I’m trying to say this to young Drosselmeier while it is clear. The forest was liberated, but it was homeless. It was—it is—free, and forlorn. A sacred grove, peculiarly lacking in fundament. Searching for—I don’t know. A place to be established.”
“The Little Lost Forest,” said Felix. “It sounds like one of those household tales published by those lexicographer brothers. One of the märchen, a folk belief, a fairy story.”
“How could I have said anything like this?” asked Dirk. “You’re mad.”
“You told me all this,” said Mesmer. “For when you died, that day in the forest when you were a small boy, you went to the sacred grove. The Little Lost Forest, as your friend has it. You took something from that unreachable land. I believe you may have it still.”
Dirk said, “I believe you have been hitting the schnapps for reasons beyond the medicinal. You’re making a joke of me. Come, Felix. I can’t be party to this nonsense.”
“‘What fools these mortals be,’” said Mesmer, a bit sadly.
“But wait.” Felix grabbed his cape and held Dirk by the wrist to keep him from bolting. He pivoted Dirk back to Mesmer. “Was there a motive in their releasing Dirk from death? Was there a gift they gave him, a challenge they set him upon?”
“Life is challenge enough,” snapped Dirk, “come—”
“You’re right to ask,” said Mesmer. “If you never see me again, young man, listen to this anyway. Some good may come of it. Or not. They want a home. This magic woods—the unrepentant Pan, the unforgiving immortalized Pythia. If that’s who they are. The male and the female demi-urges. The progenitors. Pale Eve and swarthy Adam, if you prefer. They cannot go back. None can go back—neither the figures nor the trees of the sacred forest. That congress of inspirited trees! Migrating now for several thousand years, stumping with the speed of glaciers up the hardscrabble Balkans, wading through the Carpathians, forging the streams and storming the valleys a foot or two every decade these hundreds of years—they have now reached a time and a world unknown ever before, an edge of mills and factories. The lip of industry. Europe has become too populated for them. The living timber that wanders . . . it wants you to colonize a place for it. However secular it becomes, the world still needs a sacred grove. You were there. You saw it. They have given you your life in exchange for your mission.”
Dirk slammed the door as he left. Felix was laughing on the stairs behind him. “If this doesn’t call for a mid-morning brandy—a ballooning catastrophe and a Greek tragedy, all before luncheon! At this rate, a trip to the beer halls and a raunchy evening of music and frolic and—wait, where are you going? Wait for me, Dirk!”
50.
Felix caught up with Dirk; Dirk shook him off, saying, “You’ve set me to be a laughingstock. You . . . you privileged fellow . . . you will cavort and chortle with your university scholars over my ignorance and simple nature. Gullible, that’s the word. I won’t be your toy.”
“I don’t want you for my toy,” said Felix. “Come, this is no ruse. I only tried to get you help for your Persian hausfrau. How could I know the discredited old coot would uncork a vintage experience of yours? What, do you not believe these things that Mesmer has said? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .’ I think you must believe, on some level, or you wouldn’t be so angry.”
“Leave me be.”
Felix put a hand on Dirk’s shoulder so forcefully that Dirk had to stop and wheel about and face the young man. Felix: “If you say there was nothing in what Mesmer told us both, I’ll drop the matter and never mention it again. All I ask is that you tell me the truth.”
Dirk didn’t answer for a while. The early snow was already melting into wetness. It made the world, white and airy when coated by snow-storm, into a warren of dark varnished streets, an ogre-size kuriositätenkabinett built of stone and stucco. In which Dirk was a scurrying mouse, no more.
“Well?” asked Felix.
“He told back to me something about a drea
m I must have had, long ago,” said Dirk. “I would rather leave it there. I haven’t thought of it in a decade, or more.”
“What will you do next?”
“What is it to you? Hadn’t you better go find the friend you abandoned? Von Koenig?”
“I’m going to go find my ’cello, and play up a storm.” Felix regarded Dirk with sudden coolness, as if he were a specimen of another order of being. “I should be grateful for a vision. I have to try to make my own with my music. I knew I liked you for some reason. You have something I lack.”
“Go to your ’cello, then,” said Dirk, and spun away. Though there was little he would have liked more than to lie on the floor beneath the belly of the ’cello, eyes closed, and let music wash over him, purge him, coat him.
51.
As Dirk kicked along the lanes, he watched the snow-melt coursing in the sunken gutters. In Meersburg, a dropped piece of paper was an insult to the neighbors. An unpolished boot-scraper upon a doorsill, reason to call the sheriff. A shoddy paint job on the street door was unpatriotic if not treasonous.
Dirk knew all this, and lived within the registers, though it wasn’t how the forest lived, not at all.
He was surprised therefore, turning into the lane that led to the Pfeiffer establishment, to see that the trees rising above the cloister garden wall had gone bare all at once. Underfoot, as untidy as a forest floor, lay yellowed, slick leaves; he kicked through them. It made him sick to see the instantaneity of death.
He was suddenly alarmed, and ran the rest of the way down the lane, along the garden wall.
The boys were swinging on the gate.
Dirk: “Is everything all right?”
“Of course,” said Moritz. “Mama is in the garden sewing the leaves back on the trees. We are going to have sauerbraten tonight; can’t you smell it?”
Dirk pushed through. Nastaran stood on a chair she had dragged into the garden. Her lifted arms made a perfect expressive O.
Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker Page 12