Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

by Gregory Maguire

  “This is a perfect place for you to work,” said Felix as they began to scale the bluff. Otto von Blotto was in his arms, as the incline was too steep for stumpy legs. “Look at the lovely openness of it. It just calls . . . to be filled with invention. No?”

  Dirk paused for breath at a turn in the path. Felix was right about that. A row of narrow trees, too slender to serve as a real breakfront, made an open lattice against the shimmery spangle. But the shoreline was otherwise spare of flora—only tall needle-y grasses, low shrubs contorted into the shapes of flame by the ceaseless wind.

  “You could move in your Little Lost Forest. There’s plenty of room . . .”

  Dirk didn’t answer. So much caprice and nonsense spent in negotiating the sorrier and grander realities. “The forest would get blown out to sea,” he said at last, as neutrally as he could.

  That night, after the family had retired, Dirk noticed a door at the back of the clothes cupboard that proved to be the way to the parapet. His greatcoat hung on a peg; he pulled a sleeve forward into the doorjamb to make sure he wouldn’t get locked out by accident. He had the impression he was climbing the dark sleeve of his own coat. Up a narrow set of stone steps he ventured, and lifted a trap to arrive, shivering, onto a flat part of the roof.

  A middling moon emerged, a sore that was soaking the raveled sheets of cloud with white blood. It shed enough light that Dirk could make out the brow of Hiddensee to his left, and the low sweep of north Rügen to his right. The cleft of sea between them, that narrow verge of horizon that led his eye to no land . . . He stared at it, as if expecting a ship to round the promontory of Hiddensee, to come and rescue him. Until the wind finally got the better of him, he stared. In love, and in fear. The ocean, however milder in this channel than it would be on the far side of Hiddensee, was still rough and active, and the noise was thousands of drowning ’cellos.

  73.

  For four days Ethelinda struggled to establish some kind of routine in the household. The local staff proved sullen, the Munich staff styled themselves as superior. A stalemate from the start.

  Unless the sky was spitting rain, Felix kept the boys out of the house, and most of the time Dirk joined them. They walked north to where the headland of the Rügen promontory turned east. All the time the low brow of Hiddensee winked in and out of view, depending on the strength of the fog and the warmth of the melting sun. It was too early in the season to bathe in the sea, though the boys tried. Their father stripped as well and got in as far as his calves. Dirk watched from the shore, shivering. “Take us in a boat to Hiddensee,” the boys wailed.

  “Too rough today,” said Felix, lovely when he was being lazy.

  “One day I will,” said Dirk, but they weren’t listening to him.

  By the fifth day in Meritor, the Stahlbaum family and retinue had concluded, regretfully, that the house needed to be made more comfortable before they could truly enjoy it. The old plaster walls were buckled with hidden damp. The woodwormed chestnut wainscoting in the parlor required oiling at best and perhaps replacement. The well would have to be rebuilt, as the water had proven brackish enough to make their tea somewhat tidal. Next summer would be better.

  The boys were disappointed in the change of plans. They expressed themselves, backstairs, in vital attempts at blasphemy that were almost charming. Ethelinda and Felix pretended not to hear them. “We never said we would stay the full two weeks, only that we would investigate,” their father told them. “On the way home we shall visit the carousel in the Berlin zoo in the Tiergarten, I pledge you this.”

  “We were going to do that anyway!” shouted Sebastian.

  “We’ll be back next year. I’ll take you by boat to Hiddensee. I’ll row you myself.”

  Felix didn’t keep his promise, though, as he died suddenly a few months later. Word about this from Ethelinda arrived at Drosselmeier’s shop in the form of a scribbled message. She needed him at once. Dirk glanced at the figures upon their wooden stands, but he couldn’t find one that warranted bringing as a consolation. He locked up and hurried to the Stahlbaum home.

  Ethelinda met him at the door. The boys were upstairs in the nursery, weeping. Dirk took both her hands in his and said, “But why?”

  “That’s not the right question,” she told him through her tears. He didn’t know what other question might work, but maybe it wasn’t a time for questions.

  “You are Felix’s—you were Felix’s dearest friend,” she said to him. “The boys need you now. I need you now. Please accompany me to the services as if you were my brother.”

  “But your own family—”

  “It is too late for them to make amends.”

  He needed to know how Felix had died. His heart was engorged, said Ethelinda. His grandmother had died young from a similar condition.

  She adorned herself in bombazine. With an admirable steeliness she saw her way through the services and the timid meals meant to appeal to a woman with a failed appetite. Dirk’s ductless eye, behind its patch, leaked for the only time in its blind life. He wiped away the tears with a scrap of small colored scarf he had taken from Nastaran’s cupboard after she died.

  He’d been surprised to sit in the crowded nave and glance around at the choir in their robes. They did not sing. “He wanted no music,” murmured Ethelinda. “Silence is loud enough.”

  For quite a while Sebastian and Günther wouldn’t acknowledge Dirk with a hello, good-bye, or please jump off the railroad trestle. It was as if he had disappeared from their lives as completely as their father. Curious, then, that the most significant change of heart in the household seemed to belong to Otto von Blotto. The filthy fawning thing nuzzled at Dirk’s arches and toes when he was sitting and kept to Dirk’s heel when he stood or walked about.

  74.

  Ethelinda pulled back into herself as she became more used to being a widow. “You have your own life,” she insisted to Dirk. But did he really? This was a question he could frame, but he couldn’t come to an answer. He kept his distance.

  After a few months, though, Ethelinda relented and showed up at Drosselmeier’s Toy Shop. The boys were in tow. They became engaged in small racks of tin soldiers Dirk imported from Great Britain and France and set up on a tabletop to fight the Prussians and a certain militant strain of giraffe.

  Ethelinda: “I need you to bring a packet to Meersburg. I don’t trust it by the usual couriers.”

  “What’s in Meersburg?”

  “Have you forgotten? My family home? My parents have passed on to their reward, but my brother is still there. The lake place is too big and cold for year-round, and Munich won’t do, but the Meersburg house is all right for him.”

  “Why don’t you bring it yourself when you visit him?”

  “We’re not in touch. Surely Felix told you all about that?”

  “He never did.”

  She explained. It turned out that, long ago, Kurt had sired a bastard with a member of the household staff. This had only come to light some years later when the mother showed up with the child in tow. He was something of a dullard, the boy, but his resemblance to the von Koenig line was unmistakable. The mother had once been a kitchen maid in the family’s lakeside schloss. It caused a great ruckus in the whole family.

  He fumbled. “And you—how were you inconvenienced?”

  “I took Felix’s side, of course. I was his wife.”

  “I don’t understand. Why should Felix have any opinion about this?”

  “Don’t you remember? I thought you were around that summer. At the time, Felix was believed to have gotten the girl in trouble. He had admitted as such. My parents didn’t want me to marry Felix because of that. Felix’s presumed licentiousness was the cause of their estrangement from me because, you see, I’d already become enamored of Felix. I learned far too late that the bastard was actually Kurt’s child, and that my own brother, so cowardly, had allowed his friend Felix to accept that stain upon his own reputation. And Kurt stood idly by as my forbidd
en romance with Felix caused a rift between me and my family—you see? Ach, Kurt betrayed both his friend and his sister. And this paupered my boys of their grandparents. So I can have nothing to do with Kurt. Though he’s my brother, he’s a selfish brute. No fit model for his nephews. You’d be a better godfather to them than he is an uncle.”

  So Dirk agreed to convey the packet of documents to Ethelinda’s family home. Before the von Koenigs departed his shop, he tried to give the boys the pair of wheeled elephants he had carved from some cherrywood, but Ethelinda insisted on buying some soldiers instead. The boys had turned their noses up at the pachyderms anyway—girls’ toys. They both accepted, however, a small sack of boiled sweets—acid drops in citron yellow and pear green. The Stahlbaum sons didn’t thank him exactly, he noted, but at least they nodded acknowledgment at the thump of sacks in their open palms.

  He left when they did. Closing up, he watched Ethelinda’s passive face float up in the darkening shop windows, like the visage of a marble statue tipped over backward into shallow water. Her expression was full of purse strings, he thought; variously tightening and loosening. When her eyes were welcoming her mouth was snapped tight. When her lips softened and she bit her lower lip, her eyes went mechanical.

  Dirk had little feeling for her of any variety, but even a sensation of curiosity was something of a novelty. She was keeping her grief to herself as a private treat to enjoy in her own boudoir, not to share among her friends. Ach, as if he were a friend of hers. He didn’t know if he might qualify for such a position. Nor whether he desired to do so.

  75.

  He had felt queer all morning. By the time Dirk went to the Stahlbaum house to pick up the parcel of documents, the setting sun seemed to be etching lines of gold-foil in the damp gutters. Dirk cringed at the shouting and screaming and the throwing of toys upstairs. When Ethelinda came downstairs long enough to thrust him a packet of papers, she said, “And take this—as long as you’re traveling.” Felix’s walking stick from the stand in the corner of the vestibule. “I always meant you to have something of his.” Dirk knew the thing. He’d never noticed that the dark metal knob at the tip, the grasp, was the old iron knife-head of that wizened, crouching folk figure. Felix must have had this stick bespoke.

  Tucking the papers into his vest, gripping the cane, Dirk escaped the household as quickly as he could. He paused at the bottom of the stone steps and looked along the boulevard. The trees were half unleaved and the ground was littered. He turned his collar up against a pebbling of rain. The door of the house behind him opened, the noise increased. He didn’t turn to see who was looking after him—he had had enough of them. Felix wasn’t there anymore. Dirk wasn’t sure why he allowed himself to be involved.

  He walked briskly as the rain steadied. The plashing of drops were like stains—he heard them fall on the cobbles before him. They registered to him as a splash of annihilation. As if a painter, rejecting everything on the canvas, were daubing out the view in blotches of angry nothingness. The patterns of blankness began to meet up, and he slowed his step for fear of losing his way. He was becoming blinded in his single eye. He’d never felt the like before.

  He’d stopped cold for fear of walking into a carriage. He held one hand over his face. The other hand steadied the whole tottering stack of himself upon the walking stick. Horrifyingly melodramatic, but he couldn’t help it. His body shuddered, from the backs of his ankles to the sensitive indentations in his temples. This was, perhaps, a cousin to the swollen heart that had felled Felix—simpatico. Dirk would leave now, he would go at last, after much too much waiting.

  Until he became tethered to the world once more, this time by the furry yoke that wreathed around his feet, barking to alert him of the danger.

  “You’re a damn fool to come out in the rain,” snarled Dirk to Otto von Blotto. He picked him up to return him to the household. Resentment at being importuned was a slender reason to live, but it was better than nothing.

  76.

  As he headed for Meersburg for the first time since he’d left, he began to think about those siblings, Kurt and Ethelinda von Koenig as they had once been, way back then. During his summer at the von Koenig lakeside estate, all those years ago, Dirk remembered seeing Kurt at a distance, because Kurt had been joined at the hip with Felix. But Dirk couldn’t recall if Ethelinda, née von Koenig, had even been in residence at the family home during that bright season of youth. Perhaps she’d been visiting friends or cousins elsewhere. He wasn’t aware of her existence until he met her as a married woman in Munich.

  He had no desire to run into the kitchen miss over whom he’d made such a spectacular romantic failure. He doubted he’d recognize her, and indeed it took him a while to recall her name. Hannelore, it came to him, with the feeling of a scarf being knotted too tightly around his neck. Hannelore. She would be a matron now. A matron with an adult child.

  His route from Munich to Meersburg took him through Memmingen and then Lindau, toasted golden towns set in the rolling nap of the Alpenvorland. When it stretched itself out in languor, Bavaria seemed to Dirk, somehow, tamed. Well, he’d traveled half the world since he was stupid enough to be young. The wild forests of his youth—perhaps they no longer existed. The world was too strictly regulated now. The idea of ever being able to find his way back to that waldhütte where he had been raised—to the extent he had been raised—was as impossible as Nastaran’s need to return to her lost childhood in Persia. It couldn’t happen.

  Idle thoughts for a tedious journey. No value could attach to revisiting his youth, even if he could manage it somehow.

  Still, the notion returned, and he had to throw it down repeatedly, like bread crumbs in some old tale—hoping the wild thrushes would eat them up. Despite those romantic stories that had become so popular—even Felix’s little boys adored the sweetened renditions of Grimm as served up by stern Frau Gouvernante—sometimes one wandered into the woods because the ominous woods were safer than home was.

  In the intervening years, Meersburg had grown, yet it opened its familiar prospects to him with a grudging heart. It seemed busier than he recalled. A gloss of foreign tongues spoke of a strengthening economy. Naturally, he’d never been invited to the von Koenig Meersburg quarters during the time he had lived with the Pfeiffers, both during Nastaran’s life and in those years afterward. But he was able to locate it easily enough. He stood looking through the iron gate at the shallow forecourt of the Kurt von Koenig manse. Maybe the brother would be in residence and maybe not, but either way, Dirk hoped to avoid Hannelore. Surely she’d been sent packing with a nice residual, but maybe she’d been taken in with her son. Lived here as a retainer of some sort.

  Dirk was performing this duty for Ethelinda but really for Felix. Steady now. Some impulse Dirk hadn’t felt in years prompted him to utter a silent prayer as he pulled the bell cord. The fact of a prayer made him think of Pfarrer Johannes. Dirk had left his village church with a message for the Bishop of Meersburg and had never returned . . . What a layabout he’d been! What a bad son.

  A doorman powdered in the old manner ushered Dirk into a chamber crowded with pots of straggly geraniums brought in from the early frost. A glass of beer was offered; Herr von Koenig was at home but occupied. But before long the head of the family arrived, stout as any Bavarian burgher, his thinning hair the color of melted marzipan.

  “I served briefly at your family estate one summer,” said Dirk, wanting only to be honorable and not to engage beyond what was necessary. “As I’ve come recently to befriend your sister in Munich, I’ve been deputized to deliver a packet of documents to you following the death of her husband.”

  “My old friend Felix,” said Kurt. “My former friend. Former in both senses, as there is no hope of reconciliation now.”

  “I wasn’t asked to await a reply,” said Dirk, standing. “I’ll confirm to Frau Stahlbaum that you have received the parcel. Thank you for receiving me.”

  “Sit down. Wait. A reply may be in
order, whether one was requested or not.” Kurt waved a fat hand distractedly, unfolding handwritten documents. He flipped pages, humming to himself. Some were letters. “If you were thinking of marrying the Widow Stahlbaum, you’ll get neither support nor protest from me about it. We aren’t much involved in each other’s lives now.”

  “I understand that.” Dirk managed to sound sniffy and also to avoid addressing the issue.

  “She thinks I wronged Felix somehow.”

  “I don’t enjoy such personal standing with the family that I could comment.”

  “I’m not pushing my life story upon you, sir. Just explaining the circumstances. This is an interesting letter. Have you looked at it?”

  “Certainly not. May I be excused now?”

  “You’ve come all the way from Munich on family business. It would be improper of me not to offer a meal.”

  “Thank you; it would be improper of me to accept. I’m an incidental messenger.”

  “Not according to this, you’re not,” he said, gesturing to the paper. “You did say you are Herr Drosselmeier?”

  Dirk looked as officious as he knew how.

  “I see that some of these are letters my brother-in-law sent my sister while he was away in London one year. Explaining to her why he had stepped in and named himself as the father of my child. It seems he had thought he was protecting you, and didn’t learn I was the guilty father for some years. Until it was too late.”

  Dirk, not skilled at lying, made a stab at it. “I know that story and, truly, it doesn’t concern me, or even much interest me.”

  “You were close to Felix, though. How droll, for him to be shielding a peasant boy from scandal—how could a reputation for scandal have hurt the likes of you? And all along it was my good name he was accidentally saving—at least until the wretched woman, I mean of course my lovely wife, showed up with my genius son.”