Hiddensee

by Gregory Maguire

  Frau Pfeiffer was convinced that her husband, finding his wife unmoored and deficient, had fallen in bed with an ostler’s daughter or a courtly dame. Under the circumstances, Nastaran lost her usual resolve and reticence and she succumbed to Dirk’s pleading. She presented herself at the appointed hour dressed like a proper wife, her wild hair swept upon her head and hidden under a tedious and sturdy bonnet. No circlet of brass, no veil of painted silk. The shoes were brown leather, stout as varnished aubergines. Her mouth and chin were bravely unveiled in the local manner.

  “We want to come, too,” said Moritz. Franz hung back in the passage to the kitchen, eyeing the gingerbread that the cook was rolling out.

  “Stay here. Make me a gingerbread figure,” said Nastaran.

  “A man or a lady?” asked Moritz.

  “You choose.”

  “I shall make a gingerbread nutcracker,” said Moritz.

  “Some gingerbread walnuts and pomegranates, too,” said Nastaran. She wouldn’t take Dirk’s hand to manage the stairs or to climb into the carriage, and she told him to ride up top with the coachman.

  “It isn’t far, we could easily walk,” said Dirk, a little hurt.

  “I don’t walk in Meersburg,” she replied, as if she believed the walled city to be swarming with wild cats and wolves.

  Somewhat to Dirk’s surprise, when they arrived at the apartments of Doktor Mesmer, Nastaran refused to see the scholar without Dirk as a chaperone. “My husband wouldn’t hear of it,” she told Mesmer, though he looked too old to threaten a strudel. Felix, arriving late, was heard bashing about in the antechamber as Mesmer settled Frau Pfeiffer upon a leather-covered settee. Dirk took a wooden stool in a corner.

  The woman told the Doktor scarcely more about her life than she’d ever revealed to Dirk. The old man seemed untroubled by her reticence. “If what we are seeking is to open the blocked channels,” he said, “perhaps one of the channels that is blocked is memory. Now here is what I want you to do.”

  He wanted her to keep to a seated position, not a supine one, as she would not be sleeping, and certainly not dreaming. He said he would put her into a trance.

  “It is not a condition I understand,” she replied.

  “Many say it is not a condition I understand,” he answered, working up an expression of protruded eyes and withdrawn lower lip—for comic effect. Nastaran didn’t react. His face relaxed. “Without delving into the science of it, for the science is obscure and has been both challenged and faulted, may I liken it to something else? A trance, in earlier days, might have been called an enchantment—a reverie—falling under a spell. Asclepius, the classical Greek healer, received wounded souls at his clinic at Epidaurus and wooed them into a healing calm. It is said that the visions of John, sometimes called the Apocalypse, were received in a trance state.”

  “I am not gifted with visions,” said the woman. “I suffer the absence of them.”

  “Perhaps the absence of visions is also a gift. I do not know. But you fall asleep at night without dreaming, and you walk about without remembering. You put yourself at harm and you frighten your family, and when you wake you have no memory of the excursion and no sense of what you are seeking. How can it hurt to try to find out? And how much might it benefit you if you do learn what it is you’re seeking?”

  She was silent for quite a while, and then said merely, “I am ready, because I do not like to live in a state of panic and nameless longing.”

  At that moment Dirk could hardly keep himself from rushing to her and burying himself in her bosom. Enough that she seemed a Persian goddess disguised as a commercial traveler’s wife, wrapped round with the severities of Baden rectitude. But her confessing to nameless longing—all the disassociated comments she’d made, the mysterious glances and close-harbored opinions—the contrast of effects bewildered him. He could only keep staring at her as Herr Doktor took a restorative swig of something smoky and aromatic.

  The old man lowered the drape off its hook so the room settled into a watery, dusty gloom. The distant thrub of beer kegs rolled on cobbles, the complaints of fishwives—sounds of the scrag-ends of festival in the Schlossplatz—began to be muffled. A small, gold-ribbed Meissen plate with several plums of dark Copenhagen blue swam into view upon a table. Light chooses for itself what to promote.

  Mesmer toddled across the room and opened the glassed door of a large standing clock. The hands had been removed from the clock face, but Mesmer tugged on the carved weights anyway. Their chains ratcheted up along cogs and dials. He nudged a pendulum, and as it began to tick timelessly, Mesmer inserted several tiles of pale wood. The effect was to augment the sound of the tock. Not unlike, thought Dirk, how the carved panels of a ’cello amplify the music of vibrating strings.

  Mesmer must be striking some high glass cylinder with a mallet—Dirk couldn’t see this happening, but he began to hear a repetitive note as of a glass bell. A candle guttered somewhere. An aroma of lavender and of torn leaves of geranium, that earthy, affronted smell. A flutter near the flaking rosettes of the plaster ceiling, as if a small bird had gotten into the room. Then the sense—barely an aroma, some other apprehension, maybe a certain pressure—of a thrust of native roses observed in a wildwood bower, and the soundless drop of a petal upon the forest floor, and another. Falling upon the browned needles and acorny mast of a woodland slope. Silting up against the carved haunches and screwed-up expression of a hunched figure, provenance unknown.

  41.

  He could hardly swim forward deftly enough to take in the words being spoken to the shadowy woman.

  “Now, Frau Pfeiffer, I intend to say back to you what you told me, so would you like your chaperone to withdraw?” asked the old Doktor, stopping the pendulum with a crooked finger. He twitched the drape open only an inch, as if by slow degrees to reunite Nastaran with current time. The blue plums retired from their prominence, yielding to a general air of powdery shabbiness, as if the room—walls, carpeting, furniture, and occupants—were all woven in deteriorating brocade. A sliver of the pink façade of the Neues schloss showed itself along the left edge of the windowpane.

  Nastaran waved a hand dismissing the notion; Dirk should stay.

  The Doktor spoke slowly. He seemed now to realize that German wasn’t Frau Pfeiffer’s native tongue. He said, “Only you can know if I have helped relieve some internal constriction so that your fluids—your humours, if you prefer—might better align themselves.”

  “What did you discover?” Cold as stream ice, analytical as a magnifier lens.

  “If I understand you correctly, you told me that when you walk forward in your sleep, you are trying to walk backward.”

  “I don’t comprehend you,” said Frau Pfeiffer, humbly, even pitiably.

  “Backward to some time in the past, some place. Some garden. Some walled garden in a place called, I think, something like Bandar.”

  “Bandar-e Bushehr,” she whispered. She held the pads of eight fingers and the nails of her thumbs at her lips, as if to guard any other word from escaping.

  “You left a child there, among the roses and the fountains, among shrieking peacocks and other luminous birds. You walk at night to try to return to collect the child. To rescue her. You did not mean to leave her behind when you left with—was it I think—merchants from the Low Countries, from Holland? Amsterdam? Because of a family matter? . . . and there you met your current husband.”

  His voice was neutral, without scorn or blame.

  “You could see the Persian Gulf, you could smell salt in the air. There was a tiled dome on some ecclesiastical building, a mosque or a shrine, that rose to the east, like the blue-veined breast of a sleeping mother. You could see it above the top of the stone wall. There was a pomegranate tree, there was a walnut tree. Someone used to tell you that the key to your life would be found in a walnut. You would collect the walnuts as they fell, but you hadn’t the strength to open them by hand, and there was no brick or mallet or stone with which to strike the
m. I don’t know who used to tell you that. I don’t know much more, nor if I have said this very accurately at all. I am somewhat out of practice.”

  Nastaran was weeping, and her forehead nearly touched her skirted knees. Perhaps as much to afford her some privacy as anything else, Doktor Mesmer turned to Dirk and said to him, “Please take her home when she is ready. Then come back to me at once. I have something to tell you, and another thing to ask you.”

  42.

  She wouldn’t let Dirk go back to Herr Doktor, not right away. She spent the day in a parlor whose circlets of crown glass in leaded frames looked out at the mountains of eastern Switzerland across the lake. At evening she called Dirk to the open doorway but held him there, not speaking further.

  “What is it I can do for you?” he finally asked, willing to hear any answer, any one, if it would stir her out of her spell.

  “What is the key of which the Doktor spoke?” she finally replied. “The key in the walnut shell?”

  “It is your key.” He spoke with deliberate imprecision. Cautiously. He had no idea what he meant, except that if the idea of a key had come from her, the secret of the key must be hers, too. Hidden in her memory; in her heart.

  “Someone must find it for me. I cannot find it for myself.”

  Someone? Someone? Why not Dirk, you must find it for me? He suffered a flash of irritation. He crossed the threshold of the parlor and walked to the straight-backed chair against the wall, where she sat enthroned, her hands wreathed in the lattice of its arms. She looked up at him and bit her lower lip. He knelt like a Siegfried or a Roland and bowed his head. Her feet were bare. He lifted one foot to his lips.

  He left her in silence, in the near dark. She seemed not to notice.

  He lay down outside her door once more, but if he slept, it was only behind his eye-patch.

  43.

  He hadn’t realized it was laundry day until the girl accosted him in the stairwell.

  “She’s not coming to help me hang the bedding?” she asked, raising an eyebrow to the closed door of Frau Pfeiffer. “I can’t manage on my own, and the cook is in a snit over a maggoty cut of beef.”

  “It’s started to rain,” he said. “How can you hang sheets to dry in the rain?”

  “You come upstairs and help, and I’ll show you.”

  The boys, who had been playing in the garden until the downpour, came thundering inside. They joined Dirk and the girl in traipsing to the very top of the barn.

  The young laundress swung open high wooden doors in the back wall. The view looked over the alley and roofs, north toward Munich out there somewhere. A protruding beam and a pulley for hoisting bales proved the point: This had been a hayloft once. Despite the rain, a strong breeze pulled through on a flood of grainy-green light.

  The tent-like space under sloping eaves was strung with cords for dripping clothes and sheeting during days like this, and probably in the winter, too.

  The clotheslines on the side nearer the open doors displayed billowing, painted sheets. As Dirk helped the girl square off and drape the dripping laundry over the ropes, his eye sought out the work of Nastaran Pfeiffer.

  The sheets were painted in two styles, quite unalike.

  Some were done in black line, in the style of woodcuts by late medieval cartographers or court geographers. Nastaran must have had models to work from. Several, maybe all of them, were of Meersburg as viewed from the water, the way Dirk had first seen it approaching on the steamer. The lower town; the great broad flats of cliff-edge administrative buildings. The archaic angles of the tower of the old castle. The filled-in scallops of roofline, the hills beyond. Sculpted meadows and vineyards. Tight parallel lines to indicate shadow, dimension, progression toward a dim horizon. As an engraver on steel might do.

  They might have been copied from a voyager’s collection: “Towns of the Bodensee.” They had a clinical exactitude.

  The other paintings featured vague and flaming colors. As Dirk stared, the shapes organized themselves into coherence. Sequences of disorienting landscape. Flowering trees and sculpted hills progressed in a flat, unnatural evenness from the bottom hem to the top. No sky showed, no horizon, and each sequence of trees apparently ranging behind the foremost was articulated with the same degree of precision. Nothing became dim or smoky by distance.

  The boys raced among them until the laundress spoke sharply to them. “It’ll be on my slate if these scribbles and daubs fall and dirty,” she said pointedly, though it was clear she thought it was Dirk’s job to mollify the children. “Go on, help me with this last load and then get those heathens out of here. Why should housework always feel like a military campaign, I wonder?”

  She may have expected Dirk to answer, but he didn’t. After they’d straightened the final of the sheets—she could manage the clothing on her own, and if it was female apparel he had no business handling it—he grabbed the boys and said, “Let’s do something messy—let’s go for a walk in the rain.”

  “Will we splash in puddles?” asked Franz.

  “The biggest ones we can find.”

  “The biggest one is the lake,” cried Moritz, delightedly.

  Off they went, sliding along the sloping streets and forgoing the long steps, heading for the Seepromenade edging the choppy lake.

  The boys ran ahead, holding hands. Dirk slumped his shoulders. He was clear now of the mustiness of Doktor Mesmer’s rooms, the sloppy drip of laundry in an attic, but not yet clear of the softness of Nastaran’s sole remembered upon his fingertips. What could have drawn him to touch her, and what invisibility did he suffer that she made no response? He’d been intolerably forward, even immoral, but who cared—it hadn’t been noticed.

  At the end of the Seepromenade extended the jetty. The boys wanted to scamper out by themselves along the rocks and stand at the very end, but the lake water was deep there. They might slip on slick rocks, tumble, and drown. Then, he told them, he would have to fish out their corpses and go hang them up to dry in the attic with the other laundry. They howled with glee at the thought, as if he was the most droll person in the land.

  He had rarely made anyone laugh. The sensation felt false.

  They held hands and continued nearly to the end. No steamer in view today, no sailing or fishing vessels. Though it was still raining, the clouds were very high. Dirk looked across the agitated lake to the southeast, to the highest mountains he’d ever seen. The Swiss Alps. They raised their knobby shoulders, a wall between Meersburg and some garden in far-off Persia.

  44.

  Doktor Mesmer looked up as Dirk was announced. The old man had abandoned his breakfast and was fussing in an inglenook over a weird musical instrument of some sort, fitted with a lateral spindle. “My glass armonica,” he said as he hobbled away. Tones of a mechanical shrillness faded.

  “You asked me to come back,” said Dirk.

  “I didn’t ask,” said the Doktor. “Though, frankly, I didn’t think you’d come on your own. I thought you’d have to be collared by your good friend and dragged here.”

  “Is there something more of what Nastaran said that you couldn’t bring yourself to share with her? I would like to know, even though I am not her ‘good friend.’ I’m not her husband, only her servant.”

  The Doktor rearranged some limp cushions that appeared to have given up any ambition of providing comfort. He sat upon them. He crooked a finger to Dirk to draw a stool close. He wanted that his voice should not carry. Dirk obliged.

  “The autumn and the winter are dark seasons for her,” said the Doktor. “Perhaps she finds it is painful when her husband has to leave. I think this ravaging of her spirit is not occasional but is systemic—chronic, as the Greeks would call it. Chronic. Having to do with time.”

  “My mistress is in great distress. She talks of a key; is it a key to the garden you described? She asks me to find it for her.”

  “Perhaps. But I fear you will not do so. It is a key to a garden that no longer exists. It is the garden
of her childhood. And no one can return to that garden.”

  “Your work—your therapy, if you will—does that not loosen the lock?”

  “All I can do is lay out the map for her as best I can. She must identify the garden; she must find the key; she must turn it herself. Or she must accustom herself to living without.”

  Dirk struggled to put his own words in order before speaking them. “I learned a great deal by listening to you yesterday morning. I think the reason that Nastaran is a poor mother to her sons is that she left her daughter behind when she sailed from Persia. She is distracted with grief. Surely something can be done about that.”

  “The child is dead.”

  “How do you know that?”

  The Doktor sighed and patted his heart as if cucumbers had featured in the breakfast menu. “Don’t you see? The child in the garden is Nastaran herself. Is Frau Pfeiffer as a girl. Who ever can give an adult a key to that lost garden? The child in that garden is gone. She cannot be rescued; she cannot be found.”

  Dirk slumped on his stool. “So there is no hope for Frau Pfeiffer?”

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t know. I merely hope to massage the channels of memory and longing. Once reawakened, perhaps they can renew health of their own accord. We possess our own landscapes, after all. Marking them out, I have come to believe, is a physic of the mind. Or of the psyche, in the Greek sense of soul.”

  “I am not a university fellow. I don’t understand.”

  “Let me emblemize what I mean by turning to a separate system of metaphors. What, I ask you, does music do but bring us out of ourselves into a wordless, unauthorized zone, a country of unmarked borders? Have I mentioned I was quite social with the Mozart family of great renown? Young Wolfgang directed his Bastien und Bastienne in my very own garden. Music interprets mystery, my friend.” As the Doktor spoke, it seemed to Dirk that the echo of the glass armonica returned, faintly. Perhaps it was only the memory of the echo—and perhaps that is what Mesmer was trying to propose could be useful: the memory of an echo. Better than nothing. Better than the memory of nothing.