Hiddensee

by Gregory Maguire

  A coal shifted in the grate.

  “When a cat falls asleep,” she said, “she dreams she is a fox. And she is.”

  A statement like that, for reasons Drosselmeier couldn’t name, made his hair stand on end and the inside of his eye-patch damp. It wasn’t because of a sense of identification with the child, he thought. Not any unseemly intimacy, but the opposite. She lay there only a yard or two away, but so incredibly distant, so fully, ethereally other that it nearly took his breath away. In her six-years-and-some she was already more herself than he had ever managed to become himself in the same number of decades.

  Once when Drosselmeier was taking his godchildren for a walk, Klara felt suddenly tired and turned pale, so Drosselmeier decided to turn around for home. Fritz was cross and threw stones at a squirrel, which looked venomously back at the lad, as if contemplating the purchase of a delicate though powerful jäger rifle to return fire.

  At home, Fritz disappeared into the nursery and began to toss toys about, breaking them. Klara drew her godfather into the small yellow parlor and sat him on the settee. She then proceeded to tell him he had come to the café and she would serve him. It was the best café in Prussia.

  “What is it called?” he asked.

  “You should know, you came in the door,” she replied.

  “But I forget. I am old and my memory is poor.”

  She puzzled over this. “I think it is called the Boys and Adders Café.”

  “Not Kaffeehaus?”

  “I am part French. I am the owner and the chef. I also take the money and give you the spoons and stuff. What would you like to eat?”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “Some food, perhaps.”

  “That’s a good start. I enjoy food. Do you have anything special you like to make?”

  She climbed under the desk as if it were a kitchen belowstairs, and then emerged with a scrap of paper she must have pulled from a drawer. She looked at it. “This is the menu.”

  “May I see?”

  “You can’t read it. It is written in a strange language. I shall tell you about it. We have a chicken and olive soup. Also some pears on toast. And, what else. Some biscuits with honey icing.”

  “I’ll have the soup.”

  “There’s none left. I had the last bowl. It was very good indeed.”

  “Bring me what you like.”

  She disappeared to the kitchen and returned with an invisible plate. “Here is your food.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t eat it if I were you. It looks nasty.”

  He took an imaginary bite. “I think it is a squirrel soufflé.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “It would be, wouldn’t it? I wondered where that squirrel went. It was supposed to be peeling the potatoes.”

  It took Drosselmeier a while to wonder whether, in fact, there was something strange about Klara Stahlbaum. Different, that is, from the other children he had known in his life. He hadn’t known many. Engorged with greed, children who came into the showroom didn’t count. In any case, German burghers and their wives were more inclined to steal into the shop to make selections without their children in tow.

  Of the children he’d befriended, after a fashion, little very accurate could be said. Children were a set of broken puzzles. Sloppy puddings. Throwaway woodcut proofs, blurred outside their margins. And how many children did these examples add up to, in his life? Not many. Not many at all. Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer, back in those horrible days of Nastaran’s breakdown and death. Sebastian and Günther Stahlbaum, when they were glowing golden shadows of golden Felix. These days, yet another generation of Stahlbaums: Fritz and Marie-Claire—Klara as everyone called her.

  Klara, alone of them, was a girl.

  Maybe that was part of it, Drosselmeier thought. But also, Klara had something of Felix’s glittery openness. A recklessness of heart, you might say. And from her mother, a Gallic hesitancy and tact.

  When he turned up at the Stahlbaum home—the fine Munich place that Felix and Ethelinda had left to their older son—something ached in his chest. It was like a muscle tear that couldn’t quite heal because he kept twisting it, wrenching it beyond the range of play. Klara was a cipher, something as much flame as charcoal. The boys he’d known before, he’d liked them and played with them, and even been surprised that he could amuse them so. But they’d stayed in the portable cages of their own characters, just the way he stayed in his, and always had. Klara seemed, on the contrary, frequently to be emerging. Not from silence into sociability—something other than that. From herself into herself—as if she had been born bearing multiple veils of Klara, and they were all legitimate. Echt.

  He raised the matter only once, with Sebastian, and was sorry that he had.

  “Is she entirely all right?” he had asked.

  “Klara?” Sebastian stabbed the bowl of his pipe with hard jerking motions. Flecks of tobacco peppered the table. “Whatever are you talking about, Drosselmeier? Why shouldn’t she be?”

  “I only mean…there’s a quality.”

  “She’s young, she’s gullible. She believes in fairy tales. Also in the saints of the Church. Give her time, she’ll firm up. Christ, man, you’re hard on her.”

  “I’ve offended and I have no idea how. I don’t mean that she’s young. I’m old enough to be able to recognize the young for what they are. I mean that she is . . . fickle. Capable. Capricious. Attached.”

  Sebastian Stahlbaum drew on his pipe for several long drafts, which gave Drosselmeier time to formulate a peace offering. “I am trying to find a way to say how charming she is. She hardly seems of this world.”

  At this Sebastian threw the pipe into the hearth, where it cracked, and the man burst into sobs. Raw eyes, angry mouth, distended nostrils like a frightened horse. Drosselmeier scrabbled to his feet and went to stand by the door, his hand at his mouth. He had no strategy for such insanity. He couldn’t stop it. Sebastian might have gone on like this for hours but young Fritz came wandering by looking for something to smash. That cleared up his father’s face as quickly as a wet cloth will blank a chalked slate. Sebastian was protecting his son from the sight of distress, Drosselmeier saw. So the godfather found some coins in his pocket and flung them at the older Stahlbaum child, and that diverted him from the room.

  “What has taken hold of you?” Drosselmeier demanded of Sebastian.

  The man blew his nose upon his sleeve. “Too much to go into. You cut into a nerve, Drosselmeier. My apologies. Unseemly. The doctors don’t know if she will make it to adulthood. She has an excitable heart.”

  “You’re deranged. She’s perfectly normal.”

  “I mean the heart muscle. It may be like what my father—Felix—died of. And his grandmother before him. All too suddenly. We don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know how you wrestled it out of me.” He glared at the older man, bested.

  Drosselmeier was aghast at every part of this. “They’re wrong, whoever they are, those doctors. They always are. I knew a doctor who spoke balderdash to me and distracted me from my life. Don’t let them do that to you. She has more life in her two tulip-petal palms than you and I have in our whole frames. She won’t leave life in childhood. She won’t.”

  “Don’t bring this up with Clothilde,” warned Sebastian. “She worries so about the girl.”

  “She won’t leave this life in childhood,” said Drosselmeier. “She can’t. I won’t let her.”

  “We’ll give her a good Christmas, and see if she strengthens in the spring.”

  “All this is nonsense!” shouted Drosselmeier. “I won’t have it.”

  85.

  But Drosselmeier did raise the matter with Clothilde. The next morning he closed up his shop and went by the house when he knew Sebastian would be out at the exchange. The wife was less frail than her husband had led Drosselmeier to believe, or she was better at prevarication. She poured the older man a coffee—in these days, co
ffee was just starting to be made at home—and they sat in the smaller parlor that looked over the snowy garden.

  “Perhaps an infection, it’s hard to say,” said Clothilde. “The good doctors know so little about us, after all, don’t you agree?”

  “But what are the symptoms, Frau Stahlbaum?”

  “After all this time, you may address me as Clothilde.”

  He lifted the cup to his mouth, burning his lips in preference to revising his question.

  She relented. She was a steady sort of person, rather hale, with a frame more of oak than aspen. For a strong stork like Clothilde to have given birth to such a frail daughter seemed a wicked taunt. “A fever mounts and subsides, dear Godfather Drosselmeier. They think it’s related to her heart, which sometimes races. There is not much we can do but apply the cold compress and change her nightgown when it becomes too damp. I’m sorry Sebastian worried you about it.”

  Perhaps, thought Drosselmeier, she doesn’t perceive the level of threat that Sebastian had indicated. A mother can be so blind. Blindness a skill for survival. He said, “Would you consider taking her for a cure to the thermal springs in Salzuflen, the mineral caves of Berchtesgaden? Something of that order?”

  “We wouldn’t rule it out. Though at the moment she isn’t up for travel. And of course we would have to wait for the warmer weather. Perhaps she will improve by then.”

  That child was so full of curious observations. “What does Klara say about how she feels?”

  This was the only moment when Clothilde seemed distressed. “We are often alerted to the spike in her fever when she begins to spout nonsense. For instance, she sometimes complains that the walls are running with mice. She says that she can hear them talking after we have all gone to sleep.”

  “Oh indeed.” He tried not to look either alarmed or relieved. “Does she report their gossip?”

  “She says it is very rude indeed and we should be shocked and think she was making it up, and she’d be punished for repeating what she heard.”

  “That doesn’t sound ill to me. It sounds rather adult.”

  “You profess concern and then you mock me.”

  “Please.” He put his hand on hers, truly. “What I mean is that she sounds quite like herself, so how could you tell it is a fever? She is a fanciful child.”

  “I was never so fanciful.” She made it sound like a barnyard insult.

  He began to think that Clothilde was not a very motherly mother, but then he caught himself. On what basis of comparison could he propose such a scandalous notion?

  Yet he looked at Clothilde in her brocaded shoulders, garnets looping around her bust-of-Europa marble neck. Her eye was stern and her wrist trembled slightly as she stirred her coffee. She was a Frenchwoman being maternal in a German setting. How pompous to presume that an old peasant man such as himself, however well traveled, could winkle out the degree of Clothilde’s affection or wisdom about her own daughter.

  Neither, though, would he abandon Klara. Just in case.

  86.

  Drosselmeier’s material needs were few, as he lived quite simply in a pair of rooms over his shop. Still, he wasn’t sorry for the annual coin he earned in the weeks leading up to the holiday. He needed that income. And so the feast-day of the nativity of the Christ Child approached with its usual panic, uproar, and greed.

  Sitting at his bench and carving his figurines by what light there was, he watched carts pass. They were trundling in from the countryside with fir trees bound in ropes, intended for sale in the squares and alleys of Munich. In the evenings, if he wasn’t visiting the Stahlbaum household or, once in a while, taking in a string quartet or an organ recital in a chilly church, he lowered the oil lamp on its cord so that it hovered nearer the workbench. He labored with his brushes and lacquers until the midnight bells rang in the church towers. Sometimes later even than that.

  Where are those elves who are said to come help old palsied shoemakers? Why don’t they bother with toy makers? I should make my own assistants out of clockwork, he thought. But he didn’t have enough years left for that. Klara might have her concerns with her heart, if her parents were to be trusted, but Drosselmeier had his own thoughts about mortality.

  He tried to think what he could give Klara for a present this year. He felt it needed to be something correct—something instrumental. His whittling knives teased figures out of contorted segments of birch or balsam. They came out of the wood as menaces, though. Always leering eyes, a faint, lewd sneer.

  The world isn’t that horrible. It’s a sin to tell a lie.

  But Klara may be in trouble. It’s another sin to conceal the truth.

  A pair of apothegms, where had they come from, maybe Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht, may he rest in peace. Wherever that might be.

  But wherever might that be? For Albrecht, for Drosselmeier himself?

  A place where one might feel at home. The old minister. Drosselmeier himself. Klara. But it wasn’t just the population, it was the map that was needed, the coordinates. Dante had done it. John Bunyan, and Sir John Mandeville. Milton, in his time. Prester John and Marco Polo. Even Homer, charting the world by sea. The vagabond human spirit requires a chart of possibilities in order to keep putting one foot in front of another, keep licensing the next heartbeat after the previous.

  It was so late that the mice stole out, looking for the crumbs he sometimes left for them on the floorboards. One bold fellow came right up to the edge of Drosselmeier’s workbench and sat with his tail in his front paws, a look of subservience in the gesture. “Well, in lieu of the elves I requested, are you going to help?” asked Drosselmeier. The creature waited a moment before running up the edge of the broom handle, whose top leaned against the wall behind Drosselmeier. Amused, thinking it was probably time to turn in, the old man revolved in his chair to watch the ambassador. The mouse dashed halfway along the shelf and then peered over the edge, as if he really intended to deliver a Periclean peroration to all the toys in the shop. He didn’t speak, of course—or if he did, Drosselmeier could neither hear nor understand.

  He thought, then, of a mother mouse cowering at the base of a tree, and small blind mouse babies rippling around her fundament. A vaguely distressing picture in his mind.

  “If you’re a descendant of that family, send them my best wishes,” he muttered, dunking his brushes in linseed oil to keep them supple till the morning. In the viscous gritty amber, ribbons of bloody red unfurled from the hairs of the brush.

  The mouse then scurried back and cowered for a moment behind the shabby old Nutcracker. Back to its own palace of possibilities somewhere in the walls.

  Well, maybe, thought Drosselmeier.

  87.

  He visited the night before Christmas Eve. Klara lay on the settee in the yellow parlor, weighed down under a scratchy coverlet of blue and silver Rhenish tapestry-work. Drosselmeier had the sense she was growing a bristled skin, generating a cocoon. “Let me pull that back, it’s smothering you.”

  “I’m cold. Let it be. It’s my kingdom.”

  “Your what?”

  “See?” Her fingers dallied along the stitchery. “I’m the world, and these are my mountains, and over here is my waterfall, and a temple.”

  A huge ungainly doll in a beige pinafore was kicked upside down into the corner of the settee. From underneath the lace of her petticoat, which nearly covered her whole face, she peered glassily at the cornice of the door. Drosselmeier: “Is she some sort of deposed goddess or wretched fairy godmother?”

  “You’re a godfather, you should know.” Her voice was smaller than usual. “I hate her. She’s no good. All broken and useless.”

  Fritz came through with an armful of Drosselmeier’s figures and set them out on the edge of the sofa. He wasn’t always a thoughtful brother, so Drosselmeier sat up to observe. “I think we should have a war,” said Fritz. “I’m going to bring in the cavalry and line them up on the carpet. Don’t step on them.”

  Klara fingered the Ot
toman princess, a recent favorite, but then stuck her headfirst into the seam between the back of the sofa and its seat. The child was too old to suck her thumb, but Drosselmeier had the feeling she was about to start. He took her hands in his and leaned forward on his footstool.

  “Your brother is being nice to you. Isn’t it strange?”

  “It’s Christmastime. He knows that if he is good, the Christkindl will bring gifts.”

  Such a little realist.

  “Why is your doll so very ugly?” he asked her.

  At the notion of ugliness, she rallied a little. “I think a mouse bit her and made her that way.”

  Again with the mice. Was the house overridden? He would have to ask Sebastian or Clothilde. Why was it bothering her so?

  She got to the question ahead of him. “I saw a seven-headed mouse in my bedroom last night. It came to my pillow and spoke to me.”

  “My, that’s distinguished. It must have been the Mouse King. What did it say?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t speak Mouse.”

  “Ach! You remind me of a mouse I used to know. She was out on a constitutional with her six young ones and a cat came along with a hiss and that look in the eye that says Yum, seven fresh mice for tea. The mother mouse was afraid but stood up in front of her babies and said in a firm voice, ‘Bow wow.’ The cat ran away in fright, and the mother mouse turned and said to her children, ‘Now, my dears, let this be a lesson to you all in the value of learning a second language.’”

  “But I don’t have time to learn Mouse. What if the Mouse King comes back tonight? He was very cruel.”

  “You must ask him what he wants.”

  She was almost in tears. “I told you! I can’t talk to mice!”

  He felt her forehead. Warm. “Are you sure you need this blanket so snugly pulled up, my dear, you’re quite hot.”

  “I’m chilled. I want to know why the mice are here.”

  “Are they here in this room? Now?”

  “You know if they are.”

  He kept his eyes trained on her, didn’t turn left or right so as to avoid confirming or denying her apprehensions. “Shall I get you a glass of milk?”