Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker
Gregory Maguire
Dedication
For Barbara Harrison
In honor of her love for Greece, our homeland
Epigraph
I will remind the reader that the perplexities into which the poor old gods fell at the time of the final triumph of Christendom . . . offer striking analogies to former sorrowful events in their god-lives; for they found themselves. . . . compelled to flee ignominiously and conceal themselves under various disguises on earth. . . . several, whose shrines had been confiscated, became wood-choppers and day-laborers in Germany.
—Heinrich Heine, “Gods in Exile”
For some reason, we know not what, his childhood . . . lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it. And therefore, as he grew older, this impediment at the center of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. . . . But since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do—he could return to that world; he could recreate it, so that we too become children again.
—Virginia Woolf, “Lewis Carroll,” in The Moment and Other Essays
Most of the ancient groves are gone, sacred to Kuan Yin And Artemis, sacred to the gods and goddesses In every picture book the child is apt to read.
—Robert Hass, “State of the Planet”
do you know what it’s like to live
someplace that loves you back?
—Danez Smith, “summer, somewhere”
Part One
A Household Tale
1.
Once there was a boy who lived in a cabin in the deep woods with no one for company but an old woman and an old man.
In the goat shed one day, the old woman said, “Watch and you’ll see where life comes from.”
The boy looked where she was pointing. With an expression of disgust and boredom, a cat pulsed a sac from between her hind legs. The mother cat chewed the silvery slipcase, unwrapping her kitten. It twitched and lay there, as exhausted as if it had swum its way to shore. “Was I so damp and furry when I arrived?” asked the boy. He was still very young.
“I’ve told you a dozen times. You’re a foundling, Dirk. You didn’t grow inside me. We collected you in a basket.”
“What kind of basket?” This was the only question he could think of.
She ignored that. “In those days, you could hardly go into the woods for mushrooms or acorns without tripping over some abandoned brat. A nuisance, to be sure.”
“Don’t put folly in the boy’s head,” said the old man.
The boy had gone back to watching the mother cat. She licked the transparent webbing into ribbons. Another kitten emerged from her. A third. They stretched and settled. One of them turned its head toward Dirk. Its eyes were closed. “Hello,” said Dirk. “Where did you come from?” He was still young enough, back then, to expect it would answer.
The kitten opened its mouth, but the old man said, “Come away and give them some privacy. It’s cruel to scare them so early in their lives.”
So Dirk never learned what the kitten had been about to reply.
The old woman. Here’s what she was like. Her face was scored with lines from working outside in all weathers. She wore dull clothes in colors that had forgotten to be colorful. It didn’t matter, she hadn’t much to celebrate by way of looks. Her nervous eyes were bulbous, her lips dry and inclined to pursing. When she hitched up her skirts to wash her calves once a month, however, her lower legs and ankles were smooth and pretty. Dirk always found this confounding. “One day you’ll be too old to watch me wash myself,” she said. “Towel.”
Was she loving or was she harsh? Dirk didn’t know. A child who lives in a hut in the forest can’t answer such a question. She was as she was, the way the wild boar is a wild boar, or the butterfly a butterfly. She thinned her ale with spring water. She cooked almost enough for supper every night. Quite often her bread refused to rise. Her family ate it anyway, and gave thanks—a thanks both rueful and brief.
“If we lived nearer the village, you could send me for baked bread,” Dirk told her.
“You’re too young. When you’re older, Papi will show you the way. But mind me, if you ever set out on your own, you’ll get lost. It’ll be up to you to find yourself. We won’t come looking for you.”
But you already found me, he wanted to reply.
“He’s not going off,” said Papi. “Don’t put notions into his head.”
“What head is that?” she replied, cuffing Dirk above the ear, but affectionately.
So next, Papi.
He was old, too; he was the old man to her old woman. His pathetic beard was the brown of iced mud. Dirk didn’t know if the old man had been born with that hunched shoulder or if the ailment had come from years carrying an axe.
He was a woodcutter. He maintained four cutting stations some distance away in the deep forest, one in each direction from the lonely waldhütte where they lived. Upon a tree at each station he’d hammered a wooden box. Beneath the box he left trimmed logs and stacked kindling. If passersby wanted tinder for their ovens or hearths, they could take what they needed and, in exchange, drop some coins in the box. Sometimes they took more than they paid for. Sometimes the portion they got was a little greener than would be useful. It evened out.
The old man was spare of speech. When he opened his mouth it was often to contradict the old woman. He might have been cross by nature or maybe his lumpy shoulder gave him bother. He didn’t like to wring the neck of a barnyard chicken when one was needed for the pot. He made the old woman do that job. But once during a hard winter, when a rogue wolf came prowling, he managed to trap it and kill it with his axe.
The wolf bled to death under the moon. In the morning, the old woman broke off a portion of frozen blood. It was like a cracked brown plate. She brought it home to thicken the evening stew.
“Papi, get out the carving knife if we’re to have sausage meat from that hairy old sinner,” she said.
“I’d rather drag the carcass to the village and sell it, and buy something already minced and spiced,” he replied.
“No one would give a pfennig or a ham bone for that mangy creature. You are a coward still. I’ll butcher the beast myself if you won’t.”
“Let me come with you to the village, Papi,” said Dirk.
“No one’s going to the village,” shouted the old woman. She named the rules. “Nobody here knows where it is.” That was a regular lie to make Dirk shut up—they all knew that the old man went for provisions every now and then.
The old woman hung the wolf by its back legs so it could finish bleeding into a bucket. The chickens and the barn cat and the cow didn’t seem to mind.
As the dead beast twisted on its truss, sometimes the upside-down head turned toward Dirk, who sat on the milking stool and watched. The eyes had grown filmy and red. Some flies that wintered in the barn crawled upon the wolf’s snout, but the corpse eyes didn’t blink. What are you seeing behind that calm red death, wondered Dirk. Where are you now that you aren’t bothered by the twitching of flies?
Dirk. The old man and the old woman. Birth and death. Birth and death and the woods all around. And questions that never got answered, because they couldn’t easily be asked.