Ah, but I have a job to do, said Dirk to the gate, and pulled on a bell-rope.
Dirk had long since realized he was talking to himself in moments like this, so he wasn’t surprised that the gate didn’t reply.
An underling scurried to work the latch. Dirk was led to a side door, where he was interviewed by an overseer of some sort. Dirk was told: “The good Bishop is indeed in residence, but His Excellency is at his oblations. You will repair to the kitchens. You will take a meal and wait for a reply. If the Bishop needs time to compose his thoughts, you will take a bed in the servants’ quarters.”
Mercy, a real bed: That would be a first.
The kitchen proved a well-scrubbed inferno of roasting meats. The property’s extensive staff seemed accustomed to visitors, and no one stared at Dirk or talked to him. A fleshy young damsel with hot pink cheeks, her bare arms freckled with orange, slapped before him a dish of veal stew with potato dumplings. He ate with gusto. A youth in a blooded apron bolted through from some stables with the news that the Baron’s son and his university entourage had just arrived unannounced and would be sat at table that evening. Eight more heads. “Ach,” said the head cook, “I am to prepare vegetables and potatoes with what, my toes, while my hands are finishing the strudel?”
“I can peel potatoes,” said Dirk. He took out his gnome-hasped knife and pushed aside his bowl for later.
Because the Bishop sent word that there’d be no immediate reply to Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht’s request for compensation for damages, Dirk Drosselmeier might have left the schloss von Koenig that evening. But the idea of the young kitchen maid—wringing bread flour out of towels in the doorway—gave Dirk pause. As he delayed, he was put to work again, and so without a formal arrangement he became a member of the summer staff.
Dirk fell in love, first, with the notion of his own bed, which stood in a row of five in one of the men’s dormitories above the kitchens. It came with its own pillow and its own hay mattress under striped ticking. After a while Dirk became enamored, second, with the notion of sharing this bed with someone. The pink-vermilion kitchen assistant, Hannelore, so often stood in his path, scowling and smelling delectably of onions and rampion, that he wondered if she ought to be his first. He was uncertain how to begin.
19.
Upon a knoll overlooking the lake, quite apart from the schloss, a Catholic chapel minded its own business under shaggy hemlocks. The von Koenig dynasty once must have adhered to Rome, though to judge by the look of decay no one was currently devout. Or not in the summertime.
Dirk had no language for architecture. The building was small. Its bell tower was capped with a wooden dome in the shape of a turnip, through neglect listing as a real turnip will. Narrow colored-glass windows lanceted the stone walls, but from the outside they looked mostly umber. As the doors to the place remained locked, he could neither confirm nor ruin his uncertain faith by seeing for the first time sunlit stained-glass windows from the inside.
One afternoon toward the height of summer, when the dogs lay about drooling into their shadows, Dirk took his leave of the pantries. He was keeping an eye out for Hannelore, who sometimes strolled down to the boathouse with an expression that suggested a winsome sort of boredom. Dirk was passing the vine-gripped chapel when he drew up short. The door stood open, and a single voice issued from the shadows. The noise was plangent, persuasive, but of what? Unforgettable—indeed, he never did forget it, his whole life long. Told sharply never to approach or address the von Koenig family or their guests, Dirk nonetheless was drawn in. He stood and stared with his eye, but his ears were staring harder.
A figure with rolling locks was hunched over a stringed instrument of unusual size. Of music, Dirk had known only the reedy wheeze of Pfarrer Johannes’s harmonium, with its tendency to bust a valve and leave the parish chromatically impoverished as it brayed through the militance of foursquare anthems.
This sound rolled forth. The strung melody seemed just the length of a line as sung by a human, breaking where a human voice would break for breath. As his eye adjusted to the shadows, Dirk saw the musician—a young man in a high-collared white shirt and billowy sleeves rolled to his elbows—who was caressing the exposed sternum of the instrument with a bow. He might have been bestowing loving attentions to a kneeling figure. Dust in the nearly empty room swirled around him; colored light from an Annunciation window made him crimson; from a Transfiguration, verdigris.
He finished at last, that crimson and copper-green one, and turned to Dirk.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said Dirk.
“I didn’t stop till I was through,” replied the man. The voice was refined, the glance bold. “You look as if you’ve seen a doppelg?nger.”
“I should go.”
“I’ll play another in a moment. I’m resting the pads of my fingers. Out of practice.”
“What is it?”
“Bach.”
“No, I mean—？”
“A violoncello. You’ve never seen a ’cello?” Dirk shook his head. “Come, have a look.”
“How does it do that? How do you do it?”
“Bach is the genius; the ’cello is his voice. I’m only the keyhole through which it pours. Mostly I try to keep out of the way and let the message work through me.”
This was beyond Dirk. “But it sounds—” He couldn’t find the way to say it. Some memory of—something—speaking beneath or without words. “Bach is a Christian musician,” he tried, flailing.
“Yes, Bach is Christian, but the ’cello suites are more like Euclidean arguments.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What do the suites argue?”
“I don’t know, but they do it so convincingly! Don’t you agree?”
The statement seemed nonsense—how could you be convinced by something wordless? Yet Dirk paused, and then nodded.
The man began to tighten the pegs on the head of the ’cello, coaxing the instrument into tune. “I’m Felix,” he said, between repeated iterations of nearly the same note. “At Wittenberg with the Baron’s son. Guest of the household.”
“I’m nobody,” said Dirk.
“A music lover, anyway. Want to hear another? The E-flat major.” Without waiting for an answer, he lifted his chin and raised his bow, and he brought forth the haunted disquisition. Dirk settled on a bench at the side and closed his eye. Luminous colored patterns played upon his more capable eyelid as, outside, clouds shuttered and unshuttered the light through some Revelation or other.
20.
Upon leaving the church, Felix said, “I come here often to practice because the sound against the stone is profound.”
“Oh,” said Dirk.
“I’m told to put the key here,” said Felix, showing Dirk where it was hidden. “Come see me again. I shall play more for you.”
“I don’t know if I can tolerate more,” said Dirk. But perhaps that sounded rude.
“You can tolerate more,” said Felix. “I’ll prove it to you.”
That evening the Bishop departed for Meersburg, and thence, it was said, across the great lake to Constance. The subject of a reply to Pfarrer Johannes hadn’t been broached again. This left Dirk as an independent lad upon his own road, as Pfarrer Johannes wasn’t going to come after him any more than the old man and old woman in the forest had done.