“It’s red paint, then,” said Franz, not understanding.
“It’s the red paint we all have inside us.” Dirk went to the window, to rinse his hand in the rainwater that still splashed down.
“Stop,” cried Franz.
“It’s only blood,” said Dirk, but pivoted as a chair overturned.
Moritz had grabbed the blackened knife and was hounding his brother with it. “You never let me do anything you rotten stinking shitty!”
“Gott in Himmel, give me that!” roared Dirk, and joined the chase. The boys were too quick, and tumbled out of the room and halfway up the stairs hollering.
With Dirk only steps behind, the brothers raced across the rain-spattered span. They careered onto the porch of the barn’s third level, where they were stopped by the emergence of Frau Pfeiffer. Dirk recaptured the knife by encircling it with one hand. With his other hand he froze Moritz’s fist to prevent an accident. But then it seemed everything had frozen for an instant, a tableau made more theatrical by the sound of rain.
Perhaps it was merely her garb, which wasn’t the closely fitted and over-stitched apparel of her fellow goodwives in Meersburg, but a weird and billowy shift and a pair of loose pantaloons below. Maybe a man’s shirt of a sort Dirk had never seen before. Upon her scalp her dark hair was roped, only loosely and off-center, exposing a neck of bleached oak.
“What are you doing to me?” she asked her sons, in a voice and tone that Dirk couldn’t characterize. A kind of ribboned smokiness. He wasn’t musical enough to think beyond that.
The boys hung their heads and hung back till Franz said, “He was trying to kill me.”
“I wasn’t, only hurt him,” insisted Moritz. “Anyway, it was the knife, not me.”
“Did you open the jar?”
“Dirk is working on it.”
“Bring it to me when it’s open. And please don’t shriek. Anything but shrieking. If you must kill one another, do it silently. It’s much more effective that way.”
The scarf-like clothes rippled as she disappeared. The door closed without the sound of a latch dropping. She had neither spoken to Dirk nor looked at him.
30.
And then, as if enough had decided to be enough, the next morning Frau Pfeiffer knocked on the door of the office and entered before her husband had a chance to raise his eyes from the page.
She stood with her eyes down and hands folded, one upon the other like a pair of nestling doves. “Forgive me for my intrusion,” she said to the floor. Dirk heard in her words what he’d missed earlier. It was accented German. She was from elsewhere.
By now Dirk had come across polychrome carvings of the Virgin and Child in the Catholic churches. One splendid, fourteen-inch example had sat in a nook in the chapel at the schloss von Koenig. Wood could see what stone could not. Marble eyes were blind, but wooden eyes were only cloaked. Frau Pfeiffer had eyes of polished chestnut that retained a deep gleam of greenwood. Pliability.
“Never an intrusion,” said her husband, evenly.
She was done up like a grandee in a roving theatrical troupe. At once a maharani and a hausfrau, a peddler and a djinee. Dirk had never seen the like. Musulman, Ottoman, opera buffa wife? Queen of the harem and Friday night barkeep?
She wore a proper, kitten-grey Brunswick gown, its waistcoat of contemporary style—just flanking the hips—but beneath its split sleeves spilled a voluminous silk blouse in a pattern of unkempt garden—roses, coiled brambles, irises, narcissi. Several bangles of brass or silver or white gold sloped toward her elbow. A scarf was loosely fastened around her mouth as if to keep her words and expression curtained.
Her bonnet was simple, even homely, but at her neck was gathered a scarf the colors of water reed and apricot.
“I feel I should now be introduced,” she said.
“Oh? Why now?” asked her husband, a wry twist of his lips on the side of his mouth used to accommodating a pipe.
“He has helped me with my color.”
Herr Pfeiffer turned to Dirk, who felt himself going pink. “Franz brought me a jug of paint to open.”
“Well, then, it’s cozy enough already. My dear wife, behold Dirk Drosselmeier. Dirk, Frau Pfeiffer. As you live and breathe.”
“I am in your debt,” she said to Dirk. “It is not easy to open color.” She rolled her gaze over him at last. In the serene light dropping from the clear high windows of the office at break of business day, he felt almost noticed.
31.
Gerwig Pfeiffer often sent Dirk on errands. The young man began to map out Meersburg in his mind as he crossed from Unterstadt to Oberstadt, along the Steigstra?e or down the sets of stone steps. Always around a corner or outside a window, the teal or oily-grey waters of the rippling Bodensee—Lake Constance—lurked with a hint of menace. Dirk realized that Meersburg did business across and upon the broad lake as if it were a commercial square. He didn’t like the lake much, though.
Sometimes Dirk took the boys with him. They held his hands. He wasn’t interested in children, though he did notice them. Despite being younger, Moritz was the keener, the broody anarchist. Franz was paler, more stolid, perhaps more cowed by life. He chuckled, when he chuckled, with closed lips.
As they hopped and skipped beside him, the boys recited verses from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. With joy I walked in a green wood. Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald. They didn’t know the whole thing. Above and beyond Meersburg, the vineyards and orchards seemed a distant set of flanking angel wings, antithesis to the annihilating lake, which wouldn’t hold color for long, constantly slipping into new disguise as if to hide its elemental nature.
Glancing above the rooflines, Dirk wished he could spy the steeper hills of Bavaria his homeland. But what was home to him? The only Alps were those of western Switzerland across the lake to the left, looming, when mists didn’t obscure them, like a thundering army in glacial advance. Or a battlement prohibiting passage, padlocking the lake-dwellers into place.
32.
He didn’t eat with the family. He didn’t eat with the help. Somehow he didn’t fit in with either. This seemed the usual way in his life, and he didn’t mind.
The Pfeiffer family lived close to the bone. Their home was large, handed down to them from some forebear, but it was in need of attention. Walls that hadn’t been whitewashed since the turn of the century were mottled with a green rash. Windows with cracked panes were fitted with cedar shakes. Dirk suspected subsidence in one corner of the house, as all the balls and tops that the boys dropped tended to roll toward that quarter.
In the first month alone, two separate chairs lost their footing and deposited colleagues or family upon the floor.
Despite the pleasant commotion and daily decay, Herr Pfeiffer managed to run a business. He worked from home many days, dispatching Dirk to deliver a bill or to collect a shipment of supplies. Sometimes the paterfamilias oversaw processes at the rag baths, which were housed in an old fishing shed near the jetty. On these days, Frau Pfeiffer kept to upstairs chambers. She read light fictions and sometimes could be heard weeping over them. The housemaid rolled her eyes and the boys ignored her, and pestered Dirk instead.
“Are they going off to kindergarten soon?” Dirk asked Herr Pfeiffer one day when a nasty autumn storm looked to be blowing in across the lake—some Alpine drama heading north. The threat was keeping everyone housebound.