“Oh, no. Mutter wouldn’t have that,” he said.
“Never?”
“Never so far. Moritz, he isn’t suitable.”
“Then they will want a tutor?” Dirk was risking his own employment, as he knew himself to be unequal to the task.
The Frau chose this moment to appear upon the stairs. She paused, struck by some private consternation. A non sequitur would result, Dirk predicted, and it did. “The moon bowled down the length of the Thurgau slopes last night.”
“Did it now,” said her husband. “You were up late, to notice that.”
“Is he questioning the boys’ training?”
“I mean no harm,” said Dirk, addressing her for the first time.
She continued looking at Pfeiffer. “You’ve only to move an inch one way, and all the world shifts an inch in the other direction.”
“I’m afraid it’s coming to that time of the year,” he said, shuffling some papers. “You’ll be all right for a week. Dirk will be here.”
“Dirk,” she said. Now she turned to look at him, and proceeded to the bottom step. “Is he diligent, Gerwig? Dirk, are you diligent?”
“I am attentive,” said Dirk, hoping that was the right answer.
“He’ll do just fine.” Pfeiffer sighed. “It’s only a week, Nastaran.”
She moved on in a soft whuffing of scarves, and went out into the walled garden. She was framed by the open door. A needling rain was beginning to fall, and winds stirred the leaves of the Russian olive tree, which made behind her a pattern of irregular chevrons, silvery and silky. She opened up her hands as if to collect pearls liquefying from the sky.
“I never came across the name Nastaran before,” he said.
“Persian,” replied Herr Pfeiffer. “I am told that, in the tongue of her homeland, it means ‘wild rose.’”
“Wild,” said Dirk.
“Rose,” insisted her husband, and then told Dirk the real reason he had been hired.
33.
She couldn’t be left alone overnight, that was the thing. She was a somnambulist. Dirk didn’t know what that meant.
“She walks in her sleep.”
“Surely that’s not possible.”
“It is a rare condition, but a genuine one. She finds herself in a dream, you see, and in a dream she rises and moves. We must always keep the windows locked on the upstairs floors, and we bar the door to the crosswalk to the barn, lest she take it into her vacant mind to sit upon a sill or rail and try to step upon a breeze.”
Dirk said, “Are her eyes open?”
“They are open but unseeing.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means,” said the paper merchant, “while I am away, someone must stay near her, to guide her homeward if she goes out of doors.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“It has happened, so.”
“But surely to keep attentive is the job of—a husband—or a governess—or a lady’s companion of some type—”
“She won’t tolerate a governess of any sort,” said Pfeiffer, sadly. “She is afraid of losing me to some more capable woman. I know what you’re thinking: Why not some ancient biddy, some cross-eyed housewife needing a personal income? But my wife won’t have it. She admits a sense of her own—particularity. Besides, a certain amount of physical strength could be needed in a crisis.”
“Is this situation regular?”
“Annual. It gets worse at this time of year, but in the deep winter her body seems to notice the cold even if her mind doesn’t, and there is little chance she would go barefoot into the snow. So it’s in the autumn that I need help. Her remark about the moon suggests she notices the season is changed. This is also the time I go to the university at Heidelberg and to Munich to collect my orders for the spring, which work keeps me busy all winter. If you become a true apprentice, you can take over that job of travel for me someday. For now, I need you to stay here and keep—what was your word?—attentive.”
“Where is she going when she is walking in her sleep?”
“She cannot accept that question.” Pfeiffer sighed. “She only partly believes me when I tell her she has been sleepwalking. She can’t remember her dreams, you see, so if it is something she is dreaming, she can’t learn what it is. We must keep her out of danger.” He leaned forward. “You do not know Nastaran yet, truly, but you must love her enough to keep her out of danger.”
“I will.”
34.
Herr Pfeiffer had taken leave of his wife privately upstairs, it seemed, for when the boys gathered at his hips for final embraces, and Dirk hung back trying to appear responsible, Frau Pfeiffer didn’t emerge.
“You have your instructions,” said Herr Pfeiffer. “You won’t have any problems.”
“But if there is a problem?” asked Dirk.
“Just treat the boys as you were treated yourself, growing up.” At Dirk’s blank look, the man continued. “You’re a good boy, so your parents must have done their job right.”
I’m not good, I’m just quiet, thought Dirk, but didn’t believe it was sensible to say that aloud. “But what about Frau Pfeiffer? What if she becomes—indisposed? Or needs something I can’t help with? Has she a friend I can call upon?”
“She has no friends,” said her husband, heaving his leather carryall upon the carriage bench. “The Meersburg merchants and their wives aren’t as open to the stranger among us as I had hoped. But she is used to all that.”
“A minister she might trust?”
“She is unprofessed. The cook will be able to advise if it should come to certain womanly matters. But don’t worry. I go away every fall. All part of the pattern. See to the boys, and attend to the Frau as I have instructed you, and I shall be back before you notice I’m gone.” He headed off with a heave-ho, whistling.
The boys didn’t run off to school. Their mother wouldn’t have it. She thought Moritz too intense, and Franz was needed at home to keep him engaged.
So the boys plunged about the house and gardens. During the day Dirk kept an eye on them. Neither a hard job nor interesting to him.
During the nighttime, as agreed, Dirk assembled a pallet for himself in the corridor outside Nastaran’s bedchamber.
On the third night of Herr Pfeiffer’s absence, Dirk woke to the sound of a piece of furniture being shuffled across the floor. He knew that Herr Pfeiffer had nailed his wife’s windows shut, but for a small inset of glass. Hinged on one side, it could be opened for air. Hardly large enough for a human hand to reach through.
So the only way Nastaran Pfeiffer could leave the room was to step over Dirk.
He lay so still in the dark he might have been trying to hear the fall of a shadow. The more he held his breath, however, the more the pounding of his own blood rose in his ears like a sequence of breaking waves. Once he thought he heard the noise of beaten air, as when a bird launches herself in a small wind whipped up by her own startled, urgent wings.
He might have heard another sound—a chair pulled here or there, and then bed curtains or blankets rustling.