“I suppose unless I gouge my own eyes out with a cooking implement, I shall have no choice,” said Doktor Mesmer. “I shall study up my old methods. You’re leaving the flask as tribute, I suppose.” He poured himself a second portion.
Dirk hurtled down the stairs, eager to get away. Outside the front door, Felix bounded after him, chortling. Felix pressed his palms upon Dirk’s shoulders and launched himself in the air, like a boy leaping over a stile, and hooted. “So I have powers of persuasion of my own,” he crowed. “Now you do your job, and persuade your Frau Pfeiffer to meet us here tomorrow.”
40.
As it happened, while Dirk was out with Felix that morning, a letter had arrived from Herr Pfeiffer. He’d taken ill with a bowel complaint and was laid up, unable to begin the arduous return carriage journey until his vitals settled themselves. Nastaran was to forgive him and Dirk Drosselmeier was to continue to maintain the household as directed.
Frau Pfeiffer was convinced that her husband, finding his wife unmoored and deficient, had fallen in bed with an ostler’s daughter or a courtly dame. Under the circumstances, Nastaran lost her usual resolve and reticence and she succumbed to Dirk’s pleading. She presented herself at the appointed hour dressed like a proper wife, her wild hair swept upon her head and hidden under a tedious and sturdy bonnet. No circlet of brass, no veil of painted silk. The shoes were brown leather, stout as varnished aubergines. Her mouth and chin were bravely unveiled in the local manner.
“We want to come, too,” said Moritz. Franz hung back in the passage to the kitchen, eyeing the gingerbread that the cook was rolling out.
“Stay here. Make me a gingerbread figure,” said Nastaran.
“A man or a lady?” asked Moritz.
“You choose.”
“I shall make a gingerbread nutcracker,” said Moritz.
“Some gingerbread walnuts and pomegranates, too,” said Nastaran. She wouldn’t take Dirk’s hand to manage the stairs or to climb into the carriage, and she told him to ride up top with the coachman.
“It isn’t far, we could easily walk,” said Dirk, a little hurt.
“I don’t walk in Meersburg,” she replied, as if she believed the walled city to be swarming with wild cats and wolves.
Somewhat to Dirk’s surprise, when they arrived at the apartments of Doktor Mesmer, Nastaran refused to see the scholar without Dirk as a chaperone. “My husband wouldn’t hear of it,” she told Mesmer, though he looked too old to threaten a strudel. Felix, arriving late, was heard bashing about in the antechamber as Mesmer settled Frau Pfeiffer upon a leather-covered settee. Dirk took a wooden stool in a corner.
The woman told the Doktor scarcely more about her life than she’d ever revealed to Dirk. The old man seemed untroubled by her reticence. “If what we are seeking is to open the blocked channels,” he said, “perhaps one of the channels that is blocked is memory. Now here is what I want you to do.”
He wanted her to keep to a seated position, not a supine one, as she would not be sleeping, and certainly not dreaming. He said he would put her into a trance.
“It is not a condition I understand,” she replied.
“Many say it is not a condition I understand,” he answered, working up an expression of protruded eyes and withdrawn lower lip—for comic effect. Nastaran didn’t react. His face relaxed. “Without delving into the science of it, for the science is obscure and has been both challenged and faulted, may I liken it to something else? A trance, in earlier days, might have been called an enchantment—a reverie—falling under a spell. Asclepius, the classical Greek healer, received wounded souls at his clinic at Epidaurus and wooed them into a healing calm. It is said that the visions of John, sometimes called the Apocalypse, were received in a trance state.”
“I am not gifted with visions,” said the woman. “I suffer the absence of them.”
“Perhaps the absence of visions is also a gift. I do not know. But you fall asleep at night without dreaming, and you walk about without remembering. You put yourself at harm and you frighten your family, and when you wake you have no memory of the excursion and no sense of what you are seeking. How can it hurt to try to find out? And how much might it benefit you if you do learn what it is you’re seeking?”
She was silent for quite a while, and then said merely, “I am ready, because I do not like to live in a state of panic and nameless longing.”
At that moment Dirk could hardly keep himself from rushing to her and burying himself in her bosom. Enough that she seemed a Persian goddess disguised as a commercial traveler’s wife, wrapped round with the severities of Baden rectitude. But her confessing to nameless longing—all the disassociated comments she’d made, the mysterious glances and close-harbored opinions—the contrast of effects bewildered him. He could only keep staring at her as Herr Doktor took a restorative swig of something smoky and aromatic.
The old man lowered the drape off its hook so the room settled into a watery, dusty gloom. The distant thrub of beer kegs rolled on cobbles, the complaints of fishwives—sounds of the scrag-ends of festival in the Schlossplatz—began to be muffled. A small, gold-ribbed Meissen plate with several plums of dark Copenhagen blue swam into view upon a table. Light chooses for itself what to promote.
Mesmer toddled across the room and opened the glassed door of a large standing clock. The hands had been removed from the clock face, but Mesmer tugged on the carved weights anyway. Their chains ratcheted up along cogs and dials. He nudged a pendulum, and as it began to tick timelessly, Mesmer inserted several tiles of pale wood. The effect was to augment the sound of the tock. Not unlike, thought Dirk, how the carved panels of a ’cello amplify the music of vibrating strings.
Mesmer must be striking some high glass cylinder with a mallet—Dirk couldn’t see this happening, but he began to hear a repetitive note as of a glass bell. A candle guttered somewhere. An aroma of lavender and of torn leaves of geranium, that earthy, affronted smell. A flutter near the flaking rosettes of the plaster ceiling, as if a small bird had gotten into the room. Then the sense—barely an aroma, some other apprehension, maybe a certain pressure—of a thrust of native roses observed in a wildwood bower, and the soundless drop of a petal upon the forest floor, and another. Falling upon the browned needles and acorny mast of a woodland slope. Silting up against the carved haunches and screwed-up expression of a hunched figure, provenance unknown.
41.
He could hardly swim forward deftly enough to take in the words being spoken to the shadowy woman.
“Now, Frau Pfeiffer, I intend to say back to you what you told me, so would you like your chaperone to withdraw?” asked the old Doktor, stopping the pendulum with a crooked finger. He twitched the drape open only an inch, as if by slow degrees to reunite Nastaran with current time. The blue plums retired from their prominence, yielding to a general air of powdery shabbiness, as if the room—walls, carpeting, furniture, and occupants—were all woven in deteriorating brocade. A sliver of the pink fa?ade of the Neues schloss showed itself along the left edge of the windowpane.
Nastaran waved a hand dismissing the notion; Dirk should stay.