At the end of the Seepromenade extended the jetty. The boys wanted to scamper out by themselves along the rocks and stand at the very end, but the lake water was deep there. They might slip on slick rocks, tumble, and drown. Then, he told them, he would have to fish out their corpses and go hang them up to dry in the attic with the other laundry. They howled with glee at the thought, as if he was the most droll person in the land.
He had rarely made anyone laugh. The sensation felt false.
They held hands and continued nearly to the end. No steamer in view today, no sailing or fishing vessels. Though it was still raining, the clouds were very high. Dirk looked across the agitated lake to the southeast, to the highest mountains he’d ever seen. The Swiss Alps. They raised their knobby shoulders, a wall between Meersburg and some garden in far-off Persia.
44.
Doktor Mesmer looked up as Dirk was announced. The old man had abandoned his breakfast and was fussing in an inglenook over a weird musical instrument of some sort, fitted with a lateral spindle. “My glass armonica,” he said as he hobbled away. Tones of a mechanical shrillness faded.
“You asked me to come back,” said Dirk.
“I didn’t ask,” said the Doktor. “Though, frankly, I didn’t think you’d come on your own. I thought you’d have to be collared by your good friend and dragged here.”
“Is there something more of what Nastaran said that you couldn’t bring yourself to share with her? I would like to know, even though I am not her ‘good friend.’ I’m not her husband, only her servant.”
The Doktor rearranged some limp cushions that appeared to have given up any ambition of providing comfort. He sat upon them. He crooked a finger to Dirk to draw a stool close. He wanted that his voice should not carry. Dirk obliged.
“The autumn and the winter are dark seasons for her,” said the Doktor. “Perhaps she finds it is painful when her husband has to leave. I think this ravaging of her spirit is not occasional but is systemic—chronic, as the Greeks would call it. Chronic. Having to do with time.”
“My mistress is in great distress. She talks of a key; is it a key to the garden you described? She asks me to find it for her.”
“Perhaps. But I fear you will not do so. It is a key to a garden that no longer exists. It is the garden of her childhood. And no one can return to that garden.”
“Your work—your therapy, if you will—does that not loosen the lock?”
“All I can do is lay out the map for her as best I can. She must identify the garden; she must find the key; she must turn it herself. Or she must accustom herself to living without.”
Dirk struggled to put his own words in order before speaking them. “I learned a great deal by listening to you yesterday morning. I think the reason that Nastaran is a poor mother to her sons is that she left her daughter behind when she sailed from Persia. She is distracted with grief. Surely something can be done about that.”
“The child is dead.”
“How do you know that?”
The Doktor sighed and patted his heart as if cucumbers had featured in the breakfast menu. “Don’t you see? The child in the garden is Nastaran herself. Is Frau Pfeiffer as a girl. Who ever can give an adult a key to that lost garden? The child in that garden is gone. She cannot be rescued; she cannot be found.”
Dirk slumped on his stool. “So there is no hope for Frau Pfeiffer?”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know. I merely hope to massage the channels of memory and longing. Once reawakened, perhaps they can renew health of their own accord. We possess our own landscapes, after all. Marking them out, I have come to believe, is a physic of the mind. Or of the psyche, in the Greek sense of soul.”
“I am not a university fellow. I don’t understand.”
“Let me emblemize what I mean by turning to a separate system of metaphors. What, I ask you, does music do but bring us out of ourselves into a wordless, unauthorized zone, a country of unmarked borders? Have I mentioned I was quite social with the Mozart family of great renown? Young Wolfgang directed his Bastien und Bastienne in my very own garden. Music interprets mystery, my friend.” As the Doktor spoke, it seemed to Dirk that the echo of the glass armonica returned, faintly. Perhaps it was only the memory of the echo—and perhaps that is what Mesmer was trying to propose could be useful: the memory of an echo. Better than nothing. Better than the memory of nothing.
Dirk swallowed. “She asked me to find the key.”
“We all have our secret alphabets. Private codes of gesture and symbol. Perhaps there was an actual walnut tree in the garden of her youth. Who knows. All children want to know the hidden meaning of the world, until they grow up and resign themselves to it being unknowable. Every closed walnut that fell at her feet in that cherished past held, perhaps, more possibility than anything that has happened since. I can’t say. In any case, I prefer now to talk to you about your own vision.”
Dirk snorted. “My vision? As in a rosy past like Nastaran’s? I have no vision. I hardly have a past.”
“I want to ask you something personal. I’m curious. I’ve heard of situations like yours many times, but I’ve never met anyone before who has”—he seemed to struggle for the right words— “who has died, and then come back to life.”
“I fear you are addled this morning, Herr Doktor.”
“Sit back down. I am not done. Don’t be angry. You spoke, too, yesterday morning. You do not remember? I’m not surprised. I want to ask you now about the knife, and the bird, and the lost forest. About how you died, and what you saw, and how you came back to life. Here, I thought you might need this. The French call it eau-de-vie. I had it smuggled in. I’m partial to it of a morning, but in this case I offer it to you medicinally. Do you need to lie down? Take your time. I can wait.”
And then: “Now, tell me what you have remembered. Tell me everything.”
45.
Once, Dirk heard himself say, once there was a boy who lived in a small cabin in the deep woods with no one for company but an old woman and an old man.
He was a foundling, a child of unknown provenance, and the old woman and old man cared for the boy kindly until the day they decided to kill him. At the old woman’s command, the old man turned his woodcutter’s axe upon the boy.
“And then?” asked Mesmer.
“It’s a story, and that’s all I know,” said Dirk, in a foul dark tone.
“But the old man lived.”
“I suppose.”
“And you lived, too.”
“Oh, me?” Dirk surprised himself with his own mocking tone. “I was merely telling you a story. Me, I’m from someplace else.”
“Where?”
“It doesn’t matter. Anyway I’m not the type to husband my memories. Are you thinking I am wounded as Nastaran, with her ferocious past of locked walnuts? I’m more like a spider—or a burdock—I cling with strings and hooks only to every passing day. I haul little or nothing along with me.”
The old doctor said, “The Latin word for luggage is impedimenta. But we all carry things, whether we know it or not. I think you carry your own death, uncompleted. Or revoked temporarily. I think—please don’t flinch like that, it makes me feel I haven’t adequately tended to my morning ablutions—I think you’re one of those very few people who have ever died and come back to life.”