Dirk slammed the door as he left. Felix was laughing on the stairs behind him. “If this doesn’t call for a mid-morning brandy—a ballooning catastrophe and a Greek tragedy, all before luncheon! At this rate, a trip to the beer halls and a raunchy evening of music and frolic and—wait, where are you going? Wait for me, Dirk!”
50.
Felix caught up with Dirk; Dirk shook him off, saying, “You’ve set me to be a laughingstock. You . . . you privileged fellow . . . you will cavort and chortle with your university scholars over my ignorance and simple nature. Gullible, that’s the word. I won’t be your toy.”
“I don’t want you for my toy,” said Felix. “Come, this is no ruse. I only tried to get you help for your Persian hausfrau. How could I know the discredited old coot would uncork a vintage experience of yours? What, do you not believe these things that Mesmer has said? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .’ I think you must believe, on some level, or you wouldn’t be so angry.”
“Leave me be.”
Felix put a hand on Dirk’s shoulder so forcefully that Dirk had to stop and wheel about and face the young man. Felix: “If you say there was nothing in what Mesmer told us both, I’ll drop the matter and never mention it again. All I ask is that you tell me the truth.”
Dirk didn’t answer for a while. The early snow was already melting into wetness. It made the world, white and airy when coated by snowstorm, into a warren of dark varnished streets, an ogre-size kuriosit?tenkabinett built of stone and stucco. In which Dirk was a scurrying mouse, no more.
“Well?” asked Felix.
“He told back to me something about a dream I must have had, long ago,” said Dirk. “I would rather leave it there. I haven’t thought of it in a decade, or more.”
“What will you do next?”
“What is it to you? Hadn’t you better go find the friend you abandoned? Von Koenig?”
“I’m going to go find my ’cello, and play up a storm.” Felix regarded Dirk with sudden coolness, as if he were a specimen of another order of being. “I should be grateful for a vision. I have to try to make my own with my music. I knew I liked you for some reason. You have something I lack.”
“Go to your ’cello, then,” said Dirk, and spun away. Though there was little he would have liked more than to lie on the floor beneath the belly of the ’cello, eyes closed, and let music wash over him, purge him, coat him.
51.
As Dirk kicked along the lanes, he watched the snow-melt coursing in the sunken gutters. In Meersburg, a dropped piece of paper was an insult to the neighbors. An unpolished boot-scraper upon a doorsill, reason to call the sheriff. A shoddy paint job on the street door was unpatriotic if not treasonous.
Dirk knew all this, and lived within the registers, though it wasn’t how the forest lived, not at all.
He was surprised therefore, turning into the lane that led to the Pfeiffer establishment, to see that the trees rising above the cloister garden wall had gone bare all at once. Underfoot, as untidy as a forest floor, lay yellowed, slick leaves; he kicked through them. It made him sick to see the instantaneity of death.
He was suddenly alarmed, and ran the rest of the way down the lane, along the garden wall.
The boys were swinging on the gate.
Dirk: “Is everything all right?”
“Of course,” said Moritz. “Mama is in the garden sewing the leaves back on the trees. We are going to have sauerbraten tonight; can’t you smell it?”
Dirk pushed through. Nastaran stood on a chair she had dragged into the garden. Her lifted arms made a perfect expressive O.
“The boys say you are re-leafing the trees.”
She allowed herself to take his hand and climb down. “The brutality of this German world. A wind decides the season is over, all in one morning, and annexes my garden without permission. I am not going to let it happen.” She had string wrapped around one wrist, he now saw, and on the ground sat a basket of gilded fruits, were they? She saw him looking. “Last year Herr Pfeiffer saw some Lauscha baubles in a market in Munich. He brought them for me to hang on a fir tree at the Nativity. But those are frail; they break when a wind blows upon them. I prefer to make my own.” She reached down and lifted one for him to examine. It was a hard walnut painted over with gold.
“You scared the boys. They thought you were hanging the leaves back on the tree.”
“I’ve tried that. They don’t stay.” Nastaran was laughing at him, maybe. An openhearted smile, at last. Everyone has one to give the world, at least once; this he believed.
“When did you make these?”
“When I can’t come outside during the day.”
“Why can’t you come outside?” Bold of him to ask.
She took a while before replying. “Too little here of what I might want to come outside for. But this helps, doesn’t it? Look, the wind turns them, the sun dances. It is a magic garden.”
And now he saw it. The well-clipped trees were all dressed in invisible silks suggested by the formality of lines of string and by the golden walnuts hung at various heights. Who dares to try and best Dame Nature at her beauties, he wondered? Only someone who is ill.
“That Herr Doktor,” said Dirk. “He said the key to your unhappiness was held within the walnut.” But Dirk was wrong to have mentioned unhappiness in this rare moment. Her face took on a pensive look.
“That is a Doktor’s way of speaking,” she replied. “He means something other than what he says. Why should there be a key in a walnut? And anyway, how would I get it out? To smash a walnut with a hammer is to crush what is inside.”
“What is inside the walnut shell?” He wanted to know, but he wasn’t sure that was the question.
“The walnut? When mixed with pomegranate, is the sweet grainy sauce of a fesenjan, a stew in which spring chicken is served. With pistachios and honey the walnut is baked in pastries fit to offer a Shah, or Mullah Nasruddin himself. It is put out in small bowls on the carpet at the end of the meal. It is sweetened and fermented with hazelnuts, and my father serves it to his brothers as my mother clears away the meal.” She made an effort to control the shaking in her voice. “Your friend, Herr Doktor, he has loosened much in me. The past is a temptation.” He could see her trying to become everyday. “The past is too much to bear. Surely you have such a walnut in your own life, something that holds the key to all your past ease and safety.”
“I have had little ease and safety in my life.”
“Doesn’t even the comfort of well-known foods evoke your treasured innocence? What your mother cooked for you? For my boys it will be gingery sauerbraten. For me it is fesenjan and baklava. What is it for you, then?”
The wrong question for him. “There wasn’t enough to eat. There is nothing to call me back there. It wasn’t a garden. It was a dark, fierce woods, dangerous, and I died there.”
Then she sat on the chair she had hauled from the house. She gestured to her handiwork. “This is crude and shallow, but it’s all I know how to do. It brings nothing back to me. It mocks me and proves futility.”
In a small voice, Dirk replied: “I have said the wrong thing. Forgive me.”