“There is no right thing to say.”
She tried to control her anger. “My father was a merchant in the Persian port city of Bandar-e Bushehr. In a last attempt to improve his finances, he traveled to Europe. He told me he hoped to find other trading merchants, ones who might offer more favorable terms. Now I believe he took me abroad so I wouldn’t live to see him impoverished, perhaps murdered for failure to pay his debts. Herr Pfeiffer and I met in Amsterdam, in as accidental a way as you and I have met. For a month his attentions distracted me from nostalgia, and by the time I woke up, we were married. All I have from home besides a trunk of clothes is a dotar made of walnut wood, which I have no talent to play.”
“Did Herr Preiffer hope you would learn to play a—a dotar?”
“This is all distraction. I shall tear it down.” Her arm shot out like a scimitar and caught the nearest walnut and wrenched it, and smashed it upon the gravel walk. Being a walnut, it did not break, but lay there like a gold button off an ogre’s waistcoat.
“Stop,” said Dirk. “It may mean less to you than you want. But it means something to them.” For out of the corner of his eye he saw Franz and Moritz; they’d finished swinging and come back in the garden, and were running around the perimeter, leaping among the golden walnuts like a pair of ignorant spring lambs who cannot yet control their limbs.
52.
Dirk had never heard such a parcel of rubbish in his life as that romantic fiction perpetrated by Doktor Mesmer. But how curious. While Mesmer may have actually garnered some thoughts from Dirk—however disassociated from reality they were, goat-satyrs and oracles and meandering sacred groves!— the old charlatan must have taken an image or two and used them to plant this spurious capriccio into Dirk’s untutored mind. And now—now there was some truth to it, even if it was only the truth of a story that, once heard, becomes history. You might forget a story, but you can never unhear a story.
By that token, you might forget an event, but you can never go back to living as you did before its hidden influence was applied upon you.
Pan and the Pythia. The lost forest. What a saddlebag of crap!
Still, when Nastaran began to run a fever a few days later and took to her room, admitting only the cook with goblets of steamed lemon water and honey, Dirk distracted the fretful boys with a story.
“Tell us again about the Little Lost Forest,” they said. Dirk realized they were talking as if it were a living character in a story-book. As if it had agency, desire. “Tell us where it is now.” Dirk, with his limited sense of European geography, talked the forest up the slopes of Mount Olympus and down the other side. He made it a silent partner in some Balkan war between the Tribes of Good and Evil. The next night Dirk proposed that the homeless woods had witnessed the crowning of Charlemagne and saved the day because when the Emperor thought he was dreaming in a forest grove at midnight, it was really the Little Lost Forest hiding him from his enemies, those wicked （wicked what? Sicilians? Lombards? Saracens? Oh, the English, the wicked English!） . . . those wicked English enemies, who wanted to find him and cut off his head and steal his crown.
All the while Dirk hoped his voice was carrying, and that Nastaran would hear what a jolly helpmeet he was being, and take some sort of comfort. It seemed the only kind of comfort he could offer her, and from such a hurting distance.
He unwrapped the old knife from its leather wallet. Where had the funny thing come from, really? He had grabbed it from the hut in the forest where he had spent some early days, once upon a time, with an old man and an old woman. The old man had been a woodcutter, and this knife had been his knife, and Dirk had stolen it and bravely run away. He couldn’t remember why.
It made a nice story, or the beginning of a story. Dirk didn’t know how it went on, though, so he didn’t bother to tell that one to the boys. He used the knife to carve them a few rough figures of soldiers. It seemed the blade wasn’t dulling with time, but growing keener. A trick of its metallic makeup.
53.
Another letter from Pfeiffer. He was delayed still. His ailment had grown into a pulmonary spasm. He could not sit up without a punishing cough. He couldn’t yet leave his bed.
Nastaran folded the letter into her lap. They were sitting in the orchard garden. “Who else, I wonder, cannot manage to leave his bed,” she murmured in a costive voice. It was the bitterest and also the healthiest Dirk had ever heard her. He set the boys to playing with the few little wooden soldiers coming home from the Napoleonic wars. Dirk had carved them poorly; they were little more than pegs with identifying noses. Still, the boys personalized them with crude and consistent behaviors, different for each. Dirk made up a story about a river they must forge here, see, on this broken branch, across this scarf that will be a stream, all right?—no one must fall in or the others will have to save him! Then Dirk retired to a bench in the frosty sunlight.
“All this is making a menace for you, but it needn’t be,” said Dirk. “Nastaran”—he had not before dared to use her name without an honorific—“no one adores a wife more than Herr Pfeiffer does you. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such pains to bring me into your household, so I might be an assist to you.”
“I am a sore trial to him, with my airs and vapors and, and, the offenses I take. I would leave me were I him. I would leave myself if I could.”
“Did your experience with the Herr Doktor afford you any relief?”
She grunted. “We are all migrants. We are exiled from the place where meaning meant something.”
He waited, picking at calluses near his fingernails.
“Look.” By way of explanation, she rotated a hand at her boys. Across the garden they were squatting beside the plugs of wood, moving them this way and then, while conducting muttered negotiations of the utmost seriousness. “Do you realize that they live someplace that we don’t?”
He felt he almost apprehended what she meant . . .
“Those boys and us—we only seem to be sharing a life here. The young are entirely separate. They are someplace else right now. They won’t join us in our lives, really, until they are grown. And by then, who will they become? People I don’t know. And I may not even be here when they get here.”
“Where will you be?”
She didn’t answer, but it was a normal silence this time, not a troubled one. Perhaps Herr Doktor Mesmer’s peculiar methods had massaged some paralyzed process within her back into operation. Dirk reached out and covered the hand in her lap with his. She didn’t twitch, neither did she add her other hand to clasp his.
“Those who sit in the house of grief will someday sit in the garden,” she said.
“This garden?”
“I was reciting a ghazal from the Divan of Hafez. ‘The bruised soul will find honey.’” Then she added a few more lines in Persian.
“We have that much in common, you know,” he said. “We’re both exiled from something long ago.”
“Maybe you did die once,” she said. “When it is my turn, I will not come back the way you did.”
The boys shrieked. A soldier had fallen into the raging torrent, and one by one the others jumped in, too. Whether to rescue their drowning colleague or to relish the solidarity of a community suicide, Dirk couldn’t tell.