“Dirk?” Felix waved a spoon in a nonchalant circle in the air. “Name your request.”
Nearly anything could raise a blush in Dirk. “This coffee will suffice, Fr?ulein,” muttered Dirk into its steam. The young miss hurried off to see to a noisy crowd of burghers who stood stomping at the door, chafing their elbows for warmth.
Dirk said, “How did Nastaran engage you in such folly? You’ve met her, what, twice? You owe her nothing. Besides, I’m a country cabbage compared to your high-flown friends like Kurt von Koenig and those other sharp fellows at university.”
“I’m easily persuaded to be nice if I think I can get something in return. Like nearly everyone else in Europe.”
“I have nothing for you.”
“You don’t see yourself, do you?” For once Felix’s voice lost its playful affect. He leaned over the table and looked sturdily at Dirk. “You only seem to read in yourself what you have not. Didn’t that exercise with Mesmer show you something that I saw right away, the first time my eyes fell upon you? What you do possess? In ample fashion?”
“Ignorance?”
“Capacity, maybe. I don’t know what to call it. The Scots might say glamour.”
“Glamour!” Dirk felt his blush return. Felix laughed.
“I didn’t say beauty! Though some might. I meant glamour in the sense of . . . enchantment. Otherness. Enticement. Maybe it’s merely the eye-patch.”
“Nothing more than na?veté. I’m a proper clean-souled Christian, touched by no folk hexes, no matter what else you’ve heard.”
“Mesmer brought out into words something I had seen in you from the first. Some—attachment—some—sensibility. A genius of . . . of access, maybe? I haven’t the words for it at all. I suppose that’s what attracts me to you. Could I learn it from you, it would benefit my music and perhaps my mind as well.”
“You’re speaking some tongue I don’t understand.” But despite his intention to warn Felix off the trip, thus canceling it, Dirk grabbed the fork and picked at the pastry. He ate a sloping edge of it. Raspberry, sour cream, crusty torte pastry. The tart and the succulently sweet. By the time he’d marshaled his thoughts about Felix’s plans and was ready to register an objection, Engelbertine or whoever she was returned without her apron. Abandoning the other table now the customers were all served, she sat down in a chair between them. Whether spoken for or not, the young woman seemed eager to address Felix. Dirk couldn’t command his attention again. At length he stood up, and he left them nattering away. There seemed nothing for it but to make this foolish journey to Oberteuringen and be done with it. Get back to Nastaran as quickly as possible.
56.
The following morning, the cook having supplied him with a hefty luncheon wrapped in cheesecloth, Dirk commandeered Franz and Moritz in front of the Pfeiffer establishment. “Smarten up, soldiers,” he told them. They threw their heads up and stamped their feet as they had observed soldiers doing.
Nastaran came out of the street door, an exercise Dirk had never seen happen in the Pfeiffer household; normally the family and servants used the garden entrance. The woman had thrown around herself a black shawl with a mortuary aspect. Below the shawl, Dirk glimpsed some loose and gauzy pantaloons. Her lower calves were bare and not at all pink, but sallow down to the ankles. Her feet, unshod, were stained with a pattern of curling leaves.
He wanted right then, before everyone, to kneel and to take her foot in his hand again and bring it to his lips. How like a spoon with a razor edge is human need.
Before he could speak, he heard the trap rattling along the street. Felix had arranged a carriage to take them the first leg of the journey. Out of the steeps of the city and into the more rolling upland meadows. There, it was hoped, the road would continue at a lesser grade of incline, making a trip on foot easier.
The boys shouted as Felix leapt out, showing off an outrageously cheerful and crimson cape. It whipped about his shoulders. “Brave travelers, prepare to advance to adventure!” he declaimed. “But take farewell of your mother first, don’t be nasty little weevils, go on now.”
They ran to Nastaran and lifted their cheeks for her kiss. She put one hand on Moritz’s left shoulder and the other on Franz’s right. Her hands were ornamented like her feet. She spoke in what Dirk supposed to be Persian. The boys nodded solemnly, trying to keep from craning to watch the pair of jittery horses, but their eagerness got the better of them and she let them both go.
“Madame, we shall guard them with our lives.” Felix bowed with a flourish of his silly plumed hat. He was using the voice of pretend with her. She neither scowled at him nor broke the mood in any other way, but made a gentle obeisance in return, at a careful distance.
“You’ll freeze your feet there, now, Mistress,” said the laundry maid in a voice almost beneath hearing. She chafed her own elbows as she stood at the garden gate and watched the palaver. She had arrived to stay overnight and keep an eye on things just in case Dirk didn’t return in time. But he was determined to be home by evening if he could. He didn’t mention the need to beware of Nastaran’s sleepwalking; it didn’t seem his place to do so.
“You will take care of yourself,” said Dirk to Nastaran, coming a little nearer, lowering his voice for privacy.
“That is what you must expect of me,” she replied, turning her face upon him at last. What he’d come to recognize as kohl was smeared about her eyes, lids and lashes alike. The ornamentation made her eyes bigger but seemed much farther away. “You take care of them. That’s all you can do.”
It was a dismissal and a challenge at once. He lifted his hand to her as she hurriedly fastened the black shawl around hereslf more tightly.
He unfurled his hand and gave her what he had for her. It wasn’t much.
“It won’t have a golden key in it,” he said, “but when you open it, it will smell like Persia.”
She rolled the common walnut in her hand. “I have no way to open the past,” she said.
“The smell will bring you back,” he told her. “I will open it for you when I come back. I promise. Keep it safe till I return.”
The horses nickered and paced, Felix made a trumpet voluntary with his lips meant to sound like melodic farting. The boys screamed with joy. The last warm breeze Dirk would feel in some time coiled in from the lane, smelling of baking bread and simmering pork and apples. Nastaran dropped the walnut in the neck of her blouse, between her breasts, it seemed. Dirk could barely get to the carriage on his swoony legs—he had to lean on that old staff he was still hauling about. He had thought it might come in handy while hiking along a high road; here it was being useful already.
Felix hollered an instruction. Smitten by his antics, the boys didn’t turn to wave good-bye to their mother.
57.
But at the edge of Meersburg, when the landscape began to open out into stubbled fields of hops and pastures for oxen, Felix rolled his hand in the air, bidding the driver to continue. Dirk said, “Between us we don’t have coin enough to hire a trap all the way to Oberteuringen.”
“I received my seasonal allowance. Settle down your nerves,” replied Felix, patting Dirk on the knee and pulling the blanket up around their waists. “I know you by now, Dirk. You won’t want to spend a night on the road worrying about her well-being while you’re gone. We’ll make of this trip as quick an operation as we can. Perhaps even get there and back in one day if we’re lucky.”