Dirk grunted. “Do they teach you pagan texts at university? Imagine superstitions having a place of honor there. Are your professors and ministers so flummoxed by Christian thought that they have to relish primitive lore from the childhood of the world?”
“The old-fashioned stories have always been with us, Dirkie. The cross was planted in the mouth of antiquity so modern faith could begin; but the old beliefs mumble from the ground. Those who halt their incessant prayers can hear the old stories telling themselves out loud. Indeed, I think that is what you do—that is your genius.”
“Genius!” He felt a hotness rise from his collar. “All this is nonsense meant to amuse the boys. Or stultify them into sleep, as I’ve done.”
“Don’t feel too elevated, now,” said Felix, kicking Dirk companionably. “These stories belong to Europe and to the world. Like Odysseus on his ten-year magical voyage, amid the likes of Cyclops and mermaids and Circe the witch—Odysseus coming back to Penelope the faithful wife. A world story. You know about all that?”
“I don’t want you to tell me. I’m more curious about why you even care. Why do your masters at university care. Greece is a long way away and a long time ago.”
“Ach, it’s not just the German and Prussian states that pay attention! England suffers an advanced state of Hellenophilic tumescence, you understand. Concupiscence. I know, I’ve been there. My uncle took me to the home of a great architect in London who collects artifacts of the deep past—stunning marble torsos and intelligent faces, scallops from the rooflines of buildings, pillars and such. Bodies almost too beautiful to be human. Ideas of being human rather than portraits of individuals such as the Dutch and the Venetians give us. The whole building is a mausoleum of ancient faith—or maybe it isn’t faith but trust in human capacity. I’m not sure.”
“But how does a rage for the raw niceties of Greece infect modern Munich and Berlin?”
“And London, and Paris, and overseas, too, I’m told. It’s a good question, Dirk. You might be university material after all. Maybe it goes back to the Lutheran rebellion against Rome.”
“How could that possibly—”
“Once Gutenberg and his printing device were able to make the Gospels more widely available, not only to bishops and monks but also to the pious everyman sinner, the curious among hoi polloi wanted to know more. Mighty Luther himself worked on a translation of the Holy Book from Latin into German, did you know? So it’s just sensible that the scripture-crazed devotees of the New Testament would need to go back to the original sources to ensure sound theology. And in the rush to learn Attic Greek, Germans discovered more than the foundations of the Christian faith. The Hellenic classics are stuffed with fundamental thought, oh, on government, and philosophy, and aesthetics, and architecture, and drama, too. As well as stories for children.”
“Hmmm,” said Dirk, but uneasily.
“You scoff, but really, do you know the Odyssey? Athena argues with the god Zeus for permission to intervene on behalf of Odysseus, as the great warrior struggles home from the Trojan wars. And when Zeus agrees, how does she manage her meddling?”
He expected Dirk to answer. Dirk shrugged.
“Athena disguises herself as an old woman. She helps him out with magical interventions. She then transforms him by giving him a disguise so complete that even his son and his wife can’t recognize him. Only his dog. Who does this sound like to you, this Athena?” When Dirk didn’t answer, Felix said, “Who do you think really is the fairy godmother in those tales by the Brothers Grimm, those household m?rchen that they published to such success, but Athena herself? You must know Aschenputtel, the cinder-girl in the hearth? There’s a French version written up by Perrault—Cinderella, no less—and in that one, the girl is elevated by divine manipulation, she is so glorified and disguised that her own family can’t recognize her. Just like Odysseus, hidden in plain sight. The fairy godmother is Athena brought forward. Who else but Athena at the girl’s side to help with a carriage magicked up from a garden gourd of some sort, with mice for horses, and a rat for a coachman.”
Dirk rolled his eyes toward the coachman clicking the horses up front, but Felix chattered on. “The old gods steal secretly into our own times. Just as your Little Lost Forest is doing, with its Pythia and its Pan. What I’m interested in—do you want to know?”
“No, not really.”
“What I’m interested in, Dirk—” He shifted his rump on the seat and looked at Dirk so intently that Dirk couldn’t look away however much he wanted to. Felix pulled off his grey leather gloves and took Dirk’s face in his hands and pulled him within a few inches of his own nose. “I want to know why the Pythia and the Pan would show themselves to you, who don’t even know of their provenance, and who hardly care about it.”
“I care,” said Dirk. He could hardly breathe. “I care. I do care.”
59.
The uncle was clearly a much-loved fellow. He hoisted the boys, one under each arm, as if they were squealing piglets, and romped around the barnyard with them. His wife, a stout friendly Frau with a cheery wall-eye, laughed at the reunion. Her fists clasped in a knot at her waist, and her bosom and belly shook as if well accustomed to the exercise.
“You’ll stay the night?” Onkel Peer asked of Dirk and Felix.
“You ought to do; there’s weather on the way,” said Tantchen Isabelle. She glanced skyward, though it was impossible to guess from which direction she thought trouble might be approaching. She seemed to be surveying east and west, past and future, all at once. “I’ll make up a mattress.”
Felix insisted the coachman could see them back to Meersburg by nightfall. “I’ve an assignation arranged for this evening, mustn’t miss it,” he said. Oh, thought Dirk; and with whom? Old Mesmer, seeking out more secrets of other people’s lives? As if he could read Dirk’s mind, Felix said, “If I arrive on time, the von Koenig family expects me for dinner and a concert, Dirk. You could come, too.”
“They won’t welcome me, and I wouldn’t accept if they did.” But before they could argue the matter, the coachman declared he had no intention to push his horses through bad weather. Should the lads intend to return to Meersburg by nightfall, they could do it by foot if they started at once. They might be there by sunset if they didn’t dawdle. The coachman would hunker down at Onkel Peer’s stable and return to Meersburg in the morning.
As Dirk wasn’t eager to leave Nastaran alone for a single evening if he could help it, he bade the young Pfeiffer boys a brisk good-bye. They were too busy romping about with their uncle to reply. Tantchen Isabelle refreshed the food parcel with slices of ham and a few apples and brown bread with seeds. Then Felix and Dirk set off on foot. The sound of the boys’ laughter haunted the farmland behind them until the road turned at the heel of the hill.
They strode with vigor. After the first half hour had passed in companionable silence, their pace slackened. Dirk asked Felix more about his interest in music and how he had come to settle on the violoncello as an instrument. Felix liked to talk about himself, so Dirk heard more about the university student than he’d ever heard about anyone before. There was the uncle in London, and a surviving grandfather somewhere on the Hanseatic coast. Felix’s parents lived alone in a village northwest of Munich. Their humble home looked out on the Dachauer Moos, a marshy sort of badlands that gave off a redolent stink. Felix abhorred it. Profoundly dispiriting. His parents had had no other children and seemed perpetually surprised to have given rise to Felix, as if they’d expected only to serve the Lord and not to serve supper. Vater Stahlbaum was a verger at the church of Saint Jakob in Dachau, which had a door handle shaped like a fish. He whipped young Felix once for liking the feeling of the fish in his clasped hand so much that he stood outside stroking it over and over instead of entering to receive the Sacrament. “So many ways to come to the holy truth,” finished Felix. “Now, your turn.”