Felix shrugged. His red cape seemed larger today, and he was lost a little inside it.
The thrush, if that is what she was, hopped from the post to the edge of the table, and brashly worked at devouring a scatter of crumbs. Her movements were a kind of dance, hop skip hop triple skip. She looked at Dirk, as if trying to see if he was a bread crumb, and then she departed in a flurry of wing-feathers. One fell behind on the stone terrace.
“Here,” said Felix, picking it up. “Here is your plume for Herr Nutcracker.”
Using the awl, Dirk routed a pinhole notch, and threaded the feather into it. Now the nutcracker belonged to them both, somehow. Dirk finished the corner of the jaw, and began working the tip of the knife into the back of the throat. “This is the last integument, and then the jaw will have life,” he said. His palm was closed around the black-iron imp, but the knife-head seemed warm to his grasp. “In . . . just this . . . this final bit . . . and, is it presto?”
“Presto!” said Felix. He reached over and gripped the handle of the nutcracker and lifted it up, before Dirk, using the tip of the knife, could finish clearing out the last of the shavings from the nutcracker’s throat. The mouth swung open on its solid jaw pins. “I sing of the Golden Walnut!” cried Felix in a pretense of triumph. Several other travelers on the terrace turned and looked. Then Felix slapped the handle back into place, and the bulbous lower lip of the wooden nutcracker smacked against his upper lip with a satisfied grin. “It works!” cried Felix as the blade of the knife fell out of the nutcracker’s mouth, broken off of the cold lifeless dwarf-shaped handle that had held it for so long.
63.
They parted at Kirchstra?e in the center of town. Felix would continue on to the gasthof and the von Koenigs, and make his apologies for having missed the concert last night. And then, he said, he would wander back to university, probably, and rejoin his fellow scholars.
“That’s a big change from yesterday,” said Dirk, trying to sound interested but eager to hurry home.
“As you said earlier, who knows what is to happen three days out?” said Felix. “Maybe I’ll suddenly come upon enough of life to be able to play the ’cello with conviction.”
“Conviction? Is that all it takes?”
“You mock me. You’ve learned to mock.” A wry grin worked its way forward between Felix’s clamped lips. “Hope for you yet, I suppose.”
“You’ll be playing for the crowned heads of Austria and France by the time you’re twenty-five,” said Dirk.
“I’ll be married to Hannelore or Engelbertine or some such goddess,” said Felix, sullenly, “and we’ll have eight of those little pinched newborns like the one we saw this morning. And the screams to make them come out right! . . . Dirk, give me something to remember you by. Please.”
Dirk had driven his hands into his pockets, feeling for something, so could not resist when Felix gripped him by the shoulders and kissed him so fast and hard his teeth rattled in their sockets. He pulled away. “Here,” Dirk said, opening his hand. Felix caught it. The broken knife-handle, the dead carved little figure, staring up at nothing. “Take it, Pan, it is a thing of the past.”
They parted, moved to opposite sides of the street without further comment, as the last of the melting snow ran cold and clear in the gutters, and a cart filled with squawking chickens in cages came up the street between them.
Dirk then turned toward home.
It was, as he probably ought to have guessed, too late, far too late. In the absence of family and a chaperone with any sort of authority, Nastaran had tried to release her childhood from herself through her own steps, taken in the middle of the night to the edge of the jetty that faced the barrier Alps. To the edge of the lake, and past the edge. Whether this was an accident during somnambulism or clear-eyed suicide, no one could ever say.
Part Two
Intermezzo
64.
He stayed in Meersburg another eight years, until the boys were more or less grown. Well, Franz, anyway. Perhaps Moritz would never emerge into anything like competence.
Gerwig Pfeiffer didn’t join the others at the quay to see Dirk off. Whether this was because in his stolid silences Herr Pfeiffer still held Dirk accountable for Nastaran’s death, Dirk didn’t know. Or perhaps the old man just wasn’t interested. The boys came down in the cart with Frau Pfeiffer the Next. She was a hearty proxy of a wife, not so much a pillar of the community as a footstool.
“Well, that’s that, then,” said the second Frau Pfeiffer. Her Christian name was Cordula. She handed Dirk’s lunch to him, and then assumed her customary stance, her wrists wrapped around her forearms and her elbows angled away from her waist. This, Dirk always assumed, was to air the skin on her upper arms, which tended to a farmwife gloss in the summer. “We’ll miss you, Herr Dirk. You shall always have a home with us.”
She was everything Nastaran was not, and nothing like how Nastaran had been, except in one way: Cordula kept a lot inside. The slant gleam in her eye was a sign of intelligence and probity.
Franz was now through school. （The first thing the stepmother did was throw the boys into a rowdy schoolroom with an anarchic teacher who taught them Greek and archery and sums and Psalms. Franz had thrived, Moritz become shriveled.） The older boy was ready to apprentice with his father in the paper trade. Not knowing how to perform a gesture of authority, Franz clasped Dirk’s forearms with both his hands, and then pushed a purse of cash upon him, all sudden, as a bully might land a thump. Dirk allowed only a grunt of thanks, so as not to further discomfit the boy in this shift of authority between them.
He turned to Moritz, who was kicking the rim of the cartwheel and looking down along the lake into hazy glare. The Persian force in the younger brother was emerging in his plum-like, deep-set eyes. “I don’t know why you have to go now,” said Moritz. His tone suggested a correlative assumption . . . since you didn’t have the nerve to leave eight years ago when you deserted your post and cost us our mother.
“You’re grown,” said Dirk. “Or nearly. The paper trade is your family work, not mine.”
“What is your new work to be, then?” They all watched the paddlewheel steamer approach with near noiseless plash from around the promontory, hugging the shore and heading for dock.
“I don’t know.” Dirk had resolved not to tell the boys or their father that he hoped to find his way to Persia. What he was looking for, he didn’t know. A lost land. A home without the stink of familiarity. He realized this seemed a conundrum impossible to resolve. He might try, though. He, too, had grown up.
“I want you to have this,” he said to Moritz. He had waited until the last minute to decide, and only now had the courage to reach in his satchel. Franz and his stepmother stood a step away; they understood this transaction was more important than sausage or guilders. Dirk took out the Nutcracker. Once Dirk had finished the figure with a gritted cloth and sand, he had used Nastaran’s paints to color the piece into individuality. He replaced the thrush feather of the plume every year or so, and he had oiled the hinged jaw with linseed and lemon juice to keep it from splitting or drying out or chafing. It had gone from nutcracker to Nutcracker, and, in the stories Dirk used to tell when the boys were younger, to “The Nutcracker,” or “Nutcracker, he . . .” The creature had evolved from it to he.