“The boys are never a bother. But it’s out of the question. I shall come to visit from time to time. Let that be enough between us.”
Sebastian had found a stone shaped like a butter roll. With ferocious noise Otto von Blotto was trying to scare a dead fish back to life. Günther was paying no attention to either of them, dashing toward the teasing waves, dancing away before getting his toes soaked. Gulls came in from Sweden with all the Scandinavian news. The light seemed to have a long up-swung curl to it at horizon level, some trick of atmospherics.
They sat to admire the view. It was blindingly blue today. Then Felix shifted his seat to a rock behind Dirk, and clamped his knees about Dirk’s shoulders. As if Dirk were a ’cello. “I’ll change your mind,” said Felix. “Give me time.”
“Take all the time you need. My mind is a capricious beast, and you may not find it where you expect.”
“Haven’t I already learned that.”
They sat without speaking. The boys waved, and their father waved back. Dirk’s hands were clenched tightly, one packed into the other.
When they stood and prepared to turn back, they clung closer together. “Boys,” shouted Felix. “The wind is a monster. Keep back from those tidal pools or the North Wind will push you in, and your mother will have my head on a salver.”
“You’re right to worry,” said Dirk before he could stop himself. Nastaran at the edge of the jetty at midnight. He pushed past this. “What good boys. Do they always obey you so well?”
“Rarely. As soon as this new situation becomes commonplace to them, they will begin to break the rules. The nature of boys. I hope you will look after them, Dirk.”
“I—？”
“I mean, should anything ever happen to me.”
“Like what? Your getting abducted by a sea monster?” Dirk gave Felix a sudden shove with his shoulder, knocking Felix off balance. His knee went out and he sat down in the wet, pebbly sand. “Yes, the world is a treacherous place, Felix.”
“You reprobate. I’ll get you.” And they chased each other as far as the boys, and a little ahead. Meritor came into view around the curve of the bluff. From here they could see the castellated roofline facing the sea. Perhaps the place had housed cannon at some point.
“This is a perfect place for you to work,” said Felix as they began to scale the bluff. Otto von Blotto was in his arms, as the incline was too steep for stumpy legs. “Look at the lovely openness of it. It just calls . . . to be filled with invention. No?”
Dirk paused for breath at a turn in the path. Felix was right about that. A row of narrow trees, too slender to serve as a real breakfront, made an open lattice against the shimmery spangle. But the shoreline was otherwise spare of flora—only tall needle-y grasses, low shrubs contorted into the shapes of flame by the ceaseless wind.
“You could move in your Little Lost Forest. There’s plenty of room . . .”
Dirk didn’t answer. So much caprice and nonsense spent in negotiating the sorrier and grander realities. “The forest would get blown out to sea,” he said at last, as neutrally as he could.
That night, after the family had retired, Dirk noticed a door at the back of the clothes cupboard that proved to be the way to the parapet. His greatcoat hung on a peg; he pulled a sleeve forward into the doorjamb to make sure he wouldn’t get locked out by accident. He had the impression he was climbing the dark sleeve of his own coat. Up a narrow set of stone steps he ventured, and lifted a trap to arrive, shivering, onto a flat part of the roof.
A middling moon emerged, a sore that was soaking the raveled sheets of cloud with white blood. It shed enough light that Dirk could make out the brow of Hiddensee to his left, and the low sweep of north Rügen to his right. The cleft of sea between them, that narrow verge of horizon that led his eye to no land . . . He stared at it, as if expecting a ship to round the promontory of Hiddensee, to come and rescue him. Until the wind finally got the better of him, he stared. In love, and in fear. The ocean, however milder in this channel than it would be on the far side of Hiddensee, was still rough and active, and the noise was thousands of drowning ’cellos.
73.
For four days Ethelinda struggled to establish some kind of routine in the household. The local staff proved sullen, the Munich staff styled themselves as superior. A stalemate from the start.
Unless the sky was spitting rain, Felix kept the boys out of the house, and most of the time Dirk joined them. They walked north to where the headland of the Rügen promontory turned east. All the time the low brow of Hiddensee winked in and out of view, depending on the strength of the fog and the warmth of the melting sun. It was too early in the season to bathe in the sea, though the boys tried. Their father stripped as well and got in as far as his calves. Dirk watched from the shore, shivering. “Take us in a boat to Hiddensee,” the boys wailed.
“Too rough today,” said Felix, lovely when he was being lazy.
“One day I will,” said Dirk, but they weren’t listening to him.
By the fifth day in Meritor, the Stahlbaum family and retinue had concluded, regretfully, that the house needed to be made more comfortable before they could truly enjoy it. The old plaster walls were buckled with hidden damp. The woodwormed chestnut wainscoting in the parlor required oiling at best and perhaps replacement. The well would have to be rebuilt, as the water had proven brackish enough to make their tea somewhat tidal. Next summer would be better.
The boys were disappointed in the change of plans. They expressed themselves, backstairs, in vital attempts at blasphemy that were almost charming. Ethelinda and Felix pretended not to hear them. “We never said we would stay the full two weeks, only that we would investigate,” their father told them. “On the way home we shall visit the carousel in the Berlin zoo in the Tiergarten, I pledge you this.”
“We were going to do that anyway!” shouted Sebastian.
“We’ll be back next year. I’ll take you by boat to Hiddensee. I’ll row you myself.”
Felix didn’t keep his promise, though, as he died suddenly a few months later. Word about this from Ethelinda arrived at Drosselmeier’s shop in the form of a scribbled message. She needed him at once. Dirk glanced at the figures upon their wooden stands, but he couldn’t find one that warranted bringing as a consolation. He locked up and hurried to the Stahlbaum home.
Ethelinda met him at the door. The boys were upstairs in the nursery, weeping. Dirk took both her hands in his and said, “But why?”
“That’s not the right question,” she told him through her tears. He didn’t know what other question might work, but maybe it wasn’t a time for questions.
“You are Felix’s—you were Felix’s dearest friend,” she said to him. “The boys need you now. I need you now. Please accompany me to the services as if you were my brother.”
“But your own family—”
“It is too late for them to make amends.”
He needed to know how Felix had died. His heart was engorged, said Ethelinda. His grandmother had died young from a similar condition.
She adorned herself in bombazine. With an admirable steeliness she saw her way through the services and the timid meals meant to appeal to a woman with a failed appetite. Dirk’s ductless eye, behind its patch, leaked for the only time in its blind life. He wiped away the tears with a scrap of small colored scarf he had taken from Nastaran’s cupboard after she died.