He’d been surprised to sit in the crowded nave and glance around at the choir in their robes. They did not sing. “He wanted no music,” murmured Ethelinda. “Silence is loud enough.”
For quite a while Sebastian and Günther wouldn’t acknowledge Dirk with a hello, good-bye, or please jump off the railroad trestle. It was as if he had disappeared from their lives as completely as their father. Curious, then, that the most significant change of heart in the household seemed to belong to Otto von Blotto. The filthy fawning thing nuzzled at Dirk’s arches and toes when he was sitting and kept to Dirk’s heel when he stood or walked about.
74.
Ethelinda pulled back into herself as she became more used to being a widow. “You have your own life,” she insisted to Dirk. But did he really? This was a question he could frame, but he couldn’t come to an answer. He kept his distance.
After a few months, though, Ethelinda relented and showed up at Drosselmeier’s Toy Shop. The boys were in tow. They became engaged in small racks of tin soldiers Dirk imported from Great Britain and France and set up on a tabletop to fight the Prussians and a certain militant strain of giraffe.
Ethelinda: “I need you to bring a packet to Meersburg. I don’t trust it by the usual couriers.”
“What’s in Meersburg?”
“Have you forgotten? My family home? My parents have passed on to their reward, but my brother is still there. The lake place is too big and cold for year-round, and Munich won’t do, but the Meersburg house is all right for him.”
“Why don’t you bring it yourself when you visit him?”
“We’re not in touch. Surely Felix told you all about that?”
“He never did.”
She explained. It turned out that, long ago, Kurt had sired a bastard with a member of the household staff. This had only come to light some years later when the mother showed up with the child in tow. He was something of a dullard, the boy, but his resemblance to the von Koenig line was unmistakable. The mother had once been a kitchen maid in the family’s lakeside schloss. It caused a great ruckus in the whole family.
He fumbled. “And you—how were you inconvenienced?”
“I took Felix’s side, of course. I was his wife.”
“I don’t understand. Why should Felix have any opinion about this?”
“Don’t you remember? I thought you were around that summer. At the time, Felix was believed to have gotten the girl in trouble. He had admitted as such. My parents didn’t want me to marry Felix because of that. Felix’s presumed licentiousness was the cause of their estrangement from me because, you see, I’d already become enamored of Felix. I learned far too late that the bastard was actually Kurt’s child, and that my own brother, so cowardly, had allowed his friend Felix to accept that stain upon his own reputation. And Kurt stood idly by as my forbidden romance with Felix caused a rift between me and my family—you see? Ach, Kurt betrayed both his friend and his sister. And this paupered my boys of their grandparents. So I can have nothing to do with Kurt. Though he’s my brother, he’s a selfish brute. No fit model for his nephews. You’d be a better godfather to them than he is an uncle.”
So Dirk agreed to convey the packet of documents to Ethelinda’s family home. Before the von Koenigs departed his shop, he tried to give the boys the pair of wheeled elephants he had carved from some cherrywood, but Ethelinda insisted on buying some soldiers instead. The boys had turned their noses up at the pachyderms anyway—girls’ toys. They both accepted, however, a small sack of boiled sweets—acid drops in citron yellow and pear green. The Stahlbaum sons didn’t thank him exactly, he noted, but at least they nodded acknowledgment at the thump of sacks in their open palms.
He left when they did. Closing up, he watched Ethelinda’s passive face float up in the darkening shop windows, like the visage of a marble statue tipped over backward into shallow water. Her expression was full of purse strings, he thought; variously tightening and loosening. When her eyes were welcoming her mouth was snapped tight. When her lips softened and she bit her lower lip, her eyes went mechanical.
Dirk had little feeling for her of any variety, but even a sensation of curiosity was something of a novelty. She was keeping her grief to herself as a private treat to enjoy in her own boudoir, not to share among her friends. Ach, as if he were a friend of hers. He didn’t know if he might qualify for such a position. Nor whether he desired to do so.
75.
He had felt queer all morning. By the time Dirk went to the Stahlbaum house to pick up the parcel of documents, the setting sun seemed to be etching lines of gold-foil in the damp gutters. Dirk cringed at the shouting and screaming and the throwing of toys upstairs. When Ethelinda came downstairs long enough to thrust him a packet of papers, she said, “And take this—as long as you’re traveling.” Felix’s walking stick from the stand in the corner of the vestibule. “I always meant you to have something of his.” Dirk knew the thing. He’d never noticed that the dark metal knob at the tip, the grasp, was the old iron knife-head of that wizened, crouching folk figure. Felix must have had this stick bespoke.
Tucking the papers into his vest, gripping the cane, Dirk escaped the household as quickly as he could. He paused at the bottom of the stone steps and looked along the boulevard. The trees were half unleaved and the ground was littered. He turned his collar up against a pebbling of rain. The door of the house behind him opened, the noise increased. He didn’t turn to see who was looking after him—he had had enough of them. Felix wasn’t there anymore. Dirk wasn’t sure why he allowed himself to be involved.
He walked briskly as the rain steadied. The plashing of drops were like stains—he heard them fall on the cobbles before him. They registered to him as a splash of annihilation. As if a painter, rejecting everything on the canvas, were daubing out the view in blotches of angry nothingness. The patterns of blankness began to meet up, and he slowed his step for fear of losing his way. He was becoming blinded in his single eye. He’d never felt the like before.
He’d stopped cold for fear of walking into a carriage. He held one hand over his face. The other hand steadied the whole tottering stack of himself upon the walking stick. Horrifyingly melodramatic, but he couldn’t help it. His body shuddered, from the backs of his ankles to the sensitive indentations in his temples. This was, perhaps, a cousin to the swollen heart that had felled Felix—simpatico. Dirk would leave now, he would go at last, after much too much waiting.
Until he became tethered to the world once more, this time by the furry yoke that wreathed around his feet, barking to alert him of the danger.
“You’re a damn fool to come out in the rain,” snarled Dirk to Otto von Blotto. He picked him up to return him to the household. Resentment at being importuned was a slender reason to live, but it was better than nothing.
76.
As he headed for Meersburg for the first time since he’d left, he began to think about those siblings, Kurt and Ethelinda von Koenig as they had once been, way back then. During his summer at the von Koenig lakeside estate, all those years ago, Dirk remembered seeing Kurt at a distance, because Kurt had been joined at the hip with Felix. But Dirk couldn’t recall if Ethelinda, née von Koenig, had even been in residence at the family home during that bright season of youth. Perhaps she’d been visiting friends or cousins elsewhere. He wasn’t aware of her existence until he met her as a married woman in Munich.