“You have it, then. A gift from me.”
“You sound distressed,” said Franz. “A weaker man than I am would take this just to get rid of you, Dirk, and toss it in the fire as soon as you were gone. But I am better than that. I won’t take it either. All these years on, I don’t blame you for our mother’s death. All these years later. So many years later.” He finished his ale. “But I don’t credit you with saving her life, either.”
78.
He spent the night in Meersburg, in a cold room above a quiet stable. He thought about the lost childhoods of Franz and Moritz and then, inevitably, about his own.
His clawed scraps of memory hardly seemed to signify a real life. Yet the more that the structures of his adult life failed, the stronger seemed the deep past. A life in the deep forest, that old man and old woman.
Some story that they used to tell about a little lost forest, and its cantankerous pair of ambassadors—a lovely goddess in a green kirtle, an untrustworthy hunchbacked gnome of some sort with long sharp teeth. Dirk couldn’t remember how the story went.
Though as he slipped into sleep, he came near to dreaming—an unusual experience, dreams for him being a rare abrasion against cold reality. Branches of great trees came raking down over him like the collapse of an entire hillside. A sense of urgency—not for his own safety, but for that of the woods. The rescue of the numinous world. It made no sense at all.
The beer made him belch, and that woke him up. He arranged his thoughts a little more clearly for a moment. Mesmer and some folderol about an ancient forest of Delphi, severed from its sacred home by a tremor of the earth. Migrating for two or three thousand years to the north. Mesmer, thought Dirk, must have become enamored of those tales the Brothers Grimm had collected and published, with all their adventures carried out in the tremulous Bavarian woods. What a charlatan, foisting such a romantic tale upon a lost and sensitive young man such as himself.
Having someone of whom to disapprove made Dirk calmer. He slept in steep shafts of dreamlessness.
79.
Before leaving Meersburg the next day Dirk Drosselmeier went to the doors of the Roman Catholic mother church and looked in. A stout older man in a mis-buttoned waistcoat, whose hair corkscrewed above his ears and jowls, was singing an astounding powerfully sweet melody, while seven musicians plunged their bows back and forth across the strings. The tears stood in Dirk’s eye in an automatic way, as without invitation tears will start from onions. He had no clear sense of sentiment, but he was wiping his face anyway.
When they had paused to refer to their scores over some accident of atonality, the first violinist saw Dirk. “Ave Maria,” he said. “It does that to you, doesn’t it? But this rehearsal is closed. What are you doing here?”
“I want to find the episcopal offices. I need to make an enquiry about a Protestant church in the region. I figured Rome keeps tabs on renegades and apostates.”
The violinist pointed Dirk on his way, while the portly tenor mopped his brow and swore unbecomingly about pains in his knees and his back.
Was music beautiful because it was full of mystery, Dirk wondered, or was it full of mystery because it was beautiful?
A smug-looking cleric at a stand-up desk checked the registry of vicars. “Why, you are indeed in luck,” he said. “We are all less tendentious as we veer toward unification. A Reich eventually, no? Let me look. Well, it seems a certain Pfarrer Johannes is still installed at his position in the village of Achberg. If you are going that way, perhaps you could take him a message for us?”
“Depends on the message,” said Dirk. “I don’t recall your parties were on speaking terms.”
“These days, it’s all ‘God bless you and keep you, if you’re still alive,’” said the cleric, who was young. “Apparently, Pfarrer Johannes is poorly. But our Bishop would probably like to grace him with a greeting. It’s only good form. Have a seat and I’ll be back. Or would you rather make your devotions in the chapel?”
“No.”
The packet was eventually delivered with an ecclesiastical wax seal. I’ve become an adjunct of the House of Thurn und Taxis, thought Dirk; I’ll do nothing more with my life but carry messages back and forth. But just think: after all this time, a reply from the Roman Catholic Bishop. At last.
He spent an hour or so finding out how he might hire space in a carriage heading northeast from Meersburg. A day later, for roads were better now, he had made it to the village last seen in his childhood.
It had changed less than Meersburg or Munich. Indeed, he remembered his first approach to it, that pregnant maiden at the well early in the morning. Today, no one recognized him. He recognized no one, either. He’d never had a good eye for a resemblance.
The old vicarage leaning up against the edge of the chapel was in need of repointing. A kitchen chimney seemed to have scattered bricks and stone into the herb yard. Otherwise the place looked much the same. A young man and woman were leaving the small porch, calling their good-byes. Betrotheds, perhaps, making arrangements for their nuptials. Dirk stood aside, glancing at the ground, as they came through the gate. Certain sorts of happiness made him feel aloof if not skeptical. They were too young to know how love went.
They were too young, and he was too old. Or too—something.
A housekeeper answered the door. “Rather late in the day for the old fellow to be receiving guests, and strangers at that,” she said reprovingly, but when she saw the seal of the Roman Catholic Bishop’s chancery upon the envelope she relented. “I’ll tell the Pfarrer you are come,” she said. “What’s the name, then?”
“He knows me as Drosselmeier.”
He was ushered into the room that, as he recalled, had been a sort of study. A bed was set up near the fireplace, floating like an island away from all the walls. Pfarrer Johannes was propped up upon pillows of swan’s down. Yellow his cheek, and pale his once ruddy lips, but his eyes were wide above the pince-nez.
“It never is, it never could be you, and yet it is, and could be after all,” said Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht. “Come lean down and give me a kiss, dear boy. What took you so long?”
“I got lost.”
“I should say so. Let me look at you. Stand back. No, that’s too far back. My eyes are tyrants—they like the middle spot in the carpet. Yes, perfect. Oh, my. Dirk! Am I dying even faster than I thought, that you should answer one of my last prayers?”
“I am no answer to a wish.” He pulled up a stool to the side of the bed. “What is wrong with you?”
“I am eight thousand years old, give or take, and the Lord is tired of waiting for me. Saint Peter has parked his celestial char à bancs in the courtyard. Can’t you hear the horses snorting and pounding their hoofs in impatience?”
So Pfarrer Johannes had, in old age, gone fantastical.
Or perhaps he could hear the horses nickering there, after all.
“I haven’t got long,” said the old man. “I don’t mean I am departing for heaven tonight—at least, I don’t feel that I am. But my strength doesn’t last, and you will find me nodding off just as you are about to tell me how you kidnapped Napoleon and conquered Malta and made love to some pretty young wife of a hoighty family. Very von und zu. So speak quickly. What have you made of your life?”