How to answer such a question.
“A long road toward a retreating horizon,” he ventured. “Like everyone else’s.”
“No horizon but heaven.”
“That must be true for you, good father. But the rest of us aren’t so sure of our itineraries.”
“Then you become your own destination, Dirk. That is what happens. As long as you are a person of conscience—of merit—one who makes the attempt—you head ever toward the geography of yourself. But I want the real map! Your own map in time, in days and years. Why did you never return? I was worried fair to desperation.”
Brandishing the sealed greeting: “Here is a reply, after a fashion. The delivery of post is very slow in these parts.” They both laughed, and Dirk continued. “I was taken in as a houseboy of sorts. For a while. One thing led to another.”
“Industry? Marriage? Family? Education?”
“Well . . . none of that. Travel, though. I did travel widely. And now I live in Munich, and make toys.”
“Toys!” Pfarrer Johannes wrinkled his lip. “I’d have thought you’d obey the injunction of Saint Paul and put away the things of a child.”
“One does that when one has stopped being a child, as I recall the verse. So perhaps I’ve never stopped.”
“Or you never started,” mused the old man. “You were sober as a little magistrate when you arrived. No wreathing smiles. No easy games and jokes like other boys.”
“Forgive me for disappearing. I never had a good sense of direction of any sort.”
“I was worried. You worried me. You should be whipped for causing an old man worry.” He relented. “Though I wasn’t as old then, was I? I did look for you. Did you know that?”
“Of course not. How could I?”
“I hired a fellow from the precinct to go out the road toward Meersburg and see if anyone had word of a lost boy. Someone had seen you, but no one knew which path you might have taken.”
Dirk shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“You were my responsibility. The good Lord had deemed it so. I had failed you by sending you out into the snares of the world. How happy I am that you were not eaten by more bears!” He began to cry, and then suddenly slept for a moment or two. With closed eyelids, the brightness in the old fellow’s face faded. He looked like a toy Dirk might make out of starch-stiffened old linen.
Shaking himself awake after a bit, the old man seemed surprised to see Dirk still there. “The boy. You. I also sent someone to go to look for your folk. The woodcutter. Have I told you that yet?”
“The woodcutter.”
“Right. Those people you used to call the old man and the old woman. In the forest. I thought you might’ve gone back there.”
“The old man and the old woman. But not my parents. I was a foundling.”
“They weren’t old as all that, according to report. If they were the right people. The man was still alive. He walked with a limp and a stout cane of sorts. His sister was dead.”
“His sister?”
“One of the sins of Leviticus, I fear. Perhaps. ‘Neither should any man approach a close relative to uncover nakedness; I am the LORD.’ I rarely preached on that verse. I thought it was self-evident. Anyway, the sister died of consumption apparently. The woodcutter showed my agent a grave with a stone in which the woodcutter had crudely carved her name.”
“I didn’t know them by name.”
“If I knew his name, I’ve forgotten it. It’s amazing what leaks out of my memory and what stays put. I can’t figure out the method in it. But I remember her name. Gretel, she was. His sister.”
“Perhaps they weren’t the same people,” said Dirk, standing.
The old man was awake enough, alive enough still to hear the tonal change in Dirk’s voice. The cleric stopped speaking for a moment. His eyes closed. Maybe he was praying. Dampness on his cheek. “Perhaps not. One woodcutter is much like the next. Anyway it doesn’t matter now. You’ve come home.”
“I’m not home. I’ve never really been home. And I’m leaving, Pfarrer Johannes.” He had to get out of the place. He leaned down and embraced the old man as gently as he could. “Don’t save me a place in heaven, Pfarrer. There isn’t enough room there for someone like me.”
“I reserve the right to petition for anyone I want. I can be persuasive. Just ask my flock. But Dirk? My blessing.” He raised a hand about an inch off his chest and muttered under his breath, concluding, “My blessing, and also my advice. Spend what you have, give it away, Dirk. All, all away. The only chance to replenish yourself is to use up what you are given. It’s called redemption in some circles.”
Dirk took this to heart, though he thought better of offering the old cleric the battered Nutcracker as a memento. Pfarrer Johannes had fallen asleep again, and the housekeeper was at the doorway, tutting and beckoning. “You won’t stay for a bite,” she whispered declaratively.
“No.”
“Ach. I thought not.”
And then he was on his way back to Munich, a smaller person once again, though perhaps a slightly truer one.
Part Three
The Story of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King
80.
Ethelinda survived her husband by nearly two decades. In those years, Drosselmeier became her closest companion and support. He spent every summer with her and the boys at Meritor on the Baltic. The boys were devoted to him until they grew too old to find his games diverting.
Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever given them the kind of organized attention they deserved. After they were grown, he conceded that he’d often muddled up Günther and Sebastian Stahlbaum, those doughty bürgerlichs, with Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer, the mixed-blood sons of a small-town merchant. None of the boys were alike at all, if he admitted the testing of his memories. On the sidelines of the tiresome business of his life, they’d seemed little more than interchangeable pairs of boys.
That fairy godmother of Cinderella must have learned her trade at a better establishment than Drosselmeier did. He’d been blind to the boys in more than one eye. In short, he’d failed them all, godfather or no.
To make up the loss of income from summer months and to occupy himself during long afternoons, he took up clock repair. He developed a touch and, when back in Munich, began to build clockwork into a line of increasingly complicated toys—though simple anonymous dolls and armies of perfectly matched soldiers made up the better part of his income.
In all those years with the widow, never any question of marriage. During his more rueful moments he imagined that Ethelinda kept him around in order to boast of ownership of her Felix even after his death. But Drosselmeier learned to avoid that path to desolation. Ethelinda did have superior claim, after all. And, though perhaps clueless, Drosselmeier wasn’t absent from the boys even when they’d grown from lumpy kids playing games of mermaid and Poseidon and sea snake at the tidal pools—fashioned from driftwood just so!—into sleek male princes, attracting the gazes of fr?uleins. He stood up for young Sebastian when he married a sober mademoiselle from Lyon. Her name was Clothilde. She had a high forehead and a tendency to be confident. She tolerated Drosselmeier with a philosophical neutrality.