In time, Ethelinda followed her husband to the grave. Neither her brother, Kurt, nor anyone from that side of the family bothered to attend the services. The son, Sebastian, found their absence something of a mercy. The other Stahlbaum boy, Günther, couldn’t contribute to the obsequies either, as he had moved to someplace across the ocean known as Ohio.
Sebastian brought his bride to Meritor. The spare, windblown terrain reminded her of summers spent on the Frisian coast. Clothilde had not enjoyed those summers, and Meritor was not a great success with her. When she became pregnant with her first child, she claimed the prerogative to cancel the annual trip. She wanted to christen the first child Alphonse, but Sebastian demanded a more Teutonic name, so he became Fritz. Four years later, when a daughter was born, Clothilde thought she had prevailed by insisting on Marie-Claire. Yes, Marie-Claire at the baptismal font—Drosselmeier weaseled into the role of actual godfather in both instances by dint not of faith but of his provenance with Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht—as the water rippled over the child’s pale pink brow. As she grew, German custom won through, and the child became popularly known as Klara.
81.
Drosselmeier found, as he aged and stiffened, that he was becoming more interested in Hellenic matters. To the extent that he remembered the bizarre imaginings of his youth, they became entwined with what he was reading about the pan-Athenian festival. Evidence of which had been carved into eternity in the stones of the Parthenon, long ago removed to London and now displayed free of charge in the British Museum. The fuss those marbles had engendered had only grown these fifty years since. Wealthier Germans were traveling to Athens to see for themselves.
Drosselmeier read Homer in translation. He remembered something that Felix had said once about Athena being the model for the fairy godmother who had become, by now, not only a stock figure in tales popularized by Grimm, but also a personage abducted and pressed into service, in one form or another, by the Danish fabulist Hans Christian Andersen. The Athena/godmother seemed to be everywhere in stories. Wasn’t that godlike of her? Always in disguise, like Christ in the urine-stained beggar beyond the newsstand. Like Elijah at the supper table, usually figured as a stranger with a hood over his brooding eyes.
In certain hours of the dawn Drosselmeier might remember clearly the woman in a green kirtle, her auburn hair bound only lightly with a band of hammered copper leaves. Try as he might, he couldn’t conflate her with any Renaissance Madonna he’d ever seen, nor with the wasp-eyed or vinegary portraits of intelligent northern women by Memling and Dürer and the like. The sylph was more quicksilver, harder to interpret. Whether she might be virginal or a harlot, Drosselmeier had no idea. As the morning gloom dissipated through his drapes, which fell in volutes like those carved into columns of the neoclassical architecture of Munich, the revenant occasionally fixed him with a plaintive glare. Or accusatory. He was glad when she began to dissolve. A morning coffee rudely finished her off.
The other one, which he had finally come around to calling Pan, that stumpy little grinning demon—he thought of Pan more often. Pan seemed to gleam through the eyes of the old Nutcracker, which by now Drosselmeier wouldn’t sell even if he were asked. Though that had never happened. The Nutcracker stood by himself on a shelf behind the counter, in pride of place. Sometimes he seemed to leer, or mock; other times his look suggestive of wisdom, even charity.
How many times Drosselmeier had tried to give away the Nutcracker, and none would have it. It might as well be Drosselmeier’s doppelg?nger, a toy weight around his neck. He felt he would have to get rid of it before he died. He wasn’t sure why. In an Andersen tale, the old toy would be thrown on the fire, and the smoke from its immolation would wreathe the brow of the green goddess. Whoever she was. But though Drosselmeier believed in stories—in their power, that is—he couldn’t place himself at the center of any of them. He had no standing.
Finally deciding the time had come to go to Athens, and perhaps even dare an overland trip to Delphi, for—for reasons he couldn’t name—Drosselmeier made his way to an establishment in the arcade where tickets could be booked. Trains from Munich to Vienna to Trieste. Passage on a steamer from Trieste down the Illyrian coast, or Dalmatia, and around the Peloponnese into the fabled Aegean. Alighting at Piraeus. Waiting for the clerk to copy the details in a ledger, Drosselmeier dreamed of resinous light and recited lines to himself. By now he could read enough in English to appreciate something of Keats. “Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades . . .” and “Aye on the shores of darkness there is light, / And precipices show untrodden green.”
Then, feeling a levity of being he hadn’t imagined possible, he lifted off the top step of the firm’s threshold and misplaced his foot coming down. He told the doctor a bird had flown in his face. Was it a bird, or the shadow of a hesitation? Its wings had made a protesting wind. He fell and broke a bone or two, and had to cancel his ticket. He took to relying on the imp-headed cane for balance. Travel to Greece was impossible. Indeed, getting back to Meritor this summer—for Clothilde had finally been bullied into returning—was itself going to propose a problem. In the end, he had to do without both the sunny Aegean and the cloudy Baltic.
Through this period of waiting—waiting for what, he didn’t know—the question of green returned to him. Perhaps he was going mad in the way the elderly sometimes did. The Bavarian custom of garlanding the household with balsam, of sawing down a pine tree and erecting it in a parlor with candles and ornaments of all sorts—it thrilled him every Christmastide with increasing fervor. Once, when grief for his misspent youth had been washed down with too much Riesling at the table of the current generation of Stahlbaums, he remembered the Little Lost Forest. Sebastian hadn’t allowed Drosselmeier to walk home in this condition, and had sent for the carriage. Drosselmeier’s head was operating on a set of fulcrums at odds with his spine and hips. He tried to settle his mind and his stomach by watching the street lamps. They seemed lost in arms of greenery. What did the sacred grove want? What did it need? What was he to do about it?
By the time he was home and had surrendered his dinner to the water closet, the burning question once again retired. He could think only this: how frightful that visions so rarely come intact and coherent. Their nature is to be obscure. Fragmented, maddeningly contradictory. It provides the work of a lifetime, at least for those poor souls afflicted with such sight, to puzzle out their meaning. No wonder the Saint Ambroses and Saint Jeromes of the world went off to their caves and steles.
What the sacred grove was missing was a population. Not of gods, but of the ambassadors of gods. Those who, through need, call the deities into being. The Odysseuses returning home to Ithaka, the Cinderellas in the ashes. The Persian poet naming the Divine as his lover. If Drosselmeier knew this, he knew it only in his deepest sleep, that sleep closest to death itself. He remembered nothing of this in the mornings, even on lightless mornings when the goddess implored him wordlessly.
He spent his life making toys. There is that. But what of it?
82.
But it is true that once or twice, when he saw the sloe-eyed damsel in the corners of his waking mind, he began to wonder why she so often recurred to him. He had had interest in women once upon a time, or thought he had, but then that had seemed to evaporate. Nothing much had replaced it. Felix had been, oh, an ideal of a friend, perhaps. The longer he insisted on remaining dead, the more a mystery Felix became.