“I’ll have the soup.”
“There’s none left. I had the last bowl. It was very good indeed.”
“Bring me what you like.”
She disappeared to the kitchen and returned with an invisible plate. “Here is your food.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t eat it if I were you. It looks nasty.”
He took an imaginary bite. “I think it is a squirrel soufflé.”
She wrinkled her nose. “It would be, wouldn’t it? I wondered where that squirrel went. It was supposed to be peeling the potatoes.”
It took Drosselmeier a while to wonder whether, in fact, there was something strange about Klara Stahlbaum. Different, that is, from the other children he had known in his life. He hadn’t known many. Engorged with greed, children who came into the showroom didn’t count. In any case, German burghers and their wives were more inclined to steal into the shop to make selections without their children in tow.
Of the children he’d befriended, after a fashion, little very accurate could be said. Children were a set of broken puzzles. Sloppy puddings. Throwaway woodcut proofs, blurred outside their margins. And how many children did these examples add up to, in his life? Not many. Not many at all. Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer, back in those horrible days of Nastaran’s breakdown and death. Sebastian and Günther Stahlbaum, when they were glowing golden shadows of golden Felix. These days, yet another generation of Stahlbaums: Fritz and Marie-Claire—Klara as everyone called her.
Klara, alone of them, was a girl.
Maybe that was part of it, Drosselmeier thought. But also, Klara had something of Felix’s glittery openness. A recklessness of heart, you might say. And from her mother, a Gallic hesitancy and tact.
When he turned up at the Stahlbaum home—the fine Munich place that Felix and Ethelinda had left to their older son—something ached in his chest. It was like a muscle tear that couldn’t quite heal because he kept twisting it, wrenching it beyond the range of play. Klara was a cipher, something as much flame as charcoal. The boys he’d known before, he’d liked them and played with them, and even been surprised that he could amuse them so. But they’d stayed in the portable cages of their own characters, just the way he stayed in his, and always had. Klara seemed, on the contrary, frequently to be emerging. Not from silence into sociability—something other than that. From herself into herself—as if she had been born bearing multiple veils of Klara, and they were all legitimate. Echt.
He raised the matter only once, with Sebastian, and was sorry that he had.
“Is she entirely all right?” he had asked.
“Klara?” Sebastian stabbed the bowl of his pipe with hard jerking motions. Flecks of tobacco peppered the table. “Whatever are you talking about, Drosselmeier? Why shouldn’t she be?”
“I only mean…there’s a quality.”
“She’s young, she’s gullible. She believes in fairy tales. Also in the saints of the Church. Give her time, she’ll firm up. Christ, man, you’re hard on her.”
“I’ve offended and I have no idea how. I don’t mean that she’s young. I’m old enough to be able to recognize the young for what they are. I mean that she is . . . fickle. Capable. Capricious. Attached.”
Sebastian Stahlbaum drew on his pipe for several long drafts, which gave Drosselmeier time to formulate a peace offering. “I am trying to find a way to say how charming she is. She hardly seems of this world.”
At this Sebastian threw the pipe into the hearth, where it cracked, and the man burst into sobs. Raw eyes, angry mouth, distended nostrils like a frightened horse. Drosselmeier scrabbled to his feet and went to stand by the door, his hand at his mouth. He had no strategy for such insanity. He couldn’t stop it. Sebastian might have gone on like this for hours but young Fritz came wandering by looking for something to smash. That cleared up his father’s face as quickly as a wet cloth will blank a chalked slate. Sebastian was protecting his son from the sight of distress, Drosselmeier saw. So the godfather found some coins in his pocket and flung them at the older Stahlbaum child, and that diverted him from the room.
“What has taken hold of you?” Drosselmeier demanded of Sebastian.
The man blew his nose upon his sleeve. “Too much to go into. You cut into a nerve, Drosselmeier. My apologies. Unseemly. The doctors don’t know if she will make it to adulthood. She has an excitable heart.”
“You’re deranged. She’s perfectly normal.”
“I mean the heart muscle. It may be like what my father—Felix—died of. And his grandmother before him. All too suddenly. We don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know how you wrestled it out of me.” He glared at the older man, bested.
Drosselmeier was aghast at every part of this. “They’re wrong, whoever they are, those doctors. They always are. I knew a doctor who spoke balderdash to me and distracted me from my life. Don’t let them do that to you. She has more life in her two tulip-petal palms than you and I have in our whole frames. She won’t leave life in childhood. She won’t.”
“Don’t bring this up with Clothilde,” warned Sebastian. “She worries so about the girl.”
“She won’t leave this life in childhood,” said Drosselmeier. “She can’t. I won’t let her.”
“We’ll give her a good Christmas, and see if she strengthens in the spring.”
“All this is nonsense!” shouted Drosselmeier. “I won’t have it.”
85.
But Drosselmeier did raise the matter with Clothilde. The next morning he closed up his shop and went by the house when he knew Sebastian would be out at the exchange. The wife was less frail than her husband had led Drosselmeier to believe, or she was better at prevarication. She poured the older man a coffee—in these days, coffee was just starting to be made at home—and they sat in the smaller parlor that looked over the snowy garden.
“Perhaps an infection, it’s hard to say,” said Clothilde. “The good doctors know so little about us, after all, don’t you agree?”
“But what are the symptoms, Frau Stahlbaum?”
“After all this time, you may address me as Clothilde.”
He lifted the cup to his mouth, burning his lips in preference to revising his question.
She relented. She was a steady sort of person, rather hale, with a frame more of oak than aspen. For a strong stork like Clothilde to have given birth to such a frail daughter seemed a wicked taunt. “A fever mounts and subsides, dear Godfather Drosselmeier. They think it’s related to her heart, which sometimes races. There is not much we can do but apply the cold compress and change her nightgown when it becomes too damp. I’m sorry Sebastian worried you about it.”
Perhaps, thought Drosselmeier, she doesn’t perceive the level of threat that Sebastian had indicated. A mother can be so blind. Blindness a skill for survival. He said, “Would you consider taking her for a cure to the thermal springs in Salzuflen, the mineral caves of Berchtesgaden? Something of that order?”
“We wouldn’t rule it out. Though at the moment she isn’t up for travel. And of course we would have to wait for the warmer weather. Perhaps she will improve by then.”