That child was so full of curious observations. “What does Klara say about how she feels?”
This was the only moment when Clothilde seemed distressed. “We are often alerted to the spike in her fever when she begins to spout nonsense. For instance, she sometimes complains that the walls are running with mice. She says that she can hear them talking after we have all gone to sleep.”
“Oh indeed.” He tried not to look either alarmed or relieved. “Does she report their gossip?”
“She says it is very rude indeed and we should be shocked and think she was making it up, and she’d be punished for repeating what she heard.”
“That doesn’t sound ill to me. It sounds rather adult.”
“You profess concern and then you mock me.”
“Please.” He put his hand on hers, truly. “What I mean is that she sounds quite like herself, so how could you tell it is a fever? She is a fanciful child.”
“I was never so fanciful.” She made it sound like a barnyard insult.
He began to think that Clothilde was not a very motherly mother, but then he caught himself. On what basis of comparison could he propose such a scandalous notion?
Yet he looked at Clothilde in her brocaded shoulders, garnets looping around her bust-of-Europa marble neck. Her eye was stern and her wrist trembled slightly as she stirred her coffee. She was a Frenchwoman being maternal in a German setting. How pompous to presume that an old peasant man such as himself, however well traveled, could winkle out the degree of Clothilde’s affection or wisdom about her own daughter.
Neither, though, would he abandon Klara. Just in case.
86.
Drosselmeier’s material needs were few, as he lived quite simply in a pair of rooms over his shop. Still, he wasn’t sorry for the annual coin he earned in the weeks leading up to the holiday. He needed that income. And so the feast-day of the nativity of the Christ Child approached with its usual panic, uproar, and greed.
Sitting at his bench and carving his figurines by what light there was, he watched carts pass. They were trundling in from the countryside with fir trees bound in ropes, intended for sale in the squares and alleys of Munich. In the evenings, if he wasn’t visiting the Stahlbaum household or, once in a while, taking in a string quartet or an organ recital in a chilly church, he lowered the oil lamp on its cord so that it hovered nearer the workbench. He labored with his brushes and lacquers until the midnight bells rang in the church towers. Sometimes later even than that.
Where are those elves who are said to come help old palsied shoemakers? Why don’t they bother with toy makers? I should make my own assistants out of clockwork, he thought. But he didn’t have enough years left for that. Klara might have her concerns with her heart, if her parents were to be trusted, but Drosselmeier had his own thoughts about mortality.
He tried to think what he could give Klara for a present this year. He felt it needed to be something correct—something instrumental. His whittling knives teased figures out of contorted segments of birch or balsam. They came out of the wood as menaces, though. Always leering eyes, a faint, lewd sneer.
The world isn’t that horrible. It’s a sin to tell a lie.
But Klara may be in trouble. It’s another sin to conceal the truth.
A pair of apothegms, where had they come from, maybe Pfarrer Johannes Albrecht, may he rest in peace. Wherever that might be.
But wherever might that be? For Albrecht, for Drosselmeier himself?
A place where one might feel at home. The old minister. Drosselmeier himself. Klara. But it wasn’t just the population, it was the map that was needed, the coordinates. Dante had done it. John Bunyan, and Sir John Mandeville. Milton, in his time. Prester John and Marco Polo. Even Homer, charting the world by sea. The vagabond human spirit requires a chart of possibilities in order to keep putting one foot in front of another, keep licensing the next heartbeat after the previous.
It was so late that the mice stole out, looking for the crumbs he sometimes left for them on the floorboards. One bold fellow came right up to the edge of Drosselmeier’s workbench and sat with his tail in his front paws, a look of subservience in the gesture. “Well, in lieu of the elves I requested, are you going to help?” asked Drosselmeier. The creature waited a moment before running up the edge of the broom handle, whose top leaned against the wall behind Drosselmeier. Amused, thinking it was probably time to turn in, the old man revolved in his chair to watch the ambassador. The mouse dashed halfway along the shelf and then peered over the edge, as if he really intended to deliver a Periclean peroration to all the toys in the shop. He didn’t speak, of course—or if he did, Drosselmeier could neither hear nor understand.
He thought, then, of a mother mouse cowering at the base of a tree, and small blind mouse babies rippling around her fundament. A vaguely distressing picture in his mind.
“If you’re a descendant of that family, send them my best wishes,” he muttered, dunking his brushes in linseed oil to keep them supple till the morning. In the viscous gritty amber, ribbons of bloody red unfurled from the hairs of the brush.
The mouse then scurried back and cowered for a moment behind the shabby old Nutcracker. Back to its own palace of possibilities somewhere in the walls.
Well, maybe, thought Drosselmeier.
87.
He visited the night before Christmas Eve. Klara lay on the settee in the yellow parlor, weighed down under a scratchy coverlet of blue and silver Rhenish tapestry-work. Drosselmeier had the sense she was growing a bristled skin, generating a cocoon. “Let me pull that back, it’s smothering you.”
“I’m cold. Let it be. It’s my kingdom.”
“Your what?”
“See?” Her fingers dallied along the stitchery. “I’m the world, and these are my mountains, and over here is my waterfall, and a temple.”
A huge ungainly doll in a beige pinafore was kicked upside down into the corner of the settee. From underneath the lace of her petticoat, which nearly covered her whole face, she peered glassily at the cornice of the door. Drosselmeier: “Is she some sort of deposed goddess or wretched fairy godmother?”
“You’re a godfather, you should know.” Her voice was smaller than usual. “I hate her. She’s no good. All broken and useless.”
Fritz came through with an armful of Drosselmeier’s figures and set them out on the edge of the sofa. He wasn’t always a thoughtful brother, so Drosselmeier sat up to observe. “I think we should have a war,” said Fritz. “I’m going to bring in the cavalry and line them up on the carpet. Don’t step on them.”
Klara fingered the Ottoman princess, a recent favorite, but then stuck her headfirst into the seam between the back of the sofa and its seat. The child was too old to suck her thumb, but Drosselmeier had the feeling she was about to start. He took her hands in his and leaned forward on his footstool.
“Your brother is being nice to you. Isn’t it strange?”
“It’s Christmastime. He knows that if he is good, the Christkindl will bring gifts.”
Such a little realist.
“Why is your doll so very ugly?” he asked her.
At the notion of ugliness, she rallied a little. “I think a mouse bit her and made her that way.”