The building was chillier than usual because he’d been out most of the afternoon and evening and let the fire die down. He dressed for sleeping and he piled extra blankets and an old coat on top of the bed. Sometimes at night he read by the light of a candle—he had the new tales of Andersen in translation, and something called A Christmas Carol by that Englishman everyone went on about. But he had set the book aside at the Ghost of Christmas Past. It wasn’t the ghost that was improbable, but the possibility of a happy past.
He blew out the candle.
Klara has my childhood, he thought. She is my childhood brought forward, the one that died in me.
And he enjoyed at last a small spasm of something he’d rarely noticed in himself: understanding.
So that’s why I’ve spent my life making toys.
He tossed and turned to keep warm. He thought of the girl’s clever imagination, its readiness to receive a serving of story. It isn’t only Klara, of course, but that fine-grained soil of childhood itself that can receive a seed of mystery and recognize when it starts to flower.
Midnight bells announcing the sacred day. Somewhere, a skirmish of mice and toys raged back and forth across a parlor floor.
If he did sleep, he didn’t mark the passage by dreaming. Dream may be many other things besides, but at its heart it is the primary proof of sleep. In dreams, as he had heard people say over and over, the world is rearranged. Battles are fought, and refought; the terms of life are overturned, reinterpreted; the columns of figures add up to new answers.
Klara could walk along the coast at Meritor hand in hand with her godfather and with Fritz and chatter for twenty minutes about where she had been in her dreams the night before, until Fritz got bored and began to pitch stones at the seagulls, and Klara’s recitation eventually trailed off. The dreams never seemed to crest to a finale, like an opera. They failed, perhaps for lack of energy or, perhaps, due to Klara’s inability to remember.
Admittedly, Drosselmeier had rarely had a dream in his life worth remembering upon waking. All his visions, were they visions, had visited him on some flooring other than ordinary sleep. Yet across that floor rolled a walnut, containing a secret vision sacred to some child or other.
94.
As invited, Godfather Drosselmeier arrived at the Stahlbaum residence shortly before luncheon on Christmas Day.
“Ach, things went from bad to worse in the middle of the night, but they’ve stabilized this morning,” said Sebastian, pouring a cup of whipped eggnog for the old man. “Fritz is glazed with greed and pleasure, and Klara’s fever seems to have broken overnight, despite her misadventures.”
“Oh?” Drosselmeier tried not to bolt from the parlor and head up the stairs. Though in any case he wasn’t much for bolting these ways. The word would have to be creak or toddle.
He turned, studying Sebastian to distract himself from the curiosity about Klara’s evening. He noted the way Sebastian’s chin and lower lip seemed newly segmented—in fact, just the way the jaw of a wooden Nutcracker slips into the casing of its cheeks. Those lines running from the corners of his nostrils along the sides of his mouth. Worry was aging Sebastian. And if he is aging, though Drosselmeier, remembering the first time he himself had been brought to this house by Felix, and met that galloping boy in these rooms, the same is true for me. Elderly, but not wise. An old fool.
A shaming tear stole from his eye, though whether this was about the lost boy Sebastian once had been, or the lost boy Drosselmeier had never himself managed to be, the old man didn’t know. But he thought of Nastaran suddenly, and her hunger for the locked and forbidden garden of her childhood.
“Klara is on the mend, perhaps, though it’s probably too soon to be certain,” said Sebastian. “Each crisis seems like the final one, but thank God . . . But have you caught a germ from her, my dear Godfather Drosselmeier? You’re looking peaky. Let me add a tot of rum to your eggnog.”
“Don’t bother, you’ll have me singing sad arias, and that would be a dreadful error, as I can’t carry a tune.” Drosselmeier set his cup in the saucer definitively. “And what happened over there?” He had noticed the glass-fronted curio cabinet.
“Ah, evidence of the mishaps of the young,” said Sebastian. “Fritz slept through it, but both Clothilde and I were awakened at the crash. It happened in the middle of the night.”
“A burglar?”
“It was an inside job.” Sebastian’s eyes twinkled tiredly. “You may interview the miscreant in her cell if you choose.”
Liberty granted, Drosselmeier mounted the stairs. The drapes were flung open, and the garden was domestic. Its evening mysteries, had there been any, were erased by the smudges of snow that blandished all.
Heading around the corner to the first-floor landing, he thought, I didn’t even notice what the faun and the dryad looked like today. Perhaps they weren’t even there—they’d stepped off their pedestals in some sort of miracle of the Nativity. Gone out to take a meal together in the Odeonsplatz. Or left to examine Eros and the Painter, the latest work of Nikolaus Gysis, or some other artist prominent in the the Munich School. Or a concert of sacred cantatas by Bach. What a pair of guardian angels to be dogging me my whole life, he thought. The only way to be free of them is to die, so there is nothing left for them to guard.
Or to die again, perhaps.
The door to Klara’s room was wide open this morning. Clothilde was sitting in an upholstered rocking chair diligently stitching that pink tape from Klara’s dancing shoe—the one Drosselmeier had used as a poultice for the Nutcracker—around the neck of Fr?ulein Pirlipat. “I think more than one inhabitant of the nursery deserves therapeutic tending,” Clothilde said to Drosselmeier. She made as if to rise, but he stilled her and leaned down to graze her cheek with his whiskers. “Klara’s doll seemed to have slipped dangerously near some guillotine, but I’m resolved to tend to her wounds.” How flush and relaxed, Clothilde, to enter into the spirit of it like that.
He looked at Klara, who was just waking again. Her arm was done up in a sling of some sort. “What in heaven’s name?” he cried.
“Godfather Drosselmeier,” she replied, and smiled a great lopsided grin. “Did you hear we won?”
“I see you are better,” he observed. “So something was won. Whatever happened?”
“I woke up in the middle of the night. Ach, I was worried about the poor Nutcracker! He was left all alone in the downstairs parlor. I thought his jaw must be hurting, having cracked itself on that golden walnut. So I dragged my coverlet down the stairs and lay on the settee and looked at the tree. Even thought the candles had all been whuffed out, the snow-light through the windows made the tree seem to sparkle. Then about midnight? When the clocks all struck? The King of the Mice came out to bite my head off, like Pirlipat’s. Despite his broken jaw, the Nutcracker roused Fritz’s armies into battle. All the toys from around the world joined in. Back and forth across the carpet they fought, and I thought the Nutcracker and his regiment was winning until guess who came to join the enemy’s side!”
“Who?”
Klara pointed at the doll. “This traitor! Bad doll! She must have been poisoned by that bite. It was very unrespectable of her. I think she’s sorry this morning, but last night she was an Amazon, and her help turned the tide against the Nutcracker. They began to take him prisoner and drag him into the underground. Then they would come back for me. I was so frightened that I knelt up on the sofa and I took my dancing slipper—the one without the tape, you know—and I threw it at the King of the Mice. I accidentally broke the glass in the curio cabinet, and the panes of broken glass fell everywhere. A piece of glass fell like a sharp knife and cut off the tail of the King of the Mice. And you know what that means.”