Coda
Hiddensee
All her life Klara was gifted with dreams and pestered by them, too.
She enjoyed a full-throated if perhaps innocuous life. She outlived her own children and lost several of her grandsons in the Great War, by which point her daytime memory failed her completely. She used to sit and look out at the few remaining linden trees next to the third-hand Daimler that belonged to the upstairs tenants. She was too deaf to hear the occasional ruckus of brownshirts in the streets.
When she was failing and needed removal to an asylum for the elderly, her surviving grandchildren cleared out the several ground-floor rooms in the old family house in Munich to which she had been reduced.
There were too many copies of her stories, printed in German journals and also translated into English. Those of Klara’s tales that had been collected and published in fine gift editions at the turn of the century were set aside for younger generations of the family. They were children’s stuff. Sweet gingery old pfeffernusse that she was, Klara had had a life, after all, and someday someone might want to read through the nicer volumes of what remained of Gro?mutter Klara’s work and see if there was anything worth remembering. The rest was tinder.
If you were standing on the landing of the stairs, you could see the grandchildren—Felix’s great-great-grandchildren!—bringing the literature to the flame. The stacks of old St. Nicholas magazines made a glorious bloom in the bonfire. That bookburning was also going on that season in the Konigsplatz was a coincidence upon which no one remarked.
The night before she died, her last night on earth, Klara had a particularly vivid dream. It was like a dream she’d had before, though maybe in different form. It seemed familiar. It began in the yellow parlor of her childhood. Mice, and a grotesque huge ugly doll-child, and small carved figurines, Citizens from Around the World, some set or other. The dream included toy soldiers, and a rampage of wild mice that were more like wolves, really. And a nutcracker. The battle was joined and won, and Klara went on to visit a serenely peculiar and fitting land in which food and drink, music and dance, love and laughter were cunningly made all of a single piece, somehow.
This part of the dream Klara had had before, but the next part was new.
She understood this much, that she would have no words to tell anyone about it when she woke up. She’d been beyond words for some time now. She didn’t know that, in fact, she would never entirely wake up after this.
Still, the dream.
She was a child at her grandfather’s house up at the sea. Meritor. In actuality she hadn’t been there in over half a century, and who knew if it even still stood or if it had fallen down the battered bluffs. In her dream she wasn’t tall enough to reach the handle to the front door. She couldn’t get out. The house was growing spooky, dark as a tomb, and she needed to go out into the open, but she couldn’t get out.
Then she realized she had the Nutcracker crooked in her arm. She held him up as high as she could, and he reached up and worked the latch and turned the knob. The door swung open, and they both stepped over the sill.
A stiff wind was howling around the corner of the house. The sky was bright and cloudless but not quite blue—rather more like mother-of-pearl. She could stand and look one way and then the other, to see if anyone was coming along the strand. No one was.
She saw the spit of Rügen descending from the north, on the right-hand side of the horizon. After a stretch of open water, she saw the island of Hiddensee on her left. She had always meant to go there, but it had never yet happened.
She walked to the edge of the water. The Nutcracker looked up at her with a quizzical expression. She took out a key and inserted it into a buttonhole on his fancy red coat, and his breastplate opened in two halves like a severed walnut falling apart at the seam. It was empty as a drawer at the end of summer when she was all packed to return from Meritor and go to school.
She took Godfather Drosselmeier out of her apron pocket and said, I guess this is where you go. He was very small, like the toys she used to have when she was little. Only three or four inches. She could tell it was her godfather because of his eye-patch. But the visible eye was closed.
She laid him into the breast of the Nutcracker and closed the two halves of the red coat. She didn’t lock the coat closed in case he ever wanted to come out.
The waves pressed into the shore in long rocking motions—gentle swipes against the world.
She set the Nutcracker on his back to float in the foam by her feet. One of her feet was clad in a pink dancing slipper and the other was bare. With her bare foot she nudged the Nutcracker away from the shore, as if he were a little boat like the kind Fritz used to play with in tidal pools.
Fritz would be coming soon. She missed him and wanted to see him but she didn’t want him to wreck everything as usual, so she pushed the Nutcracker a little harder. She wanted it to float beyond easy reach.
She thought she heard Fritz shout for her. She did hear him. She turned to see. He must be beyond the bluff, he was calling her, he would be here soon, around that barrage of stranded rocks, but she couldn’t see him yet. She turned back to watch the Nutcracker float away.
He had moved out onto the busy foam as if on another military campaign—this one naval. Who knew he would be so clever at sea?
Of course he would be that clever.
She expected to lose sight of him as more and more ranks of waves drew their white parallel lines from left to right between the Nutcracker out to sea and Klara left on shore. But his red coat remained visible, a dot on the blue-black steel of the waves and the glass-green of the waves and the white lips of the waves.
Then he was beyond the pounding of the tide and going farther out, and still through the spray she could see him on his back, that old Nutcracker. His head was facing one way and his feet the other, so he was long and low like the spit of Rügen, like Hiddensee.
She realized with a glad clasp of her heart in her chest that he wasn’t drowning, he wasn’t sinking. He wasn’t even diminishing. He broke the laws of perspective, holding his own shape and size the farther out to sea he went.
He was on the horizon now. A broad swath of red on the horizon like a sunset, only he was as large as Hiddensee. He was a bridge between Rügen Island and Hiddensee. He was an island, he was a land unto himself, he was a whole place. He was that other place, the Nutcracker: It was he, himself, a sovereign kingdom built of himself.
She rubbed her eyes against the grit of the wind and the smudge of atmosphere, for finally the mists that always collect around horizons at sea were blurring the edges of the Nutcracker. She peered again. He had separated from Rügen and begun to drift behind Hiddensee. She might never see him again. She rubbed and rubbed, and it seemed to her that the red of his coat and the black of his hat and the white furze of his beard had gone green and black and bristled like a forested nation, a refuge out on its own on the high water.
Over the sound of the waves and despite that distance, some sounds rose that made Klara’s heart feel bright and yearning, itself rising in accord. She heard some music, pipes perhaps, a stringed instrument, a tambour, and the sound of children at play—not the high shrieking of school-yard mayhem, but the quieter murmur of children in small groups, working, reading, thinking, laughing. With the kind of sobriety, so often forgotten, that children possess. The trees hid the children from view—maybe toys were playing there, maybe even mice. In any case, above that ground-level murmur of children in the sacred grove, she could make out the threaded notes of a thrush’s song. Perhaps all the sweeter for being so long delayed.