“What was there?” asked the grandmother. “What did you see?”
“I saw a gnome, a little schwarzkopf, staring at me with an evil grin!”
“Nonsense,” said his father. “There is no such goblin in these woods, Torsten.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said the grandmother. “Torsten knows what he knows.”
“It was a hateful creature, small enough, but fierce and ugly, and it had a hunch on its back and a sack to carry me away in!”
“Stay away from black-caps, stay out of the woods,” said Agathe Mitzelhaupf.
“Don’t talk foolishness to him,” said Hans crossly.
“I know what I know,” said Agathe. “I’ve heard that gnome calling to me from time to time, but my knees are too much like soft cheese to go clock him on the head as he deserves.”
“Supper on the table,” called a woman from inside. Berthe, probably.
“You heard no goblin black-cap, Mutter.” Hans lifted his mother to a standing position. “It’s wicked to mix up your old tales with the truth. All you could hear from the woods was a little evening birdsong. Torsten, wash your face and your hands. Mutter, mind the step or you’ll go off to the devil before he’s ready to receive you.”
“Angels will carry me to Paradise, where I intend to make a lot of trouble.” But she was laughing a little now. Whatever crisis she had been suffering was over.
Dirk stood and watched the door close. The aroma of supper drifted out the open window.
The bird was silent. Indeed, she was nowhere to be seen. Dirk looked at the carved handle on the knife. Its crouching gnarled figure grinned with protuberant eyes at him. It looked as if it had a little woven cap upon its bulbous head, fitted as neatly as the cap of an acorn upon its kernel.
9.
At darktime, Dirk spread out some lengths of burlap on a heap of hay in a stall next to the cow. He lay down. It was too cold, but there was nothing else to use as a blanket. He shouldn’t have abandoned the drowned bearskin. In a cubby with a tin lining he found a sack of milled flour. It was sewn shut. With some effort he hauled it to the hay. He lay down beside it as if it were a person who could keep him warm, and he spread the burlap over both of them. He thought about that little boy, Torsten. He would have liked to have a friend, or a younger brother, if only in his dreams. However, he wasn’t in the practice of having dreams.
A barn mouse, several in fact, climbed the hill of the sack while he slept. Hardly believing their good fortune, they gnawed through the threads. They had a better supper than he did.
10.
He woke before dawn. His shoes in one hand and the staff in the other, he slipped out the side door of the barn. He was intending to tiptoe on the grass, get going and get gone, when he was stopped by a sound from the house.
The father, that Hans, stood in the open door of the kitchen. He was dressed in a long greasy shirt. His legs and feet were bare. He had his pipe in his hand. He had been about to knock it against the doorsill to clear it out. Enjoy a draft of cherry tobacco before the day’s work began.
Dirk and Hans, they stared at one another without speaking.
If Hans would just pick Dirk up the way he had done little Torsten, that would be fine indeed. Dirk was, after all, younger in mood and mind than perhaps he was in years, having been raised an isolate.
The father shifted his foot and kept working at his pipe, but his eyes were trained on Dirk, who stood like a rabbit ready to dash.
“Our Torsten said it was a little dark dwarf with a black cap,” murmured Hans, loud enough for Dirk to hear. “Are you he? Do you darken as the day gets longer? Or are you the dwarf’s counterpart, to bring some sort of a blessing? You’re welcome here, if you promise to do no harm.”
They talk sometimes of l’heure bleue, that segment of evening when the sun has fallen below the horizon but the vegetable world is still visible. Also more intense, as a consoling purple rises beneath every grieving leaf. Pre-dawn has a counterpart. A sort of light is cast from the world itself, before the sun gets to its job. It is beige and yellow, or amber like an ale.
Dirk stood in l’heure bronze, and waited. If his heart trembled, his eye remained unblinking.
Hans stooped to put down the pipe on the doorstep. When he stood up again, to comfort the waifling, the boy was gone. Without a sound.
As Dirk moved through the newborn world, clouds of fine meal puffed from his clothes, rendering him more solid, less an apparent ghost-child than he must have seemed in the barnyard.
11.
Dirk continued downstream. The world breathed and steamed. Wherever the little river slowed to widen and to shallow, sheers of wisp arose, dissolving into loose columns.
If you want to keep my company, go back to the forest, advised the gnome-knife. See those stones ahead where the river narrows into a rapids? You can cross back to the wildness there. I can’t follow you into the human world.
The boy is made for his own kind, not for ours, said the thrush. A rushing river means a mill. A mill means a settlement. He is of no use to us. Leave him to his destiny.
And me to mine. You have no agency here, Fr?ulein. He may not be our salvation, but send him to the human wolves? A kugelhead like him? The world would carve him up. Whereas I’d rather do the honors.
Dirk interrupted them. “Hush.”
The brown thrush whisked about him in the air as if she could bully him forward. Dirk kept on, but not because of her. He knew a bit more about people now that he was able to add Torsten, Hans, and Gro?mutter Agathe to his collection. He wanted to learn more. He was too young to be a hermit.
Misty forests leaned in upon the encircling slopes. Before long the cataracts descended around a corner and were tamed into a millpond.
Storehouses and other timbered structures were arranged around a well. There, a young woman rotated a crank, lowering a bucket. His sixth new person, not counting the visitor to the waldhütte, whom he hadn’t actually seen.
The thrush flew up to the roof of the well but made no comment.
The boy wondered if this was the village that he’d always been prohibited from visiting. Though probably there was more than one village in the world.
Against the chill, the doors were closed and windows shuttered. Roosters marked the hour, cows lowed to be milked, but the village was still sleeping. Only this woman in her apron, keen to her task.
He stood a distance, waiting for her to look up. She had a full, satisfied belly and her russet hair was undone in the back. “Oh, you startled me,” she said when she turned to decant a pail of water into one of two pewter pitchers. “Where do you come from, tousle-head?”
He shrugged.
“A changeling child? Did you go to sleep as a piglet and wake up as a boy? They’re much the same, in my experience. I’ve known pigs to take better care of their grooming than you do.” She kept working as she spoke. Her manner wasn’t unkind. She was young, he thought. Younger than the old man and the old woman. Though old enough to be grown.
He thought about the visitor to the waldhütte, the man who’d been hunting stories. The old woman had said that the curious fellow and his brother were staying in the village. “Have you had guests overnight, two men?” he asked the maiden.
She patted her spreading waistline. “Two men? You’re cruel and sinful to suggest such a thing. Wasn’t one enough, to get me into such a barrel as this?” She winked at him, a gesture he didn’t understand. He tried to wink back, uselessly.