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“And now the saints have deserted us,” hissed the old woman. She meant it as a whisper but Dirk’s ears were alert with panic. “The boy is alive. You ought to have buried him there when he was too far gone to suffer. And so it all starts again. How shall we manage now?”
The old man and the old woman had meant to lose him at best, to kill him perhaps. If he’d truly come back from death, they must be terrified.
Luck and grace: an unmatching pair of boots with which to address a long dusty road.
brown bird came down from some bower and landed upon the rustic rail of the bridge. She sat there, almost encouragingly, were he to think about it like a poet. Come, come this way, bright world ahead, she seemed to want to say, in short bursts of song. And yet what now is hidden in shadows below may become more welcome to you in the long run, growled a voice in his pocket. This is my third and final warning. You can leave the path entirely, don’t you know that? Pick up your bearskin.
All paths lead to the same place, and that place is whatever comes next.
I’m not good, I’m just quiet, thought Dirk, but didn’t believe it was sensible to say that aloud.
A congregation of pastors in formation, apparently right at home among this midnight revelry. A goat-legged impresario of sorts. A truculent bear on a chain, sometimes on four paws, sometimes upright. Prisoners in chains, singing. What a motley population the world could pretend to tolerate.
We sleep with exhaustion, thought Dirk. We do this every night, don’t we. And we wake with such exhaustion.
“I intend to learn only enough theology to know how to sin more effectively, thus to become more deeply penitential. The darker the sin, the richer the value of spiritual recovery.”
“No, I hope to become a better performer, to be worthy of the music I am learning. If knowing music can bring me relief, can—move me across the border—how to say this—can release me, perhaps, to write my own, so others may be moved as I have been—is there any other ambition? Theology and art aim in the same direction.”
Without naming Nastaran, Dirk told Felix about a woman from somewhere in the Near East, a woman possessed of a dybbuk of sorts, pestered by an incubus, that caused her to walk at night in her sleep.
“To live, to give us life.” She was cross and fiery. “He’s the wrong one, he hasn’t got what it takes either to live or to die,” muttered the squatting creature. “You have a spark inside you,” she said to Dirk. “Let it go out or let it loose, one or the other. What is your life for? You chose to live, you chose this world! What is this half-living? Even a mouse has more intention.”
“You took the knife,” said the one perhaps called Pythia. “You took it from us. What is a knife for but opening?”
“I died a long time ago,” said Dirk. “The old man tried to kill me, but I died before he could manage it.”
“Lost is not an address, it’s not a permission to fail, it’s not an excuse.”
“The collapse of Icarus, brought down not by sun but wind and snow. It’s a mercy we weren’t killed. You, too, as we all but ran roughshod over you.
“We were air-ballooning,
We could see nothing!—we were twirled about like mad Viennese waltzers!—and we buffeted against cornices and slid down the roofs, ending quite by accident in the square. Catching you on the side of our downed runaway chariot in the bargain. You! It might have been anyone in town, it might have been no one. For all I know you provided a brake in our velocity, though you took quite the thumping for your kindness. Now what do you make of that? Destiny or accident?”
“You have seen them before,” said Mesmer. “When you died as a child.” “That’s balderdash.” “You took something from the Pan. You took his knife.” “I . . . thought he was the knife?” “We often mistake the object for its essence. Philosophy will clear that muddle up in time. Do you know why they come to you?”
ludic demi-urge Pan traveled
Today’s scholars think the Oracle at Delphi was a handmaiden of the ancient goddess Gaia, whom Zeus and his broody, inbred, self-involved cohorts ignored.
“The Little Lost Forest,” said Felix. “It sounds like one of those household tales published by those lexicographer brothers. One of the märchen, a folk belief, a fairy story.”
“You told me all this,” said Mesmer. “For when you died, that day in the forest when you were a small boy, you went to the sacred grove. The Little Lost Forest, as your friend has it. You took something from that unreachable land. I believe you may have it still.”
They want a home. This magic woods—the unrepentant Pan, the unforgiving immortalized Pythia. If that’s who they are.
Europe has become too populated for them. The living timber that wanders . . . it wants you to colonize a place for it. However secular it becomes, the world still needs a sacred grove.
He wanted right then, before everyone, to kneel and to take her foot in his hand again and bring it to his lips. How like a spoon with a razor edge is human need.
Felix’s intelligence was one thing, his rapscallion nature another, and his unsolicited affection a third. Too much for Dirk.
“We’re not happy,” said Franz cheerily enough. “Something has to happen now in the story. It’s stuck.” “I forget who the spirits were,” said Moritz.
“What are you making?” asked Felix, scrabbling out from behind the red cloth. “A nutcracker.” “For me?”
“You? No. For Nastaran.”
“Why a nutcracker, of all things?” “To open the proverbial golden walnut, of course.”
Dirk then turned toward home. It was, as he probably ought to have guessed, too late, far too late. In the absence of family and a chaperone with any sort of authority, Nastaran had tried to release her childhood from herself through her own steps, taken in the middle of the night to the edge of the jetty that faced the barrier Alps. To the edge of the lake, and past the edge. Whether this was an accident during somnambulism or clear-eyed suicide, no one could ever say.
He stayed in Meersburg another eight years, until the boys were more or less grown. Well, Franz, anyway. Perhaps Moritz would never emerge into anything like competence.
