The Castle in the Forest (18 page)

“Of course,” said Alois. “They also know to use propolis for mending cracks in their walls.” He was pleased with himself again.

“I see,” said Der Alte, “that I have failed to discourage you.”

“I live by the law of averages,” said Alois. “I prefer to think of the ongoing possibility of profit rather than of the intermittent perils that surround all activity.”

“Does the bee-wasp frighten you?” asked the old man of the boy.

Adi nodded, but then was quick to say, “If my father is ready to do this, then so must I be.”

“You have a splendid son,” said Der Alte.

Alois was ready to agree for the first time that this might be a possibility. How nice it was to learn that his little Adolf was more than a bed wetter. Might he even be the equal of Alois Junior one of these days?

But thoughts of Alois Junior invariably reminded him of all that was not yet in place. So now Alois wondered why Der Alte had been seeking to discourage him. It made no sense. Given the state of his hut, the old man could use the money. To what purpose then was he scorning a potential customer's desire to invest?

For the first time, he felt as if he had a grasp on Der Alte. The hermit understood him better than others, decided Alois. “He knows that I am a man who looks to keep his pride intact. I do not give way to the first warning. So Der Alte must know that the more he discourages me, the more I will be ready to begin my colony. He will have his money after all.”

Alois now gave Der Alte what he considered his largest and most confident smile. “I respect your cautions,” he said, “but we must move now to the other side of the question. Can we speak of what you will do for me, and what I can do for you?”

“Not quite yet,” said Der Alte. “If you wish to remain a man with a modest little hobby, I will, of course, be available for necessary materials. But I see in you, Herr Hitler, if I may speak on a more personal level, the possibility of a true vocation. So I would propose another consideration, a better approach. To learn my metier, I put in an apprenticeship that continued for three years, but provided me with an advanced license. What I would propose to you is a more collegial relationship—may I put it so? I am prepared over the next few years, for the most modest fees, to have you associated with me as I work on my colonies. It could prove an agreeable arrangement. You will learn much, and I will have the pleasure of an intelligent man's company. It is sad to say, but in all these verdant fields that surround our Hafeld, we are the only two individuals of outstanding intelligence.”

Alois kept a smile on his face but his nostrils were paying their own tithe. “Work for years with you, you foul-smelling old goat?” was the speech he did not utter. There was, after all, the need to come to an arrangement with the old mountebank.

In turn, I was horrified. No professional has a greater desire for competence than a devil. I had been incompetent here. Der Alte might have been a pensioner, but I had neglected him for too long. The loneliness revealed in these last remarks was like the chill of an unoccupied house. How intense was the old man's yearning to see more of Adi. No bold move is ever free of unplanned turns. Calculated mischief might be our province, but such indulgence should not be there for a client. Not if we can prevent it. We look to direct the romantic habits of our fold, rather than to correct them. Any future episode between the old man and the boy would not be to the Maestro's liking. Too many indeterminables!

At this point, Alois said, “I am honored by your personal interest in me, but I must explain. In my family, we are blockheads. All of us, blockheads. We are even proud of that. So, I must work alone. That is how I am. I look forward, therefore, to enjoying a mutually agreeable commercial relationship.”

Der Alte nodded. He, too, had his pride. He would not repeat his suggestion.

“Yes,” he said, “we will make arrangements. I will put together a couple of colonies for you and supply those tools and products you do not have in hand already.” He turned to Adi. “Soon your father will be very busy. Are you able to count to one thousand?”

“Yes,” said Adi. “They do that in the Upper Class at school, and so I know.”

“Good. Because this spring your father will be master of many, many thousands of bees. Will you be afraid of them? Are you ready?”

“I am afraid,” said Adolf, “but you know, I am also ready.”

“A wonderful boy,” said Der Alte, and his expression was full of love. Tears came into Adi's eyes. His mother would soon have another baby, and again it would be the same as when Edmund was born. He would not see the love he wanted to find in her eyes when she was looking at him. Not for a while.

5

I
must now inform the reader of an unexpected summons from the Maestro that removed me from Alois Hitler and his family for close to eight months. Indeed, it took me out of Austria altogether. I can add that this alert arrived on the same evening early in October of 1895 that Alois completed his apicultural negotiations. Two colonies of bees installed in two Langstroth boxes were purchased from Der Alte, as well as a variety of tools, together with enough sealed jars of pollen and honey to feed his newly acquired inhabitants through the winter.

So soon as purchased, the goods were transported by Alois to the Hitler home. It was to prove an exciting trip for Adi, who sat beside his father in the dray and could not sleep that night in anticipation of morning, when the hive boxes would be set up on a bench under the shade of an oak tree some twenty paces from the house.

If there is some curiosity concerning how much these purchases cost, I have no dependable way to carry a calculation forward from the kronen of Alois' era to the present American dollar—certain products are priced one hundred times higher today than a century ago; other increases are more restrained. I will offer one rough estimate: Alois' pension in 1895 may have been the equivalent of sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year in the present era, and so I can say that he found the new expenditures dear. What Der Alte charged him might be the equal today of a thousand dollars. Alois, fully anticipating that he would pay too much, was weary, nonetheless, of dealing with the old man and so did not press beyond the small satisfaction of acquiring a few extra tools at no cost.

It was at this point that I was ordered to leave Adi and the other members of the family as well as my other clients in that area of Austria. They were, however, numerous enough for me to deputize three of my agents to remain while I left for St. Petersburg with my best assistants, all of us eager to embark on a massive oncoming project. We would attend the Coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, scheduled for May of 1896 in Moscow, an event still many months away.

Off to St. Petersburg. Leave it that I was obliged immediately upon arrival to commence my study of the late-nineteenth-century Russian soul, all of it—vices, beliefs, harmonies, and inner disharmonies. Once in that Slavic realm (which is so much nearer to God and to the Devil than any other land above the equator) I stayed for all of a winter in the capital prior to coming down to Moscow on a cold April morning one month in advance of the Coronation that May.

During these months in St. Petersburg, I did receive news regularly of Alois, Adi, Klara, and Angela. There were even reports on the temperament of the dog, Luther, and the horses, Ulan and Graubart. In any event, none of that was of great interest to me, not at all, what with our Russian venture approaching. The Maestro was obviously in the first stages of mounting a major and mighty mischief.

I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) I will say that having read the best and worst of novels for many years, which is, to remind you, part of a good devil's education, I know by now that not even a loyal reader can stay true to an author who is ready to leave his narrative for an apparently unrelated expedition. Until now, I have spared the reader, therefore, any reference to other cases, particularly the month I spent in London back in May of '95, when I attended the trial of Oscar Wilde and was in the courtroom on the day of his conviction for “sodomy and gross indecency”—a matter where I certainly took a hand in the jury's deliberations, since my instructions were to do my best to get him convicted. It is likely that the Maestro was looking to stimulate a rabid sense of martyrdom among many of Wilde's intimate associates, particularly those who were of good family.

6

I
have yet to describe the disorder we planned to wreak in the wake of the Coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, but I would prefer to stay somewhat longer with an account of the small events and minor adventures of the Hitler family in Hafeld during the period while I was away. Only then will I feel free to recount our activities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. I will say that the eight months from our departure in October 1895 until my return to Austria in June 1896 were of personal importance for Adolf Hitler, and so I feel bound to tell what took place during my absence.

There is, however, a difficulty. During this absence, reports of the various experiences of Alois, Klara, and the children were passed on to me by low-level agents—the three I had left behind to oversee my portion of the province of Upper Austria. Given the import of our mission to Russia, I had, of course, taken the best assistants along. So my knowledge of what was taking place in Hafeld had to suffer a loss. Lesser devils, like lesser humans, can be insensitive to significant detail.

While I can obtain a good notion of what is happening to my clients even when I have to rely on what is given to me by mediocre agents, the work can lose tone. Nonetheless, my narrative will not suffer too critically. Long in advance of my departure, I had succeeded in bringing all my aides up to a reasonable level of perception. I say this with pride. They had so little to offer when they first came to me. I am, however, not eager to explain our means of recruitment. It would bring us immediately into a more sacrosanct question: How do devils come to be in the first place? Is the Evil One on the alert for superior humans who might be ready to work for us, or, as is more usually the case, do they arrive as a brood of rejected humans? How this arrangement was negotiated between the D.K. and the Maestro is, as I have already indicated, beyond my knowledge. I cannot declare why or when it happened, but I would suppose from my experience that the Maestro, looking to make his way up onto a plane of equality with the D.K., had to be ready to accept a good deal of exudate—all these spoiled human possibilities. Over the centuries, perhaps even over the millennia, the Maestro had to disburse a very large share of his resources on the Time needed to train the disturbed material we do receive. It is analogous in difficulty to working up a symphony orchestra from applicants who have yet to play an instrument.

I will not pursue these difficulties here. I will only say that the agents I left in Hafeld did their best to report on Alois' ongoing efforts at beekeeping, but since they did not have a close enough sense of his difficulties, they could not always satisfy my understanding of what went on with him, his bees, his wife, and his children from the end of 1895 until the following summer.

7

I
n late October, if I had permitted it, the agents left behind would have overwhelmed me with detail. To my complete lack of surprise, Alois was having obsessions concerning his new venture.

I had no time to attend to this while in Russia. Short of forcing a direct entrance into Alois' waking thoughts, which, it may be remembered, is rarely done with men and women who are not our clients, my agents had to work by way of their milk runs. In what our Maestro chooses to call “the marketplace of sleep,” most dreams of men and women are reasonably open to devils and Cudgels alike, and so their daily thoughts can be picked up in superficial degree by no more than passing through the night chamber.

We also learn a good deal through the simple expedient of listening to a family's chatter. To be sure, a plethora of superficial information arrived, more than enough to be annoying, for it was a biased portrait. My agents perceived Alois as weak and much too worried, but they lacked insight for dealing with men or women who possess strength, yet are being studied during a time of anxiety. It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful. Respect is demanded, precisely what my locals were lacking.

Being of no great stature themselves in their former lives, they tended to pick up all that was second-rate in Alois. I was left, therefore, with the burden of discounting such improperly weighted materials. I would admonish the reader not to forget that the boy who later became Adolf Hitler emerged from a childhood with this father and mother. So it has to be obvious that we would do well to take measure of Klara and Alois' strengths as well as, needless to say, their significant weaknesses.

Very well. Here then is my developed if secondhand account of Alois' woes now that he was becoming a beekeeper.

His first concern (which I find comic, since he has spent his life in uniform) is that he has to remind himself constantly to put on light-colored gloves and a beekeeper's large hat and veil, always of the whitest material. Since he must avoid dark coats or trousers, when that is his customary dress, he is always concerned in these first days to remember to change his garments before going out to the hive boxes. Deep and somber colors, he knows all too well, do irritate bees. He knows that by experience. On the particular occasion some years ago when he had been gravely stung while working with the little colony he then kept near Braunau, he had made the mistake of inviting an attractive woman out with him one Sunday afternoon. As an element in his plan of seduction, he thought he would demonstrate not only his competence with the hive, but his elegance. Therefore, he was in full-dress dark blue uniform. That twilight he was stung so fiercely that the recollection still rises from the pit of his stomach. Alois' hopes of fornication were obliged to remain unsatisfied that Sunday, since the lady was stung as well, and on no less than the exposed flesh of her ample breast. Only a passing romance was lost, but a blow was delivered to his best opinion of himself. As we see, he continues to pay the price. Dressed in white, he feels shoots of fear. Bright as rockets, they fire off in his stomach as he approaches the hive boxes.

In some part, however, Alois remains a good peasant. He has not forgotten that one must remain on the alert after any small disaster. Unexpected value can be gained at times from an unexpected misfortune. His interesting medical theses, for example, were stimulated by the alleviation of his rheumatism on the following day—bee stings did seem to be good for his knees. When their meeting occurred, Der Alte, we remember, was ready to agree.

This confirmation could have been part of Alois' decision to accept Der Alte's opinion that imported Italian bees were superior to the Austrian variety. While Alois had his suspicion that Der Alte might be selling exactly some stock that he wished to get rid of, still, the telling point was that Italian bees were easier to handle. They were gentler, Der Alte assured him. Moreover, their rich yellow tan, not unlike the mellow glow of the best shoe leather, made them more beautiful. Alois had to admire the three golden segments of their bodies, each set off by the sharpest edging in black. Chic! That was the word that came to mind. Whereas the Austrian honeybee was gray and hairy. It did not gleam like these gilded Italians. Afterward, Alois felt as if he had been disloyal. He should have taken the “Franz Josefs,” the graybeards.

What added to his unease was that he kept wondering whether he would have done better to wait for spring. Now he had to keep his colony warm enough not to perish in the cold.

Through these months, therefore, temperature within the hive had to be measured every day. Yet he must not open a hive for more than a few seconds. “No matter your curiosity,” Der Alte had confided, “do not allow yourself to extract any of the movable frames for study of the combs. The cold draft that could result from lifting the large lid of the box might so lower the temperature that your bees would need hours to warm the interior again. Such a chill could decimate your population. Take no chances, Herr Hitler. Until now, from what you have told me, I assume that in the past, you have lived with bees only in June and July. Any tourist can do that. But to be the Skipper of your little people through the ice-cold air of all the winter months to come, that takes character, my friend.” And then, as if to enrich the assumption, he added, “My new friend.”