The Castle in the Forest (33 page)

“What are you saying? Do you sneer at me as a beekeeper?”

“Well, you are always getting stung.”

“That happens. In this work, it will happen.”

“Yes, and for those who know how, they can say, ‘Oh, I had a little accident today,' but for you, not so. You are full of bites. Always.”

Now Alois lost his temper, that valuable but dangerous temper he was always ordering himself to keep locked within. Now there was no help. His temper was out of the gates.

“Boy,” he said to his son, “you are not equipped to go out in the world. You have no schooling. You have no money. And you think you will be able to talk your way into money? That is nonsense. All you can know is how to get your farm girls to flap their tits at you and spread their legs. Why? Maybe they believe they will get lucky and pick up a husband as lazy as themselves. Maybe they will, and then I will have to look at grandchildren as ugly as your girlfriends, and you will have to work on her father's farm.”

He had gone too far. He knew it. The fear he had been secreting was as loose by now as his temper. It had been a large mistake to speak his mind.

Alois Junior was infuriated. To speak of the children he might have as ugly—outrageous. “Yes,” he said to his father, “I have seen you as a farmer. Your knowledge is outdated. Even Johann Poelzl, stupid as he is, knows how to farm. You don't.”

“So, I am now stupid? You are the one to speak of such a matter when you flunked out of school. And then lied about it. What a stupidity! I have lived with this foul and rotten news for too long. I can come to only one conclusion. The only answer as to why you lied to us and tried to write a counterfeit letter is that you are indeed an idiot.”

“Yes,” said Alois Junior, “and you are different. You have beautiful children. Do you know why?” The boy's breath was coming so quickly that his voice went up in pitch. He was all but singing his way through the next words, “Yes, you find your women, you fuck them, and then you forget them. And my mother dies.”

The father's reflex was faster than his mind. His fist struck Junior on the side of the head hard enough to knock the boy down.

13

I
f young Alois had been a client, I would have ordered him not to get up. His father would have been saddled with a guilt the boy could have ridden for a year. But since I had no control in this matter, Junior rushed at Senior, grabbed his legs, and, in turn, threw him to the ground. Turn for turn.

Knowing his life was at a crossroads, he made the error of helping his father get up. He had to. He knew an incommensurable terror in the immediate moment after upending him, for there was his father prostrate, looking like an old man. So Junior picked him up.

To be knocked down was bad enough, but to be assisted to his feet by a youth with an open pimple on his face and the beginnings of a ridiculous little brown mustache? Having sprouted but a few lank hairs, that mustache was an insult all by itself. He began to beat upon Junior until the boy fell to his knees, whereupon Alois kept pummeling him further even as his son lay on the ground.

Klara had come out of the house by now. She begged Alois to stop. She wailed. And that was just as well. For now, Junior did not move. He lay motionless on the ground and Klara kept screaming.

She believed she was shrilling for the dead. “Oh, God,” she managed to cry out, “I cannot believe what You have allowed!”

I saw a rare opening. She was without her Guardian Angel—not a Cudgel near. Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly—they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries. To add to the tumult, there was Adi giving vent to the most penetrating set of shrieks.

And Klara was vulnerable. I saw my moment. I touched her thoughts, I reached her heart. She believed Alois Junior was dead, and so his father would spend the rest of his days in prison. It was her fault, all her fault. She had told the father to get close to the boy, even when she knew better. Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one's prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him. Only the pious can believe the Devil has such powers! “Save the boy's life,” she implored, “and I will be in your debt.”

So we had her for the future. Not as a client. She had merely ceded her soul to us. Unhappily, these changes are never whole and immediate. But at least we now had some purchase on her.

She was a true gain. So soon as Alois Junior began to stir, she was convinced that she had received our direct response. She felt the full woe of being responsible for a nonnegotiable oath. Unlike so many with whom we traffic, she was the essence of responsibility. In consequence, she felt a mutilation of her soul and was full of grief for the pains she must be rousing now in God. What a nun she would have made!

Our most significant gain was with Adi. He had seen his father beat young Alois into the ground. He had heard his father utter a groan remarkable for the fullness of its woe. Then as Junior began to stir, Adi saw his father stagger off into the woods, his stomach heaving and Klara's apple strudel now extruding from his nostrils. In consequence, unable to breathe, Alois felt as if he must evacuate a cannonball from his esophagus. The midday dinner was surging up and down in his gullet. But now, out in the woods, just so soon as his stomach ceased its heaving, he knew that he could not go back to the house. He needed a drink. It was Sunday, but he would find something in Fischlham.

That is time enough to spend on Alois Senior. My attention was for Adi. The boy had voided everything, urine, feces, food. He was half out of his senses with fear that his father would return and beat his head into the ground. I could not ignore so direct an opportunity to exercise a few skills. I would engrave this beating into Adi's memory. Again and again, I returned the same images to his mind, until—given his certainty that it would all be done to him as well when his father returned—I managed to brand his mind with a clear image of himself lying close to death from the beating his father had given him. He not only ached in his limbs, his head hurt. He felt as if he had just risen from the very ground where he had been beaten down.

In later years, at the height of his power, Adolf Hitler would still believe that he had received a near-mortal beating. On many a night during the Second World War, at Headquarters in East Prussia for the Russian front, he would tell the tale to his secretaries as they sat at table after evening mess. He would be eloquent. “Of course, I deserved a whipping,” he would say. “I gave real trouble to my father. My mother, I recall, was distraught. She loved me so, my dear mother.” He would remember himself as being just as brave as Alois Junior, yes, he had stood up to his father. “I think that is why he had to beat me. I must have deserved it. I said terrible things to him, words so awful I cannot repeat them. Probably, I deserved this good beating. My father was a fine, strong, decent man, one Austrian who was a real German. Still, I do not know that a father should ever beat a son so close to death—it was a little too close.”

Yes, he could tell stories about his childhood to bring tears to the eyes, and pure sorrow to the hearts of all who listened. It had not come all at once, this immaculate bedrock of a lie I had fixed into those folds of the brain where memory is stored in close embrace with mendacity. My art was to replace a true memory by a false one, and that can be equal in its exactitudes to removing an old tattoo in order to cover it with a new one.

Moreover, this fiction would enable me to develop Adi's future incapacity to tell the truth. By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.

Working properly on a client is, as I say, a slow process, and it took many a year to convert this particular scoring of his psyche into a full installation of well-layered mendacities. The grown man would have been ready to die in the belief that he was telling the truth when he declared that his father had almost pounded him to death. From time to time, I still took pains to reinforce the keel of this one absolute lie. It was worth it. For the Maestro often pointed to my work on this matter: “There is no better way to usurp the services of a high political leader,” he would tell us, “than by this method. They must not be able to distinguish certain lies from the truth. They are of considerable use to us when they do not even know that they are lying, because the mistruth is so vital to their needs.”

14

W
hile the tavern in Fischlham served no drinks on Sunday, there was a house on the outskirts of town where you could buy a stein of beer in the pantry.

Alois had never visited this oasis before. It had been altogether beneath his notion of what a reputable retired official of the Crown might consider reasonable leisure activity, but this was one of the few times in his life when—and he had to keep telling it to himself—he had to have a drink. His knee throbbing from the first fall, his head aching from the explosive effects of his rage, and his heart sore, he had hobbled across the fields and by sunset had taken in close to a gallon of beer.

Nobody had to help him home. There were offers, but they were rejected—it was still early enough in the evening for the sky to retain some light. With a full sense of his own dignity, he made it up over the first hill out of Fischlham and almost over the second before he lay down in a pasture to sleep. He awoke a couple of hours later with his head not six inches away from a monumental cow flop the size of a derby hat.

His hair was clean. He had not rolled into it. If he had believed in Providence, he would have offered thanks, but it was just as well he did not, for by this time—it was after ten—decently rested by his impromptu slumber, he came up over the last hill and saw the embers of a fire not thirty feet from his front door.

There had been no wind that night, which certainly saved the house, but no more than ash remained of his three Langstroth boxes, nor any sign of bees except for those poor tens of thousands who had been roasted to a microscopic crisp. A startling sense of gloom was clinging to the walls of his home.

Klara met him. If she had been weeping, she was, by now, as crisp and dry-eyed as the husks of the hive colonies. An odor arose from the last black lees of the honey that was as harsh as a catarrh of the throat.

Alois knew. A part of his wife's heart had to have been soured forever by the fact that on this, the worst of all nights, he had found a way to drink enough beer to reek of it from six feet away.

Detail by detail, she told him all that had happened. The boy had ridden off on the horse and did not return until dark. They were all asleep, or pretending to be—she would admit that they by now felt afraid of him. He must have gathered together his clothing, tied it in a sack, attached it to the saddle of the horse, and gone off again.

Yet just half an hour ago, safe as they hoped themselves to be by now, Spartaner began to bay. He howled with such ferocity that she almost left her bed to see what was wrong. But then he made noise no more, just whined a little—like a puppy. And the horse neighed as young Alois rode off again. A minute later, the flames had begun. She had known almost at once what was happening. Adi, as alive as a deer in flight, kept running between the house and the beehives. “He has set them all on fire. With kerosene!” cried Adi. “I know. It is like it was before.” And he was laughing as much as he was weeping, not certain whether this was a terrible event or another glorious act of incineration.

Klara and Angela had done what they could, which was to throw pails of water on the walls of the house closest to the flames. More than that would have required the presence of a man.

They had even heard the last sounds of Ulan's hooves as he trotted away. Nor would the boy be back. Had he left any way for himself to return? She did not think so. Before he left, he had poisoned Spartaner. The dog was dead by the time Alois came back.

BOOK X

T
O
H
ONOR AND
T
O
F
EAR

1

A
letter came in August. After that, they did not hear from Alois Junior again. In the course of a trip to Linz, Alois Senior learned that Ulan had been sold to a horse trader for half of his value, and that might be enough for Junior to live in Vienna until he could find work.

On many a late afternoon, Alois Senior would walk down the trail the boy had used on the night when he set out for the road to Linz. Senior would come to an old stump, now his favorite seat in the forest, and there he would listen to the birds.

At rest on the remains of what once had been a noble oak, he would mourn the bees he had lost, and dream that he had come back early enough on Sunday night to chase the horse and boy through the forest. This fantasy accompanied a long summer of mourning for all he could name as lost, and then he would grieve even more for what he could not name.

So the summer passed. He hired a man to assist him in mowing their pastures. He baled his cuttings and sold the hay in Fischlham. Having no hives to worry about, he had no fear of swarming, nor were there calculations to be made of how much feed to give in the after-season to the colonies, no further examinations of the health of the hives, no estimates as to how many old bees had died but were not yet replaced by newborn, no tremors at the thought of mouse invasions, no need to consider whether he should put up netting again to keep the birds away, nor a need to weigh his boxes or ponder whether enough pollen had been collected by the foragers to provide them with protein for the winter. There was no Queen to locate. There were not even any Langstroths to repaint. He was done.

Sitting by the stump, there came an afternoon at the end of summer when the more caustic tastes of mourning finally passed through some vent of his mind, and he said to himself, “I am relieved that I do not have to worry anymore. I loved my bees, but their loss is not my fault.”

At this juncture, I did not have to pay daily attention to the Hitler family. They would be in Hafeld until they left. I was hardly concerned. One of my developed instincts is to know when the humans under my study are ready to change at a good rate, as opposed to when they are virtually inert.

In truth, that is how we measure Time. Except for those occasions when the Maestro assigns us to arenas where history can be shaped, we live reflexively. We, too, are in need of fallow periods. For me, the quiet summer of the Hitler family went by like sleep. I tended a little to other clients.

Alois, meanwhile, was marooned in the pall of a long and lackluster meditation. He was worrying to a modest degree about the value of the farm. If he were to sell it, could the price match what he had paid? Or would a potential buyer recognize the beginnings of neglect? That became the focus of his attention. Nothing, he decided, can be more subtle than the onset of neglect. While he did feel more relaxed than in many a year, it did nag at him that he was leaving all too many chores to the women—certainly those which did not call for a man's strength. He did nothing with the vegetable garden. He thought of buying a new dog; instead, he examined the paint on poor dead Spartaner's doghouse and decided it was not yet ready to peel in the summer heat.

They did not seem to need a new dog. With young Alois gone, he did not have to entertain any fears of an irate father skulking in the neighborhood. No parent of Greta Marie Schmidt was likely to appear on the doorstep—he could give thanks that that particular young lady was not pregnant, for if she were, he would by now have known all about it. And the smuggler who lived on the other side of Fischlham hardly entered his thoughts. Somehow, that phantom of a malefactor also seemed far away.

Senior's real worry was that he might become habituated to idleness. Even a few minutes spent in doing nothing at all had once been guaranteed to annoy him. Now he felt a little too contented by the drift of a cloud or, for that matter, a curl of cigar smoke.

Such peace could prove expensive. A farm that remained unworked—no matter how tidy one kept the house, the barn, and the yard—might never look right. Not to a potential buyer. A small part of Alois continued to run uphill in his sleep. It was as if his unplanted fields were reproaching him.

The economic facts (which he calculated over and over on separate pieces of paper using separate stubs of pencil) were that he and Klara, no matter how careful they might be with expenses, would sooner or later be obliged to spend more each quarter than his pension.

So there might come a time when he would have to decide that it cost too much to go to his miserable tavern in Fischlham. That would double every indignity. He had to recognize a fact. He was missing Linz. There, at least, you could drink with intelligent people. What it all came down to was that they must sell the farm. He knew it would not happen quickly. These days, the less work one did, the longer it took for anything to get done. Moreover, very much against his will, he was beginning to feel remorse about Alois Junior. What an ungovernable emotion! Was it incumbent upon him as a father to forgive his son? Yet what if Alois Junior was also full of remorse? He could not bear the thought of that boy alone in a poor room, sitting on a mean cot, his eyes full of tears.

He might as well have had an amputated forearm whose nerve endings remained alive. Alois Senior began to think again of Hitler and Sons, Apiarian Products. Because he had to invest no real belief in the idea, the dream, perversely, was sweeter than before.

He even brought it up with Klara. If she had felt at a good and considerable distance from her husband all summer, if she could not forgive him for being such a helpless drunk on that terrible night, nonetheless, her sense of duty still prevailed. “If you want him back, if you truly want him back, I will not stand in the way.” That is what she said. That was what she felt obliged to tell him. She even felt a sense of shame, for her quick hope was that they would not find him.

No such drama was going to develop, however. A letter without a return address came a few days later from Vienna, a vile letter. “You killed my mother.” The phrase was repeated several times. Then the letter declared that the son would yet be famous, and the father would twist in his grave.

Alois could not believe what he read. The rest was worse. “You were a terrible farmer, and the reason is clear. You are, as I happen to know, half-Jewish. No wonder you cannot be a farmer.” And there were so many misspellings in the letter that out of a sense of shame for his son, Alois Senior had to write it out all over again before he felt able to show it to Klara. As he wrote, his hand shook badly, but the original, with its ink blots and errors of syntax, was abominable. And to think that the boy had always been able to speak well.

All the same, these awful words had to be shown to Klara. Alois Junior could only have received such rank ideas by listening to Johann Poelzl. That pious hypocrite!

Klara, however, kept the discussion well away from Poelzl. She only said, “I did not mind that thought so much. I used to think this was your reason for not going to church.”

He was indignant. “It did not bother you to believe you had a husband who was half-Jewish?”

“How could it? Alois, you have always said that a man who hates Jews is uncultured. So, I knew. It is not appropriate to hate Jews. It is a sign of ignorance.”

“But that does not make me Jewish.”

He had a headache, sudden and fierce. Old memories of the earliest taunts at school now came back. When he was six years old. Of course. That had been the talk in Strones and in Spital.

“It never bothered you to think I was half-Jewish?” he said again.

“No. I was always so worried about our children. I wanted them to be able to live.” She could not keep her eyes from watering—not with these recollections at the root of her tear ducts. “So I was glad to think you were part Jewish. I thought maybe that could give a little fresh blood to our Adolf and our Edmund and Paula.”

“But I am not at all Jewish,” he said. “We must be clear about this. Old Johann Nepomuk once told me who I am. I am his son. I am your real uncle, yes.”

“He told you? He said such words?” She knew her grandfather Johann Nepomuk well enough to understand that he could never utter such a speech. Not in that way—not so directly.

“He,” said Alois, “suggested this information to me. He did state that he knew who my father was. And then he said, ‘This man was not Jewish.' He did not have to say more. It was clear. There was only one way he could know. So that was that. The next time a boy called me a Jew, I gave him a good poke in the face and broke his nose. That was one fellow who was left with an ugly mug.” Alois began to laugh at the recollection. Then he laughed even more, as if to signify that he was not heartsick. “And all these years you thought the opposite?”

She nodded. She hardly knew whether to be relieved or disappointed. She had always felt excitement sneak into her at the thought of being wed to a man with such blood. Jews did forbidden things in bed. That she had heard. Maybe Alois and she had even done these same forbidden things—was that not so? And Jews were reputed to be intelligent. That she had also heard. Now she was truly confused.

Alois, thinking of Johann Poelzl, could have boiled the old bird for soup.