The Castle in the Forest (36 page)

5

F
rom Paula's infancy, there had not been a morning when Klara did not whisper to her, “You will be so beautiful.”

But now, although not yet two years old, Paula seemed a little backward.

Alois did not notice. He loved to dandle Paula on his knee. He was ready to dream of a time when this child would be the loveliest young lady in town. Her wedding might even be an event.

But on a given day, after a visit to the town doctor, Klara came home with the news that their daughter was developing too slowly.

The doctor's remark had not come as a surprise. Klara had certainly been concerned. At two, Paula could not use a spoon without spilling most of the contents, whereas Edmund had been able to manage the trip from the soup bowl to his mouth not long after he was a year old. At two, he could dress himself, even begin to wash himself. Paula could not. She would lie in her cot with her good friend, the rag doll, hugged to her breast.

Long before he was two, Edmund knew the words for arms, legs, fingers, and toes. Paula would giggle, but knew none of these words. During the doctor's examination, she was asked to stand on one foot but could not keep her balance. Now, she looked blank when the doctor asked her, “What do you do when you are tired?”

Klara tried to help by saying, “Sleep,” but the doctor was annoyed. “Please, Frau Hitler, no help,” he said.

“Yes,” Klara now told Alois, “he even says she is retarded.”

“He doesn't know what he is talking about.”

“Alois, it could be true.” Klara began to weep.

Alois fell into a depression. His old gifts of perception, so skilled at spotting a smuggler across a Customs shed, were now addressed to examining Paula's smile. It seemed to him that her eyes were much too vacant.

An ugliness of mood descended upon the family. When Alois would go on his walk, Adi would look to badger Edmund. To Klara, that was intolerable. She would snap at Adi, then feel disloyal. The truth was that Edmund had become the bright light of the family. Having grown out of his runny nose and dirty pants, he had become a charming four-year-old, as full of future promise—in Klara's opinion—as a prince, and it had all happened since they left Hafeld. Edmund did have the sweetest smile, and the funniest face. Klara had to laugh at the expressions he offered, so wise, so comical, and sometimes so outrageous. He was a good little boy and a scamp, all in one. But Adi was reacting badly. He had formed the habit of sticking a leg out just far enough to trip his little brother whenever Edmund ran by. Edmund, however, would not complain, just get up and keep running up and down the floor of the loft.

It would have bothered Klara even more if she had been aware of Adolf's secret desire. It was to hit Edmund as hard as he could and not be punished for the act. Alois, Klara, and Angela were always carrying on about how blue were Edmund's eyes. Yet his own eyes, Adolf decided, were a nobler blue. Besides, Edmund's face looked squashed together. How he would have liked to squash that face a little more whenever his parents called his little brother cute.

Edmund was always receiving praise for the concern he showed for Paula, whereas Adi felt that he had been the first to see how Paula was not too bright. He could have told them, but no, his mother and Angela were impressed instead with how much Edmund loved his little sister.

Klara was even glad that the big, sweaty blacksmith, Preisinger, was down there in his shop hammering away because Adi liked him and stayed there a good deal. That was better than trying to keep watch on him when he would sit outside her kitchen waiting for Edmund to run by so he could stick out his leg and trip him one more time.

6

A
t this time I had to move from Austria to Switzerland, and was active in Geneva for the next month overseeing the transmogrification of a petty criminal into an impassioned assassin.

Given the variety of clients I was developing in the environs of Linz, I had to return to Austria more than once to take note of their condition and so was able to stay close to events at the grain mill in Lambach, but I will not speak of those matters until I tell a little about my assignment in Geneva. To those readers who are, by now, wary of these expeditions, I can promise that this time I will not be absent from young Adolf for more than an interesting chapter or two.

Moreover, a few pages of the text to come will quote Mark Twain, even if he was never my client—I would not have dared to make that attempt! In truth, if such a possibility had existed, the Maestro, given his admiration for great writers, would probably have looked to explore such a seduction on his own.

In the event, Twain, a most complex man, was not considered suitable material. Some of his associates were, however, and so I knew enough about his activities to respect the passion with which he wrote about the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth in Geneva on September 10, 1898. Married in 1854 to Franz Josef, she had long been considered the most beautiful and cultivated queen in Europe. Her favorite poet, for example, was Heinrich Heine. What added to the lady's exotic status was that after the double suicide in 1889 of her beloved son, Crown Prince Rudolf, and his young mistress, Baroness Vetsera, the Empress dressed only in black. That tragedy, known to all of Europe as “Mayerling,” was an event in which I had played no small part. Indeed, that may have been why I was chosen to shepherd Luigi Lucheni around Geneva after he had been sighted as a putative assassin.

“He's a dreadful piece of work,” the Maestro said, “but made to order for us. A most unbalanced little malefactor. He sees himself as a serious philosopher and is sincere in his belief that only the most exceptional individual deeds will leave a lasting influence on the public. So, go to it!”

I worked with Luigi Lucheni. I expanded the gaseous irresolutions of his psyche, then compressed such inflammable vapors until they were as focused as a blowtorch. Assassins need many quick magnifications of their ego if they are to be ready at the murderous moment.

I did not fail. Lucheni, an impoverished young man, chose to become an anarchist after he came to live with the Swiss. In Geneva, he found revolutionaries who accepted him, at best, with misgivings. His fellow Italians chose to call him
il stupido
(which doubled the daily compression of his furies). It was of help to me that he was being ridiculed by those whom he had expected to applaud him. “Convince them by way of your actions,” I kept counseling. “You are here among us to take the life of someone who is very high among the oppressive classes.”

“Who is this person?” he asked.

“You will know when the person is pointed out.”

Poor Empress Elizabeth! She was so proud and so poetic that she allowed only a few bodyguards to escort her when she was on vacation. Even then, they had to stay at a remove of ten paces from her person. It did not matter that strangers were bound to approach. Invariably, it would be a tourist asking for an autograph. So, as she stood by herself on a promenade along the banks of the Rhone, Lucheni came up, took out a sharpened rat-tail file, and thrust it into her heart.

He was immediately apprehended, his quarters were searched, and his diary examined. All the world soon knew that he had written: “How I would like to kill someone—but it must be someone important so it gets in the papers.”

He might have chosen Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, who was present in Geneva then on a visit, but so was the beautiful Sisi—Empress Elizabeth. Sisi, I knew, would count for more. Even as I had led the anathematic priest by his long nose to the gateway where Adi was smoking, so did I direct Lucheni to Empress Elizabeth.

If it is discomforting to the reader that I usually present myself as a calm observer, capable of a balanced narrative, and yet am also able to abet the most squalid acts without a moment of regret, let it not come as a surprise. Devils require two natures. In part, we are civilized. What may be less apparent on most occasions is that our ultimate aim is to destroy civilization as a first step to obviating God, and such an enterprise must be able to call on one's readiness to
do what it takes
—a fine expression I picked up years later from a minor client who worked on a film crew.

In any event, the immediate effect of the deed was exceptional. I will, however, leave that description to Mark Twain himself.

7

T
he author was then at Kaltenleutgeben, a small Austrian town forty miles from Vienna. By way of the failure of his investment in a new linotype machine, Twain was bankrupt.

So he left his home in Hartford, Connecticut, and traveled through Europe giving popular lectures for fees large enough to pay off many of his debts. Resting in Kaltenleutgeben when the murder of Elizabeth occurred, he wrote the next day to a friend: “This murder will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from now.”

I cannot begin to speak of the elation with which I read those words. My own opinion of the importance of the deed had now been confirmed by a master of prose. Indeed, Twain was so powerfully affected that he soon composed an essay full of the incomparable flow of his language. Although, for a myriad of reasons too labyrinthine to catalog, he chose not to publish it. I, however, came into possession of these pages by way of one of his servants.

The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and tremendous the event becomes…. One must go back about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one…. “The Empress is murdered!” When those amazing words struck upon my ear in this Austrian village last Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice was cursing the perpetrator of it.

…And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and value go; a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without talent, without education, without morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human polecat. And it was within the privileges and powers of this sarcasm upon the human race to reach up—up—up and strike from its far summit in the social skies the world's accepted ideal of Glory and Might and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes to us what sorry shows and shadows we are. Without our clothes and pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often forget—or try to; that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one way or another all men are mad and one of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed…. It is this madness for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship and the thousand other dignities…. It has made kings pick one another's pockets, scramble for one another's crowns and estates, slaughter one another's subjects; it has raised up prize-fighters and poets, and villages' mayors, and little and big politicians, and big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions, and banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons. Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the nation, or the planet shouting, “Look—there he goes—that is the man!” And in five minutes' time, at no cost of brain, or labor, or genius, this mangy Italian tramp has beaten them all, outstripped them all, for in time their names will perish; but by the friendly help of the insane newspapers and courts and kings and historians, his is safe and will thunder all down the ages as long as human speech shall endure! Oh, if it were not so tragic, how ludicrous it would be!

I rushed to present this to the Maestro. I do not know that I had ever taken myself so seriously before. I knew that I was, at last, an actor in history.

He was scathing. “I may value great writers,” he said, “but look how Mark Twain exaggerates the event. It is hysterical. One thousand years! Sisi will be forgotten in twenty.”

I did not dare to ask, “Does the event serve no large purpose?”

My thoughts were heard. “Oh,” he said, “it's a bit of help. But you, like Twain, are much too impressed by mighty names. They count for so little once they are gone. I'd like to clean the snobbery out of you. It's not the name. Only an exceptional client that we develop ex nihilo—or virtually ex nihilo—can affect history to our advantage. But for that, we have to build him up from first brick to the last. Killing Sisi offered no such value. It will not be conducive to ongoing social unrest. Khodynskoe is still serving us, whereas knocking off Sisi? I tell you that if I were a gourmet picking a perfect peach off the tree, I might be able to enjoy a few minutes of gastric excellence. That would be analogous to the pleasure we can take because of your nice work with Luigi Lucheni. But you must not lose your sense of measure.” Here, he did smile.

“There was one nice moment,” he said. “Our great author did recover his good sense on the last paragraph.”

Twain had also written:

Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination, we must concede high rank to the many which have described it as “ordained from above.” I think this verdict will not be popular “above.” If the deed was ordained from above, there is no rational way of making this prisoner even partially responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him without manifestly committing a crime.

“Yes,” said the Maestro, “when it comes to being aware of us, that good fellow, Mark Twain, must have been so near to saying ‘ordained from below.' Thank God, he didn't!”

How the Maestro could laugh on these rare occasions when he felt merry.