The Castle in the Forest (40 page)

5

A
few weeks later, Alois awoke worrying whether Alois Junior had been a product of too many beatings. Next day, while walking with Mayrhofer, the subject came up once more. Alois declared that he never engaged in corporal chastisement. (He even said to himself, “Oh, you are lying like a thief.”) But Mayrhofer's good opinion was crucial to him. So on he went: “I never strike my kids. I must admit, however, that I do bawl them out frequently.” How could a parent not? “Adolf,” said Alois, “is the one I scold the most. He can be a miserable urchin. Sometimes I say to myself, ‘I'll bash him yet.'” Alois said that on purpose. It would serve as an explanation if it were ever to come out that he had been whipping him.

In truth, however, it was becoming more difficult to grab hold of him. The boy had a way of sliding and turning, a product perhaps of his skill at the war games. Usually, he succeeded in getting away from Alois after one off-centered slap on the rump. And for those times when his father did manage to turn him over his knee, there was now no great arm left to give the whipping. How sodden was Alois' heart on such occasions. It had become more enjoyable to call him Toga Boy. Alois even kept the mockery in play until Adolf reacted by coming down with an attack of measles.

Such a connection may be, of course, too simple. In Leonding, at this time, others his age were also in bed with the disease. While it was certainly contagious, Adolf may, in effect, have been made vulnerable by the ongoing misfortunes of recent events. His army ceased operations after the fire in the forest. Now the jeers about Toga Boy rankled his skin. The worst news, however, was to hear that Der Alte had died. An obituary had even appeared in the
Linzer Tages Post,
such news forwarded all the way from Hafeld, but then, the event could be seen as sufficiently unusual to be worth a description in newsprint. By the time his body was found, Der Alte had been in a sad state of decomposition. “Such,” observed the
Post,
“is often the fate of lonely hermits.” To make matters worse, the unfed bees had perished in the cold. How many must have kept beating their wings until the end!

Adolf was in silent mourning.

Alois, however, retained enough sour feeling about Der Alte to be rewarded now with a keen trace of pleasure—a most unseemly reaction. To compensate—he hardly knew why—he did buy Adolf an air gun for Christmas. It was a solid gift, ready to pump out pellets with enough power to drop a squirrel or a rat, and so would prove its value to the boy, but not as yet. Alois had the impression that his son might even be crying in his sleep. He did look frightful in the morning. Then he came down with the measles.

Klara kept the house in a rigid quarantine. No one was allowed to visit Adolf in the hitherto-unoccupied maid's room on the second floor. Only Klara, wearing a gauze mask, would tend to him, and she would wash her hands afterward with antiseptic.

He had a rash, he had red eyes, he was not allowed to read, he suffered boredom, he complained endlessly to his mother yet was almost glad when she left the room. The odor of the antiseptic she brought with her was near to intolerable.

It proved, however, to be a mild case. The white spots on his tongue and in his throat disappeared after a few days and his rash lessened, but his disquiet increased. He was obsessed with how filthy he felt. Was that not exactly the way they all thought of him? Diseased and therefore filthy. He worried about where Der Alte might be now that he was not only dead but had been left alone to rot.

6

A
last word about Der Alte might be fitting. Adolf still hoped that Der Alte, rot or not, was on his way to heaven. Such a sentiment in my young client disconcerted me because I was hardly certain we had carried the old boy over to hell in high style. In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know.

To keep up our morale, therefore, we are reminded constantly of how much cosmic pretension there is in human affairs. We are frequently brought back to Nietzsche's immortal remark “All priests are liars.”

“How could it be otherwise?” the Maestro says. “The Dummkopf is not about to open His secrets to individuals distorted enough to choose the ministry or the priesthood in order to dominate gullible audiences with their self-serving descriptions of how the Lord will reward their belief when they die. Priests are, indeed, liars. They do not know a thing about the highest matters. Nor, for that matter, do any of you.”

Leave it then that I knew nothing of the final destination of Der Alte. I do suspect he was the sort of long-term client that, by the end, we are often obliged to ignore. Certainly his use for us had dissipated. So it is possible that he was ready to beseech heaven to grant him final acceptance. Who knows? Given the few hints I can use, I would suppose that the Dummkopf does accept some of our clients for reincarnation. As I have mentioned, the Maestro is not vigorously opposed to this. “Let us have the pleasure of picking up this piece of small fry once more if the Dummkopf is so foolish as to give Der Alte another opportunity to pump up his vanities.”

Throughout his illness, Adolf not only thought of Der Alte but even more often wished that the misery of his measles would visit Edmund. Then, after Adolf recovered, Edmund did come down with a severe case. I will save the reader a detailed description of the turmoil that
reverberated
—that is the word—through the Garden House as Edmund's condition worsened. His face swelled. He became incoherent. The doctor warned the family that he might yet suffer from encephalitis.

In their bedroom, Alois knelt beside Klara, and they began to pray for Edmund's life. Alois even said, “I will believe in God if Edmund is spared. May I die if I do not obey this vow.”

We will never know whether Alois would have been true to such an oath. Still, he did say, “God, take my life, but spare the boy.”

Then, Edmund died.

Prayer can be a perilous expedition for those who pray. We, for example, have a power—which is expensive to call upon—that enables us to block even the most essential, heartfelt, and desperately important prayers, and we exercise such powers when the stakes demand it.

Cheap prayer, on the contrary, we encourage. We see all that as adding to the Dummkopf's Fatigue, to the Dummkopf's Indifference. Cheap prayer wearies Him. Cheap patriotism enrages Him. (Cheap patriotism is, after all, one of our most useful provenances.)

The point is that despite Alois and Klara's prayers, blocked or not, Edmund did die on February 2, 1900. I even felt as if I were one of the mourners. Edmund was the first child for whom I had entertained so curious a set of sensations as love (or at least a wholehearted liking sufficient to explain the warmth that inhabited me when in his presence). I had not been certain of what I was feeling. I only knew that Adolf was not ready to contemplate his brother's death (for, indeed, he had a secret to bury as direct and powerful as the arm that protruded from the grave), and I was not ready to contemplate it either. I, too, had been culpable.

7

O
n the day of Edmund's funeral Alois told Klara that he would not go. He could not even give a reason. He stood there like a pillar of stone.

Then he began to weep. “I cannot control my feelings today,” he said. “Would you have me make a spectacle of myself in church? A church that I hate?” For the first time in their marriage, she raised her voice in anger. “Yes,” she said, “this church that you hate. But I go to it for peace. For a little consolation. I am able to speak to our Gustav then, and to Ida and Otto, and now”—it was her turn to burst into tears—“to Edmund.”

They did not quarrel. They wept together. She said at last, “You must stop being so hard on Adolf. He is now the only hope left for you to have a good son. Why must you beat him into the ground?”

Alois nodded. “I will make a promise,” he said. “That is, if you will stay here with me today. For I cannot go to the funeral. I am not able to keep myself together.” Before he could finish speaking, he was weeping again. He hugged her. “I need you,” he said. “I need you to stay with me in this house.” He had never said that to her before. He could hardly believe he was saying it. “Yes,” he declared, “I will take a solemn promise. I will not strike Adolf again.”

It is a mistake to characterize a husband and wife who are in pain, but I cannot resist remarking that in my experience, few marriages exist where a vow is not countermanded by a secret covenant.

Yes, that is our Alois. He has already told himself, “No, I will not strike Adolf again unless he does something awful,” but then, Klara was not of one piece either. Not now. She was beginning to wonder if it was the fate of her family to be destroyed. Indeed, she was not ready for the funeral. This once, let God pay attention to her.

So Klara told Angela that she must represent the family. “If people ask, just say that your parents are stricken. This is true,” said Klara. “I don't trust myself to go, and your father cannot. I have never seen him weep before. He is near to out of his mind. Angela, it is so terrible for him. I cannot leave the man alone. I must not! So today, you will act as the woman of the family. For today at least, you must be the woman.”

Angela said, “You have to go to church with Adolf and me. It will be a scandal if you don't.”

“You,” said Klara, “are much too young to worry about scandal. Tell them we are ill. That has to be sufficient.”

“Will you stay here at least, will you promise to stay in the house?” asked Angela. “I am afraid he will want to go out. He will want you to bring him to the tavern. He will get drunk so it doesn't hurt so much. You must not leave the house.”

“It depends on your father.”

“You are his slave.”

“Silence yourself!” Klara said.

So to Adolf's surprise, he and Angela went to church by themselves. When asked for a reason, all Angela said was, “Before we go, you must take a bath. You smell awful again.”

8

A
lone with Alois, Klara could not bear to think of each and every death in her family. It was not only her children, but the deaths of her brothers and sisters. “Cannot God have mercy?” she asked herself. She felt a frightening exhaustion, as if she were standing in an old house and the floor was falling apart and she had no interest in saving herself. She was tired of believing that the fault must be her own.

I have to admit that I was tempted to approach her, but I knew this would be refused by the Maestro. What, after all, could be gained by looking to pick up a client like Klara? We could put the Cudgels in disarray for losing her. But what labor there would be to train so new and difficult a client.

Indeed, I soon recognized that Klara was having no more than a rebellion, which is common among pious people. Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God—this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right. Since this illicit wrath is usually submerged in pestilential waters of modesty, they do not make sterling clients for us, although, in the event, we do use some. Pious people can derange those in their family who are less pious. Repetition kills the soul.

On this long day, Alois felt so savaged by the loss of Edmund that he had to look into the long-buried recollections of his incest. Were he and Klara polluted people? If so, Edmund might be better off dead. Again he wept.

When, at one point, Klara began to have second thoughts and said, “Maybe we should go to the church after all,” he was gripped with fear. “For me to break down in public?” he repeated. “That is worse than death.” Now Klara asked herself, “What is wrong with weeping in church when one's heart is broken?” She began to wonder. Was Alois evil? Was she? What of the vow she had taken when Alois Junior seemed lifeless on the ground? Perhaps it was better, yes, actually better, that they stay away. For evil people to attend a funeral might hurt the departed. Slowly, over that long day, as they remained at home, she felt an awful flush in her breast. Was this a fury directed at God? She, too, was now afraid to go to church. Yes, how could one ever dare to bring such fury into a holy place? That would be like taking another vow of allegiance to the foul one.

9

A
t the funeral, Adolf heard none of the words. His head was ablaze. In the hour that Edmund died, Alois had said to him, “You are now my only hope.”

“Yes,” Adolf said to himself, “it is true, my father used to see Edmund as the only hope. That is what he really was saying. But actually, he hates me. He thinks I was cruel to Edmund.”

Yet Adolf refused to agree that he might have mistreated Edmund. “It was no more,” he told himself, “than the way Alois Junior used to treat me.” All too soon, however, he began to feel full of dread. How deep and unrelenting might be the anger of the angels!

In the days just before he came down with measles, he had taken Edmund for a walk in the woods. He was still uneasy about the fire and so he remained concerned over Edmund's loyalty to him. He picked up a twig on the path and scalped his brother by drawing the stick in a circle across his forehead, above the left ear, under the back of the head, and then above the right ear, before returning to the forehead. Then Adolf said in a most vibrant voice, “Now I own all. Your brain is mine.”

“How can you say such a thing?” said Edmund. “That is stupid.”

“Don't be a fool,” said Adolf. “Why do you think Indians wanted scalps? It is because it is the only way to own the person just captured.”

“But you are my brother.”

“It is better that your brother owns your brain than some stranger. A stranger could throw it away.”

“Give it back to me,” said Edmund.

“I will when the time comes.”

“When will that be?”

“When I tell you.”

“I don't believe you. I don't believe you own anything. My brain feels the same.”

“Oh, you will see a difference. You will feel headaches. They will bother you. That is the first sign.”

Edmund was ready to cry, but he did not. They walked home in silence.

Now, in church, Adolf's heart was beating in time, step by step, with the strides they had taken on returning from the woods.

He was also feeling a most peculiar pain from this recollection. It was in his heart and was as sharp in sensation as a splinter driven under one's fingernail.

He told himself not to think about Edmund anymore. Not on this day. Indeed, he prayed to God to be able to cease thinking of Edmund. With my help, he succeeded to some degree, as much as one can remove most of a splinter under the nail. The fragment that remains, however, has now become a root ready to offer its own discomfort. So the memory festered in his heart.

It was his turn now to be ready to weep. He thought of how Klara used to call him “
ein Liebling Gottes.
” “Oh,” she used to tell him, “you are so special.” That was true, he told himself. (“God's own Beloved.”) He had not been like Gustav and the others. Perhaps he had been selected by Destiny. He had survived.

I could see the extent of the reconstruction that lay before me. I would have to restore him once more to what he had felt when he was three and his mother had adored him.

Now he felt that his mother was ready to abandon him, just as she had abandoned Edmund. Why, then, must he feel so guilty? Let her be the one to feel the pain. She had pretended to love Edmund and yet she was not here in church. How awful. So unfeeling!