The Castle in the Forest (38 page)

^{not. Not for long. He must soon say goodbye to everyone and to everything here, especially to his horse. Or should he steal him?}

^{This last idea proved too large for Alois Junior. Yet it was enough to know that, for the sake of his future self-respect, he would not leave until he was ready to strike back. That must come one way or another. Soon.}

⁸

^T

^{hey were quiet at supper, even Paula, whom Klara kept on her breast. Alois Senior was certainly preoccupied. He had received a few more bee stings than the one or two or, occasionally, three, he was used to accepting on most days—that was part of the occupational hazard, no more. Tonight he not only had little to say, but hardly noticed that the others were silent.}

^{He was waiting for bed. Lately Klara had begun to treat his bee stings and he was able to enjoy that. She was so adept. She was careful. She never pulled the stingers out clumsily. So he did not have to suffer the small bites of barbs left under his skin through the night. Done poorly, it could feel like a needle had been left inside. A tiny wound but a real one, ready to puff up. Sometimes it even felt personal, as if, from meanness itself, it refused to stop hurting. But Klara knew how to nudge the flesh where the stinger was peeping out and then coax it forth by soft pressure.}

^{Now, when they went to bed, he was looking to have his pains cared for. Only, on this night, he had to wait. First she must describe all the mess that Junior had made, all that
egg
and shell. He did not care to listen. “
Ach,
”
he said, “it breeds bad feeling if you always take Adi’s side.”}

^{“What are you saying? Tell me of something good we can expect from Junior.”}

^{“No,” he said, “you must listen to me. We are obliged to look for a balance. We must try. A good balance between these boys, and it will all quiet down. That is the secret.”}

^{A silence. It was followed by a deeper silence.}

^{“I will try,” she said at last.}

^{Her instinct was to reduce this space between them. If she didn’t, the difference would increase. But could she believe that her husband was right? Young Alois was behaving like Fanni. Only ten times worse than Fanni could ever have tried to be. Yet, was it possible? Had she left a curse?}

^{They certainly had to live with poor omens for more than a few nights. Alois Junior kept giving a demonstration of his skills through these last days of June, doing just enough good work to justify his right to go off with Ulan. The boy was good at his duties, he kept the hive boxes clean, he knew when and where to move the trays. He was even able to locate the Queen and put her into a queen cage without using the glass trap. Like Der Alte, he could do it with his fingers.}

^{Now, at the dinner table, his silences weighed on them. No member of the family crossed him these days, not even Alois Senior, but then, despite himself, he could feel sympathy for this son. He understood one side of young Alois so well. Riding Ulan, the boy must feel as handsome as an officer on one of the better streets of Vienna. But Alois also knew what was hatching beneath. If, at present, the horse came first, soon it would be all about girls. The father knew this as well as if sperm were stirring in his own good equipment. Those revelations! Nothing could be better than the moment when a woman opened her legs for you. That first time! If you had an eye for the little differences, you knew twice as much about her as you could learn from her face. Alois Senior would attest to that. The female organ! Whoever designed this form had certainly been sly about the job. (This was about as close as Alois ever came to admiring the Creator.) Such a wonderful array of meats and juices—such a panoply of flesh in miniature—this offering of archways and caverns and lips. Alois was certainly no philosopher, so he would not have known how to speak of Becom-}

^{ing (that state of existence when Being suddenly feels itself out in the open), but all the same, he could have given a tip to Heidegger. Becoming is, yes, exactly, when a woman opens her legs! Alois felt like a poet. How not? These were poetic thoughts.}

^{Let me leave it at this: If Alois could have talked to his son, he would have had a good deal to tell him. But he would never venture to speak of these matters. Having been a guardian of the border, which is to say a policeman, he could not even trust his children. A good policeman had to live with trust as if he were handling a dangerous bottle of acid. Trust was teeming with risk. To offer your closest thoughts to others was to ask them to betray your counsel.}

^{Still, if he could have spoken to young Alois, he would have been quick to inform him that there was nothing better than to be a young man interested in girls—he, the father, could tell him the best of stories if it came to that—”but, young Alois, I must impart this to you: Young women can be dangerous. Often, they are the sweetest angels, a few of them maybe, but it is not them you have to be ready to deal with. It is the fathers of these angels, or their brothers. It can even be an uncle. Once I almost received a beating from a girl’s uncle. I was big enough, but he was bigger. I had to talk my way out of it. So will you. It is certain that you will know how to talk, young Alois, but that is an ability which only works in a good-sized town, or best of all in the city. Out here in Hafeld and Fischlham—not so good—country people can be difficult.”}

^{There was so much he would have told his son. If only they could have confided in each other. It made Alois sad. I must say, however, that it can certainly be construed as his fault. What could be closer to him than maintaining his authority?}

^{So he would not be so generous as to offer the root of his advice. But if he had been able to, he would have told Junior: “Enjoy every woman you can, but be aware of the price. Especially in the country. Listen, young Alois,” he would have said, “country people do not have enough to do with their minds. Their backs are strong, but their lives—year after year, it is the same. They are tired of being bored. So they start to think about the wrongs that have been}

^{done to them. I say to you, son, watch out! Do not get a girl in trouble. When the time comes, do not be too certain that you will be able to deny that you are the fellow who made her pregnant. Sometimes that does not work.”}

^{Alois lay in bed, drenched in perspiration. His son’s drama unfolded before him with the power of a tragedy. He would have said to young Alois, “Do not take for granted the father of any girl you have had in the straw. Never insult a peasant who has too little to think about. Ten years from now, he will find out where you are living, and he will come to your door, and he will blow your head off with a shotgun. I have heard more than one story like that.”}

^{Since devils know to what extent men and women are able to conceal from themselves a clear view of their own motives, I soon understood that behind all this splendid advice to young Alois, the father was worried about his own safety, yes, Alois Senior felt as if it could be his own treasured buttocks that were exposed.}

^{One evening, over a month ago, while having his beer in the Fischlham tavern, there had been talk which he dismissed at the time as idle, a bit of prattle about a fellow who lived on the other side of the tavern a few miles farther away from Hafeld. Two of the farmers in the tavern actually knew the man, and it seemed this fellow had spoken about Alois. Yes, more than once, they assured him, “He knows you, and he made it clear. He don’t like you.” They had laughed.}

^{“I assure you,” Alois said in all of his local majesty, “if I ever met this individual, I have forgotten it. His name means nothing to my mind.”}

^{Indeed, it did not, until the name came back to Alois during the middle of a sleepless June night. When he got up to look out their bedroom window, he was offered a moonlit view of silver fields, and thought of how happy these fields must be to lie fallow and not have to satisfy young potatoes grubbing down for more of the earth’s riches. Alois, however, then made the mistake of looking at the full moon, and abruptly, the face of this fellow who had declared his dislike of Alois Hitler came back to him.}

^{Good Lord! That fellow had been a smuggler, yes, he had caught him in Linz one day. Yes, he could remember now. The fool had been trying to take a vial of opium over into Germany. Alois could certainly recall the hatred in the man’s eyes when he was caught. The vile look in his eyes had been offensive enough to tempt Alois to strike him, but such an act he considered entirely beneath himself. Certainly, he had not laid a fist on anyone while on Customs duty, not in years.}

^{Was the full moon a mirror to one’s memory? It was there before him now, and so clearly. He had not struck the fellow, no, but he had mocked him. “You are angry at me?” he had said. “Be angry at yourself. You are a fool. A measly test tube of opium buried inside a leg of ham. Even my first day on duty when I was eighteen, I would have caught you. That is the kind of fool you are.”}

^{If he was going to recall it properly, could it be that the smuggler had not begun to look back with hatred until Alois began to jeer at him? Smugglers do not hate you for catching them—that is part of the game—but do not mock them. How often had he said as much to young officers. “Have a little fun with a bad fellow, and he will never forgive you.”}

^{Alois suffered a night full of fear—the smuggler he taunted had received a year in jail. Now the man was free! Alois arose from a bed bereft of decent rest with the recognition that there was not going to be a hell of a lot of sleep for him until he got a new dog, a truly fierce hound. Luther was good for no more by now than yo-deling at the moon on a night when nothing was happening. He needed a dog who would be ready for a lout stealing across the fields toward them with odium in his heart.}

⁹

^I

^{t so happened that the right dog was available. A farmer he knew was looking to sell a German shepherd. “He is the best of his litter, which is why I have kept him all these months and have fed him, this gross guzzler. Can you afford to labor longer hours? Because he eats all the time. That is why I will sell him to you for next to nothing. Maybe he will make you as poor as he has made me. Then I can laugh, and you will cry.”}

^{Good beer talk. Alois decided to buy the hound.}

^{This was a good one, Alois could tell. When it came to dogs, he had always had a nice understanding. He could stare right into the eye of a fierce mongrel, yet because he felt a moment of love for the poor ugly old bastard, the animal would usually respond well. Alois could talk to dogs. If the beast growled a bit, Alois would say, “Oh, fellow, how can you speak like that to me? I like you, I approach you as a friend.” And he even knew enough to bring his hand to the dog’s mouth as a token of friendship. He had never made a mistake. The one time in a hundred when a dog was actually fierce enough to bite, Alois could sense that, too, and he would extend the forefinger and pinky of the near hand, his separated fingers directed to the dog’s eyes like pointed horns, and the animal might keep up his imprecations, but he would not attack.}

^{So Alois was delighted with this overgrown, six-month-old German shepherd who had the regal name of Friedrich. He would be fierce. Better still, he was a one-man dog. Let the children recognize that quickly. Let Klara complain. Let young Alois mind his business. He would be the only one to feed Friedrich. And he}

^{would change his name. From what he had heard, King Friedrich the Great had had a boyfriend, not a mistress. So maybe he was not so great. Besides, he was a German. To hell with honoring him. He would call the dog Spartaner. A warrior. Any ex-smuggler who had thoughts of coming to the farm in the middle of the night would not dare, not now, not with both dogs present. You could take care of Luther with a piece of meat and a cloth dipped in chloroform, but Spartaner would be there to attack you.}

^{How Alois enjoyed the walk back over the hills. He let the dog off the leash early, threw sticks for the animal to return, taught him to stop and sit at command, although Spartaner learned all this so quickly that he must have been trained a bit already. No question, however, the dog was good. Alois found himself in such a fine mood that he almost wrestled with the beast. Indeed, he restrained himself only because it was too soon. Wonderful. Quick love between a dog and a man is close to a perfect event, he decided.}

^{The animal did not cease grinning with an all-knowing, all-breathing tongue that lolled at the edges of his grin until they came in view of the farm. But now it was as if he realized, and all too abruptly, that there was a problem waiting right by the house.}

^{Of course. It was Luther. Alois was ready to clap himself on the head for having been in such a state of blind certainty that he had not thought once of how these two dogs might get along on first meeting.}

^{They didn’t. They were terrified. Each was abominably afraid of the other, and each was sick with shame at his own fear. They nipped with their teeth at their own fur, clawed at newly discovered fleas beyond the reach of their bite, they barked at bees and then at butterflies, they ran in circles which did not overlap each other, they staked out territories with their urine.}

^{Luther, while now an old dog, was larger than Spartaner, considerably so, but he was making the big mistake of lumbering around enough to tell the young dog what to capitalize upon.}

^{As it transpired, they went to war two hours after this first sight of each other. The family rushed out in the yard to witness them}