The Castle in the Forest (41 page)

^{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 Your knowledge is outdated.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}

^To
Honor

^and

^To
Fear

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 Fischl-ham. 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.}