The Castle in the Forest (49 page)

^{boiling.” Adolf nodded profoundly. “But nobody can take these matters for granted.”}

^{“My mother would never do that to me.”}

^{“Maybe not our mother, but I cannot say what Angela would do.”}

^{“Oh, no,” said Edmund, “Angela would never do something like that to Paula or to me.”}

^{“Don’t be so certain.”}

^{Edmund shook his head. “I know you are wrong.”}

^{“Do you want another story?”}

^{“Maybe not.”}

^{“This one is the best,” said Adolf.}

^{“Is it truly the best?”}

^“Yes.”

^{“Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”}

^{“It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse. In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.”}

^{At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.}

^{Unfortunately for Adolf, this last conversation was overheard by Angela. She was standing in the doorway shaking her head. Adolf had time to think that his luck was foul.}

^{Angela patted Edmund’s face until he could sit up. Then she went to tell Klara.}

^{His mother no longer called him Adi, certainly not on any occasion when she had to scold him. “Adolf, this was dreadful. You are going to be punished.”}

^{“For what? Edmund loves the stories. He kept asking me for more.”}

^{“You knew what you were doing. So I am going to tell your father. I have to. He will decide on your punishment.”}

^{“Mother, this is not something to bring Father into.”}

^{“If I don’t tell him, then I will be the one who must look for a real punishment. And maybe I will. Maybe I will buy you no present at Christmas.”}

^{“This is so unfair,” said Adolf. “I try to entertain my kid brother. But he is a brat.”}

^{“Do you accept what I say? No gift for Christmas?”}

^{“Yes. If you think that is fair, I have to accept. But, Mother, please, look into your heart when the time comes. See if you will still see me as guilty then.”}

^{Klara was furious. This was even worse. He was so certain that she would change her mind and buy him a good present after all.}

^{That evening, therefore, she did tell Alois.}

^{His father had no doubts. He gave Adolf a severe whipping. It was the worst since they moved into the house in Leonding. But this time, Adolf was determined to make no sound at all. He thought of Preisinger all the while. He stiffened his body.}

^{Alois was beginning to feel as if he had Junior back on his hands. Another criminal to deal with! That excited more rage.}

^{Between each blow, Adolf thought of how Alois Junior had run away. It was the one memory he could use to make no sound. He could be and must be as strong as Alois Junior. If he did not cry, then his own strength might become great enough to justify whatever he might yet want to do next. Strength created its own kind of justice. He called upon the force of command that had been near to him after the fire in the forest. He had ordered them all then never to speak of it, and they had obeyed. Yes, he had been full of fear then, but he had called on his force of command. Then he had lived for days in the fear that someone would talk. He could hardly know it, but I had been with him through that turmoil, and I was with him now. Adolf’s confidence was so fragile that, metaphorically speaking, I had to maintain his ego at full erection. (Egos are prey to the same weakness that erections exhibit when unsure of what comes next.)}

^{So, yes, I was there to monitor the whipping of Adolf, and fortify his resolve. If it was most important to him that he not weep, I had to be ready to diminish the intensity of Alois’ blows whenever the boy might break. Equally, I was ready to increase his father’s}

^{force, whenever it flagged. There were moments when Alois’ fear of overstraining his heart was in direct opposition to my desire to salt Adolf’s will. Let his hatred for Alois become intense enough to serve many an uncommon purpose ahead.}

^{Nonetheless, balance is crucial to our activities. Equally, I could not allow antipathy to his father to become excessive. Immense hatreds in childhood that find no dependable outlet have to make a client unstable. While high imbalance was acceptable in Luigi Lucheni, that would not do for Adolf. We had put in too much effort on the boy. We did not care to have to deal with a future too full of errant impulses and blind rages. Indeed, one product of this heavy whipping was bound to be detestation of Edmund. That made me uneasy. Edmund had remained in such a sorry state after hearing the tales of the Grimm brothers that Klara tried to lull him to sleep with lullabies. Adolf, lying in the next cot, felt as bruised thereby as if he had fallen out of a tree. Indeed, his feelings became so outraged by Klara’s apparent indifference to him that he decided to run away. Right there, lying on his cot, he so decided—aching bones and all. He even made a point of telling this to Edmund after Klara left the room.}

^{“It is all your doing,” said Adolf. “So I must go.”}

^{Immediately, Edmund leaped out of bed and ran to tell his father. Yet, when Alois came up the stairs to collar the potential runaway, Adolf said, “It’s a lie! My brother is always telling lies. This one I will not forgive him for. This lie is atrocious! I’ll get him for this!”}

^{“You’ll get him, will you?”}

^{Alois was not ready to give another beating. His arms were aching more than Adolf’s back. Still, he was sufficiently concerned to lock the boy in a room on the ground floor whose only window had bars. Alone, Adolf tried to squeeze his way through. It was too tight. He soon discovered that his pajamas seemed to make the difference. Their buttons kept getting caught on the bars. So he took them off, rolled them up, put them outside the bars, and, stark naked, attempted to wriggle through once more.}

^{He was so overheated with the fury of his righteousness that he did not feel the chill of the open casement window nor hear the sound of his father’s boots returning to the room. Only at the sound of the door unlocking did he pull away from the bars, seize a tablecloth, and wrap it around himself. Alois, entering, the brass key still in his hand, took in the situation, and roared with laughter. He yelled for Klara until she came through the door. Then Alois pointed to Adolf and said, “Look at the toga boy, our Toga Boy!” Klara shook her head and left the room. That roused Alois to a full harangue: “So you were trying to run away. I tell you, it would not be such a loss. All the same, I forbid it. Not because I would miss you, Toga Boy. I would not. I forbid it because I would have to call in the police to tell them you are missing, and they might put me in jail.” Alois knew this was an outright exaggeration, but he was full of masterly scorn. “How your mother would weep! Her son is lost and her husband is in prison. Shame has come upon the Hitler family! All because of Toga Boy!”}

^{Adolf had stood up to the whipping, but now he was in tears. My work on his ego had suffered a loss.}

^{What soon made it worse is that Alois came back into the room, roared with laughter, and said, “I have just stepped outside. It is so cold tonight that you would have been back in two minutes knocking on the door. It is not so good to have a bad temper, but it is worse to be a fool.”}

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 Dumm-kopf 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.}