The Castle in the Forest (42 page)
Sitting by the stump, there came an afternoon at the end of summer when the more caustic tastes of mourning finally passed through some vent of his mind, and he said to himself, “I am relieved that I do not have to worry anymore. I loved my bees, but their loss is not my fault.”
At this juncture, I did not have to pay daily attention to the Hitler family. They would be in Hafeld until they left. I was hardly concerned. One of my developed instincts is to know when the humans under my study are ready to change at a good rate, as opposed to when they are virtually inert.
In truth, that is how we measure Time. Except for those occasions when the Maestro assigns us to arenas where history can be shaped, we live reflexively. We, too, are in need of fallow periods. For me, the quiet summer of the Hitler family went by like sleep. I tended a little to other clients.
Alois, meanwhile, was marooned in the pall of a long and lackluster meditation. He was worrying to a modest degree about the value of the farm. If he were to sell it, could the price match what he had paid? Or would a potential buyer recognize the beginnings of neglect? That became the focus of his attention. Nothing, he decided, can be more subtle than the onset of neglect. While he did feel more relaxed than in many a year, it did nag at him that he was leaving all too many chores to the women—certainly those which did not call for a man’s strength. He did nothing with the vegetable garden. He thought of buying a new dog; instead, he examined the paint on poor dead Spartaner’s doghouse and decided it was not yet ready to peel in the summer heat.
They did not seem to need a new dog. With young Alois gone, he did not have to entertain any fears of an irate father skulking in the neighborhood. No parent of Greta Marie Schmidt was likely to appear on the doorstep—he could give thanks that that particular young lady was not pregnant, for if she were, he would by now have known all about it. And the smuggler who lived on the other
side of Fischlham hardly entered his thoughts. Somehow, that phantom of a malefactor also seemed far away.
Senior’s real worry was that he might become habituated to idleness. Even a few minutes spent in doing nothing at all had once been guaranteed to annoy him. Now he felt a little too contented by the drift of a cloud or, for that matter, a curl of cigar smoke.
Such peace could prove expensive. A farm that remained unworked—no matter how tidy one kept the house, the barn, and the yard—might never look right. Not to a potential buyer. A small part of Alois continued to run uphill in his sleep. It was as if his un-planted fields were reproaching him.
The economic facts (which he calculated over and over on separate pieces of paper using separate stubs of pencil) were that he and Klara, no matter how careful they might be with expenses, would sooner or later be obliged to spend more each quarter than his pension.
So there might come a time when he would have to decide that it cost too much to go to his miserable tavern in Fischlham. That would double every indignity. He had to recognize a fact. He was missing Linz. There, at least, you could drink with intelligent people. What it all came down to was that they must sell the farm. He knew it would not happen quickly. These days, the less work one did, the longer it took for anything to get done. Moreover, very much against his will, he was beginning to feel remorse about Alois Junior. What an ungovernable emotion! Was it incumbent upon him as a father to forgive his son? Yet what if Alois Junior was also full of remorse? He could not bear the thought of that boy alone in a poor room, sitting on a mean cot, his eyes full of tears.
He might as well have had an amputated forearm whose nerve endings remained alive. Alois Senior began to think again of Hitler and Sons, Apiarian Products. Because he had to invest no real belief in the idea, the dream, perversely, was sweeter than before.
He even brought it up with Klara. If she had felt at a good and considerable distance from her husband all summer, if she could not forgive him for being such a helpless drunk on that terrible
night, nonetheless, her sense of duty still prevailed. “If you want him back, if you truly want him back, I will not stand in the way.” That is what she said. That was what she felt obliged to tell him. She even felt a sense of shame, for her quick hope was that they would not find him.
No such drama was going to develop, however. A letter without a return address came a few days later from Vienna, a vile letter. “You killed my mother.” The phrase was repeated several times. Then the letter declared that the son would yet be famous, and the father would twist in his grave.
Alois could not believe what he read. The rest was worse. “You were a terrible farmer, and the reason is clear. You are, as I happen to know, half-Jewish. No wonder you cannot be a farmer.” And there were so many misspellings in the letter that out of a sense of shame for his son, Alois Senior had to write it out all over again before he felt able to show it to Klara. As he wrote, his hand shook badly, but the original, with its ink blots and errors of syntax, was abominable. And to think that the boy had always been able to speak well.
All the same, these awful words had to be shown to Klara. Alois Junior could only have received such rank ideas by listening to Jo-hann Poelzl. That pious hypocrite!
Klara, however, kept the discussion well away from Poelzl. She only said, “I did not mind that thought so much. I used to think this was your reason for not going to church.”
He was indignant. “It did not bother you to believe you had a husband who was half-Jewish?”
“How could it? Alois, you have always said that a man who hates Jews is uncultured. So, I knew. It is not appropriate to hate Jews. It is a sign of ignorance.”
“But that does not make me Jewish.”
He had a headache, sudden and fierce. Old memories of the earliest taunts at school now came back. When he was six years old. Of course. That had been the talk in Strones and in Spital.
“It never bothered you to think I was half-Jewish?” he said again.
“No. I was always so worried about our children. I wanted them to be able to live.” She could not keep her eyes from watering—not with these recollections at the root of her tear ducts. “So I was glad to think you were part Jewish. I thought maybe that could give a little fresh blood to our Adolf and our Edmund and Paula.”
“But I am not at all Jewish,” he said. “We must be clear about this. Old Johann Nepomuk once told me who I am. I am his son. I am your real uncle, yes.”
“He told you? He said such words?” She knew her grandfather Johann Nepomuk well enough to understand that he could never utter such a speech. Not in that way—not so directly.
“He,” said Alois, “suggested this information to me. He did state that he knew who my father was. And then he said, ‘This man was not Jewish.’ He did not have to say more. It was clear. There was only one way he could know. So that was that. The next time a boy called me a Jew, I gave him a good poke in the face and broke his nose. That was one fellow who was left with an ugly mug.” Alois began to laugh at the recollection. Then he laughed even more, as if to signify that he was not heartsick. “And all these years you thought the opposite?”
She nodded. She hardly knew whether to be relieved or disappointed. She had always felt excitement sneak into her at the thought of being wed to a man with such blood. Jews did forbidden things in bed. That she had heard. Maybe Alois and she had even done these same forbidden things—was that not so? And Jews were reputed to be intelligent. That she had also heard. Now she was truly confused.
Alois, thinking of Johann Poelzl, could have boiled the old bird for soup.
2
T
he reader may recall that when I presented myself as the narrator of this novel, I appeared as an SS man. Indeed, I was one. Over that period in the late 1930s, I was installed corporeally in a particular SS officer named Dieter. At a price to myself, I lived and functioned within him. I can say that we do not engage in total investiture unless the stakes require it. For our personal cost is direct. One has to relinquish the stimulation of living in more than a single consciousness. Demonic power is thereby reduced. One has become a simulacrum of a human.
So, as Dieter, I did make inquiries in Graz in 1938 about Hitler’s grandfather. The way I learned, however, that the true father of Alois was Johann Nepomuk came by information I had once received directly from the Maestro, which, of course, meant that I was not in a position to name my source. In Special Section IV-2a, we were obliged, as in any other Intelligence organization, to be credible at least among ourselves, and so the only way to explain to Himmler what the origin of my information had been was to fabricate the story. While I knew that Hitler was not Jewish, I would not have been able to convince Heinrich Himmler of such a fact without revealing my source. So, to make it credible, I needed to use a means of information gathering with which Heini was familiar—human witnesses.
Of course, it was not quite that simple. I did not know the truth to a certainty back in 1938 so much as I sensed that once I had known it—which is a way of saying that the Maestro must have concluded long ago that he had to close down the memories of his
devils if he wished to keep order in his share of the world. Nonetheless, I would warrant that the memories we are not encouraged to recall are still there to serve, no matter how muted, as our guides.
I mention this condign matter because the question whether Jewish blood was present in Alois has reared up so suddenly.
He was in a fury. His rage at Johann Poelzl would soon subside into what would be no less than a lifelong detestation—his heart would lift on the day that Poelzl died—but his fury against Alois Junior rose up again.
For that matter, his conversation with Klara had stimulated such an inner storm that he could not stay in bed. For the first time in all the years they had lain side by side, near to each other or not, he now had to get up on this night, dress, pace the floor, try to sleep on the couch, try to sleep on the floor, and succeeded, of course, in keeping both of them awake.
Klara knew she would have to pay. “Don’t say a word,” she told herself. “Do not touch this subject ever again.”
While I cannot speak with the authority of those devils who are doctors of medicine, I will say it is possible that the cancer which would end Klara’s life in 1908 could have taken a step forward on this miserable night.
Too much had happened to her at once. She had lost possession of a long-cherished idea. Because of the certainty that all her children with Alois were one-quarter Jewish, she believed that her last three had been provided with more opportunity to stay alive. If she had one notion about Jews (and she could not really say she had ever met a full-blooded Jew), it was that no matter what their faults might be, and she had heard the most awful stories from friends and relatives, even from storekeepers, the truth was also obvious—those Jews knew how to survive. To be so disliked, yet still be among the living. Some were even rich! Klara had always been impressed, therefore, in absolute privacy with herself—whom could she talk to about this?—that she did have three living children, saved in good part by their Jewish blood.
If Gustav and Ida and Otto had all died much too soon, she could attribute that to her side of the family. But Adolf had survived, and then Edmund and Paula, over whose health she prayed every night.
Now her confidence was breached. If the three remaining children continued to live, it would not be because of some preservative in their veins. There would be no such advantage.
A large reason not to sleep. What was worse, she was ashamed of her cowardice. How could she have accepted the idea that Alois Junior should be invited back? Lying there, listening to Alois Senior thumping the floor with his body as he lay down, she was soon suffering her own rage. It was shocking. She could not believe what she was telling herself. If it was possible, yes, she would kill Alois Junior. Only, she knew she could not. She would not ever. But the effort to repel such a fury throbbed in her heart, which is to say, in her breast, with such force and such detestation that, yes, it is possible—this could have been the night when the breast cancer which would yet burn with hell’s pains in her chest might have begun. Since the answer is not easily available, I prefer to return to Alois trying to sleep on the floor.
The immensity of his rage on this night was that he had betrayed himself. That spoiled all the joy which is also implicit in rage, a notion too infrequently considered. Rage, after all, can offer the same nourishing sense of self-righteousness that is available on more ordinary occasions to the most hypocritical of churchgoers. The core of such pleasure is never to be angry at oneself, only at others. Yet, here, on this night, Alois was infuriated at the cost of his own deeds.
If Junior had turned out badly, it was his fault, his fault alone. By such a light, he was among the worst of human beings, a weak father. He had spent his life obeying orders, and then enforcing them in the Customs service, he had revered Franz Josef, a gallant, great, and good king who embodied hard work and discipline. His guardianship of his own nature had become a species of homage to Franz Josef. Yet he had implanted none of this sense of respect in