The Castle in the Forest (51 page)

^{This conviction of personal immortality can cause us considerable difficulty. Many of our men and women, particularly late in life, come to the conclusion that if they atone for their sins, they will be reborn. That does play havoc with hitherto dependable clients. They are not, after all, completely unbalanced on this certainty. No matter how abominable and unrepentant are a few of the humans chosen by Him to be born again, he probably does feel there is something exceptional present even if it failed to develop properly last time out.}

^{At this point, I began to wonder whether the Maestro might even have a covert influence in the D.K.’s councils. It is, obviously, too large a question for me, but the Maestro does seem to know which of our clients have been chosen for rebirth. Yet to speak of this with greater authority, I would have to know how the D.K. envisions the future of His Creation. Is it comparable to the ruthlessness of our Maestro? Is ruthlessness indeed a necessary passion among these divine forces?}

¹²

^A

^{few months after Edmund’s death, Klara began to have fearful thoughts. Was it possible that Adolf’s attitude to Edmund had been more than cruel? Was it even unforgivable? Angela told her again that when the brothers played together she had overheard Adi terrifying Edmund with fairy tales from Grimm, the very worst ones.}

^{From her bedroom window, Klara could see Adolf shooting at rats while sitting on the cemetery wall. She would flinch each time she heard the popping sound of the discharge. For her, the air gun was equal to an ugly voice. She felt as if she could hear disaffected spirits coming up to her from the cemetery. When someone is not a client, we can still exert some small influence on them, and in this case, I certainly did not wish Klara to be pushing Adolf more deeply into his depression, so I did lay atmospheres upon her sleep in which I suggested that Adi was not evil, but suffering terribly. This technique is available to use on any mother who retains some love for her child. Over a period, therefore, the situation did improve. Once again, Klara came to recognize the need to change Alois’ feelings. As she told her husband, the boy’s dreadful mood was beginning to affect his marks at the little school in Leonding. The explanation had to be that he was mourning for Edmund. “But he is also afraid of you,” Klara dared to say. “He hates disappointing you. Alois, you must become again a kind man to your son.”}

^{Those were heartfelt words, but they only succeeded in reminding him of Edmund. Adolf, alas, was not Edmund. All the same, he nodded.}

^{“I will do what I can,” he said. “Sometimes my heart slams shut like a door.”}

^{Once aroused, however, she was not about to close off her own feelings. She must find a way to be near again to Adolf. His heart could also shut like a door. But she had noticed that Adolf was most impressed with the new year, 1900. “Adolf, this will be your century,” she told him. “I know it. You will do wonderful things in time to come.”}

^{He did feel important that she spoke in such a tone, but he hardly knew whether to believe her. How could it be his century? At this point, he felt incapable of accomplishing anything of high worth. So he nagged her. “Is it really so?” he kept asking. At last, her tongue slipped enough to uncover the truth. “You are the one I must love,” she said. He brooded over her phrasing. He was aware for the first time that women were not there just to love you because that was their duty. Instead, they could offer love that was real or provide a substitute that was less dependable.}

^{Here the Maestro intervened. “Do not,” I was told, “encourage any undue interest in women. Let him remain fearful.”}

¹³

^O

^{n late overcast afternoons in early spring, when there was a fog, and the odors of moss and mold rose from many a tombstone, Adolf would sit in the damp of the low cemetery wall and wait in the dusk for rats to come out. When they faced to the west, their eyes would shine in the sunset, even in a clouded sunset, and so would offer sharp targets. When he was able, however, to hit one with his air gun, he did not feel up to approaching the corpse. It was too close to evening for him to be ready to step off from the low wall onto the cemetery sward.}

^{Early morning, however, before he was off to school, he would pass by, and if no dogs or cats had been ready to reconnoiter the graveyard at night, and the cadaver of the rat was still intact, he would inhale a first hint of the aroma of carrion. That stirred his mood. He would wonder whether comparable changes had taken place in Edmund’s flesh.}

^{Even by spring, he did not feel ready to go back to the forest. He kept to his perch on the cemetery wall.}

^{In turn, I had decided not to discourage Adolf’s guilt. Indeed, this instinct was soon corroborated. While the Cudgels were partial to guilt, since they were invariably looking to increase all impulses to atonement in their clients, we usually chose to calcify guilt, leave it, so to speak, bone-dry. While that did raise the risk that we were narrowing future possibilities for the psyche, I had to be ready to lift Adolf out of his depression before it grew extreme. Depression can descend into aberration. On many an evening, Adi sat on the cemetery wall wondering what he would do if Edmund’s arm were to rise suddenly out of the grave. Would he run? Would he attempt to talk to Edmund? Would he ask for forgiveness? Or would he pelt the limb with his air gun?}

^{All through the winter, the spring, and the summer of 1900, the memory of Edmund’s illness remained like a deadweight on his chest.}

^{It was not hard to discern the reason. Adolf still possessed some funds of conscience. Even as self-pity is the lubricant we use most often to smooth the entrance of the heart into uglier emotions, so does conscience become our antagonist. The Cudgels whip people into shape by way of conscience. We, in turn, when dealing with the most advanced of our clients, do our best to extirpate conscience altogether. Once accomplished, we then proceed to build up a facsimile of good conscience, ready and able to justify most of the passions that the Cudgels seek to repress: greed, lust, envy—no need to list the sacred seven. The point is that when this substitute is properly developed by us, our clients’ ability to justify ugly acts is strengthened. We have then succeeded in releasing conscience}

^{from the shameful memories that obliged it to develop in the first place. I can add that we are most successful when the all-but-emptied remains of the old conscience are stubborn enough to vie with one’s new sense of detachment, and so are felt to be a useless scourge, an enemy to one’s well-being. Of course, serial murderers who take pride in their daring have usually succeeded in banishing all conscience. A corollary to this is the benefit we gain from war when a soldier grows conscienceless. Our work is then simplified. It is calm periods that call upon the skills of advanced devils like myself. I will say that it is not at all routine to convince a man or woman to slay another. Left to their own estimate, they worry that murder may be the most selfish of acts. Primitives certainly know this to be true. When ready to sacrifice an animal for one of their feasts, they are wise enough to ask forgiveness before cutting the throat.}

^{In turn, I was now ready to fortify Adi’s sense of the power that murder can offer the murderer. Of course, he was too young for our most developed techniques, but I did work up a dream-etching where Adolf became a hero in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. This entailed the suggestion that he had been there in his previous life, almost two decades before he was born in 1889. It was not difficult to bring him to believe he had massacred a platoon of French soldiers who had made the signal mistake of attacking his lonely outpost. Of course, such a dream-etching was gross, but it did prepare a base on which to lay more sophisticated impulses later. By itself, however, the Franco-Prussian dream-etching was naught but a wish fulfillment, and their effects are most temporary.}

^{May I say that we knew all about wish fulfillment long before Dr. Freud had anything to say on the matter. Our approach to human psychology must of necessity go further. Indeed, we smile at the superficiality of so many of Freud’s analyses. That is his fault. He wanted nothing to do, after all, with angels or demons and was willfully determined not to recognize the engagement of the Dummkopf and the Maestro in large or small human matters.}

^{On the other hand, a small portion of praise can still be given to}

^{the good doctor for his delineation of the ego. That concept has become one of the tools by which humans have become almost as adept as we are at assessing shifts of self-worth within.}

^{Be it said that the state of Adolf’s ego had become the focus of my attention. It would do no good to keep raising his estimate of his own worth if, at the same time, he was terrified that he had helped to kill Edmund. Because he did not wish to believe it, he most certainly did feel guilty, and the worst of it was that I hardly knew the answer. Had he, or had he not?}

^{The facts were simple—which is to say that the deed was clear, but the consequences were not. On a morning when Angela was working with Klara and Paula in the garden and Alois was out for his walk, Adolf found Edmund playing alone in the room that they had shared until Adolf’s illness.}

^{Adolf walked over and kissed Edmund. Simple as that. I must admit that I was impelling him. If, personally, I certainly did feel something comparable to affection for Edmund, there was little I could do about it in this situation. In those days, I was not prepared to defy an order given directly by the Maestro.}

^{“Why are you kissing me?” asked Edmund.}

^{“Because I love you.”}

^{“You do?”}

^{“I love you, Edmund.”}

^{“Is that why you scalped me?”}

^{“You must forget that. You must forgive me. I think that is why I caught the measles. I was so ashamed of myself afterward.”}

^{“Is that true?”}

^{“I think so. Yes. And that is why I must kiss you again. That is the way to give you back your scalp.”}

^{“You do not need to. I have no headache today.”}

^{“We cannot take a chance. Let me kiss you again.”}

^{“Isn’t that bad? You have had these measles?”}

^{“Between brothers and sisters, yes, it could be bad. But not between brothers. It has been established medically that brothers are able to kiss even when one has measles.”}

^{“Momma said we must not. We are not supposed to kiss you yet.”}

^{“Momma does not understand that it is all right between brothers.”}

^{“You swear?”}

^{“I swear.”}

^{“Let me see your fingers when you swear.”}

^{Adolf was impelled most definitely by me then. He held up his hands, fingers outstretched. “I swear,” he said, and kissed Edmund repeatedly, a boy’s kiss full of slobbering, and Edmund kissed him back. He was so happy that Adi did love him after all.}

^{Edmund came down with the measles. And the disease proved fatal. We were responsible for his death. Or we were not. I knew no more than Adolf. Night after night, therefore, a new platoon of French soldiers were massacred in Adolf’s sleep. I had decided to distract him with one wish fulfillment after another. Taken each by each, they would produce no large effect, but quantity does change quality, as Engels once wrote to Marx, and so I believe my work would have had its desired effect if there had not been separate problems with which he had to contend. Otherwise, I think Adolf might have been ready eventually to move his psychic strengths over to the rigorous belief that murder offers power to a murderer.}

^{BOOK XIII}

^Alois

^and

^Adolf

¹

^A

^{dolf Hitler’s readiness to exterminate humans in the gas chamber was obviously not at this time, in 1900, an active longing. If I speak, therefore, of a year like 1945, it is to make no direct connection to the months after Edmund’s death. Wholly guided in those years by the Maestro, I was looking to do no more than intensify some early sense that he might yet become a high agent of the gods of death. That did allow him to believe that his own end would not be like others. Of course, I had no real expectation as yet of the dimensions to come. I would have done the same for Luigi Lucheni if he had been my client when he was young.}

^{I do find it interesting, however, that close to the last few months of his life, Hitler did wish to be cremated. The meanest aspect of his life had always been his body, but by then, late in life, his soul—by any but our measure—was more befouled than his torso. Of course it is also true that when one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us}