The Castle in the Forest (13 page)

3

A
lois had never been one of our clients. He was by our measure an average man, which is to say, sufficiently corrupt to be available for our use should we be in true need of him. The assumption was that he would then be open. The Cudgels would hardly be guarding the fellow. To what end? What was there to protect? Whereas, when it came to Klara, we did not choose to go near. It would have proved punishing, and again—to what end? We did not need her directly—as I have already remarked, evil children can issue nicely from the most loving mothers. Of course, average men and women find the thought repulsive. It rattles their faith in the Dummkopf. How could God allow it? A standard lament.

Alois was directly useful to us. He was so dependable in his strengths and habits, his productive contributions, his built-in cruelties (not to mention his crudities) that one could, if necessary, intensify or reduce the heat of Adolf's hatred for his father in such a way as to mold the boy. Depend on it—we depended on Alois.

But now, his outsize love for bees seemed out of character. Atheists like Alois, who attempt to go all the way to the grave without being challenged by the intimation that God may have created their universe, are not unlike pious virgins who fear the temptation of unholy heats. Such ladies can only accept their pinched carnality through a variety of counterfeits. So, too, do atheists have their substitutes by way of paganism, service to others, or, by now, technology—usually seen by them as the best possible solution to humankind's problems. Occasionally, they feel an exceptional allegiance to some phenomenon of nature. In Alois' case, it happened to be the recognition that a collaboration could be possible between the mighty and the minuscule, himself and the bees.

Sufficiently concerned, I penetrated one night into his mind, a costly move, since he was not a client, but necessary if I was to comprehend his motive, and, indeed, I now knew more. Alois saw bees as living a life with parallels to his own. That gave me cause for apprehension. To Alois, bees in search of new fields of flowers were intimate little creatures he could understand.

On any warm day, such foragers know the heat of the sun and the intimate yearning that the sun can arouse in flower petals. Alois was not about to throw open the door he had bolted to the mystical side of himself, but he did keep picturing the honeybee on its entrance into the caverns of the flower. Under the burgeoning heat of the sun, the flower would surrender its nectar to the bee's tongue, even as the hairs of the honeybee became covered with pollen. In another moment, the same bee would separate from one passionate lust to dive into another, whichever fine flower of the same species was beckoning in the breeze, the creature ready again to gather more nectar while strewing pollen picked up from the first flower to the second. Hard work and satisfied desire!

He could feel close to that bee staggering back in flight, with its pollen bags heavy, and a stomach full of nectar. Had not Alois given much to women and yet brought back much for himself—much accumulated wisdom on how to deal with his Customs House corner of the world. By the end, he invariably knew what was true and what was false in declarations offered by strangers, particularly women who might wish to deceive him, yet could not, because he was wiser. He possessed the true honey—wisdom. That was the knowledge of what others were up to, all those secrets held by passing travelers and commercial people, secrets as sweet as honey, all those little goods travelers looked to steal and keep for themselves. But he was there to capture their secrets. He could work as hard and long as any honeybee on the hottest and most productive day of summer to protect the glory, centuries old, of the exceptional Empire of the Hapsburgs. Not all of them had been great, he would admit, not all were even very good people, but the best of them had been, like Franz Josef, good, very good. As we know, Alois could find a resemblance to Franz Josef in his own features—the same sideburns, the same dignity. It was said of the Emperor Franz Josef that he could work for endless hours at his necessary and near-to-endless duties. When necessary, he, Alois, was also ready. And yet they knew enough, both of them—the Emperor and himself—to comprehend that it was not enough to amass the honey; one must keep a taste for oneself.

Some people in Linz, he knew, fools for the most part, had been shocked when gossips spoke of the actress, Fräulein Katharina Schratt, whom Franz Josef had taken for a mistress. How could this be? The Emperor's wife was so beautiful—Empress Elizabeth. The news had spread like a spill of oil. But it had not been shocking to Alois. He understood. Men had to keep some share of the honey for themselves.

Let me not be carried away altogether by the voluptuous swells of Alois' meditation. In truth, he had some fear of bees. Once, in previous years, he had been stung so ferociously and apocalyptically (if I may put it so) that he never forgot the attack of vertigo it caused. Such power to create pain! That it could exist in creatures so small! It could not have come from the honeybee alone, he decided. Such pain must express the rage of the sun. With that, Alois was familiar. He had worked through many an August afternoon, stuffed into his uniform. Of course he knew the rage of the sun, and honeybees were agents of the sun even as he was an agent of the Hapsburgs, and thereby close to the greatness of ultimate power.

Could these epiphanies be the product of his approaching retirement? I looked forward with my own trepidation to the changes I could not anticipate once he began to live with his family on the farm.

4

O
n the very night in April when they slept in the house at Hafeld for the first time, Klara became pregnant again. Until then, she had remained with the children in Passau. Edmund had been ailing, and it was winter. Moreover, Alois would not be able to join them permanently at the farm until his retirement at the end of June. By April, however, Klara decided to brave the difficulties and, right after Easter, accompanied by Angela, Adolf, Edmund, and the sum of their possessions, she accomplished the move to Linz. It was made even more difficult since she was without Alois Junior to help her with the luggage—he had had to stay behind and board with a neighbor until the end of his school year. Angela, however, was of great help to her. She had insisted on not finishing her term, but coming along instead to help Klara.

“School is not so important,” she said. “I will make up what is lost in the next year, but for now you need me at the farm. I want to be with you there.”

She was right. Klara knew as much, and was moved. I would say that is the moment when she began to love Angela as a true daughter. Klara was wise enough in her innocence to know that Angela's feelings were genuine. She liked school well enough but she cared more for Klara's well-being, and so Klara in turn had become more than a good stepmother, much more.

Whatever the difficulties, they embarked by train from Passau early in the day and her husband was at the station in Linz with a large wagon and two workhorses to carry their trunks, valises, packing crates, and packages over the last thirty miles to Hafeld.

This portion of the trip lasted from noon to dark, but the day had been warm, and Alois, to everyone's surprise, entertained the children with one song after another—his voice was rich, and Klara, who had a clear if delicate soprano, would join him when she knew the words. Alois was in a rare mood, and proud of his skill with the horses and wagon. It was some years since he had gotten up on a buckboard, and he had almost hired a driver, but given his oncoming responsibilities as a farmer, he took on the project himself.

The previous owner had—as was local custom—stocked each fireplace with logs and kindling, and so the rooms, before long, were warm. What with a jar of potato soup, and bread, and liverwurst, they had enough to eat. They went to bed happily. Alois would spend the next day with his family before driving their rented wagon back to Linz.

By the first night, however, Alois was also ready to establish his investiture of the premises. By the light of the gas lamp in their bedroom, he could see that Klara looked in fine color, not pale at all, and when he said as much, she laughed in true merriment.

“You, too, Uncle,” she said. “Your nose is very red from the sun.”

“
Ach,
” he said, “you are still calling me Uncle. It is almost ten years that we are married and still, what am I to you? Uncle Alois? Do you mean Old Uncle Alois?”

“No,” she said, “we are very proud of you. Today, so much. The horses and the wagon. You did it all. And so well. Something you never did before.”

“Well, I can do a lot of things you do not know. I am never so simple as you think.”

“I do not think you are simple,” she said. “No, that I do not think.”

“Yes, you can tell me. What do you think, my little niece?”

It was not often that she was ready to speak to him so directly, but on this night, an exceptional night after all, she said, “I wonder why you never tell me that you love me.”

“Maybe,” he replied, “it is because you still call me Uncle.”

To his astonishment, her answer was the nearest she had ever come to speaking in a manner that most certainly belonged to other kinds of women. “Maybe I call you Uncle,” she said, “because you are such a big, healthy fellow of an uncle.”

This was not about to pass him by. The Hound was straining instantly at the leash. “How would you know what is the size of a healthy fellow?” he asked.

“I do not know. But I am free to guess. You are a very big uncle.”

That was what made her pregnant. He was excited enough to take her by the side of the bed, both of them standing, half-dressed, and then he took her again in bed. He was full of love—for himself, first, and his prowess—such a fine power at his age. Then, he felt a degree of love for her—plus a good deal of love for the farm. It was a beautiful piece of land. He even took pleasure in the notion of coming a little closer to his children, which is to say, he had an image of working along with them in the fields. Then, about to fall asleep, he thought instead of summer bees searching the meadows. He was unusually delighted with how much power had been in his loins. To have it all there on this night, just when he had begun to wonder.

He even held Klara in his arms, which was seldom his habit, and when he woke up to honor the alarms of his bladder, he almost kicked over the chamber pot. In the dark, what with his unfamiliarity with a new bedroom, he was stumbling around, and Klara was giggling. Then she wrapped her arms around him as he came back to bed. “I am happy,” she said. “I think this will be the place for us.”

“Silence!” he growled. “Don't be a goose! One does not make silly predictions.” Yes, he could feel the earth of the farm, all those nine acres to the rear and to the front of them, and felt just as superstitious as any of the peasants of his childhood. A person should not be as ready as Klara to speak out with good feelings to the empty night air. In any event, not aloud! Was the night so empty after all? Who knew what might be there to listen?

In the morning, she could sense his impatience to be done with the unpacking. It was obvious. He wanted to go out and walk his grounds. So she took over the larger part of the immediate tasks while he gave the children a tour of the barn, Adi and Edmund huddled close to him before the animal immanence of the two horses, the cow, and the prize sow that had been part of the purchase price. Those animals were huge, and the sow was close to overpowering in odor.

Now Alois told Adi and Edmund to go back to the house and help their mother. That was a joke. Klara would have to milk the cow, feed the pig, curry the horse, and attend to the henhouse, but he needed to walk his lands alone. He had to make more than a few decisions. So, once again, he studied the condition of the fruit and walnut trees. When he had last seen them, there was more than a little snow on the ground, but the trees looked healthy, and the large branches did appear to have integrity—strong, reasonably straight, not too many tortured shapes to suggest the aftermath of crazy storms when the trees were young.

In truth, he realized now, he had hardly studied the place before. Enough that the price was reasonable and the house owned a fine view. He had had to be in a hurry—he could not expend days in travel back and forth from Linz.

All the same, he was not so much at ease with his purchase as he had anticipated. Walking the meadows and mounting the one small hill of his new domain, he found the land was less extensive than he remembered, no larger, really, than what it was, nine acres, a good-sized parade field. On the other hand, three or four of those acres would make a decent but manageable potato field. Should he give another acre to beets? Could he plant this year? That would be the question. He could not get going until the end of June, the beginning of July, but Alois Junior would be back with them, his school year finished, and, yes, maybe they could take on some late plowing.

All this while, he felt disappointment. He had to recognize—once again—that he could not cultivate his bees, not this summer. The brunt of the project would have to wait. Honey gathering began in April and hardly lasted into September. One had to be there at the beginning. So he must wait. All right, he would have nine months now to prepare, counting at least from the time when he would be back here again,
permanently,
in June, late June, and an unexpected and most unpleasant shiver of anticipation came to him at this thought. Did he know what he was doing? That was one thought he needed to force to the back of his head. He had been in control of his feelings for many years, and he was not preparing to let go now.

5

B
y the first of July, Klara was visibly pregnant. In seven months, assuming the baby was born without incident, there would be a total of eight kids alive or dead who had come into existence because of Alois. Of course, if he so desired, he could add a few not exactly accounted for—he had known a number of cooks and chambermaids who had managed to conceive with what might be called mixed male parentage. And yes, whenever one of them said she was pregnant, he had agreed that he could be the true father, but then, hadn't she also been with Hans and Gerhardt and Hermann and Wolf? With rare exceptions (like Fanni) those women were not in a position to argue. It was enough to give them a decent gift.

Here in Hafeld, he was face-to-face with the other side of such achievements. Through the heat of July, in this farmhouse up on the hill, he had to look at five faces every meal, from Klara all the way down to Edmund, sixteen months old and already starting to talk. By January, there would be another child. He was used to living with people's faces in front of him, more new faces than most people had to encounter every day, but now, it was always the same mugs. He was not used to dwelling with such questions as whether Edmund, for example, had come up with a new phrase or was just gurgling out old globs of sound.

Managing the farm was another matter. He could take pleasure in Angela's work. For a twelve-year-old who had been putting cold cream on her hands ever since she was eight—a little city girl, ready to be spoiled—she was now, to his surprise, decent help. She was always currying the two horses, and washing down the cow even when that hefty lady didn't need another bath. She would also get Adolf and Edmund to laugh at the hearty contentment to be heard in the full-gutted sound of the sow every time they approached with food. Rosig (Pinky) was large for a pig, large even for a prize pig, and seemed happy in her smelly wallow with its pink rosette tacked above the stall, a prize from the summer before they bought the farm. By next winter, when all the new work wouldn't be weighing on them, Angela wanted to prepare Rosig once more for local competition. Yes, his girl, Alois decided, was a prize herself. Angela even took pains to keep the manure of the farm animals separate. She made a point of carrying each collection to a different pile. Why? Because, she declared to Klara, “My father would want it that way. Nice and neat.” She even succeeded in getting Adi to take up a part of the slack. While he could be counted on to throw a tantrum, Angela would ride it out. Then the boy would follow her, his nose up to heaven in horror, but nonetheless carrying a second manure pail.

His school year over, Alois Junior arrived at the farm by the beginning of July. For a short period, no one could surpass him at work. Right off, he was splendid with the horses, particularly Ulan, a stallion five years old. Alois was proud of how quickly Junior took to the saddle. The youth was always ready for the joy of a quick canter up the hill and down, accompanied by full screams of excitement from Angela and Adi. Yet he was also available to work the plow with the dray horse, Graubart. Before too long, they had turned up three acres of hard soil pasture for the potatoes, the same sprouting seed potatoes Klara had bought and stored in the root cellar a week after her arrival. Alois Junior worked harder for two weeks than his father would have believed.

Of a sudden, this flurry fell off. Bad news arrived in a letter from the school in Passau. Alois had failed half of his courses. He would have to take those studies over again.

“I won't go back,” he told his father. “The teachers are so stupid that we laugh at them.”

Yes, the boy must have been brooding for these two weeks over the bad school news but had not said a word, just kept working hard. In that time, they had tilled ten inches deep into the three acres chosen, a stubborn, resistant soil, after which they laid the seed potatoes in those shallow trenches and covered them lightly, each of the sprouters a foot apart, each furrow less than a yard away from the next, but that had been only the commencement. Next came the labor that went into weeding and fertilizing. Bad memories, fifty years old, came back to Alois. He now encountered white grubs and wire worms, and had to watch as the earliest potato leaves were nibbled into green lace by aphids and beetles. Every day one had to go back for more weeding. Soon enough, watering became an ongoing problem. One could only dig a few inches down for the irrigation canals. Go deeper and potato roots would be mangled by the shovel. These shallow trenches soon filled, however, with silt. Hours had to be spent carrying pail after pail of well water up the slope to the meadow. On one of those afternoons, Junior disappeared. He was out riding Ulan. Alois put Angela to work in his stead, and for the rest of the working day, she carried the water, heavy duty for a girl her size.

That night, Alois gave his son a tongue-lashing in front of the others. “You are,” he said, “very much like your crazy mother. Only with you, worse. You have no excuse. Your mother, by the end, was out of her mind, yes, but at least she had once been a hard worker. You are lazy.” If the episode had happened even a year earlier, Alois would have given him a beating, exactly the apocalyptic variety that leaves a scar on the heart, but now the boy was wild enough by the look in his eyes to offer Alois pause. So he did not strike him. Which, he came to decide, was a mistake. The boy's head should have been ringing from one hell of a wallop. Now Junior might be able to think that his father could be a little afraid of him, maybe a little, yes. For a fact, Junior kept reducing the total of his hours—a true city lad doing summer labor. Well short of sundown, he would ask Alois to let him take Ulan for a ride.

The trouble, Alois told himself, was that as a father, he was not hard enough. Under all the bite, he had a soft heart. The truth was that he adored Alois Junior. The boy was so attractive. Restless, yes, and like his mother, victim to terrible moods. He was much too prideful, and in full flight from getting a decent education. Yet he could be as charming as Fanni when he chose to be. He reminded Alois of how well she used to move. He even felt pride at how quickly his son had gotten on good terms with the stallion. Alois himself hesitated to ride him. It was truly a long way to the ground for a heavy man. But Alois Junior could saddle up with all the éclat of a prize cadet—the sort who used to promenade along the best streets of Vienna wearing the boots that Alois had made for them in those years, all the way back when he had so admired such well-turned-out young men. Memories returned of those officers strutting on the Ringstrasse with their handsome ladies, even as he, the apprentice, had dreamed of finding an elegant and lovely young milliner for himself, yes, the old dream! They would start a shop offering the finest handmade hats and most exceptional boots, a stupid dream, but now Junior reminded him of those cadets. Such a striking young man. He was not at all like little Adolf, full of hysterical temper, or tiny Edmund, full of snots.

So Alois could not bring himself to refuse when Alois Junior would ask for an hour off. Ulan, after all, had to be exercised. And the horse did love his young rider. But not the father—whenever Alois approached, the beast would show his teeth in an unmistakably evil grin.