The Castle in the Forest (27 page)

BOOK IX

A
LOIS
J
UNIOR

1

T
here was an odd matter waiting on my return to Hafeld. It was to convince Der Alte to burn one of his hives. He had been stung so severely by his bees that I found him in bed with a cruelly swollen face. Several of the stings had come close to his eyes.

Given Der Alte's skills, he could not comprehend how so embarrassing an event had occurred during the course of looking into one of his better hives. While attempting to replace the Queen—she was showing the first unmistakable signs of final fatigue—he had been attacked by her escort. Der Alte was able to subdue this revolt with the cigar he happened to be smoking at the time, but so drastic a revolt of his creatures had not visited him in years. It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation). I had to assume that this attack by the bees was inspired by the Cudgels, and so the hive had to be destroyed.

Upon receiving my order—which I passed into him as he slept—Der Alte did not obey quickly. A few days went by. Again, I sent the thought into his sleep, but now with emphasis enough for him to recognize that it could not be construed as a dream but as an imperative, which left our old fellow full of dismay. “Do it,” I repeated to him in his sleep, “it will be good for you. Tomorrow is Sunday. That will augment the good effect. Sundays provide double value. But do not employ a sulphur bomb. Too many could survive. Rather, soak the hive with kerosene. Then light it, box and all.”

He groaned in his sleep. “I cannot do that,” said Der Alte. “The Langstroth cost me dearly.”

“Burn it.”

Der Alte followed my orders. He had to. At his age, he knew how deeply we were infiltrated into him. He did not wish to live with the terrors we could arouse, fears as real to his flesh as an ulcer. Death was close to his thoughts, sometimes as close a caged beast in the next room. All of this, however, left me indifferent. It is hard not to feel contempt for old clients. They are so submissive. Of course, he did it. What facilitated the act was that a good part of him was still enraged by the attack from his bees. His sense of the given had been upset. Old habits are willing to afford few shocks.

Sunday morning, he laid the hive on the ground and doused it. Staring into the commotion that seethed up in its flames, he did feel better. I was on the mark. It
had
been good for him. But he was perspiring like a horse. He was, after all, full of woe at the incineration itself—that did violate his professional instincts. He expected to weep for all those innocents now scorched into extinction with the guilty, but to his surprise, a rare sweetness returned to his loins. This was the first such sugaring of his body he had felt in years. As with many an old man, his lust had been confined to his head. It had been a long time since any accompaniment to a libidinous thought had been more memorable than a twinge of his groin.

I will mention that Adi happened to be present at the burning. He, too, had been given a message in his sleep which he had no difficulty in accepting. He slipped away from Klara and Angela even as they were preparing to go to church. Nor did his escape bother Klara unduly. Adolf was no joy to bring along. If not squirming in his seat, he would commence a contest with his stepsister to see who could succeed in pinching the other. On the sneak.

Yes, to be alone with Angela on Sunday morning allowed Klara to feel a little closer to her stepdaughter. If the truth be witnessed, she was also content not to bring Edmund along, nor to be obliged to hold Paula at her breast through the service, hoping all the while that she did not wish to be fed. Today Alois had said he would remain with the two little ones. Klara could hardly believe such generosity. Was he softening? Was that possible? That was certainly another question I might have to explore. But first I would speak of Adi's excitement during this burning of the bees. His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter. The ardors of living in Russia had, however, left me a touch indolent. I did not, as yet, feel eager to reenter the complexities of this particular six-year-old. My morale was, as I have said, in fine shape, but I did not wish to set it to work so soon. Indeed, on my return to modest duties in this region of Austria, I did not mind that existence was simpler. Hafeld might even be ready to offer its own revelations, and meanwhile, it allowed me to live with the subtlety of small tasks. I could, for example, witness a few changes in Alois' spirit. That alone was enough to interest me.

For example, Klara had been mistaken. Alois was not softening, not exactly. He had told her it was good for him to spend a little time with the small ones every now and again, but the moment she left, he put Paula in her trundle bed and told Edmund to stay in the room and make certain she did not wake up. He knew Adolf would go off by himself, and Alois Junior would be on the other side of the hill with Ulan. Indeed, he was looking forward to being alone. He wanted to meditate upon Der Alte's mishap. That event had left Alois feeling cozy. A dire expectation was gone. He had always expected to be the one savaged by the bees.

All through May, as the weather turned warm, Alois' recurring fear had been that he would lose his colonies. He lived with a vivid picture of himself up there, high in a tree, much too high, trying to charm a maddened swarm back to their hive. The sad fact was that, having eaten well through the winter, he felt as overstuffed as a man who has crammed 250 pounds into a 200-pound sack.

Small surprise, then, if this Sunday he was ready to let his face go slack, his stomach rumble, his sphincter break wind. There had been too many weeks through the winter, and now even into the spring, when he had become convinced he was going to fail at some serious activity that would wipe out some important part of his self-esteem. If such an end once seemed unlikely because his vanity forbade it, that same energetic vanity (which he had constructed up from boyhood piece by piece, episode by good episode) now seemed to be fading. Where was his confidence? He had not gone to church on this Sunday, no more than any other. Of course not, not if he could help it. Yet he no longer knew whether he could continue to stay away. On this particular Sunday, he had even thought of accompanying Klara.

The thought was odious. To sit in a pew through the drivel! Such an act would wipe out his sense of himself as a man who does not shiver as others do. But possessing bees had scared the hell out of him. Might this last year have loosened the keystone of his pride? No one else he knew had ever been as ready to thumb his nose at bad omens. That was an achievement not common to anyone born as a peasant.

Yet, just a week ago, his hands had begun to shake while reading a story in his newspaper about the death of a beekeeper. The man had not recovered from an outbreak in a hive.

Looking to allay such fears, Alois even paid Der Alte a visit. This occurred while the old man was still in bed and at his weakest. Indeed, Der Alte burst into tears while describing his mishap. It left Alois with the same sense of cockeyed virtue that a younger brother can feel when he sees the older one cry.

Afterward, for a few days, Alois was relieved of his fear. He could not say why, but Der Alte's ill fortune had relieved his own dread. Now it was coming back. He had not felt right ever since Alois Junior had returned. He could not be such a fool, he told himself, as to live in fear of his bees because he was not at ease with his son. All the same, that could be the truth! Human beings were full of subterfuge. He had learned as much at Customs. He remembered a woman who wrapped her gifts in the folds of her black lingerie. A good-looking woman. When caught by Alois, she was brassy enough to smile and say, “You are so smart. The other officers were afraid to touch these private things.”

“That,” he told her, “is because most of my associates go to church. You did not have good luck this morning.”

She laughed. He was tempted to let her off. Let her avoid the cost of the fine by smuggling him into her thighs. But he hadn't allowed himself. Serious rules he would not disregard.

All the same, the recollection kept him brooding about the nature of subterfuge. Back in the days when he could still enjoy a ride on a horse, there had usually been one or another steed who could rob some of his confidence, something in their gait—as if, should they choose, you would find what might as well be five legs under you rather than four. You wouldn't know a damned thing about how to control that kind of animal.

Yes, that was like Alois Junior.

On the other hand, he might be making too severe a judgment on his oldest son. Klara kept saying that Junior did not seem to be the same boy who had gone away to work for Johann Poelzl. Her parents must have been good for him. His manners were nice. He did not look to be judging you all the time. Before he had gone away, Klara said, he was like a friend who was warm to your face but would say something ugly so soon as you left. She had no proof, but she would swear that was how he used to be. Now there was something better about him. Maybe. He still spent too much time riding Ulan. Yet, as Klara also announced to Alois, she was ready to put up with that. Better to ride over the hill than to start flirting with his own sister.

“What would you ever know about such matters?” Alois asked.

“I don't,” said Klara. “But when I was young, I saw things. In certain families. It is not something to talk about.”

That she and Alois might have something larger and more private to talk about was not evident in her voice. She flushed only a little as she spoke.

This ability to wall up the most unpalatable facts about oneself will always elicit my unwilling admiration. I do not know if the inner construction of such a barrier is equal in difficulty, let us say, to scaling the Alps, but in any event, credit must go to the Dummkopf. He created the ban against incest—we certainly didn't—and then it became His secondary task to protect humans, should they ever do it, from remembering what they had done.

We lose certain advantages thereby. Most men and women are incapable of facing unpleasant truths. They have what can only be a God-given ability to conceal themselves from themselves. So I could appreciate how Klara was full of unadmitted worry over Alois Junior and Angela and never spent a moment pondering whether her husband was not her uncle but her father.

2

I
, too, had been pondering the changes in Alois Junior. On the face of it, he had improved. If manners were a guide, he had become a reasonable imitation of a trustworthy and pleasant youth.

The devils I had left behind were now pleased to tell me that they had made a copy of a short letter Johann Poelzl had sent back with Alois Junior. It gave a definite and most decent opinion of the lad.

I could hardly trust the validity of the letter. For one thing, it was not the original but a copy made by the agent. That voided one of my talents—I can obtain a good deal of insight by no more than a glance at a person's handwriting. Many an undisclosed corner of the soul is revealed. Falsities stand out like acne.

As I have already indicated, the devils I had left in Hafeld had not been skilled. So they did no more than study Johann's letter (left in Klara's sewing basket) and make a copy. Possessed of more technique, they could have forged a facsimile and kept the original.

Bereft of the calligraphy, I had to content myself with the words.

         

Esteemed daughter,

This I give to the boy. He will give to you. Your mother says he is good boy. She will cry for missing him. That is what she says.

Tell your esteemed husband. Alois Junior is good. Hard worker. Very good.

Your father,

Johann Poelzl

         

I could have put in a request for one of our nocturnals in Spital to pass through Johann's thoughts on a milk run, but I decided to wait. He was a stubborn old man ready to repel any entrance into his mind, and I could learn as much as I needed to know about Alois Junior in Hafeld. The minor devils left here had, to my surprise, improved to some degree. Even without my surveillance, they were picking up our trade. One of them might soon be ready for lessons in dream-etching.

I will not, however, bother to describe them closely. At present, more than a century has passed, and former devils offer even less pleasure to memory than mediocre songs. While a man or woman's presence is closely related to their body, and so offers a multitude of insights, we devils are without salient personality except when it is necessary to dwell within some man or woman's body for the length of a project. Then we do have a presence and it is near to indistinguishable from the person we inhabit. I would say it bears no more relation to ourselves than a change of garment.

We enjoy a happier existence in the land of the dream. There—if we are ready to afford the expenditure—we can be anyone we wish. Some improvisations are brilliant. Indeed, if dreams dictated as much of human history as we desired, the Dummkopf would soon be the Maestro's retainer.

But we were nowhere near to such a point. Certainly not back in 1896. God was still the Lord of our immediate universe. Humans, animals, and plants were still His Creation. Nature, imperfect as it was and, on occasion, cataclysmic (due, I must repeat, to imperfections in His design), remained nonetheless in His command, that far-from-faultless command. Only the night belonged in good part to us.

Being most aware of this, the Maestro frowned upon self-approbation. He let us know that devils were not to congratulate themselves on the terrors they had initiated by nightmare. “Dreams are evanescent,” he told us. “Control of events belongs to the day.”

Control of events? The Maestro was certainly keeping alive his interest in the Hitlers of Hafeld, but when I looked to comprehend why, his avowed high hopes for young Adolf Hitler made me wonder whether I could discern the Maestro's real interests. Our special six-year-old might be no more than one of a hundred or a thousand prospects whom the Maestro was overseeing with no more than the remote likelihood that they might yet become important to our serious intentions. Any estimate that my task might be of major magnitude was obliged, then, to rise and fall more than once in the immediate seasons ahead.