The Castle in the Forest (31 page)

9

I
t so happened that the right dog was available. A farmer he knew was looking to sell a German shepherd. “He is the best of his litter, which is why I have kept him all these months and have fed him, this gross guzzler. Can you afford to labor longer hours? Because he eats all the time. That is why I will sell him to you for next to nothing. Maybe he will make you as poor as he has made me. Then I can laugh, and you will cry.”

Good beer talk. Alois decided to buy the hound.

This was a good one, Alois could tell. When it came to dogs, he had always had a nice understanding. He could stare right into the eye of a fierce mongrel, yet because he felt a moment of love for the poor ugly old bastard, the animal would usually respond well. Alois could talk to dogs. If the beast growled a bit, Alois would say, “Oh, fellow, how can you speak like that to me? I like you, I approach you as a friend.” And he even knew enough to bring his hand to the dog's mouth as a token of friendship. He had never made a mistake. The one time in a hundred when a dog was actually fierce enough to bite, Alois could sense that, too, and he would extend the forefinger and pinky of the near hand, his separated fingers directed to the dog's eyes like pointed horns, and the animal might keep up his imprecations, but he would not attack.

So Alois was delighted with this overgrown, six-month-old German shepherd who had the regal name of Friedrich. He would be fierce. Better still, he was a one-man dog. Let the children recognize that quickly. Let Klara complain. Let young Alois mind his business. He would be the only one to feed Friedrich. And he would change his name. From what he had heard, King Friedrich the Great had had a boyfriend, not a mistress. So maybe he was not so great. Besides, he was a German. To hell with honoring him. He would call the dog Spartaner. A warrior. Any ex-smuggler who had thoughts of coming to the farm in the middle of the night would not dare, not now, not with both dogs present. You could take care of Luther with a piece of meat and a cloth dipped in chloroform, but Spartaner would be there to attack you.

How Alois enjoyed the walk back over the hills. He let the dog off the leash early, threw sticks for the animal to return, taught him to stop and sit at command, although Spartaner learned all this so quickly that he must have been trained a bit already. No question, however, the dog was good. Alois found himself in such a fine mood that he almost wrestled with the beast. Indeed, he restrained himself only because it was too soon. Wonderful. Quick love between a dog and a man is close to a perfect event, he decided.

The animal did not cease grinning with an all-knowing, all-breathing tongue that lolled at the edges of his grin until they came in view of the farm. But now it was as if he realized, and all too abruptly, that there was a problem waiting right by the house.

Of course. It was Luther. Alois was ready to clap himself on the head for having been in such a state of blind certainty that he had not thought once of how these two dogs might get along on first meeting.

They didn't. They were terrified. Each was abominably afraid of the other, and each was sick with shame at his own fear. They nipped with their teeth at their own fur, clawed at newly discovered fleas beyond the reach of their bite, they barked at bees and then at butterflies, they ran in circles which did not overlap each other, they staked out territories with their urine.

Luther, while now an old dog, was larger than Spartaner, considerably so, but he was making the big mistake of lumbering around enough to tell the young dog what to capitalize upon.

As it transpired, they went to war two hours after this first sight of each other. The family rushed out in the yard to witness them rolling on the ground, their incisors as awesome as shark's teeth, blood on their faces and their flanks.

Alois, being the farthest away, was the last to arrive. He was also the first and only one to dive into the fray. He had no fear of either animal. He was too outraged. How did they dare to begin this? He had told Luther an hour before to shut up and sit down. This was rank disobedience.

He roared at them to stop. On the same impulse, he flung them apart with his bare hands. The sound of his voice was enough. They lay on the ground, half-stunned, breathless, two yards apart, showing open gashes on their noses and bloody fur at their throats. Spartaner kept panting as if the breath he needed was out there just beyond his tongue. Luther was ill within. The sum of his years had exploded. He looked at Alois with such pain and so full an expression that Alois could all but read what he said: “I have worried about you and the safety of your house for all these years, and you yell at me as if I mean no more than that interloper you just brought in.” Alois came near to petting him, and tenderly, but that would have spoiled his plans for turning Spartaner into a perfect dog.

As their wounds healed, Luther did not try to eat until after Spartaner had gorged himself. This regime continued even when Klara made a point of putting out separate bowls at a distance from each other. But Spartaner proceeded to gobble up the second bowl as well. It hardly mattered. Luther had lost his appetite.

Alois now decided what the next step must be. He would indeed have to dispose of Luther. Good old Luther was probably ready by now to lick the hand of the first thief who came strolling over in the middle of the night.

10

T
his was the second time that Adi had heard his father roar, once at young Alois for leaving that hive in the sun, and now again to shock the dogs into separation.

What mastery had been in his father's voice. What command of the situation! His father had leaped at two beasts entangled in one fury, blood flying from strings of saliva, yet his father had pulled them apart. So fearlessly! Adi was now in love with his father. Now when he went into the woods by himself—no small matter—Adi forced himself to try to be unafraid of the silence of these immense trees quietly muttering into the greater silence of the forest. There, shivering, Adi would work on the power of his voice. He would roar at the trees until his throat was sore.

I was delighted with him. I was beginning to see why the Maestro might be exhibiting this special interest. If, after Adi's best attempts to bellow, a few leaves did shift by way of a passing breeze, he was quick to decide that the power issuing from his throat had inspired the wind. And on so still a day!

Once he almost met his father in the woods, but I steered the boy away. I did not want father and son to meet. Not on this occasion. The father might have mocked the child for being so crazy as to shout at the trees, and the boy might have crept up behind his father and thereby would have witnessed the execution of Luther. I was looking to avoid that. The Maestro would be displeased if the shock proved disruptive. We looked to be the ones who would shape our clients, not events.

That afternoon became a long walk for Alois Senior and considerably longer for Luther. One of his hind legs had been infected by the battle. He limped, and after a few hundred yards, he began to hobble.

I think Luther understood what was awaiting him. While the Maestro must certainly possess the ability to monitor any thoughts that pass between humans and animals, he does not encourage us to exercise our instincts in this direction. Or, at least, not among the devils I work with. For that matter, I often feel painfully curious concerning all I do not know about the departments, outreaches, special services, zones, belts, salients, precincts, orbits, spheres, beats, and occult enclaves that the Maestro commands. Particularly this last—occult enclaves. For a devil, I know no more about the sinister than what I am instructed to use for effect in my work. The curses and spells which legend would have available to all devils are, actually, meted out to us as tools, and only when needed.

So it was not common for me to follow the thoughts offered and thoughts received that passed between Alois and Luther. All the same, I was at no loss to recognize that Luther knew his end was near and Alois, willingly or not, was fully occupied in thinking of how he would dispose of the dog.

To begin with, he decided he would not shoot him. He did own a shotgun and a pistol. The first would be too messy, and the second made him uneasy. It would dishonor Luther. Yes. Pistols were reserved for malefactors. Whether in cold blood or self-defense, a round from a pistol was not only impersonal, but a shattering end.

Let me remark that I was not surprised to read Alois' thoughts so easily. I was long familiar with the workings of his mind and so could often follow his conscious thoughts as adroitly as one connects the dots in a child's puzzle. He was not invested by me, yet I knew him better than many a client.

I think I may have developed or been granted a few exceptional abilities for this particular service. Adi might be my major assignment, but I had been granted some secondary powers on my return from Russia, enough, at least, to enter the father and mother with something like the clarity we possess for the humans we do own.

Alois' thoughts were, indeed, interesting on this occasion. He had decided that the only way to dispatch his old companion Luther was by the stroke of a knife directly into his heart. Poison would never do—worse than a pistol or a shotgun—wholly treacherous, and it might involve hours of pain. Alois did not know (or care that much) whether men and women had souls, but he was in no doubt about dogs. They did, and you had to be loyal to the soul of a dog. You would not blast him out of life with the reverberations of the bullet—what a shock to the soul!—no, it would have to be the incisive stroke of a knife, fierce and clean as the dog's heart itself in the moment when attachment to existence is severed.

Alois kept thinking these thoughts as he trudged through the woods, slowed and slowed again by the hobbling of the old hound, and soon there came a point where Luther sat down and refused to move and looked for a long time into Alois' eyes. I could swear that if he had speech at his command, he would have said, “I know you are going to kill me and that explains why I have been afraid of you all my life. Now I am still afraid, but I will not move further. Can't you see, I am losing the last of my dignity even as you insist on taking me further and further into the woods? I can no longer control my bowels and I do not want to keep pushing my legs on and on while they are covered with this filth, so here I sit, and you will have to lift and carry me if you wish to go further.”

Alois blew his nose. He could see that the dog would not move. But they had not yet come to the ground he had selected for the deed. In his mind, he had chosen a small gully one half mile further along, where he could lay the carcass at the bottom of the divide and cover it with mud and leaves, then branches, and finally he would place a large hollowed-out branch over the body. If necessary, he would weigh it down with stones.

That had been Alois' plan. He had thought through every detail. He had liked the logic of such a burial—so much better than being choked by clods of earth, his dog was not a damned potato!—but now he saw that Luther would not move on. And he, Alois, regrettably, was no longer strong enough to carry him up and down this trail for the next half mile. Therefore, it must be here. Afterward, he would go back to the farm, get a pick and a shovel and dig a grave in this copse, which was, in fact, a green and decent place, enclosed by a half circle of trees and some scrub brush, yes, it could be done here. Poor Luther.

So Alois turned the sitting dog on his back, petted him, looked into his eyes, which had sickened in the last few minutes as directly and recognizably as the expression of any old creature whose liver is rushing to the grave ahead of him, a sad old face to be certain, and Alois unbuckled the flap of the sheath that held his hunting knife, laid the point of the blade at the center of the arch of Luther's rib cage, and pushed it in to the hilt. The dog's face contorted, the sound of his expiring came out of him and it was hurtful to Alois' ear. For it was much more human than he had expected.

Then the dog's face passed through many expressions. His look settled finally into the face it would hold for the first few hours of its death before all began to decompose. Luther now looked like a young dog again, and some indefinable self-esteem had returned, as if he had always been more beautiful than anyone had realized, and could have become a great warrior if it had been asked of him when he was young, yes, he did look like a warrior as his features composed into this near-final pride.

It was a better death than he had hoped for, Alois decided. He was pleased with his acumen, he had made the right choice, but all the same, he was startled by the changes he had seen in the dog's last moments, and he felt hollow.

Alois would live for six and a half more years, yet on this afternoon in the forest he passed a junction on the road to death. So he wondered afterward and often whether he was a better man or worse because of this commitment to dispose of Luther in person and take the pains to bury him carefully afterward.

11

I
n the course of a walk that Luther and he had been taking through the woods, the dog lay down to rest and died peacefully. That is what Alois told the family. Klara was the only one to suspect that more than this might have happened. For, on the same night, perhaps six hours after the dog's demise, Alois made love to her with a good deal of vigor. It was more than she had enjoyed in a while.

He had had a variety of insect bites from his second trip to the woods with pick and shovel to dig a grave for Luther. It had taken a while, therefore, to salve the bites and remove the stingers. By the time she completed her ministrations, they were both ready to make love. While she had no basis of comparison, she was ready nonetheless to think that there might not be another man of Alois' age, only one year shy of sixty, who was so vigorous, this Uncle Alois, her man, a good man.

They had an agreeable few nights. Alois was experiencing what can only be called a transformation. He was loving her. That event can take place in a marriage. Often, it is necessary. That is because most husbands and wives use so much of their time together in excrementitious exchanges. Indeed, that is often why they married in the first place. As the Maestro presents it, they needed to be able to exercise one or another petty cruelty at any moment to a dependable person who would be close at hand.

Yet even the worst marriage allowed one species of magic. The fierce upbraidings one would have liked to present to the world (but did not dare) could now be delivered through critical judgments on one's mate. All that spiritual excrement! In marriage, it is there to be traded back and forth, a practice which mediocre participants find much more to their need than trying to contain it fecklessly inside.

Ergo, marriage is a workable institution—especially for dreadful people. Of course, it can also serve men and women who may be seen as
average,
or slightly better than average. Like our Klara and Alois. And strange shifts into love do occur. Few of these reversals are permanent, but while they last, aeration is offered to what has been an airless union.

So we are always alert for signs of a fresh breath in the exudations of married people. We can use these turns to shore up the worst of marriages for a period—should that suit our purpose.

This was not the occasion here. The change in attitude was of their choice, and it caught me by surprise. Intoxicated by the full moon and the June air that came up at night from the fields, Alois lay beside her in a state of trust—he knew her fingers would make no painful mistake as she took care of removing each stinger. There were so many more of them these days, given this lush late spring, but she was deft, she was purposeful, and he was at peace beside her. For this little while, Klara became a presence he had never been able to know—a mother hovering over him.

Night after night, the ritual took place. He even grew so careless on occasion as to work without the veil. He was not seeking to be stung; he had, after all, acquired the skill to make fewer mistakes. Still, it is fair to say he did suffer a few needless attacks, but they enabled her fingers to play their delicate movements on his brow, the cheeks of his face, the meat of his hands.

Sometimes, Alois felt as if his brains were creaking. He was entertaining ideas he did not believe could belong to him. He actually began to consider whether the pain from these bites was a means of paying for one's sins. Just supposing—for in no other way was he ready to assume that he believed in sinning—but could it be that these little wounds were a way of accounting for bad things a man had done?

What a notion! Until the night that he had this thought, he had been enjoying decent sleep. It came from the knowledge that full-chested Spartaner was out there below occupying a new doghouse built for him on the day after Luther's death. That had been no small task, but necessary. Not only was a guard dog entitled to his own sense of shelter, especially in a new habitat, but Alois' handiwork had established close feelings between the hound and himself.

New ideas, however, can be full of paradox. Alois twisted in the discomfort of considering that guilt might be real. It gave too much dignity to all the weaklings who huddled in churches. They traveled around with a stone in their stomachs and a bigger one up their ass. But now, he did not know if he could scorn them any longer. For he had committed incest. If he had made love to all three of his stepsisters, that was not incest, no, not unless their father was his father. But had he not known that Johann Nepomuk was his father? Of course, he had always known it, although he had chosen not to. It had been the sort of thought he had always swept to the rear of his mind. Now it was in the forefront. Worse. If Klara was not the daughter of Johann Poelzl, then she had to be his child (
“Sie ist hier!”
) That was a fact as sharp as the knife that had gone into Luther. God Almighty, what if there was a God who knew about things like this?

In common with most humans, however, he had the mental force to send such thoughts away again. He was not ready to relinquish the soulful pleasures that arrived each night in the wake of the needles removed from his flesh.

On such June evenings, his pains would resonate within. He did not look to divert these modest agonies by searching for happy thoughts. Instead, he was there, ready to accept the message that came to him from this mysterious province of pain. To Alois, it was a species of music, replete with new sensations for the mind and heart, full of its own clarity even as it spoke sharply, even with some cruelty to his flesh. He laid himself open to the soaring voice of each pain, as rich in amplitude as a choral group. In truth, he was exhibiting the saintliness of a sinner.