The Castle in the Forest (35 page)

BOOK XI

T
HE
A
BBOT AND THE
B
LACKSMITH

1

I
n the summer of 1897, after the sale of the Hafeld property, the family moved to the Gasthof Leingartner in Lambach, and there they would live until the end of the year. Having left behind the responsibilities of the farm, Alois began his true retirement, which occasioned a few small but surprising changes. He had, for instance, no interest in the cooks and maids at the Gasthof. Worse, they seemed to have no interest in him. Nor did he mind it.

I would even say that Alois was temporarily content. Since that could affect our purposes in regard to Adolf, I kept a close eye on Senior's modest activities. To my surprise, he took a proprietary interest in the medieval flavor of Lambach and so enjoyed walking down its streets. The town had a population of no more than 1,700 people, but it could boast of a Benedictine monastery founded in the eleventh century, and a church, Paura, that had been built in the shape of a triangle, with three towers, three gates, and three altars. I must say Paura had the strangest effect on his thoughts.

Alois had begun to wonder whether, hundreds of years ago, he had had a previous life here. Was he feeling some shadowed hint of an earlier existence? He did not dismiss the notion. He could have been a medieval knight. Why not? It would certainly account for his boldest qualities as a man.
Der Ritter Alois von Lambach!

If it be asked once again how I can be aware of such a reaction when Alois is, after all, not my client, I will reiterate that on occasion we can enter the thoughts of humans who are closely related to one of our charges. Alois' meanderings about reincarnation were available to me, therefore, and he had come to quite a conclusion. Most people, he decided, could not believe that they would ever cease to exist.

I must say that for Alois, this was a stimulating thought. Reincarnation might well be conceivable, and if so, then he, Alois, must have been one hell of a licentious knight. Such a possibility put him into an excellent mood. New ideas were exactly what he needed. They kept you out of the quicksand of growing old, he now decided.

2

T
he imperative he put upon himself to entertain fresh thoughts may account for the reception Alois gave to Adi's desire to join the children's choir at the Benedictine monastery. Klara could hardly believe her husband would say yes. She had, for that matter, come close to warning the boy not to ask, but then asked herself: What if God wanted Adi to be in that choir? She was not about to interfere with what might be the Lord's purpose.

So young Adolf, spiritual hat in hand, did approach Alois and managed to say that the monks told him he had a good voice. With his father's permission to stay after school, he could rehearse.

If it would be asked why Alois was amenable to allowing any son of his to study with monks and priests, his answer would have been ready. “I have made careful inquiries,” he would have said, “and these Benedictines conduct the best school in Lambach. Since I wish Adolf to do well in life, I have decided to send him there no matter what other objections I choose to retain.”

Adi took to the school. Soon enough, he was seen by the monks as one of their best pupils, and he knew it. In turn, Alois was delighted with his marks. The boy was not only taking twelve required subjects but was receiving the highest grade in each course, which was more than enough to leave Alois in a benign mood.

“Let me tell you,” he said, “when I was young, I, too, could lay claim to a good voice. It was a gift from my mother. She was once the soloist in the parish church at Döllersheim.”

“Oh, yes, Father,” said Adi. “I remember how well you sang on the day we first came to Hafeld from Linz.”

“Yes,” said Alois, “the old ditties did come back. Do you remember the one that upset your mother?”

“I do,” said Adi. “‘She kept saying, ‘
Ach,
not for the children!'”

They laughed. The memory prompted Alois to sing the same lines.

He was the best I ever had,

Together through good and bad,

The drum called us to fight,

He was always on my right.

A bullet flew toward us,

Meant for him or meant for me?

Into his life it tore,

At my feet a piece of gore.

Alois laughed and so did Adi. They remembered. That was when Klara had cried out, “No, not for the children!”

Now Alois' voice grew even more resonant.

My friend, I said, I cannot ease your pain,

But in life eternal we will meet again,

Mein guter Kamerad, mein guter Kamerad.

Alois now declared in a voice made husky by the song, “Yes, I will give permission. That is because I have come to believe in your future possibilities. You are to be rewarded for the excellence you have shown in your new school.”

To himself, Alois was thinking, “Of course, I will not encourage him to go too far on this path. No need to end as a sickly priest.”

Adi, however, was wondering whether he might, one day, become a monk, or better, an Abbot. He loved their black habits, and his image of heaven quivered in the light that came through the rose windows. The boy was ready to weep before the power of “Grosser Gott Wir Loben Dich”:

Holy God, we praise Thy Name,

Infinite Thy vast Domain,

Everlasting is Thy reign…

Fill the Heavens with sweet accord,

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord.

While he sang, I was encouraging him to believe that he might rise supreme over all these monks and hold authority in one hand and mystery in the other. Indeed, he had a model. The Abbot of this monastery was the most impressive man Adi had ever encountered. He was tall, his hair was silver gray, his expression was elevated. To Adi, he was as handsome as a king.

One time, alone in the room at the Gasthof that he shared with Angela, he lifted her darkest dress off its hook and draped it around his shoulders as a species of vestment. Then he stood up on a stool. He knew he must speak in a low voice or he would be overheard in the hallway, but he felt full of the sermon he had heard at Mass, as well as the prayer addressed to St. Michael the Archangel that he repeated every day. Now he was absorbing these sounds and relishing the moment when he would be alone in the forest speaking to the trees.

First he felt impelled to voice the sermon that had preceded the prayer. “These fires of hell,” he said, “will reach into every pore of your body. They will melt your bones and your lungs. A terrible odor will arise from your throat. The stench of the body will be heinous. This is the fire that will never end.”

He staggered as he stood on the stool. The force of the words had left him giddy. He had to take a breath before he could utter the prayer.

“Thy Glorious Majesty, we supplicate Thee to deliver us from the tyranny of the infernal spirits, from their snares, their lies, and their furious wickedness—O Prince of the Heavenly Host, cast into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls, Amen.”

He felt most excited. I did my best to encourage him to believe he was receiving a sign from above. But then to spoil it all—were other forces present?—he proceeded to have the first real erection of his young life. Yet he also felt like a woman. It must have been the odor of Angela's dress. So he threw it away from him and jumped down from the stool, even kicked the dress before he picked it up, sniffed it again, and was abominably disturbed. He still felt like a woman.

It was at this point that he knew he must do what other students were doing. He had to feel equal to them. He must start smoking. He had been breathing the fumes of Alois' pipe since he had been an infant, and he detested the smell, but now he had to feel male again, purely so. No more of this half and half.

3

O
ver the entrance to the monastery was a large swastika carved into the stone of the arched gate. It was the coat of arms of a previous Abbot named von Hagen, who had been Abbot Superior in 1850, and von Hagen must have enjoyed the propinquity to his own name—a hooked cross was called a
Hakenkreuz.

Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen's swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a hooked cross.

On his ninth birthday, Adolf was alone and smoking a cigarette in the archway. He was not alone for long, however. The meanest of the priests under whom he studied, a prelate notorious among the students for his stealthy tread, came by to catch Adolf in the act. The cigarette (a twist of Alois' pipe tobacco rolled into newspaper) was immediately seized and stomped upon by the cleric. He had all the frenzy of a man who is squashing cockroaches.

Adi was ready to weep. “It is possible,” he now heard, “that the Devil has entered into you. If so, you will die in great misery.” Then he gave an evil smile. He was summoning the powers of anathema he had collected over the years.

So soon as Adolf was able to speak, he said, “Oh, Father, I knew it was wrong. I detested it always. I will never go near to tobacco again.”

At that moment, however, he had to run down to the grass beyond the stone steps of the entrance, where he immediately threw up. The execration of the priest had presented such aridity of soul that Adi could not breathe. The long nose of the man seemed as malignant as his lips and they were as thin as a knife edge. All the while, in the midst of suffering such a whole set of atrocious feelings, Adi was already calculating how to seek forgiveness from the Abbot. He knew he would be sent over to that august office so soon as he stopped vomiting.

Before the Abbot, he burst into tears again. He had the inspiration to say that he did not want this abominable act to interfere with his longing to become a priest. How much he wished to repent, he declared. When he was done, the Abbot even said, “Well, someday you may yet make a fine man of the cloth.”

The sincerity in Adi's voice resonated with the full inspiration of an outright lie. His one taste of anathema had been sufficient. He was now disabused forever of the thought of becoming a priest. Only his admiration for the Abbot remained intact.

By the measure of my endeavors, it had been a profitable day. Given the many clients I was overseeing in that part of Austria, I cannot claim to have been always in the right place at the best moment, but on this occasion I was. Our mean-spirited cleric—small surprise!—happened to be one of my finest clients in Lambach and had of course been alerted to take a quick stroll over to the gate where von Hagen's hooked stone cross was emblazoned.

4

I
will say that Adi's veneration of the Abbot was retained, but only as an echo of that early infatuation. His hatred of the priest with the long nose did not diminish, and so the memory of the moment when Alois gave him permission to sing in the choir was all but gone. In any case, the recollection would soon have lost all warmth, since it had also become obvious that his father favored Edmund. Once, after Adi had given him a good shove, Edmund dared to poke back. “Don't you touch me,” he said. “I am just as good as you are.”

For that remark, Edmund was hit hard enough to encourage him to wail with all the power of his four-year-old lungs.

When Klara descended, Adi said, “Alois Junior always used to hit me. Nobody ever cared about that.”

Alois now loomed overhead. “You had your mother to protect you from Junior,” he said. “I remember. She was on your side always. Even when you were in the wrong. This used to upset your brother very much, and maybe I did not pay enough attention!”

Alois chose, therefore, to give Adi a spanking. It was stinging to the boy's backside but without real force. Alois still lived in fear of the anger with which he had belabored Alois Junior once the youth was on the ground.

These quarrels between Adi and Edmund resounded through the inn, and Klara was thereby embarrassed. The innkeeper and his wife were, however, content with the rent provided by the Hitlers and made a point of treating Klara with the greatest respect, even trying to give her the illusion that she was a notable example of a fine, middle-class lady. Klara was not about to believe them. Klara knew better. She told Alois that the family needed to find more space at a lower cost.

She had also decided that Angela was much too old to keep sharing a room with Adi. Indeed, Angela had complained that one of her best dresses had dusty shoe-prints all over it—that had to be her brother's doing. Klara decided not to accuse him. He would deny it. The true problem remained; they had to move. Nor was Alois opposed. Adi's quarrels with Angela had been getting on his nerves. One time, he had said to Klara, “You wish me not to give him a good one, but he's very trying.”

“When children fight,” said Klara, “it can be the fault of both.”

“Well, I am not about to put her on my knee.”

With true perturbation, Klara said, “Of course not.”

“In any case, it is the boy. I repeat: I find him trying.”

Klara now decided to tell Alois about the day Adi was caught smoking. In the hope that Alois might feel sympathy, she said, “Adi needs kindness. He needs that so much. After the Abbot forgave him, Adi told me, ‘I didn't know a big grown man could be so kind.' Alois, he needs a kindness from us.”

Alois shook his head. “No,” he told her, “already you are his slave. I think it is all to the good that he started smoking. In time to come maybe he will like tobacco and even become a real guy.” At which point Alois laughed until he began to cough.

Klara thought, “Yes, one tough guy, full of phlegm.”

It could be said that Klara was beginning to have a few private thoughts. For years, she had felt that such private views might not be suitable for a good wife. Now, however, she had begun to entertain a secret project. She had come to the conclusion that it would be good to buy a nice house, but she knew Alois was not yet ready. Instead, she would have to go along with his decision to move to the unused upper floor of a nearby grain mill. That would be considerably cheaper than the inn and would offer a good deal of space. Moreover, Angela would have her own room. Let her begin to enjoy some of the opportunities that Klara had never had. Later, once they owned a house, whether in this town or another, she could hope that Angela would yet be married to a fine young man. And for the present, she certainly deserved to have her own room. Such a good stepdaughter.

So Klara put up with Alois' desire to move to the mill. There would be endless work, but Angela was done with school and ready to take on her part of the task. Early in the winter of 1898, they did rent a floor, therefore, on the upper story of the grain mill. Its owner, one Herr Zoebel, kept four mules to activate the grinding wheel. To add to this clamor, there was also a blacksmith shop at the rear worked by a big fellow named Preisinger. Living on the floor above would be a war against dust, but Klara was not unhappy. Angela was always ready to be Klara's maid, or a devoted younger sister, or a devoted friend. That left Klara free to enjoy some time alone with Paula.