The Castle in the Forest (45 page)

12

A
fter recuperating from the hemorrhage, Alois gave Adolf no more beatings. Sometimes when Alois thought the boy was becoming too sure of himself, he would threaten a whipping, but the warning had lost all drama.

At the Buergerabend on the night before New Year's Eve of 1903, the members allowed themselves a bit more to drink, and Alois could feel how disturbed was the mood. In the last few weeks, a Capuchin Monk named Jurichek had been invited to preach in St. Martin's Church, where he would deliver his sermon in the Czech language as a means of collecting money for a proposed Czech school. Some members at the Buergerabends began to complain (most incorrectly as it turned out) that before long there would be a Czech invasion of Linz.

Alois was uneasy. “If a Czech uprising takes place,” he did say, “it could mean the end of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Yet,” as he would also murmur, “my best friend is a Czech.”

He almost recounted a discussion with Karl Wesseley, who had passed by on a business trip from Prague to Salzburg. “We Czechs,” Wesseley had argued, “offer more loyalty to the Emperor than you Austrian-Germans who would dissolve the Empire in a moment if you could just link up with the Prussians.”

His brief visit left Alois in a state of confusion. Contradictory remarks were now being voiced by him at the Buergerabends. It was as if the loss of blood had also loosened his tongue. First he would find himself on one side of an argument, then the other. Finally, he was attacked by one of the oldest gentlemen in the club.

Unfortunately, this fine elder also proved to be a hint unbalanced. “Herr Alois,” he said, “you have been so totally opposed to our poor little local priest, who wants to invite poor Czechoslovakian workers to come to free food kitchens when they are hungry. That does make you sound like you are a pro-German. ‘Get rid of these dirty Czechs,' it seems you are saying. But I cannot follow you. Your best friend, you tell us, is a Czech. Dear Herr Hitler, I hesitate to say this, but I must attribute your confusions to the one affliction we are all in danger of approaching these days. That is premature old age. You are not an old man, not as old as I am, but, my esteemed fellow Buergerabender, I must warn you that confusions, if not promptly cleared up, can swallow good intentions.” And abruptly he sat down, as if to apologize for having gone too far.

Unhappily for Alois, the old man had not been inaccurate. Since the lung hemorrhage, Alois had lost exactly that clarity of which he had been so proud. Now many of Alois' thoughts seemed to come into his head for no better purpose than to proclaim the opposite of his previous remarks. Indeed, Alois had confessed as much to Wesseley on the last visit, after which he sighed and said, “I like talking to you. In my opinion, you are as deep as the sea.”

“Alois, tell the truth. Have you ever seen a large body of water?” asked Wesseley.

“Beautiful lakes I have seen, and plenty. That is enough.” He paused. “I feel as if I am living in the desert.”

A couple of nights after the old member's tirade, Alois kept remembering how some of the Buergerabenders had been nodding their heads in agreement. And Alois did keep hearing the old man's voice: “You say that we give too much to the Czechs, but then I hear you tell us that to be against the Jews and the Hungarians is antagonistic to good culture. Where is the focus of your thoughts?”

In the course of that upbraiding, Alois had felt so weak that he could not summon enough vigor to stand up and leave the room. Then he found the strength. Not often did members walk out of the Buergerabends in such an abrupt manner, but on this occasion it became imperative. Be damned to how weak he felt.

He was furious. It seemed undeniably clear to him that he had only been tolerated at the Buergerabends. Did they laugh among themselves at remarks he had made? Was it like that? Had he been their resident fool?

It gave him a fearful headache. Four days later, on January 3, he was dead before noon.

BOOK XIV

A
DOLF AND
K
LARA

1

O
n the morning of January 3, 1903, Alois was not feeling too well, and so on his daily walk through Leonding he decided to stop at the Gasthaus Steifer for a glass of wine. To cheer his mood, he called upon an old memory.

Once, in Customs, many years ago, he had come across a box of cigars whose seal had been carefully removed, then repasted. He could discern as much by a thin welt of cement at the edge of the stamp. Thereupon, the box was opened for examination and revealed a diamond hidden under the cigars. He was even tempted to pocket it. The smuggler—a well-dressed traveler—was ready to make any arrangement if he was not charged. Alois, however, was afraid of a trap. Moreover, he was proud of his honesty. He had never indulged in such chicanery. If, on this occasion, he was tempted—the gem did look to be valuable—still, he turned it over to the authorities. That certainly helped to advance his promotions.

He had used this recollection more than once as a tonic to his spirits, but now, at the Gasthaus Steifer, he did not capture the pleasure he expected on the first sip of the wine. Instead, to the consternation of the few Saturday-morning drinkers present, he collapsed. His last thought was in Latin:
Acta est fabula.
He said it aloud and passed out, proud to have remembered Caesar's last words: “The play is over!”

Now the innkeeper and his assistant carried him to an empty side room. The waiter was ready to run for a priest, but the tavern owner said, “I don't think Herr Alois would want one!”

“Sir,” asked the waiter, “can one be certain in matters like this?”

The innkeeper shook his head. “All right, get him.”

But it developed that their patron was dead before the priest came in, dead from a pleural hemorrhage, which a doctor declared soon after.

Klara ran up with the children a few minutes later, and Angela began to sob. She was the first to see her father's body. Laid out on the table, he looked made of wax. Adolf burst into tears. He was terrified. He had dreamed of his father's death for so long that when the waiter came rushing to their house, Adolf did not believe the news. He was certain his father was merely pretending to be dead. That would be his father's way to rouse a little sympathy from the family. Indeed, even as they hurried through the streets to the Gasthaus, Adolf remained convinced. Only when he saw the body was he overcome. He wept loudly and without cease. His immediate necessity was to conceal every last wish he had had for the demise of his father. It was as if the more he wept, the more might God believe he did mourn the loss. (That he was certain of God's interest in him was now a keystone of his vanity—one of my major contributions.)

On January 5, the day of the funeral, he wept in church. By now, however, it had become a labor to force these tears forth sufficiently to impress the men and women who might be staring at him. I, in my turn, had to convince him that God was not angry at him. In consequence, I was presenting myself once again as his guardian angel. While we can, on occasion, alleviate fear of the Lord by increasing our client's sense that the Power Above does love him, it is a tricky task, since the better we are at it, the greater grows the risk that the client will react with sufficient piety to attract the attention of the Cudgels, and they in turn will be particularly vindictive toward us because we dared to imitate them.

Indeed, on one occasion when I played at being a guardian angel for another client, one of the Cudgels threw me down a flight of stone stairs. It may be hard to conceive, but spirits can also take a damaging fall. Since I was not corporeal at the time, there was no flesh to bruise but, oh, what a pummeling to my inner presence! Steel and stone are harsh materials when they come in contact with the Spirit. That is why prisons are built of steel and stone.

Let me not digress, however, from the funeral. I had to prepare Adolf to deliver a good many facsimiles of grief. We were certainly facing a demand altogether different from that first burst of tears when he saw his father dead. Now, in order to come forth with a few sobs, he had to uproot bits and pieces of memory from the few good conversations he had had with Alois. It helped that he had used to admire (if grudgingly) the way his father could speak. But that might not be enough to prime the dry well of so impoverished a sorrow. At last, he chose to think of the day when they went to Der Alte's house for the first time. He was able to bring forth tears at this recollection, but it was for Der Alte's death.

So the weeping, while in full view of everyone in church, did have to live with ongoing inhibitions. His sobbing pinched off each time he had a memory of Alois' body at the Gasthaus Steifer, and he was able to cry in earnest only by thinking of how awful it had been for Der Alte to die alone and not be found for weeks. Given these impediments, he was often close to hiccups.

Klara sat close to Adolf on this occasion, but her maternal sensitivities, never wholly removed from telepathy, had her soon thinking of bees. She remembered how she would talk to the Langstroth boxes in Hafeld on evenings when Alois was at the tavern in Fischlham. Now she wondered whether she might even leave a wreath on the empty beehive that still remained at the back of the house in Leonding. Alois' last little hive had only given them a small return of honey, but back in Hafeld, following the old customs of Spital and Strones, she had made a point of talking to the beehives and would relate to them what was going on in the family. During her childhood she had been told that it was bad luck not to speak to your bees. They expected such attention. But if you ever were so unlucky as to see a swarm alight on a dead plant, why, then, a member of the family was bound to die.

When Alois had started the new hive in Leonding, she had told him about this practice and asked if he would like her to talk to them. He laughed. “I can see the point if it's a real bee house of the sort Der Alte had. When there's a large investment,” said Alois, “one would not wish to endanger it in any manner. So, of course, a few superstitions cannot hurt, and how can one say it will not help? But, if you insist, give a real speech to the bees and tell them all there is to know about us. They will look to pass such gossip on to the newspapers,” and he had laughed heartily at his own joke, enough for her to regret telling him.

She remembered how, just six months ago, Alois had cursed bitterly when his hive had swarmed away. That had been the end of the venture in Leonding. The unhappy dream he had had in Hafeld six years ago that his hives would desert him had been realized instead in the summer of 1902.

Now, at the funeral, a half year later, she was convinced that this flight of his bees had helped to bring on his lung hemorrhage. She knew. He had been afraid to climb the tree onto which they had swarmed. Indeed, he knew in which tree they had installed themselves but pretended he didn't. Yes, she knew. That was because he did not feel able to climb a tree. So, to make up for that, he had chosen to carry the coal all by himself down to the cellar. So foolish an act! His disappointment with Adolf, his heartbreak concerning Paula—no, she must not dwell on any of this, not for a moment. Nor dare to think of Edmund! She blinked back bottomless grief. One must weep properly at a funeral, and she wanted to scream.

The priest's eulogy proved acceptable. She had chosen not to tell him how irreligious was her husband, even as she knew he must have heard many a rumor. All the same, this priest now offered a dignified description of Alois' service to the Empire. That, said the priest, could also be God's desire.

Later, after the funeral, as people came to visit at the Garden House, Klara tried to convince herself that Adolf's grief was real. Once again she chose to decide that he had loved his father. It was just that both of them had lived too much in their pride, and such pride was bound to turn into animosity. They were men. Anger was natural to them. But beneath was love. Such love could not be expressed easily. In years to come, however, wisps of grief were bound to wander through Adolf's soul, grief possessing all the tenderness of a mist. So she had decided.

While this funeral took place on an icy day, and the roads were glass, the trees were bare, and the skies dark, virtually everyone they knew in Leonding was there, as well as his colleagues from the Linz Customs office. Karl Wesseley had come all the way from Prague. He spoke to Klara for a little while and said, “Oh, we used to tease each other unmercifully, Frau Hitler, and how we laughed. Alois, as you know, loved his beer, and I had my preference for wine. ‘You are nothing but an Austrian,' I would tell him, ‘so you drink beer like a German, but we Czechs are cultured enough to enjoy wine.' We certainly joked. ‘
Ach
! You Czechs,' he would then say to me, ‘You are cruel to grapes. You stamp all over them with your dirty feet and then, when the poor things are feeling very sour from such mishandling, you add sugar and pretend to be connoisseurs. You sip your sour juice and sugar and try not to make a face. Beer, at least, comes from grain. Its feelings are not so tender.'” He laughed as he told her. “Your husband knew how to talk. We had fine times together.”

Mayrhofer mentioned the frightful day when he had had to tell Alois about Junior's incarceration. “Dear Frau Hitler,” he said, “I wake up at night and upbraid myself for having been such a messenger.”

The
Linzer Tages Post
also carried an ad.

Bowed in deepest grief, we, on our own behalf, and on behalf of all the relatives, announce the passing of our dear and unforgettable husband, father, brother-in-law, uncle, Alois Hitler, High Official of the Royal Imperial Customs, retired, died Saturday, January 3, 1903, at 10 o'clock in the morning in his 65th year, suddenly fell peacefully asleep in the Lord.

In the cemetery, Alois' stone carried his photo protected by a glassed frame, and beneath was the following inscription:

         

H
ERE RESTS IN
G
OD

A
LOIS
H
ITLER

H
IGHER
C
USTOMS
O
FFICER AND
H
OUSEHOLDER.

D
IED
3
RD
J
ANUARY
, 1903,
IN HIS
65
TH
Y
EAR.

Adolf decided that his mother was a criminal hypocrite. She would honor her husband's memory, yes, indeed! “Rests in God,” indeed! All that was left of his father was his picture resting in a frame set on the headstone in the cemetery, the glass in the frame ready to protect the photograph from the wrath of the weather, Alois' hair close-cropped, his small eyes standing out, just as beady as a bird's, and his Franz Josef sideburns. Yes, here was a man who had served his Emperor, but how could anyone say he was resting in God?

Klara, however, was warmed by a notice the
Linzer Tages Post
gave to the funeral:

We have buried a good man—this might we say of Alois Hitler, Higher Collector, Retired, from the Imperial Customs Service, who was borne here to his final resting place today.

She was so proud of the notice. It was not an advertisement. The paper had done it on its own, the paper with the largest circulation in Upper Austria. She read this item over and over. The lines brought back each moment of the funeral. She could picture Adolf weeping once again, and felt considerable comfort. To herself she said, “He did love his father, after all,” and she had to keep nodding her head to sustain the thought.