The Castle in the Forest (9 page)

2

N
ot long after Adolf was born, Alois decided to leave the Pommer Inn. This move amounted to his twelfth change of address in Braunau over fourteen years. But Alois had good words for the Pommer: “It has
elegance.
I don't know that I would use the word for much else in this little city.” He had a dozen such remarks to enliven a hundred situations of small talk. “Women are like geese,” he was ready to say. “You can recognize them from behind.” Heavy tavern laughter would follow, even if none of them could explain what was so particular about the rear end of a goose. Or, when speaking to fellow professionals: “To pick out a smuggler is easy. Either they look like the wretches they are, or they are too good to be true. They dress too well, they speak too well, and the amateurs always work very hard at looking you in the eye.”

When asked, however, why he had moved from the Pommer Inn after a residence that had lasted for four years, he would shrug. “I like a change,” he would say. The truth was that he had used up the waitresses, chambermaids, and cooks at the Pommer who were not too old or too ugly, and he could have added (and did to one or two friends), “When a woman goes dry on you, change your house. That can put a little oil in her.”

On the day when the Hitler family left the Pommer Inn, he had, however, a most uncharacteristic thought. It was that fate could yet choose him for high position. I will remark that his idea of high position was to become Chief Customs Officer for the provincial capital of Linz. Indeed, fate would yet give him exactly that post. Never superstitious (except when he was), Alois decided that the shift from the Pommer Inn to a rented house on Linzerstrasse was a good move. He and Klara both agreed that they needed more room, and now they had it. Of course, there were no females in the attic, but he could manage with that. He had nosed out a woman who lived on his route home from the tavern. He had to pay for the privilege by purchasing a small gift from time to time, but then the rent on Linzerstrasse was low. It was a dreary house.

All the while, he fought against falling in love with his wife. She infuriated him. If ants were like bees and had a Queen for whom they labored, then Klara was Queen of the ants, for she commanded his skin to crawl, his crotch to itch, and his heart to toll in his chest—all of this coming from no more than Klara keeping to her half of the divided bed. He had to think of how lovingly she had looked at him on the night of her wedding. She had worn a dark silk dress, rose colored with a white collar—that much white she allowed herself as a bride—and on her white forehead, she had teased some charming curls. At her breast was pinned the one piece of jewelry she possessed, a small green cluster of glass grapes looking real enough to mislead a man into reaching for one. And then there were her eyes—no mistake! He had to fight against falling in love with a woman who kept the cleanest house in Braunau just for him and for three kids—two of them not even her own!—a woman always as polite to him in public as to an emperor, a woman who never complained about what she had and didn't have nor nagged him about finances, a woman who still had only one good dress, the one worn at her wedding party, and yet if he had laid a finger on her, she would have bitten it off. He wondered if the difference in their age was what it was about. Better than marrying her, he should have put her in a convent. Yet his skin itched at the thought of how she would not let him near.

Drinking at the tavern, he would look to regain some pride. His dislike of the Church had by now become a conversational grist. At home, he would glean further material from an anticlerical volume he had found in an antique bookshop in Braunau. Indeed, the store owner, Hans Lycidias Koerner, would meet him on many an evening for beer. While the bookseller kept himself at a scholarly level above more mundane discussions by offering no more than a nod of his head from time to time, his wise presence, his shaven chin and shaven upper lip, his full muttonchops, his peephole spectacles, his half-bald head of burgeoning white hair offered a slight but legitimizing resemblance to Arthur Schopenhauer and thus gave support to Herr Koerner's smallest assent, just enough to carry the other Customs officers around the more bruising turns of Alois' argument. While they were hardly to be counted as churchgoers—“No good man wants to be neutered,” most were ready to admit—still they were officials. So they could hardly feel at ease when a prestigious institution was mocked, let alone the Holy Roman Church.

Not Alois. He showed no fear in declaring that he had no fear. “If there is a Providence larger than Franz Josef's power to provide for us, I have not encountered it.”

“Alois, not everything comes up to a man with a printed sign,” said the officer closest to him in rank.

“It is all a mystery. Mystery, mystery, mystery, and the Church keeps the keys, they are our caretakers,
ja
?”

The others laughed uneasily. But Alois was thinking of Klara and how her piety left a hot rock in his stomach. He would grind this rock to powder. “In the Middle Ages,” he said, “do you know? The whores, they were more respectable than the nuns. They even had a Guild. For themselves alone! I have read about a convent in Franconia so stinking bad the Pope had to investigate. Why? Because the Franconia Whores' Guild complained about the illegal competition they were receiving from the Franconia nuns.”

“Come now,” said two drinkers at once.

“True. It is true. Absolutely true. Herr Lycidias Koerner can show you the text.” Hans Lycidias nodded slowly, reflectively. He was a little too drunk to be certain on which side his authority should fall. “Yes,” said Alois, “the Pope says, ‘Send a monsignor to look into it.' I ask you: What does this good monsignor report? It is that half the nuns are pregnant. This is the sober fact. So the Pope now takes a real look at his monasteries. Orgies. Orgies of homosexuals.” He said it with such force that he had time to take a long swallow from his tankard.

“That, of course,” said Alois, once fresh breath had also been ingested, “need not surprise us. To this day, half of the priesthood are mama's boys. We know that.”

“No, we don't,” muttered one of the younger officers. “My brother is a priest.”

“In that case, I tip my hat to him,” said Alois. “If he is your brother, he is different. But that was then. And I assure you: The priests who were real men did worse. You ever hear this saying by the Pope? From the same Pope. He said, ‘No priest needs to marry so long as the peasant has a wife.'”

The unspoken demand of his voice was that the junior officers be ready to applaud with laughter. So they laughed. “It was exactly like that,” he said. “The poor merchant has one wife, the priest has ten, and the bishop cannot enter heaven—too many wives to bring along.”

“Which bishop?”

“The Bishop of Linz, don't you know?”

Alois had not forgotten the Bishop of Linz, who, six years ago, had refused his application to marry Klara. He certainly recalled how, in order to defray the expenses of translating his letter into Latin, he had been forced to declare himself a pauper. That still rankled.

On the walk home he came, however, to an unhappy conclusion: His tirades against the Church might have to cease. He was fifty-four years old, and for many years had not worried about his position in life. He knew that he would rise in the ranks open to him, but no higher.

Now, however, a well-placed friend up in the Finance-Watch had told him that there was talk of a promotion for Alois Hitler up to Chief Customs Officer at Passau. Given his lack of formal education, this would be a true rise in rank. “However, you must now watch yourself, Alois,” the friend said. “All this is still a year away. Keep a good name if you want to be moved to Passau.”

He had always seen himself as exceptional, afraid of no one (except for certain superiors in uniform), and possessed of a genuine magnetism for women. (How many men could say that much for themselves?) Moreover, he had never been timid about public opinion. Nobody he knew could say as much. In that department, he was no coward.

But now this respected friend (by way of his confidant in the upper councils of the Finance-Watch) was saying, “Watch out for the townspeople in Braunau.”

This caution traveled into his digestion. Because Alois could not decide whether to trust his friend. The man was a practical joker. In fact, he was the same one who had once told him: “The townspeople of Braunau are nothing. You can put your thumb to your nose at them.” Alois had indeed put together a good many habits around that remark, but the truth was he had certainly said too much tonight if there was any ground to the rumor concerning Passau. Of a sudden, he was learning how much ambition he had, a real ambition which he had never admitted to himself. He couldn't. It would have been like a river breaking through a levee. But now he knew this much: He had to stop pissing on the Church.

Yes, his wife might be a cold tit to him and a jug of warm milk to the baby—what a guzzler! never off the tit. Yet he must get by all that—she was a useful wife. Good for the children, good cook, very good with the Church.

Now, he, personally, was not going to be caught at a High Mass except for State occasions, holidays. He did not wish to live with a new itching attack, no, he did not see the confessional box for himself. His skin prickled. A serious official of the Crown like himself should not have to bare his soul to a priest.

Women, however, should be seen in church. So, yes, he admitted to himself, Klara was an asset concerning his new professional goals.

3

I
n our ranks, we look upon excessive ambition as a force at our disposal. We are ready to attach ourselves to any urge that mounts out of control. Of no passion is this more true than outsized ambition. Yet ambition is also related to the Lord's purposes. After all, God designed ambition for humans. (He wanted them to strive to fulfill His Vision.)

Of course, the Lord's supposition was a folly. As the Maestro is never loath to tell us, a human who suffers from too much ambition succeeds only in exemplifying the Creator's own lack of anticipation. The D.K., wishing His Vision to be innovative, had created the human will as an instinct all but free of Him. Once again, God had miscalculated. Ambition is not only the most powerful of the emotions but the most unstable. So many of the most ambitious choose to blame God for a run of bad luck.

Large appetite for success has, therefore, to awaken our interest. The D.K., a prodigious optimist, had not foreseen that the men and women who intended to promulgate His Vision had better possess the selfless ambitions of saints. In contrast, the Maestro has always been alert to the lodes of perversity to be found in human flesh.

Consider the case with Alois. Many people guard their ambition as the most sequestered part of their emotions (guarded even from their own awareness). For so soon as ambition becomes excessive, it is ready, if necessary, to shred a good many long-held convictions about the inviolability of one's honor. Or one's loyalty to friends. All too often ambition can become as blind as a scythe.

No surprise then if Alois was not the only one in the Hitler family to suffer such a disruption. Ambition, being a true germ, is infectious. If Klara now had a child who was actually giving signs of staying alive, her breasts, in consequence, were suffused with joy, the most generous joy she had ever known, and now she wanted everything for Adi. To such a degree, indeed, that she was ready to allow her husband to cross the middle of their bed.

A second courtship began. She was still breast-feeding Adolf. So there was no question of a pregnancy. What inspired the return of some carnal interest was her growing appreciation of Alois. He had built strong foundations, after all, for the good future of Adolf. Even as her husband had risen from the mud of Strones and Spital to the honor of an officer's service to Franz Josef, she, in turn, was ready to dream of the heights to which little Adolf could ascend should his ability prove equal to the vigor of his father.

For that, however, he would need this same father to love him. Once, in her gentlest voice, she said to Alois, “Sometimes I wonder why you never hold Adi.”

“It will just make the other two jealous,” he answered. “Jealous kids are not to be trusted with babies.”

“Alois and Angela hold him all the time,” she said. “They are not jealous. They like him. Sometimes you could say they love him.”

“Let us keep it that way. Maybe they are happy because I do not hold him.”

“Sometimes I am afraid he is not very important to you,” she dared to say.

She had gone one step beyond where she had thought to go. Bad enough for him that he had only half a bed, but now she was looking to scold him? “Important to me?” he said. “
That
I can answer. He is not important to me. Not yet. I want to see if he will live.”

She did not weep often, but here she burst into tears. The worst had happened, and once again she felt weak before her husband. She was not free of loving him.

At that moment, the dog began to bark. Alois had bought a mongrel for a few kronen from a farmer he knew. Since they were living in a house, rather than at an inn, the purchase could be considered protection worth the cost. But the dog, whom he named Luther, proved disappointing. While Luther worshipped Alois and quivered before his master at every shift of tone, he did not seem otherwise alert. Moreover, he had nervous habits. On this night, as Alois shouted at him to stop howling, poor Luther watered the floor.

Afterward, Alois had his regrets. The dog, after all, did adore him. First, however, he whipped him. Even as Luther tried to crawl away, the poor bottom of the beast became soaked in his own outpourings. All the while, he was yelping in full terror. The uproar woke the children. Alois Junior came out first, then Angela, and Adi at the last, not yet two years old, but agile enough to get out of his low bed and walk into the midst of this. Klara leaped up to seize him. She was ready for the worst, she hardly knew what—that the child would step into the urine, that he would cry for her breast, that Alois might strike them both—she had seen the look in her husband's eye when Adi became too greedy with her nipple. None of this happened, however. To the contrary, the child looked with solemn interest at the whimpering dog, then at the flailing hand of the father, and the boy's blue eyes had a gleam, a look of remarkable intensity for one so small. She had seen it on his face when suckling him. He would stare at her with the tender expression of a lover overwhelmed for a moment by the implicit equality of flesh to flesh, soul upon soul. At such instants, she felt as if this child was closer to her and knew more about her than anyone.

Now, as Adolf stared at the wet dog and then at the overflushed face of his father, there was no tenderness in this look, but much comprehension.

Klara felt an odd panic, as if she must now startle the little boy into weeping so that she could give him her breast and thereby remove him from the room. And she succeeded. Adi burst into a rage as she took him up, bore him away, and force-fed him. Indeed, he nipped her enough with his young teeth for Klara to cry out, whereupon he stopped bawling long enough to give a deep and hearty chuckle.

From the room she had just quit, she could hear Alois bellowing.

“That dog can't learn to control himself!” he cried out of his own pain at the awful turn the evening had taken. Luther was bleeding at the mouth from blows he had received full-face on his muzzle, but in turn, Alois' palm had a small but ugly laceration from raking one fierce slap across a broken incisor in the middle of Luther's sad front teeth.