If he could measure himself by such deeds, it was in relation to the accomplishments of other low-ranking officers in the Finance-Watch. His rise was remarkable for a young man with so sparse an education. Nonetheless, in four more years, he had another promotion, and still another by 1870, when at the age of thirty-three he had worked himself up to Customs Collector. By 1875, he was Full Inspector and would write below his signature, on any government paper, the full weight and address of the title: “Official of the First Class Imperial Customs Post in the Railroad Terminal, Sim-bach, Bavaria. Residence, Braunau, Linzergasse.”
All through his rise toward the highest official rank that was open for a man of his beginnings, he never relinquished any of his good appetite for women. The first principle of Austrian bureaucracy was to do your job, but the more effective you became at such tasks, the less you had to fear for the little indulgences of your private life. This understanding he obeyed to the letter. In those years, no matter where he was assigned, he would stay at an inn. Before long, given his confidence, he would proceed to conquer the loosely defended bastions of the cooks and chambermaids in the hostelry. When he had gone through all of the available women, he would usually move to another large inn. Through the forty years of his career, his change of residence was frequent. In Braunau, for example, he moved twelve times. Nor did it bother him that his women were not elegant enough to walk with cavalry officers. Not at all! Elegant women, he had come to decide, were too difficult—no doubt of that—whereas maids and cooks were grateful for his attention and would raise no ruckus when he moved on.
In 1873, he married a widow. Having developed an eye for the social stature attached to any woman presuming to pass for a lady—his occupation demanded, after all, some ability in that direction—he was not dissatisfied with his choice. He might be thirty-six and the widow already fifty, yet he could respect her. She came from a worthy family. She might not be good-looking, but she was the daughter of an official in the Hapsburg tobacco monopoly that produced a share of the Crown’s income, and the size of her dowry was agreeable. They lived well; they had a personal maid. His own salary was, by now, substantial—the principal of the highest public school in Braunau did not earn more. As his rank increased, so did his uniform generate an increase in gold trim and gold-plated buttons, and his cocked hat was entitled to sprout elegant official embroidery. His mustache was now worthy of a titled Hungarian, and his face came at you, jaw-first. His inferiors at the Customs post were told they were always to use his correct title when speaking to him. With it all, he was putting on weight. Soon after his marriage, and very much at his wife’s urging, he shaved his mustache and grew sideburns on each side of his face. Given the care he afforded them, they soon became as imposing as castle gates. Now he not only looked like a Customs official in the service of the Hapsburgs, but he even resembled Franz Josef himself! There he was, a fair facsimile of the Emperor, with a full expression of duty, hard work, and an imperial face.
His wife, Anna Glassl-Hoerer, had lost, however, her appeal for him. This deficit occurred some two years into the marriage, when he discovered that she, too, was an orphan and had been adopted. In turn, she also lost respect for his presence when he (grown weary of making up stories about an imaginary and somewhat fabulous Herr Schicklgruber, his father) confessed that there was no such man on the parental side of his natal ledger, merely a blank.
She began her campaign. Alois was to legitimize himself. His mother, after all, had been married. Why could that not be taken to mean Johann Georg Hiedler was the father? Alois knew it was unlikely, but now that Anna Glassl was making it an issue, he was not averse. He had, after all, never enjoyed his last name, and Anna Glassl was not necessarily wrong when she judged that his career, despite its success, had been obliged to deal every day with the sound of Schicklgruber.
He traveled from Braunau through Weitra to Spital in order to see if Johann Nepomuk would help him. The old man, now turned seventy, misunderstood. When Alois told him that he wanted his last name changed to what it should be—Hiedler!—Johann Nepomuk’s heart passed through a scalding shame. He thought he was being named as the father. Immediately he was ready to argue that at this late date, what with his two remaining married daughters to think of (not to mention his wife, Eva!), how could he declare himself Alois’ father? These excuses, however, did not reach his mouth. At the last instant, he realized that Alois was only asking for Johann Georg to be named as his sire. Whereupon—old men being as ready as young girls to move on the instant from one extreme of emotion to the other—he was furious at Alois. His own son did not want him, Nepomuk, to be thought of as the father. It took another moment to recognize that Georg, having married Maria Anna, was the only one who could be used legally for this venture.
In a farm cart pulled by two old horses, he journeyed with Alois and Romeder and two neighbors who had agreed to serve as witnesses all of the miles from Spital to Strones, then farther on a few miles to Döllersheim, all of it close to a four-hour journey on a narrow meandering carriage road impeded by many fallen limbs and a few uprooted trees, but still reasonably free of mud on this October day. (With mud, it might have taken eight hours.) On arrival, Johann Nepomuk came face to face with the particular priest he had no wish to remember. There he was, a very old priest now, shrunken in stature, yet still the priest who had scolded him for traffic with the vulva of a mare.
This recollection was shared by the two men, even if there was not the smallest shift of expression between them. They were all present for the business at hand, Alois, Nepomuk, Romeder, and the two witnesses who had been brought along from Strones. Since none of them but Alois knew how to write, the others signed the document with an XXX. They said they had known Georg Hiedler and that “in their presence and repeatedly” he had admitted to being the father of this child. The mother had stated the same. They swore to that.
The priest could see that, legally speaking, very little was correct. Each of the witnesses’ hands had shaken with a good bit of godly fear as they put down an XXX. One of them, the son-in-law, Romeder, could not have been five years old when Anna Maria died. Of course, she would have told all to the five-year-old! Moreover, Johann Georg was also long dead. Given such a dubious case, a more careful proceeding would be appropriate.
The priest did what he had been doing for years—he certified the paper, even as he kept smiling with his old and toothless mouth. He knew they were lying.
He would not, however, insert the date. On the yellow page of the old parish registry of June 1, 1837, he crossed out “Illegitimate,” put Johann Georg’s name in what had previously been the blank space, and smiled again. Legally speaking, the document was shaky, but it did not matter. Which church authority in Vienna would challenge such an alteration? The word was to encourage certified fatherhood no matter how late in life it arrived. Already in some districts of Austria, illegitimacy was up to forty births per hundred. Of that forty, could even half be free of one or another unmentionable family matter? So the priest, disapproving of these loose procedures even if he was bound to accept them, chose not to inscribe his own name. If it ever went wrong, he could disavow the paper.
Then he spelled each of the witnesses’ names by choice, inasmuch as there was no agreement on orthography from province to province—one reason why Hiedler eventually became Hitler.
Now that Alois had his new name, he decided to stop off for an hour in Spital rather than continue on immediately in Nepomuk’s cart to the railroad station at Weitra. The change from Schicklgruber to Hiedler was sufficiently agreeable for him to feel an upsurge in the happy region below his navel. This was, he knew from long experience, one of the gifts his nature had given him. He was as quick as a hound to sense when female company happened to be near.
Was it Johanna who had put him on the alert? She lived next door to her father, and at this moment Alois glimpsed a woman looking out the window. But, no, that could not be Johanna. This woman looked older than his w
ife. Now he was in no hurry to visit.
Yet his steps took him to the door. Once again, the Hound had not betrayed him. For if there in the doorway was Johanna, prematurely deep into middle age, beside her was a girl of sixteen. She was the same height as himself, with the nicest and most agreeable features, modest, well formed, with a good head of abundant dark hair and the bluest eyes he had ever seen—they were as blue as the light that once reflected from a large diamond he had seen behind a glass in a museum exhibit.
So soon as he separated himself from the powerful hug and whole set of steamy kisses Johanna left with her honest saliva on his mouth, he took off his cocked hat and bowed. “This is your uncle Alois,” Johanna said to her daughter. “He is a wonderful man.” She turned back to him and added, “You look better than ever—there is even more to the uniform now, yes?” And she pulled her daughter to her. “Here is Klara.”
Johanna began to weep. Klara was her seventh child. Of the others, four were now dead, one was a hunchback, and her son, now nineteen, the oldest remaining, had consumption. “God never ceases punishing us for our sins,” she said, at which Klara nodded.
Alois had no desire to hear about God. Spend a little time with Him, and the Hound might moan for shame. He preferred to enjoy the thought that he could soon see more of this niece.
He took a walk outside the village with the mother and daughter. They went to that part of Nepomuk’s fields which now belonged to the husband, Johann Poelzl, who—no surprise to Alois—bore no resemblance to this rare blue-eyed Klara. Poelzl had gray, clouded eyes and a face full of lines that drooped in concert with a sad nose. It was obvious that he had given up the once-enduring hope that sooner or later he would be certain to prosper because he was an honest farmer. Nor did Alois stay. Poelzl had the expression on his face of a man who still has a host of chores. On this day, scattered in the rows of stubble, were stray ears of corn not yet too rotten to feed to the pigs, and Poelzl stood on one foot and then the other (as if to talk for another two minutes would allow more of the remaining ears to spoil). If he was also discomforted by the implicit prosperity of Alois’ uniform, Poelzl’s mood took no happier turn when Alois remarked that his own wife was not well and needed a maid who was pious and of reliable breeding. Was it possible—not to rush things!—that Klara might be just that person?
Poelzl could hardly say no when he was told of the amount his daughter would be able to send back. Cash not dependent on a crop was the best of crops, and, as always, he needed money. The alternative—to borrow further sums from his brother-in-law Romeder or his father-in-law, Nepomuk, was unpleasant. Poelzl could hear the diatribe that would come from his wife’s family. Johanna’s disposition had become so sour that he often thought (very much in private) that her blood must taste like vinegar. Nor did he wish to listen to the loud sigh of his brother-in-law as Romeder came up with some kronen. He certainly didn’t want to hear the advice which was bound to come from Nepomuk. That would insult his judgment. A farmer could have fine instincts for husbandry and still be prey to bad luck—did that mean he must pay tribute twice by listening to others when he had already paid once by living with an insufficient return from his fields? So he accepted the fact that Klara would go to work for Uncle Alois, but his feelings turned over in him with the emptiest anger of them all—rage that has lost its heat.
One week after Alois’ return to his post in Braunau, Klara followed with a small chest filled with a modest cache of clothes and a few possessions.
4
Alois and Anna Glassl had three rooms in the second-best inn of Braunau—the Gasthaus Streif. There was also a small room for Klara on the top floor where other maids and servants slept.
For a while, Alois entertained the happy notion that he might be able to spend a little time up there with Klara, but his niece did not welcome him, not exactly. It was evident to all including his wife that Klara was steeped in respect for her exceptional uncle, but it seemed no cause for concern to Anna Glassl—not yet! The girl was pious to a degree that would have seemed incomprehensible if one did not understand that death was her nearest relative. There were lights in those pale-blue eyes that spoke of angels—godly angels and fallen angels. Her face was so innocent that one could ask in all honesty what she could know of fallen angels, if not for that second sense which is there to tell us that devils hover like moths at the closing doors of life. Even the innocent do not always like to dream of the departed.
Alois could envision other dubious portals—the doors to Klara’s chastity might open to an icehouse. So he was charming to his niece but made a point never to touch her. His wife, as unhappy by now as a crow with a broken wing, had put up with his yen for maids and cooks, but then, about the time she began her campaign to expunge the name of Schicklgruber, she allowed her distrust of him to take on new force. Never had Alois encountered jealousy so passionate, so far-ranging, and so much to the point. Yet he felt ready to deal with it.
While he considered his first quality as a man to be dedication to his work—to the cleanliness of his personal appearance, and the punctilio he presented in each and every working hour, he had not stood for years at a border post looking to root out the attempts of travelers and merchants to cheat the Hapsburg Crown of its tariff without learning a good deal about false presentation and outright mendacity. Now he was having to exercise such abilities himself in order to divert Anna from another girl he had taken to visiting on the top floor of the inn.
There was an old Viennese joke that to have a flourishing society, both the police and the thieves must keep improving at what they did. He thought often of the remark. It was true for Anna Glassl and himself. The more acute her sense of what he might be up to, the finer were his lies.
She had cause for distrust. There were days when he made love to each of the three women he could look upon as regulars. In the morning, full of the bounty of sleep, he would take care of his wife, and in the afternoon when Anna Glassl was napping and his off-duty time coincided with an hour when the chambermaid washed their floors, he usually enjoyed the coquetry of her hips as she, down on her hands and knees, slung a wet cloth from side to side—truth, he rarely saw her face at such times. And in the evening after Anna Glassl had gone to sleep, there was Fanni.
So if he was ready to wait for Klara Poelzl, it was because his nocturnal and, for the present, true interest was with this waitress at the inn, a nineteen-year-old named Fanni Matzelberger, who was voluptuous but lithe, and—by every good measure—smoldering. He had learned to strip his eyes of all expression when she crossed the room, but she did have an irrepressible turn to her hips that spoke to him—Fanni was a good girl who did not want to be so good.
Indeed, as he soon learned by visits to her attic room, she was a virgin of the most tormented sort, a maiden in the old peasant tradition: She had kept the formal entrance to her chastity intact but the same could not be said of its neighbor. This was not all so agreeable for Alois. The Hound was too large to permit a good poke into “the smelly and the damned” (or so he would characterize it). Fanni would moan in a very low voice (in order that the rest of the attic not hear) but they were both suffering. All the more intense became their embrace. In the heat of the hour, they loved each other, a not uncommon reaction when the carnal ore is considered to be contraband.
He told himself that she was no more than a good-looking daughter of a prosperous farmer—she did have a decent dowry—but he also told her that he loved her. She said, “Enough to give up your wife and live with me?”
“I will give her up,” he said, “when you give me something else!”
No, she must remain a virgin. So soon as she was ready to do what he wanted, there would be a child. She knew. Then there would be another child. Then she very well might die.
“How do you decide such things?”
“We have gypsies in my family. Maybe I am a witch.”
“What a remark!”
“No, you are a bad man and I am a witch.
Only witches put their mouths in forbidden places. Now I am afraid to go to confession.”
“Stay away from priests. They are there to suck your blood. They are the ones who will leave you weak and good for nothing.”
They argued round and round about whether she should or should not go to confession. She was tempted to let him win, and then, given the force of his desire, she did give it to him, she gave it up, and proceeded to tell him one month later that she was pregnant. Had the time come, she asked, to tell his wife?
He no longer trusted Fanni. He did not think she would have become pregnant if she was really afraid of dying. Besides, he had been lying to his wife with so much skill that now he did not dare to confess. Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth. Anna Glassl-Hoerer Hitler was fifty-seven and looked ten years older (although to his continuing surprise she could be a virago at dawn). To lose her would reduce his financial situation measurably. Moreover, he would be giving up a lady for a farm girl, a most attractive farm girl, but then he had decided long ago that in the end a peasant was like a stone. Throw a stone high in the air—it will always come down. Whereas a lady was like a feather. A lady could tantalize you with her intelligence. He would hate to give up his ever-increasing skill as a liar.
The Castle in the Forest Page 4
