The Castle in the Forest

by Norman Mailer

  She had also thrown too many logs on the fire. The rest of the dancers soon gave up. The room had become much too hot. Half in annoyance but half in exuberance, Alois kept teasing Rosalie, “Oh, you are the one who is in a hurry to burn up a man’s goods, are you not?” and Rosalie would cover her cheeks with her hands and giggle.

  Rosalie’s eyes would open wide when she was teased. It was no small matter that her breasts were undeniably full, and now were heaving in the aftermath of the polka. It did not need even that much to convince Klara. Alois was ready for his next diversion. She would remember this night for all the years to come, those years of sorrow when the child Gustav she was carrying on this night and the two who were to follow, Ida and Otto, were all to die in the same year, Gustav at two, Ida at one, and Otto only a few weeks old.

  Johann Nepomuk also noticed the warmth of the room and the look in Rosalie’s eye. “Get rid of that maid,” he whispered to Klara, but she did no more than shrug. “The next one could be worse,” she whispered back.

  Nepomuk had a terrible nightmare after the wedding party. His heart felt ready to burst. He could have died that night in his bed but instead he continued to live for another three years. There is no organ more resistant to rupture than the heart of a tough old peasant. Nonetheless, he never felt the same, a cruel punishment for an old widower who was trying to hold on to what was left for him. Death, when it came to him at the age of eighty-one, arrived with the same epidemic that took away the children.

  4

  Diphtheria had come into their family like the Black Death.

  Mucus welled up from the throat of the two-year-old and the one-year-old, an up-pouring of green phlegm, thicker, heavier than the mud of Strones. Noises rasped forth from the boy and girl, sounds uttered with the tortured authority of an old man and an old woman working their lungs like galley slaves to clear a straw’s width of passage. Gustav died first, Gustav, always sickly, a two-and-a-half-year-old who looked like the ghost of Klara’s lost brothers and lost sisters, then Ida went, Ida, fifteen months old, certainly the blue-eyed image of Klara, going three weeks after Gustav. Both deaths came back to the mother in the blow that soon followed. That was Otto’s end—Otto, just three weeks old!—lost to a galloping colic that gutted him. The stench of a baby born to die in its first weeks of life settled into Klara’s nose as if her nostrils were another limb of memory.

  She had no doubt whose fault it was. Alois had been close to the Evil One. But such a matter she could understand. A boy in Vienna all alone and he always wanted so much. Of course! But for herself, there was no excuse. She had desired a family where children did not die but grew to their full age, and yet she had been unfaithful to the Lord God Almighty on the night Gustav was conceived, yes, and that secret pleasure she still looked to find on nights when Alois chose to make love as a change in his diet from the present affair with the new cook, Rosalie, at the Pommer Inn.

  She hated him for such acts. But then, she also learned that this kind of hatred was treacherous. It seemed to increase her desire. Whereas on those nights when she felt a moment of love for Alois, all such good life turned to ice below. Alois would grumble when the act was done even as she was kissing him in a fever to set things right.

  “Your mouth gives promises you do not keep,” he would tell her.

  It did not feel as if she were married. Anna Glassl and Fanni were always in her mind. If she had begun as a maid, and then become a nurse to Fanni’s children, and then a stepmother, now her own children were dead. Alois Junior and Angela had been sent to Spital when diphtheria assaulted the younger children, and so escaped infection. They were back with her now, but all of their three rooms at the Pommer Inn still reeked of the fumigation that followed each death, and the odor lived on in Klara’s clothes through the three separate days of the three services at the cemetery. She knew how small a coffin could be—she had learned as much from the losses in the Poelzl family—but the miniature coffins of her own children were three slashes upon her heart that awakened the love she had not dared to feel when her children were alive. She had been too terrified of the evil she could bring to these newborn souls. It was only after the death of Gustav that she realized she had loved him.

  Alois, in his turn, had decided he was not about to forgive God. To his friends at the tavern near the Customs House, especially the newcomers, young Customs officials, he would speak with the authority of his three decades in the Finance-Watch. “It is the Emperor who has the power to guide us,” he remarked one hot summer night. “The real power is right there. God does nothing but kill us off.”

  “Alois,” said an older friend, “you speak as if you are not afraid of going upstairs.”

  “Upstairs or downstairs, the real authority for me is Franz Josef.”

  “You go too far,” said his friend.

  By the time he reached home, Alois was usually in no good mood. The beer wore off in a sour cloud. He would scold Alois Junior, he would upbraid Angela, he would not say a word to Klara. Now no more often than once a week (and he was furious at how much these three deaths had taken from his vitality) he would look at Klara again as he had on their first night and would try to conceive of how to introduce her to certain spécialités de la maison. He did not speak French but he knew all he needed to know about those few words. One of the Customs officers would brag that he had been to Paris in his youth. There, in a brothel, he claimed, he had learned more over two nights than in all the rest of his life.

  Alois refused to be impressed. Some of the details were not foreign to him. Fanni, for one, liked to put her mouth into many a place, and Anna Glassl was no lady when you got down to it. And now and again, with one of the maids or cooks, he would receive a nice wet surprise.

  Of course, these days he was with a frightened bird whose torso could scorch him even if her thighs were as cold as a snowbank. She made love, yes, when he could actually get all the way into her—not often—she was as strong as the Hound, yes, so much like bitches he had seen snarling and snapping at a male dog’s genitals. Klara did not snarl or snap, she just jumped up on her altar, alone, always alone, she was so private that he wanted to put his mouth where she was most private, and then he could slip the Hound into her mouth. He would show her where Devotion was located. Spécialités de la maison!

  Yet, on this hot summer night when he tried to open her closed legs, pushing harder than ever with the force of his arms, there came a moment when his breath overtook him. A startling pang! For one instant, he felt as if he had been felled by thunder. Was that his heart? Was he the next to die?

  “Are you all right?” she cried out as he lay beside her, his breath going in and out with a rasp that sounded as terrible as the last winds of their lost children.

  “All right. Yes. No,” he said. Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni’s death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One—that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

  The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety, yes, damn all piety, thought Alois—damned church-mouse wife, damned church!—he was back from the dead—some kind of miracle, he was all there, his pride equal to a sword. This was better than a storm at sea! And then it went beyond such a moment, for she—the most angelic woman in Braunau—knew she was giving herself over to the D
evil, yes, she knew he was there, there with Alois and herself, all three loose in the geyser that came out of him, and then out of her, now together, and I was there with them, I was the third presence and was carried into the caterwauling of all three of us going over the falls together, Alois and myself filling the womb of Klara Poelzl Hitler, and indeed, I knew the moment when creation occurred. Even as the Angel Gabriel served Jehovah on a momentous night in Nazareth, so too was I there with the Evil One at this conception on this July night nine months and ten days before Adolf Hitler would be born, on April 20, 1889. Yes, I was there, an officer of rank in the finest Intelligence service that has ever existed.

  BOOK IV

  THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

  1

  Yes, I am an instrument. I am an officer of the Evil One. And this trusted instrument has just committed an act of treachery: It is not acceptable to reveal who we are.

  The author of an unsigned and unpublished manuscript can attempt to remain anonymous, but the margin of safety is not large. If, from the beginning, I have spoken of my fear at undertaking this work, it is because I knew that sooner or later I would have to reveal myself. Now, however, that I have offered this disclosure, there is a shift in the given. I can no longer be envisioned as a Nazi officer. If in 1938 I could pretend to be a trusted aide to Heinrich Himmler (by the means, yes, of inhabiting a real SS officer’s body) that was temporary. When so ordered, we are always ready to inhabit such roles, such human abodes.

  I recognize, however, that these remarks can hardly be accessible to the majority of my readers. Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil. They have even less readiness to accept the cosmic drama of an ongoing conflict between Satan and the Lord. The modern tendency is to believe that such speculation is a medieval nonsense happily extirpated centuries ago by the Enlightenment. The existence of God may still be acceptable to a minority of intellectuals, but not the belief that there is an opposed entity equal to God or nearly so. One Mystery might be allowed, but two, never! That is fodder for the ignorant.

  There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality. Detestation, yes, but understanding of him, no—he is, after all, the most mysterious human being of the century. Nonetheless, I would say that I can comprehend his psyche. He was my client. I followed his life from infancy a long way into his development as the wild beast of the century, this all-too-modest-looking politician with his snippet of a mustache.

  2

  As a newborn, he was a most typical Klara Poelzl product. He was not healthy. Indeed, he terrified Klara every time a drop of mucus oozed out of his nose or a bubble of sputum popped from his infant lips.

  It is probably true that she was ready to die if he did not live. The attention she gave to Adolf’s early days would have been seen as hysteria in any woman who had less cause for concern, but then, Klara was living at the edge of the abyss. Recollections of her nights with Alois were pervaded now by the penetratingly corrupt smell of the sickroom as Gustav, Ida, and Otto had been lost one by one in the same few months of the same year. She had prayed devoutly to God to save each of her three babies, but the prayers were unavailing. As she saw it, God’s rebuke could only confirm the sin of her condition.

  After Adolf was conceived, she formed the habit of washing her mouth every morning with laundry soap. (Alois was now full of a predilection—especially in late pregnancy—to force Klara’s mouth onto the Hound and keep it there, one big hand on her neck.)

  No surprise then if her love was for the baby. So soon as Adolf gave some real indication of living—he would soon smile with delight at the approach of her face—she began to believe that God might be kind to her this time, that He could even be ready to forgive. Would He be ready to spare this child? Might she think His Wrath had lessened? Had He even given her an angel? Such is the nature of pious hope. Then she had a dream that told her to have nothing to do with her husband. Such is the nature of pious obligation.

  Alois soon had to face the possibility that a will of iron, when forged by prayer, can be quite as powerful in a wife as a highly developed biceps on her mate. At first, Alois could not believe that her refusal to let him touch her was more than a whim, a new species of enticement. “You women go back and forth like a kitten chasing its tail,” he told her. Then, deciding that rebellion such as this was to be mercilessly crushed, he seized her buttocks in one hand and her breast with the other.

  She bit him on the wrist hard enough to draw blood. Whereupon he cuffed her, leaving Klara with a bruised eye. Gott im Himmel! He was obliged next morning to beg her not to go out until her eye was no longer discolored. For a week, his hand bandaged, he shopped for food after work—no tavern on those nights. Then, with her bruise gone at last, he still had to give up what he considered irrevocable rights, and was obliged to sleep in a huddle on his side of the bed.

  Since this state would be maintained over quite a period, I choose for the present to stay closer to Klara. An intensity of emotion is always attractive to demons and devils, even as farmers dream of black soil for future crops.

  It need hardly be underlined that the death of Otto, Gustav, and Ida proved useful to us even if death is still in God’s domain, not ours. Their loss intensified Klara’s adoration of Adolf past any usual measure of large maternal love. When he began to scream every time she kissed his lips, she came to recognize that it was the odor of lye on her mouth. But since Alois had been driven to his side of the bed, there was no longer a need each morning to use the disinfectant. So she could kiss Adolf again even as he gurgled obligingly.

  We expected that this would prove useful. Excessive mother-love is almost as promising to us as a void of mother-love. We are keyed to look for excess of every kind, good or bad, loving or hateful, too much or too little of anything. Every exaggeration of honest sentiment is there to serve our aims.

  However, we would wait. When it comes to turning a child into a client, we follow a reliable rule. We move slowly. While an incestuous procreation followed by swarms of mother-love will offer rich possibilities, particularly when the event has been fortified by our presence at conception, and we have, therefore, every reason to expect exceptional potentiality to be present for us, still we wait, we observe. The child may not live. We lose so many. All too often, God is aware of our choice and, heartlessly—I will say this about Him—yes, God can remove certain children heartlessly, no matter the cost to Himself. The cost to Himself? A curious calculation is present. The Lord is not insensitive to the hopes of those who surround the young one. The early death of an exceptional child can demoralize a family. Even when He knows, therefore, that a given individual has been in good part captured by us, He hesitates. Sometimes He does not wish to take on the collateral damage to the family. Besides, His angels can always look to steal the child back from us.

  So the Lord is respectful of mother-love even when it is all-embracing. It can come as no surprise, then, that many artists, ogres, geniuses, killers, and an occasional savior live to maturity because God chose not to dispose of them. The first element of mutual recognition in the struggle between the D.K. (as we shall now often call Him) and our leader—the Maestro—is their mutual understanding that no single splendid human quality is likely to prevail by itself, unaltered by His powers or ours. Even the noblest, most self-sacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster. Provided we are present. All the same, this is not a game where we can count on the end result. That is why investing in the newborn is an unbalanced gamble for both the Maestro and the Lord.

  But I can see that further explanation of the conditions, limitations, and powers of the world I inhabit must be presented or too little will be understood.

  3

  I will attempt, then, an explanation of these Two Kingdoms, the Divine and the Satanic. I could speak of them as two antagonisms, two realms, two visions of ex
istence at odds with each other, but Two Kingdoms has been the term used by us for countless centuries. Needless to add, we devils are confronted daily by a formidable array of angels. (We call them the Cudgels.)

  While these warring forces will not be unfamiliar to anyone who has read Paradise Lost, I would note that many of us are well versed in literary classics. I cannot speak for the angels, but devils are obliged to be devoted to good writing. Milton, therefore, is high in our arcana of those few literary artists whom we do not have to look upon as unforgivably second-rate (because of their sentimental inexactitudes). Milton, after all, did provide his intuitive understanding of the contest between the Two Kingdoms. No matter how inaccurate were his details, he did present a pioneer demonstration of how such armies might have confronted each other at the commencement of that great estrangement which occurred when the earliest squadrons of angels divided into opposed camps and each was convinced that they were the ones to direct the future of human beings.

  One can offer respect, then, to that great blind man, even if his descriptions are out of date. Devils who serve the Maestro do not go to war in phalanx against angels any longer. Rather, we are artfully installed by now in every corner of human existence.

  To bring, therefore, a first explanation of the sinuosities, salients, dead ends, and recesses of our war, I am obliged to offer an outline of the forces we look to exert now on human society. I would start by remarking that there are three aspects to reality—the Divine, the Satanic, the human—in effect, three separate armies, three kingdoms, not two. God and His angelic cohorts work upon men, women, and children to bring them under His Influence. Our Maestro, and we, his representatives, look to possess the souls of many of these same humans. Until the Middle Ages, human beings could not bring much of an active role to the contest. Often, they were pawns. Hence the notion of Two Kingdoms. By now, however, we are obliged to take the individual man or woman into account. I will even say that many, if not most, humans are at present doing their best to be beholden neither to God nor to the Maestro. They seek to be free. They often remark (and most sententiously), “I want to discover who I am.” All the while, we devils guide the people we have attracted (we do call them clients), the Cudgels contest us, and many a particular individual does his or her best to fight off both sides. Humans have become so vain (through technology) that more than a number expect by now to become independent of God and the Devil.