The Castle in the Forest

by Norman Mailer

  “I am prepared to,” said the youth. He smiled warmly at Der Alte, as if to offer one concrete instant when they could feel nicely connected to each other. Before the air between them could take on such emphasis, however, Alois Junior made a point of adding, “I think you have confused me. Aren’t all these bees little women?”

  “Yes,” said Der Alte, “in the technical sense, if we speak of their gender they are female, but, of course, they are not queens, so their generative organs are undeveloped. Consequently, they act like men. Some become guards. They defend all the gates in the hive. Some are warriors. Most of them are loyal, determined, hardworking. In that case, yes, they are like women, too. They live for the good of the hive. But they are like men when it comes to worshipping the Queen.”

  “This is all wonderful to hear,” said Alois Senior, “but I am still waiting to get my honey out of the hive.”

  “In that case,” said Der Alte, “I will give you the key.”

  “Timing,” said Alois Senior. “You told us already.”

  “Yes, that is the general rule of thumb. But what is the secret to timing? It is to wait until you hear an unmistakable sound of happiness rising from the hive. Exactly so! When the honeycomb is full, and the bees know they have made good honey, why, they are ready to act like women again. They sing to each other. You must be able to recognize this sound. They sing in joy. On the morning after you have heard such a chorus of contentment, you must be ready to lead all these good bees through the exit in the separator board into the chamber where you have moved the Queen. Then, of course, the honey will be left ready and open to our invasion, if I may put it that way. But come, I will lead you outside. One of my hives is now singing this song of contentment.”

  I went with them to hear it. I do not know if I would have interpreted the hum that entered my ears in those words. The sound was unmistakably strong. It offered the rapt, intense sound of dynamos in an electrical plant, that elevating yet fearsome hum which comes into human ears whenever one form of energy is converted to another. So much is taking place. A dominion is being directed to enter another dominion. It is the sound common to many motors. “How much we have done,” these motors could be murmuring.

  Der Alte’s last injunction was to put the honey chamber into a sealed box so soon as it was free of its bees. “Then you must take it indoors for the extraction. Into a good sealed room. I cannot emphasize this enough,” he said directly to Alois Junior. “As you may not yet know, these divine creatures have two natures: total loyalty to their Queen, but whole greed for the honey itself. They will gorge on it anywhere they can find it, from any and all hives. So you must not attract any bees who may be out foraging. For that reason, extraction can never be attempted in open air. I repeat: it must take place in a sealed chamber.”

  4

  Once given her instructions, Klara went to some pains by blocking up all the window- and doorsills to their kitchen with every rag at her disposal. She wore a white blouse and white apron for the occasion, and so did Angela. Alois Senior even gave up his cigar. For the family, that was, indeed, an event. But Der Alte had warned him, “Cigar smoke does pacify our bees. But when it comes to their honey, beware. A cigar must not be allowed to insinuate itself into the taste.”

  Luther was, of course, banished from the room. So were Adi, Edmund, and Paula, even if this occasioned a series of trips by Klara to the children’s bedroom, each time removing the cloths piled up against the doors, then replacing them on return. Alois complained that she was protecting everything too much—he did not think one bee had gotten into the house.

  Otherwise, the task went well. As each frame was taken out of the hive box, Alois Senior proceeded with the pride of a surgeon. He pared the wax caps from the honey cells by way of a tool designed to lift off the thin top layer of wax that closed off each cell in the frame. Since there were two thousand cells in each of the ten frames of the Langstroth box, and a cell was no wider in diameter than the fingernail of a child, one could hardly uncap them one at a time. That might have taken a week. Instead, Alois applied the separator knife to whole patches, stripping off swatches of wax an inch wide and from three to four inches long. To his eye, it was like a skin which he, the surgeon, had to remove, yes, no mean touch required to strip this wax without damaging the wax cells beneath. He was beginning to take pleasure in the job. He would have made a good surgeon, he decided. Out of the corner of his eye, he was looking to see if Alois Junior might also be admiring his command of the procedure.

  The supposition that he had a talent for bodily operations had begun to warm his loins. A woman once told him that a surgeon of her acquaintance was one of the two best lovers she had ever had. Alois was the other. How he had enjoyed the remark. Of course. He had no fear of the flesh and neither did a surgeon—brothers under the skin!

  After a time, nicely pleased with himself, he handed the decapping tool to Alois Junior, who mangled one swatch and then the next, but proceeded to get better at the job. Soon he was as deft as his father. This occasioned pride in Senior, and a touch of disappointment. To make it worse, Alois Junior said, “This is as good as scraping icing off a cake.”

  “Watch out for the cells,” said Alois Senior. “Don’t damage them with your big mouth.”

  Adi had by now been allowed into the room to watch, and Alois Junior extended the decapping tool toward his brother as if to say, “Want some?”

  Klara reproved him on the instant. “Why are you offering your little brother a mouthful of wax? He could choke on it.”

  “No, no,” said Alois Junior, “it is a legitimate offer. The wax has honey sticking to it.” He nodded. “I do not think that Adi would be so silly as to swallow the wax.”

  When Klara glared at him, Junior proceeded to chew some himself, then extracted the residue from his mouth and nodded. Klara could only look away.

  Soon the task grew more difficult—they had to strip another layer of wax from the back side of the tray, the frames having been installed on the vertical precisely so cells could be built on both sides of the glass surface. To remove the second surface took longer, however. Honey leaked from the front, and more from the rear. Soon enough, Klara had to take over. Before long, it was apparent that she had the cleverest fingers of all.

  This work took a few hours. As each tray was uncapped, it had to be slotted into the honey extractor, where Angela was now turning the crank. With devotion, she followed her father’s instructions. “Yes, yes, move slowly now as you start, yes, just as you are doing it. Look inside! The honey is beginning to come out of the combs. Keep it slow, yes. Don’t speed up on that crank. Not yet. Slow, Angela, slow.” (He could have been driving a cart while calling to his horses.)

  It proved a strain. The more slowly Angela went, the longer it took for centrifugal force to fling the honey onto the metal sides of the extractor bucket down whose walls it would drip to a funnel. But when she sped up, too much wax flew off with the honey.

  Before long, Alois Junior had to take over. There was silence in the kitchen as they listened to the murmur of honey dripping down the walls of the pail.

  By way of a petcock at the bottom, the honey was then gathered in a basin. Klara was prepared with a coarse sieve and a fine one. But she held everyone back. It was absolutely necessary, she told them, that she and Angela spend another hour filtering the product through cheesecloth. Moreover, she was determined to save the wax as well. Beeswax had value. It could produce the finest grade of candles. So Mr. Rostenmeier had told her at the Fischlham store. Alois snorted. He could have told her that himself, he said.

  Adi was the most impatient. He wanted honey, he wanted to gorge. Not even his mother would permit this, however. “Be patient,” she said. “The honey has to settle.”

  “It is there,” he cried. “It wants us to taste it.”

  “No,” she said, “it is full of bubbles.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You must. Bubbles make honey uncomfortable.
”

  “They don’t,” said Adi. “I know.”

  “You don’t. Air,” said Klara, “will be uncomfortable to the honey, just like gas would be on your stomach.” She had no idea whether this might be true, but she hardly cared. It felt true. Besides, it would be good for Adi to wait. Patience could strengthen his character.

  Tears came into his eyes. As was expected. Whenever he was denied, he was quick to weep.

  “Think of this honey,” she said to Adi. “It has gone through so much. Such a great deal. It was living in one place quietly and the bees were its friends. Now they are gone, and look at all that has happened. We have been shaking it and scraping it. Then we have been spinning it. Now the honey does not know where it is. Let it sit. We will wait. Tomorrow we can have the party.”

  5

  No party took place the next day. Foam and bits of wax had collected on the surface of the honey. Klara scraped it off carefully, but insisted all the same on postponing the feast.

  For one thing, Klara wanted to keep stirring the honey each day. She was convinced this was necessary. Whenever she returned to the kitchen, she stirred it for ten minutes or more and then dragooned Angela or Junior, despite their protests, to fill in for her.

  They must, she told them, all work to keep their honey from becoming hard. She remembered this from her childhood. Once in a while, she thought, a wife could see farther than her husband. Why not? God gives different gifts to everyone.

  Finally, she declared the honey to be ready, and they had their party. Alois Senior considered inviting Der Alte, but Klara was quick to stop such a notion. “This is for the family,” she said.

  So they each took a spoon and stood in a circle, all but Paula, whom Klara held, and fed by way of her forefinger. The others licked their spoons. Instantly, they were ready for more. Klara had baked a sponge cake and offered slices dipped into their trove, but Senior and Junior and Angela and Adi just kept licking their spoons, yield after yield.

  It was as if they were drunk. All of them. In separate ways, but certainly each and every one was having an exceptionally good time. For Alois, it was as special and highly particular as good French brandy—which he had tasted three times in his life. Yes, this honey was magical. It offered memories of Fanni, splendid memories he had not permitted himself to enjoy for years. That had been true heat. What a bitch! What a witch! Too bad. She had paid a great price. To die so young. Could it not be said that she had loved him too much? The thought of such an overabundance of love, excitement, and his old but so-successful treacheries toward Anna Glassl mixed well with the taste of the honey, yes, he might just as well be drunk.

  And Klara, filled with notions of the panoply of God’s gifts, thought again of a young fellow she had liked back in Spital when she was very young, even a year or two before Alois came to visit the farm, this uncle who would be her man for life. But the other fellow had been nice. They had held hands once, although she had never kissed him, not that. But this honey must have stolen into her heart because she realized now—so beautiful a memory—that she had been happy when she held hands with the rough paws of the farmer boy, happier than she had ever been with Alois. Such was life. One had to be careful. One could not live with honey every day. She was careful now to put down her spoon and eat the cake.

  Alois Junior was thinking of Der Alte. It had been in the way the old man stared at him. Eyes so moist. The old man looked like he was ready to open his mouth and wet his lips and do the thing some of the younger boys back in Spital had done for him already. Once or twice. Then more than once or twice. The honey was telling him the truth. He had liked it. He had tried to get a girl to do it, but she had refused.

  Now he remembered the older boys who had wanted him to do the same for them. One had even twisted his arm. When he yelled no, he wouldn’t, this big fellow hit him in the stomach. He had been smart enough to throw up. That discouraged the big fellow. Now maybe he could enjoy something with Der Alte. It would get him ready for the girl he had in mind. Give her a ride on Ulan. Bareback.

  Angela was off in her dream. The honey left her feeling nicer than she had ever felt. A sensation. So strong. She felt as if there were another person in her, someone new, someone good to feel. Was it right to enjoy anything this much?

  If the question now exists, how is it possible for a devil like myself to enter the thoughts of this family when little Adolf is my only true client, I will give credit to the honey. We have among our gifts the power to invest many a substance with a trace of our presence. It takes no more. If we respect such a faculty, then that trace can, for a short period, enter the thoughts of a man or woman or child. This delicate link, carried off with finesse, can even be truth; I suspect that was why Klara kept stirring the stuff for those several days. It was as if she wished to step in as one more guardian against our inroads.

  I did not spend time with Edmund and Paula. Before it was over, the boy would gorge too much and soil his pants, and the baby had a touch of colic. But that was later. At first, they kept smiling with such innocent glee that all the others were laughing at them.

  Adi was the most interesting. As I anticipated, he went wild. The sweet had an effect on him equal to schnapps for Alois Junior on an empty stomach. So Adi made a point of giving sticky kisses to Klara and Angela, delighting in their cries and the panic with which they wiped his kisses off their mouths. Klara, particularly. To scrub her mouth was a reflex, but when she saw a hitch in Adi’s laughter, as if he had been surprised enough by the detestation on her face to allow a tear to pop up in his eye, she caught the boy and kissed him with all the muscular intensity of a mother doing her duty, and Adi, not knowing whether he had been rewarded or further rebuked, crept up on Angela with a small gob of honey on his index finger.

  Angela bellowed when it was entwined in her hair, and there was hatred in the sound. He had ripped her away from the sensations cavorting through her. But even as Angela was catching enough breath to scold him, Adi was prancing toward Alois Junior—who stopped him with a look.

  Edmund remained. Adi left Edmund with so much honey on his head that the two-year-old dropped more caca into his pants, whereupon Adi went up to Klara, pointed at Edmund, and said, “Mother, I did not make messes like that when I was two years old. This Edmund, he is always dirty.”

  Thereby, he handed Angela her quick revenge. She was there on the spot to tell Klara what had happened, and proved so precise in her description that Klara began to scold Adi with words she had not used before, not to him. “This is a disgrace. Do you understand? It is a sin to be cruel to those who are smaller than you. How can you be so bad? God will punish you. He will punish all of us.” She spoke with woe. She did not wish to spoil this splendid family occasion but must do it for the sake of the others, for Angela, and for poor little Edmund, dirty again. “How can you play such a trick?” she said to Adi. “Edmund loves you so much.”

  This time she actually did want to make Adi cry. Instead, she was the one with tears in her eyes. He—perhaps it was the honey—felt as important to himself as he had ever been in his six and a half years. He was enraged at these criticisms. He glared at Angela. He whispered to his thoughts, “I will never forgive her. That is a fact! I will see her into hell!” And with it all, he was proud of himself. He had brought his mother to tears. “Let her cry for once. Not me. It is time for her to learn.”

  6

  I must now describe the carnal act of Alois Junior and Der Alte. This is with some distaste. Be it understood, I am without moral judgments on these matters. Devils are supposed to be interested in every form of the bodily embrace, dedicated, casual, perverse, or, as the Americans say, missionary—“I got on top and whaled away.” We are, of course, much more interested in sexual deeds that fall into no established fold. Routine practices are inimical to our purposes. First sexual encounters, however, are rarely to be ignored. We speak of them as primes. The stakes are larger. Few primes take place without some representative of the Maest
ro and the D.K. in attendance. Fucking—to employ that most useful, all-but-cosmopolitan, and near-onomatopoeic word, so close to the meats, body slaps, and fats of the occasion—is of real interest to both sides. Much can happen, and quickly. Old habits, whose presence in the psyche have become as heavy as old sandbags standing in place to bolster the trenches, can now be listed.

  Small surprise, then, if we are free of moral judgment, and alert to fresh estimates. Will this particular joining weaken our position or enhance it?

  I was repelled this time, however, by what took place. Der Alte, after a few habitual courtesies and social commonplaces designed to shield his excessive pleasure (and instant alarm) on seeing Alois Junior at his door—what if it all turned out a disaster?—soon came to recognize (given his decades of experience in these matters) that Alois Junior had arrived for the precise gift Der Alte had dreamed of offering him ever since they met. “I am so glad you wished to visit,” he repeated several times in the first few minutes, to which Alois finally replied, “Yes, here I am.”

  The hitching post was some fifty feet away outside, but Der Alte could hear Ulan swishing his tail. He knew enough not to spend one second more in conversation, but moved over to Alois Junior, knelt before him, laid his hand upon the boy’s crotch. Whereupon—fierce jack-in-the-box—Alois Junior was on his feet, pants unbuttoned, and full of a happy, blood-filled organ, which he thrust at once into Der Alte’s mouth—those yearning, long-unused lips.

  It was during the next moments that I became displeased. If I am free of moral judgment, I am hardly void of good taste, and Der Alte demeaned himself. To say it straight, he slobbered over the boy, and spluttered raucously when Junior thrust a full discharge down his throat. Like a baby, Der Alte also peed in his pants. It was, in turn, his discharge—the best urination he’d had in months. Then he was all over Alois Junior with kisses, plus a variety of verbal endearments I will not repeat here. “You taste sweet, your heart is good” is perhaps the most manageable example to offer, and, of course, the most absurd, for Alois Junior did not have to be a client for me to perceive that his heart was cold. His first concern was loyalty to himself. Like all such very young men, he was filled with disgust for this quondam partner, and left as soon as he could.