The Castle in the Forest

by Norman Mailer

  Alois could not believe what he read. The rest was worse. “You were a terrible farmer, and the reason is clear. You are, as I happen to know, half-Jewish. No wonder you cannot be a farmer.” And there were so many misspellings in the letter that out of a sense of shame for his son, Alois Senior had to write it out all over again before he felt able to show it to Klara. As he wrote, his hand shook badly, but the original, with its ink blots and errors of syntax, was abominable. And to think that the boy had always been able to speak well.

  All the same, these awful words had to be shown to Klara. Alois Junior could only have received such rank ideas by listening to Johann Poelzl. That pious hypocrite!

  Klara, however, kept the discussion well away from Poelzl. She only said, “I did not mind that thought so much. I used to think this was your reason for not going to church.”

  He was indignant. “It did not bother you to believe you had a husband who was half-Jewish?”

  “How could it? Alois, you have always said that a man who hates Jews is uncultured. So, I knew. It is not appropriate to hate Jews. It is a sign of ignorance.”

  “But that does not make me Jewish.”

  He had a headache, sudden and fierce. Old memories of the earliest taunts at school now came back. When he was six years old. Of course. That had been the talk in Strones and in Spital.

  “It never bothered you to think I was half-Jewish?” he said again.

  “No. I was always so worried about our children. I wanted them to be able to live.” She could not keep her eyes from watering—not with these recollections at the root of her tear ducts. “So I was glad to think you were part Jewish. I thought maybe that could give a little fresh blood to our Adolf and our Edmund and Paula.”

  “But I am not at all Jewish,” he said. “We must be clear about this. Old Johann Nepomuk once told me who I am. I am his son. I am your real uncle, yes.”

  “He told you? He said such words?” She knew her grandfather Johann Nepomuk well enough to understand that he could never utter such a speech. Not in that way—not so directly.

  “He,” said Alois, “suggested this information to me. He did state that he knew who my father was. And then he said, ‘This man was not Jewish.’ He did not have to say more. It was clear. There was only one way he could know. So that was that. The next time a boy called me a Jew, I gave him a good poke in the face and broke his nose. That was one fellow who was left with an ugly mug.” Alois began to laugh at the recollection. Then he laughed even more, as if to signify that he was not heartsick. “And all these years you thought the opposite?”

  She nodded. She hardly knew whether to be relieved or disappointed. She had always felt excitement sneak into her at the thought of being wed to a man with such blood. Jews did forbidden things in bed. That she had heard. Maybe Alois and she had even done these same forbidden things—was that not so? And Jews were reputed to be intelligent. That she had also heard. Now she was truly confused.

  Alois, thinking of Johann Poelzl, could have boiled the old bird for soup.

  2

  The reader may recall that when I presented myself as the narrator of this novel, I appeared as an SS man. Indeed, I was one. Over that period in the late 1930s, I was installed corporeally in a particular SS officer named Dieter. At a price to myself, I lived and functioned within him. I can say that we do not engage in total investiture unless the stakes require it. For our personal cost is direct. One has to relinquish the stimulation of living in more than a single consciousness. Demonic power is thereby reduced. One has become a simulacrum of a human.

  So, as Dieter, I did make inquiries in Graz in 1938 about Hitler’s grandfather. The way I learned, however, that the true father of Alois was Johann Nepomuk came by information I had once received directly from the Maestro, which, of course, meant that I was not in a position to name my source. In Special Section IV-2a, we were obliged, as in any other Intelligence organization, to be credible at least among ourselves, and so the only way to explain to Himmler what the origin of my information had been was to fabricate the story. While I knew that Hitler was not Jewish, I would not have been able to convince Heinrich Himmler of such a fact without revealing my source. So, to make it credible, I needed to use a means of information gathering with which Heini was familiar—human witnesses.

  Of course, it was not quite that simple. I did not know the truth to a certainty back in 1938 so much as I sensed that once I had known it—which is a way of saying that the Maestro must have concluded long ago that he had to close down the memories of his devils if he wished to keep order in his share of the world. Nonetheless, I would warrant that the memories we are not encouraged to recall are still there to serve, no matter how muted, as our guides.

  I mention this condign matter because the question whether Jewish blood was present in Alois has reared up so suddenly.

  He was in a fury. His rage at Johann Poelzl would soon subside into what would be no less than a lifelong detestation—his heart would lift on the day that Poelzl died—but his fury against Alois Junior rose up again.

  For that matter, his conversation with Klara had stimulated such an inner storm that he could not stay in bed. For the first time in all the years they had lain side by side, near to each other or not, he now had to get up on this night, dress, pace the floor, try to sleep on the couch, try to sleep on the floor, and succeeded, of course, in keeping both of them awake.

  Klara knew she would have to pay. “Don’t say a word,” she told herself. “Do not touch this subject ever again.”

  While I cannot speak with the authority of those devils who are doctors of medicine, I will say it is possible that the cancer which would end Klara’s life in 1908 could have taken a step forward on this miserable night.

  Too much had happened to her at once. She had lost possession of a long-cherished idea. Because of the certainty that all her children with Alois were one-quarter Jewish, she believed that her last three had been provided with more opportunity to stay alive. If she had one notion about Jews (and she could not really say she had ever met a full-blooded Jew), it was that no matter what their faults might be, and she had heard the most awful stories from friends and relatives, even from storekeepers, the truth was also obvious—those Jews knew how to survive. To be so disliked, yet still be among the living. Some were even rich! Klara had always been impressed, therefore, in absolute privacy with herself—whom could she talk to about this?—that she did have three living children, saved in good part by their Jewish blood.

  If Gustav and Ida and Otto had all died much too soon, she could attribute that to her side of the family. But Adolf had survived, and then Edmund and Paula, over whose health she prayed every night.

  Now her confidence was breached. If the three remaining children continued to live, it would not be because of some preservative in their veins. There would be no such advantage.

  A large reason not to sleep. What was worse, she was ashamed of her cowardice. How could she have accepted the idea that Alois Junior should be invited back? Lying there, listening to Alois Senior thumping the floor with his body as he lay down, she was soon suffering her own rage. It was shocking. She could not believe what she was telling herself. If it was possible, yes, she would kill Alois Junior. Only, she knew she could not. She would not ever. But the effort to repel such a fury throbbed in her heart, which is to say, in her breast, with such force and such detestation that, yes, it is possible—this could have been the night when the breast cancer which would yet burn with hell’s pains in her chest might have begun. Since the answer is not easily available, I prefer to return to Alois trying to sleep on the floor.

  The immensity of his rage on this night was that he had betrayed himself. That spoiled all the joy which is also implicit in rage, a notion too infrequently considered. Rage, after all, can offer the same nourishing sense of self-righteousness that is available on more ordinary occasions to the most hypocritical of churchgoers. The core of such pleasure is never to be a
ngry at oneself, only at others. Yet, here, on this night, Alois was infuriated at the cost of his own deeds.

  If Junior had turned out badly, it was his fault, his fault alone. By such a light, he was among the worst of human beings, a weak father. He had spent his life obeying orders, and then enforcing them in the Customs service, he had revered Franz Josef, a gallant, great, and good king who embodied hard work and discipline. His guardianship of his own nature had become a species of homage to Franz Josef. Yet he had implanted none of this sense of respect in Alois Junior. Was that because he did feel guilty about the boy’s mother? Yes, he had treated Fanni badly, so badly that he could not be stern with her offspring. That had been a lack of discipline in himself.

  It took every hour through the darkness of this night for his rage to subside. It was not until the first light of morning—a dim light that came with shrouds of rain at dawn—that he was able to speak from one part of his mind to the other, and so could issue a few orders on what his future conduct with Adi must become. He was not going to make the same mistake he had allowed with Junior.

  3

  Now, whenever he wished to bring Adi to his side, Alois would whistle. It was a fine drill of a whistle, sharp enough to hurt the ear. Nor did he reduce the intensity when the boy was within reach. In the tavern, Alois was now fond of saying, “If you are raising a son, do not let go of the whip. I speak from experience.”

  More than once, Alois said to Adi, “Time and sacrifice were wasted on your older brother. You, Adolf, will not waste my time.”

  Adi was paralyzed with fear. I had to wonder how the final effects of this could serve our purposes. We certainly know how to use humiliation and self-abasement as a tool when working with manic-depressives. If we look to drive a client into a violent act, a series of humiliations can stir the subject into oscillating too fast between the poles of his depression and his mania. Soon enough, there is an eruption.

  I did not see why we needed anything so drastic here at so early an age. The Maestro was, however, not urging me to restrain Alois, and the father was drenching the boy’s spirit with wretchedness. Adi was being given more than a hint of the anguish that attaches itself to the onset of ineradicable melancholia.

  These are established means for seeding suicide. So I could not know what ultimate purpose the Maestro had in mind. The boy was delicate enough for it to go wrong. What a disaster, and for so little.

  Yet the Maestro often surprised us by such moves. He was often ready to take bold chances with the lives of our clients. There were occasions when the Maestro, entertaining an ambitious future for a young client, would be ready to encourage such parental domination and, at times, incite it. I think he saw it as still another species of inoculation against future emotional crises.

  Naturally, these gambles could also make for future instability. Once we implant a deep humiliation in a proud client, we also set ourselves the task of converting such a wound into a future strength. That can prove equal in difficulty to converting a coward into a hero. Yet, when we succeed, when the psychic abyss of a would-be suicide is transmogrified into promontories of ego, an immense gamble has succeeded. The once-humiliated wretch has now acquired the power to humiliate others. That is a demonic power and is not acquired easily. Nonetheless, I would not wish to exaggerate. Adi was, at this point, far from being altogether reduced. He did show some talent for pleading his case before Klara.

  “Mother,” he told her, “my father now looks at me as if I am always guilty.”

  She was aware of this. The whistle had become a needle into her own ears as well.

  “Adi, you must never say that your father is wrong,” she told him.

  “But what if he might be wrong?”

  “He does not wish to be. Perhaps he makes a mistake.”

  “What if he is very wrong?”

  “It will not remain that way.” She nodded. She did not know if she believed what she said next, but she said it nonetheless. “He is a good father. A good father always realizes sooner or later that he may have been going in the wrong direction.” She nodded again, as if to oblige herself to believe such words. “There can be a moment,” she said, “when the father recognizes that he, too, can be in error.” She put her hand to the boy’s face as if to cool the fever in his cheeks. “Yes,” she said, “he hears his own words and realizes that they are not correct. So he changes.”

  “He does?”

  “Absolutely. The father changes.” She spoke as if this had happened in the past. “He changes,” she repeated for the third time, “and now there is order in what he says. Now it goes in a good direction. Because he is ready to change. Do you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because you were able to tell yourself that you would never cause him confusion. You would not do that, because he is your father.” She held Adi by the waist and looked into his eyes.

  Klara had been the first in the family to recognize (and she was still the only one) that Adi could be spoken to as if he were ten or twelve years old. “Yes,” she now said, “it is best when there is no confusion in the house. So you must never accuse your father. That might cause him to feel weiblich. And for him to feel weak is very bad. You cannot expect him to admit that he has a weakness.”

  At this point, she began to speak of die Ehrfurcht. To honor and to fear. Her mother had used the word when speaking of Johann Poelzl. He was, she had all but said to Klara, a hardworking but very unlucky farmer—who in the family did not know that?—and yet she had always treated her husband with Ehrfurcht, as if he were an important and successful man. “That is what my mother taught me, and I now tell it to you. The word of the father is the law of the family.”

  Klara said this with such solemnity that the boy felt it come into him as holy strength. Yes, someday he would have a family and all who were in it would honor him and they would fear him. At this point, his need to urinate became pressing. (This phenomenon always afflicted him in these years whenever he was on the point of developing large and happy thoughts about himself.) In the midst of his mother’s peroration, he almost had an accident but did not—not if he was going to believe that in the future he would receive his share of Ehrfurcht.

  “Yes,” she said to her son, “the word of the father must be law. Right or wrong, one cannot argue with his word. You must obey him. For the good of the family. Right or wrong, the father is always right. Otherwise, all is confusion.”

  Now she referred to Alois Junior. “He did not have Ehrfurcht,” she said. “Promise me that will never be said of you. Because now you are the oldest brother. You are important. That boy who used to be your brother is as good as dead.”

  Adi’s body was wet. His perspiration might as well have been illumined by sacred light. Just so complete was the importance of this sentiment. I entered his thoughts long enough to tell him, “Your mother is correct. You are now the oldest brother. The younger ones will honor and respect you.”

  Yes, Adi understood, and nightly I worked upon his mind until this concept became a mental certainty equal to one of those well-paved avenues of the mind that are always ready for heavy mental traffic. On many a night I would tell him again and again that Alois Junior was separated forever from the family.

  Alois Senior was of no small aid to me. By December, he wrote a new will. It stipulated that in the event of his death, the son named Alois was to receive no more of the estate than the minimum prescribed by law. “The smaller the better,” he added. Since the act of drawing up a will reengaged all of Senior’s long-developed sense of proper official procedure, he also added: “This is stated in the full recognition of the seriousness of such an act by a father. In my years as a Chief Customs Officer for the Crown, I warrant that I became most familiar with the responsibility that must always be seriously attached to such grave decisions.”

  Whereupon, having completed the rewriting of his will, he whistled for Adi and read portions aloud to him.

  4

  Alois
’ decision to write a new will came after he knew that he would be able to sell the farm. The buyer had been referred to him by Herr Rostenmeier, who had even offered good advice to Klara.

  “Dear Frau Hitler,” he told her, “your farm will only find a buyer for one reason—because it looks good. Is that not exactly why your husband bought it in the first place?”

  “I will not say that has to be untrue,” said Klara. (For her, this remark was equal to flirting with Herr Rostenmeier.)

  “Yes,” he said, “it is good you recognize this. I believe you will be able to sell your property to people who are less experienced at farming than yourselves, but”—he held up a finger—“more well-to-do, not so? You must have the patience to wait. Soon enough, one of these comfortable people will come along. And when he does, you must please send him to me. I will be your friend. I will know how to answer all the questions that are asked.”

  The wealthy house hunter did arrive, did like the look of the house and the land, knew even less about the pitfalls of husbandry than had Alois, and the sale took place. If the price presented no real profit, neither did Alois suffer the loss he had feared. The finality of the transfer even convinced him that any dream of living out his last days on a farm could be put to rest together with any hopes that the oldest son would yet bring him some reason for pride. No, it was now up to Adi. He was not nearly so lithe nor strong as Alois Junior, nor nearly so good-looking, but as bright, perhaps, and obedient. He was certainly obedient. Whistling for him had become a pleasure. The response was quick.

  In his heart, however, Alois Senior did keep the equivalent of an old photograph. There still were nights when he would sit on the oak bench and muse again about the Langstroth box he had built for himself. He would pat the seat as if to recall the sound of the slap he used to give that wooden box in the old days, yes, a nice and solid slap to stir up his bees.