The Castle in the Forest

by Norman Mailer

  Now, in church, Adolf’s heart was beating in time, step by step, with the strides they had taken on returning from the woods.

  He was also feeling a most peculiar pain from this recollection. It was in his heart and was as sharp in sensation as a splinter driven under one’s fingernail.

  He told himself not to think about Edmund anymore. Not on this day. Indeed, he prayed to God to be able to cease thinking of Edmund. With my help, he succeeded to some degree, as much as one can remove most of a splinter under the nail. The fragment that remains, however, has now become a root ready to offer its own discomfort. So the memory festered in his heart.

  It was his turn now to be ready to weep. He thought of how Klara used to call him “ein Liebling Gottes.” “Oh,” she used to tell him, “you are so special.” That was true, he told himself. (“God’s own Beloved.”) He had not been like Gustav and the others. Perhaps he had been selected by Destiny. He had survived.

  I could see the extent of the reconstruction that lay before me. I would have to restore him once more to what he had felt when he was three and his mother had adored him.

  Now he felt that his mother was ready to abandon him, just as she had abandoned Edmund. Why, then, must he feel so guilty? Let her be the one to feel the pain. She had pretended to love Edmund and yet she was not here in church. How awful. So unfeeling!

  10

  Even as brother and sister came away from the grave, some mourners began to pay attention to Angela, who was embarrassed by knowing how red-faced she had become. How could she avoid that? She was trying to speak of how terrible were her parents’ feelings. “It is so frightful a day for them—they are both in bed. They are too weak to move.” On she went, embarrassed yet excited to be the center of this occasion.

  Once they were alone, however, and could walk off into the forest, Adolf did say, “Why do I know that my mother will not come to my funeral?”

  Angela berated him: “Klara is the finest person I have ever known. The kindest. No one is more good! How can you say something like that? She is suffering for your father. He loved Edmund so much!” And when in payment for this remark, Adolf looked venomous, she added, “As well he should. Edmund was a beautiful child. I cannot say that of you. Even on this day of your brother’s funeral”—she had to repeat it!—“you still have an unpleasant body odor.”

  “What do you mean?” he answered. “I took a bath. You know that. You even forced me to. You said, ‘Going to the funeral, smelling as you do? Get into the tub,’ and I told you it would take too long to boil the water. What did you care?”

  He had had to use cold water. It had been a splash and a wipe, no more. Maybe he still did smell. “No,” he said now, “I forbid you to speak that way to me. I do not have an unpleasant odor. I did take a bath.”

  Angela said, “Bath or no bath, Adolf. You just may not be a very good person.”

  He was so furious with her that he stepped off the forest trail into the unpacked snow. She, just as angry, followed him. The moment they were out of earshot of any person who might have been at the service, she yelled at him so loudly that he ran off, “Not a good person! An awful one! You are a monster!”

  Alone in the forest, Adolf began to have fears of his own death. It was so cold in the snow. He was recalling the look of terror in Edmund’s eyes as he listened to the tales of the Grimm brothers.

  When Angela caught up with him, they walked home silently to find that their father now had a red and swollen face. He turned to Adolf and said, “You are now my life.” He embraced him and began to weep all over again. How false were his words, thought Adolf. His father still believed that Edmund was the only hope. He could not even pretend that anything else was true. “I hate my father,” Adolf told himself once more.

  11

  Several nights after the funeral, I prepared a dream-etching for Adolf. An angel told him that his cruelties to Edmund would yet be justified. Why? Because Adolf’s life had been spared in infancy. There was a special purpose yet to come. He need only remain loyal to every command he received from above. In this manner, he could escape any and every ordinary death. He would yet become God’s gift to the people, fierce as fire, as strong as steel.

  It was a carefully worked-up dream, but I had to ask myself whether such a belief was being implanted too soon. It did suggest that he would live forever. Of course, that is not at all impossible to believe. There is good reason why it is difficult for any man or woman to picture their own death: The soul, I would offer, does expect to be immortal. To a degree, this may even be true. Many humans, after all, are born again. I would not wish to suggest that this is by way of the passing hand of a priest or by a reverend as one is submerged in the river, no, they are born again through reincarnation. The Maestro has told us that this is part of a conceptual scheme developed by the D.K. “He does see Himself as the Divine Artist. Of course, He is also a blunderer—so many of His creations are botched. A good many are disasters which He then proceeds to plow back into the food chain. That is His only means of keeping His multitudinous, mediocre, and often meaningless spawnings from choking the existence of the rest. Yet, I will admit, He is dogged. He is still looking to improve His previous creations.” As the Maestro describes it, the Dummkopf is bound to try to improve even His most unsatisfactorily developed humans. And that is why few men and women really believe that they will cease to exist. They would say it aloud if not for their fear of appearing ridiculous. Indeed, their real anxiety is that the new life, because of the ways in which they wasted the last one, might bring them closer to the heat of the Dummkopf’s Wrath, yes, closer than in their previous existence. One’s new situation in life might reflect how badly the last life was lived. So the rebirth could offer a pure example of living hell. While the Maestro does not impart such answers to us, I am convinced that there is a region in the unconscious of every human being where belief does exist that one is immortal.

  This conviction of personal immortality can cause us considerable difficulty. Many of our men and women, particularly late in life, come to the conclusion that if they atone for their sins, they will be reborn. That does play havoc with hitherto dependable clients. They are not, after all, completely unbalanced on this certainty. No matter how abominable and unrepentant are a few of the humans chosen by Him to be born again, he probably does feel there is something exceptional present even if it failed to develop properly last time out.

  At this point, I began to wonder whether the Maestro might even have a covert influence in the D.K.’s councils. It is, obviously, too large a question for me, but the Maestro does seem to know which of our clients have been chosen for rebirth. Yet to speak of this with greater authority, I would have to know how the D.K. envisions the future of His Creation. Is it comparable to the ruthlessness of our Maestro? Is ruthlessness indeed a necessary passion among these divine forces?

  12

  A few months after Edmund’s death, Klara began to have fearful thoughts. Was it possible that Adolf’s attitude to Edmund had been more than cruel? Was it even unforgivable? Angela told her again that when the brothers played together she had overheard Adi terrifying Edmund with fairy tales from Grimm, the very worst ones.

  From her bedroom window, Klara could see Adolf shooting at rats while sitting on the cemetery wall. She would flinch each time she heard the popping sound of the discharge. For her, the air gun was equal to an ugly voice. She felt as if she could hear disaffected spirits coming up to her from the cemetery. When someone is not a client, we can still exert some small influence on them, and in this case, I certainly did not wish Klara to be pushing Adolf more deeply into his depression, so I did lay atmospheres upon her sleep in which I suggested that Adi was not evil, but suffering terribly. This technique is available to use on any mother who retains some love for her child. Over a period, therefore, the situation did improve. Once again, Klara came to recognize the need to change Alois’ feelings. As she told her husband, the boy’s dreadful mood was beg
inning to affect his marks at the little school in Leonding. The explanation had to be that he was mourning for Edmund. “But he is also afraid of you,” Klara dared to say. “He hates disappointing you. Alois, you must become again a kind man to your son.”

  Those were heartfelt words, but they only succeeded in reminding him of Edmund. Adolf, alas, was not Edmund. All the same, he nodded.

  “I will do what I can,” he said. “Sometimes my heart slams shut like a door.”

  Once aroused, however, she was not about to close off her own feelings. She must find a way to be near again to Adolf. His heart could also shut like a door. But she had noticed that Adolf was most impressed with the new year, 1900. “Adolf, this will be your century,” she told him. “I know it. You will do wonderful things in time to come.”

  He did feel important that she spoke in such a tone, but he hardly knew whether to believe her. How could it be his century? At this point, he felt incapable of accomplishing anything of high worth. So he nagged her. “Is it really so?” he kept asking. At last, her tongue slipped enough to uncover the truth. “You are the one I must love,” she said. He brooded over her phrasing. He was aware for the first time that women were not there just to love you because that was their duty. Instead, they could offer love that was real or provide a substitute that was less dependable.

  Here the Maestro intervened. “Do not,” I was told, “encourage any undue interest in women. Let him remain fearful.”

  13

  On late overcast afternoons in early spring, when there was a fog, and the odors of moss and mold rose from many a tombstone, Adolf would sit in the damp of the low cemetery wall and wait in the dusk for rats to come out. When they faced to the west, their eyes would shine in the sunset, even in a clouded sunset, and so would offer sharp targets. When he was able, however, to hit one with his air gun, he did not feel up to approaching the corpse. It was too close to evening for him to be ready to step off from the low wall onto the cemetery sward.

  Early morning, however, before he was off to school, he would pass by, and if no dogs or cats had been ready to reconnoiter the graveyard at night, and the cadaver of the rat was still intact, he would inhale a first hint of the aroma of carrion. That stirred his mood. He would wonder whether comparable changes had taken place in Edmund’s flesh.

  Even by spring, he did not feel ready to go back to the forest. He kept to his perch on the cemetery wall.

  In turn, I had decided not to discourage Adolf’s guilt. Indeed, this instinct was soon corroborated. While the Cudgels were partial to guilt, since they were invariably looking to increase all impulses to atonement in their clients, we usually chose to calcify guilt, leave it, so to speak, bone-dry. While that did raise the risk that we were narrowing future possibilities for the psyche, I had to be ready to lift Adolf out of his depression before it grew extreme. Depression can descend into aberration. On many an evening, Adi sat on the cemetery wall wondering what he would do if Edmund’s arm were to rise suddenly out of the grave. Would he run? Would he attempt to talk to Edmund? Would he ask for forgiveness? Or would he pelt the limb with his air gun?

  All through the winter, the spring, and the summer of 1900, the memory of Edmund’s illness remained like a deadweight on his chest.

  It was not hard to discern the reason. Adolf still possessed some funds of conscience. Even as self-pity is the lubricant we use most often to smooth the entrance of the heart into uglier emotions, so does conscience become our antagonist. The Cudgels whip people into shape by way of conscience. We, in turn, when dealing with the most advanced of our clients, do our best to extirpate conscience altogether. Once accomplished, we then proceed to build up a facsimile of good conscience, ready and able to justify most of the passions that the Cudgels seek to repress: greed, lust, envy—no need to list the sacred seven. The point is that when this substitute is properly developed by us, our clients’ ability to justify ugly acts is strengthened. We have then succeeded in releasing conscience from the shameful memories that obliged it to develop in the first place. I can add that we are most successful when the all-but-emptied remains of the old conscience are stubborn enough to vie with one’s new sense of detachment, and so are felt to be a useless scourge, an enemy to one’s well-being. Of course, serial murderers who take pride in their daring have usually succeeded in banishing all conscience. A corollary to this is the benefit we gain from war when a soldier grows conscienceless. Our work is then simplified. It is calm periods that call upon the skills of advanced devils like myself. I will say that it is not at all routine to convince a man or woman to slay another. Left to their own estimate, they worry that murder may be the most selfish of acts. Primitives certainly know this to be true. When ready to sacrifice an animal for one of their feasts, they are wise enough to ask forgiveness before cutting the throat.

  In turn, I was now ready to fortify Adi’s sense of the power that murder can offer the murderer. Of course, he was too young for our most developed techniques, but I did work up a dream-etching where Adolf became a hero in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. This entailed the suggestion that he had been there in his previous life, almost two decades before he was born in 1889. It was not difficult to bring him to believe he had massacred a platoon of French soldiers who had made the signal mistake of attacking his lonely outpost. Of course, such a dream-etching was gross, but it did prepare a base on which to lay more sophisticated impulses later. By itself, however, the Franco-Prussian dream-etching was naught but a wish fulfillment, and their effects are most temporary.

  May I say that we knew all about wish fulfillment long before Dr. Freud had anything to say on the matter. Our approach to human psychology must of necessity go further. Indeed, we smile at the superficiality of so many of Freud’s analyses. That is his fault. He wanted nothing to do, after all, with angels or demons and was willfully determined not to recognize the engagement of the Dummkopf and the Maestro in large or small human matters.

  On the other hand, a small portion of praise can still be given to the good doctor for his delineation of the ego. That concept has become one of the tools by which humans have become almost as adept as we are at assessing shifts of self-worth within.

  Be it said that the state of Adolf’s ego had become the focus of my attention. It would do no good to keep raising his estimate of his own worth if, at the same time, he was terrified that he had helped to kill Edmund. Because he did not wish to believe it, he most certainly did feel guilty, and the worst of it was that I hardly knew the answer. Had he, or had he not?

  The facts were simple—which is to say that the deed was clear, but the consequences were not. On a morning when Angela was working with Klara and Paula in the garden and Alois was out for his walk, Adolf found Edmund playing alone in the room that they had shared until Adolf’s illness.

  Adolf walked over and kissed Edmund. Simple as that. I must admit that I was impelling him. If, personally, I certainly did feel something comparable to affection for Edmund, there was little I could do about it in this situation. In those days, I was not prepared to defy an order given directly by the Maestro.

  “Why are you kissing me?” asked Edmund.

  “Because I love you.”

  “You do?”

  “I love you, Edmund.”

  “Is that why you scalped me?”

  “You must forget that. You must forgive me. I think that is why I caught the measles. I was so ashamed of myself afterward.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I think so. Yes. And that is why I must kiss you again. That is the way to give you back your scalp.”

  “You do not need to. I have no headache today.”

  “We cannot take a chance. Let me kiss you again.”

  “Isn’t that bad? You have had these measles?”

  “Between brothers and sisters, yes, it could be bad. But not between brothers. It has been established medically that brothers are able to kiss even when one has measles.”

  “Momma s
aid we must not. We are not supposed to kiss you yet.”

  “Momma does not understand that it is all right between brothers.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “Let me see your fingers when you swear.”

  Adolf was impelled most definitely by me then. He held up his hands, fingers outstretched. “I swear,” he said, and kissed Edmund repeatedly, a boy’s kiss full of slobbering, and Edmund kissed him back. He was so happy that Adi did love him after all.

  Edmund came down with the measles. And the disease proved fatal. We were responsible for his death. Or we were not. I knew no more than Adolf. Night after night, therefore, a new platoon of French soldiers were massacred in Adolf’s sleep. I had decided to distract him with one wish fulfillment after another. Taken each by each, they would produce no large effect, but quantity does change quality, as Engels once wrote to Marx, and so I believe my work would have had its desired effect if there had not been separate problems with which he had to contend. Otherwise, I think Adolf might have been ready eventually to move his psychic strengths over to the rigorous belief that murder offers power to a murderer.

  BOOK XIII

  ALOIS AND ADOLF

  1

  Adolf Hitler’s readiness to exterminate humans in the gas chamber was obviously not at this time, in 1900, an active longing. If I speak, therefore, of a year like 1945, it is to make no direct connection to the months after Edmund’s death. Wholly guided in those years by the Maestro, I was looking to do no more than intensify some early sense that he might yet become a high agent of the gods of death. That did allow him to believe that his own end would not be like others. Of course, I had no real expectation as yet of the dimensions to come. I would have done the same for Luigi Lucheni if he had been my client when he was young.