The Castle in the Forest

by Norman Mailer

  While I can obtain a good notion of what is happening to my clients even when I have to rely on what is given to me by mediocre agents, the work can lose tone. Nonetheless, my narrative will not suffer too critically. Long in advance of my departure, I had succeeded in bringing all my aides up to a reasonable level of perception. I say this with pride. They had so little to offer when they first came to me. I am, however, not eager to explain our means of recruitment. It would bring us immediately into a more sacrosanct question: How do devils come to be in the first place? Is the Evil One on the alert for superior humans who might be ready to work for us, or, as is more usually the case, do they arrive as a brood of rejected humans? How this arrangement was negotiated between the D.K. and the Maestro is, as I have already indicated, beyond my knowledge. I cannot declare why or when it happened, but I would suppose from my experience that the Maestro, looking to make his way up onto a plane of equality with the D.K., had to be ready to accept a good deal of exudate—all these spoiled human possibilities. Over the centuries, perhaps even over the millennia, the Maestro had to disburse a very large share of his resources on the Time needed to train the disturbed material we do receive. It is analogous in difficulty to working up a symphony orchestra from applicants who have yet to play an instrument.

  I will not pursue these difficulties here. I will only say that the agents I left in Hafeld did their best to report on Alois’ ongoing efforts at beekeeping, but since they did not have a close enough sense of his difficulties, they could not always satisfy my understanding of what went on with him, his bees, his wife, and his children from the end of 1895 until the following summer.

  7

  In late October, if I had permitted it, the agents left behind would have overwhelmed me with detail. To my complete lack of surprise, Alois was having obsessions concerning his new venture.

  I had no time to attend to this while in Russia. Short of forcing a direct entrance into Alois’ waking thoughts, which, it may be remembered, is rarely done with men and women who are not our clients, my agents had to work by way of their milk runs. In what our Maestro chooses to call “the marketplace of sleep,” most dreams of men and women are reasonably open to devils and Cudgels alike, and so their daily thoughts can be picked up in superficial degree by no more than passing through the night chamber.

  We also learn a good deal through the simple expedient of listening to a family’s chatter. To be sure, a plethora of superficial information arrived, more than enough to be annoying, for it was a biased portrait. My agents perceived Alois as weak and much too worried, but they lacked insight for dealing with men or women who possess strength, yet are being studied during a time of anxiety. It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful. Respect is demanded, precisely what my locals were lacking.

  Being of no great stature themselves in their former lives, they tended to pick up all that was second-rate in Alois. I was left, therefore, with the burden of discounting such improperly weighted materials. I would admonish the reader not to forget that the boy who later became Adolf Hitler emerged from a childhood with this father and mother. So it has to be obvious that we would do well to take measure of Klara and Alois’ strengths as well as, needless to say, their significant weaknesses.

  Very well. Here then is my developed if secondhand account of Alois’ woes now that he was becoming a beekeeper.

  His first concern (which I find comic, since he has spent his life in uniform) is that he has to remind himself constantly to put on light-colored gloves and a beekeeper’s large hat and veil, always of the whitest material. Since he must avoid dark coats or trousers, when that is his customary dress, he is always concerned in these first days to remember to change his garments before going out to the hive boxes. Deep and somber colors, he knows all too well, do irritate bees. He knows that by experience. On the particular occasion some years ago when he had been gravely stung while working with the little colony he then kept near Braunau, he had made the mistake of inviting an attractive woman out with him one Sunday afternoon. As an element in his plan of seduction, he thought he would demonstrate not only his competence with the hive, but his elegance. Therefore, he was in full-dress dark blue uniform. That twilight he was stung so fiercely that the recollection still rises from the pit of his stomach. Alois’ hopes of fornication were obliged to remain unsatisfied that Sunday, since the lady was stung as well, and on no less than the exposed flesh of her ample breast. Only a passing romance was lost, but a blow was delivered to his best opinion of himself. As we see, he continues to pay the price. Dressed in white, he feels shoots of fear. Bright as rockets, they fire off in his stomach as he approaches the hive boxes.

  In some part, however, Alois remains a good peasant. He has not forgotten that one must remain on the alert after any small disaster. Unexpected value can be gained at times from an unexpected misfortune. His interesting medical theses, for example, were stimulated by the alleviation of his rheumatism on the following day—bee stings did seem to be good for his knees. When their meeting occurred, Der Alte, we remember, was ready to agree.

  This confirmation could have been part of Alois’ decision to accept Der Alte’s opinion that imported Italian bees were superior to the Austrian variety. While Alois had his suspicion that Der Alte might be selling exactly some stock that he wished to get rid of, still, the telling point was that Italian bees were easier to handle. They were gentler, Der Alte assured him. Moreover, their rich yellow tan, not unlike the mellow glow of the best shoe leather, made them more beautiful. Alois had to admire the three golden segments of their bodies, each set off by the sharpest edging in black. Chic! That was the word that came to mind. Whereas the Austrian honeybee was gray and hairy. It did not gleam like these gilded Italians. Afterward, Alois felt as if he had been disloyal. He should have taken the “Franz Josefs,” the graybeards.

  What added to his unease was that he kept wondering whether he would have done better to wait for spring. Now he had to keep his colony warm enough not to perish in the cold.

  Through these months, therefore, temperature within the hive had to be measured every day. Yet he must not open a hive for more than a few seconds. “No matter your curiosity,” Der Alte had confided, “do not allow yourself to extract any of the movable frames for study of the combs. The cold draft that could result from lifting the large lid of the box might so lower the temperature that your bees would need hours to warm the interior again. Such a chill could decimate your population. Take no chances, Herr Hitler. Until now, from what you have told me, I assume that in the past, you have lived with bees only in June and July. Any tourist can do that. But to be the Skipper of your little people through the ice-cold air of all the winter months to come, that takes character, my friend.” And then, as if to enrich the assumption, he added, “My new friend.”

  8

  If Alois had stood in the dock before himself as judge, he would have found the defendant guilty. How could retirement prove so enfeebling to a strong man? He had bought the farm on impulse and now, to double such a bet, had purchased two beehives in their Langstroth boxes. Why, so suddenly, had he committed himself to apiculture over the winter? Hadn’t that also been done on too quick an impulse? Der Alte had had the consummate nerve to say to him, even as Alois left, “You will soon see how much work I have saved you.”

  What Alois saved in work, he spent in worry. He was still under sixty, damn it, not yet sixty by a year and more, but he had such a sense of inner weariness before these new responsibilities. His two populated boxes were now set under the oak tree with tarpaper underneath for warmth, and more tarpaper above, all kept in place with stones. Two populations housed in two boxes. Each day he read the temperature in each box, then did a weighing once a week. Part of the problem was that he had more worries than work. Should the colonies look weak when spring came, he would combine the two boxes into one, and, if necessary, buy more
bees, undertake more expense, more of Der Alte, who would be smelling up his pants, no doubt, from laughing so hard at the great esteemed High Customs Officer Herr Hitler with his ten thumbs all ready to be stung by what he didn’t know about advanced apiary matters. Already, in November, Alois was lecturing Angela and Adi, even Klara, on the need in apiculture for immaculate hygiene once warm weather arrived. No matter how warm the day, they must certainly not leave the hives open. Above all, they must never spill honey outdoors. If they did, they must mop it up instantly, for the bees could be drawn to it and might begin to fight for free honey, easy honey, as it lay in a pool on the ground. If the puddle was deep enough, they could drown en masse.

  So his fears were enough for him to harangue his family on what might or might not occur in summer. So much depended on what he read each night on how to keep a winter hive.

  He did build one new hive box, which he did not need as yet, but he was proud of the skill demanded, even if his box was not the equal of the Langstroths.

  Yet such work eased his worries. His chest puffed up with an old truism. “Good German blood understands,” said Alois to his wife, “that blessings do not come from God, but from hard work.” Still, it was not such a very good remark. Why not speak instead of Austrian blood?

  That question soon came to bother him. Did a particular blood possess its own virtues? Why, indeed, praise German blood? Why not Austrian? He had an Emperor who could live with the huge (and often) idiotic problems of keeping Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Jews, Serbs, plus Gypsies, living in peace under one Hapsburg Empire. Germans couldn’t do that. Germans were always squabbling. Without Bismarck, they would be nothing. Petty principalities. King Ludwig I and Mad King Ludwig II, both crazy Bavarians. And Prussians were worse. Prussians had a ramrod up their ass. Why speak then of good German blood? “Because,” he said to himself, “I know what it means.”

  Yet what did it mean to decide you knew something when you didn’t. Although in some way you most certainly did. A nice enigma. Alois decided that he was now thinking like a philosopher. Not bad for a boy who was once a peasant. He was tempted to bring up the question at the tavern in Fischlham, but didn’t, after all. They were dolts. He resented the time he spent with them. By November, he had even found himself drinking there in the afternoons, a proof, if he needed it, that there was not enough work. For that reason, he had chosen to stay away for a few days, and hang some netting near the hives in order to keep birds away in the spring. He even debated whether to visit Der Alte, but recollections of the high odor put an end to that.

  Before long, he was back in the tavern. There was one pleasure he did find there. The dolts now saw him as an expert on apiculture. Every bit of advice Der Alte had offered, plus whatever nuggets he had picked up of late in the literature, could now be presented as his own well-acquired lore. Alois would be the first to say that honesty and modesty were excellent virtues and should be employed when dealing with superiors. An inferior mind, however, always wanted to feel that it was listening to a wise man. Since he was more available to the locals than Der Alte, he stood in, therefore, as the resident expert. A farmer even walked over one Sunday afternoon to seek his advice on how to get started. Alois proceeded to overwhelm him with the details of feeding a hive through the winter.

  This discourse allowed him to feel like the fine fellow he had once been before his retirement. “The trick,” he told his visitor, “is to master the technique of your special feeder. Because you not only put in the liquid nourishment, and cover the mouth of the jar, as I just explained, using the fine mesh, but you must then hold the vessel upside down over the bunghole above the brood that is waiting to be fed. Do you follow?” Alois could see that he didn’t. Before long, this Sunday visitor, thoroughly disheartened, said goodbye—he was not likely to be competition next winter.

  My agents kept providing me with these petty episodes. They were missing the depth of Alois’ new anxieties. So soon as his visitor left, Alois felt so alone with his project that he began to wonder whether disease might strike the colonies.

  He spent an evening reading his books, but the anxieties remained. He had dreams of living in one of his boxes, himself a bee, no more than part of a cluster living in deepest and darkest obscurity. How could these bees guide themselves in that world, so stygian, so bereft of light?

  By the end, Alois had raised this dream to the level of a nightmare—now I could feel more interest in what my agents were transmitting. Alois’ hive multiplied in the darkness, then escaped from the box and flew far away. They could not be found.

  When spring came, would he lose his hive? In the dark, he felt for Klara, and his hand came across her belly. She was so big now, yet the new one wasn’t due until January. Would he be a giant of a fellow?

  She came awake with his hand on her, and would have nestled into the embrace of his arm, but in the middle of this darkness, he felt a need to discuss a worrisome matter. She was soon wide awake and unhappy.

  “I hope,” Alois said, “that you haven’t spoken to Herr Rostenmeier.”

  She knew immediately what was coming next. Herr Rostenmeier was the owner of the country store in Fischlham, where once a week, on Saturday, she and Angela would buy a few foodstuffs not raised in their garden. Klara liked Herr Rostenmeier, and had begun to talk to him about the sale of their honey. Alois had told her not to make any deals, not yet, because the possibility was still there that he would do business with Der Alte. Nonetheless, she had taken pleasure in the thought that it might still be Herr Rostenmeier, and in that case she could serve as the person in between, and bring a little money back to the house. Her fingers tingled each time she thought of such a transaction.

  But now Alois had decided to go to Der Alte. She knew it. “I thought,” she said in the darkness, even as he patted her belly, “that you didn’t like that man at all, yes, I remember you said you would have to smell him.”

  “He will be good to consult,” Alois said shortly. The tendrils of the nightmare were still with him.

  “Yes, yes,” said Klara, “but you told me you don’t trust Der Alte. Yes?” She was close to becoming hysterical. To be torn out of an agreeable sleep for this! “Yes, you say you don’t trust him, and yet you are still ready to choose this Der Alte over an honest man like Herr Rostenmeier?”

  “Klara, this is all because you feel embarrassed,” he told her. “Maybe you had a little too much conversation with Rostenmeier already. Something you haven’t mentioned, could it be? A real commitment. Without speaking to me first.”

  “No,” she said, “not at all. I am not embarrassed. I made no commitment.” She was tempted to add, “But this I will say, I must say, I will never understand the thinking that goes on in a person like you.” However, she was silent. He would have ridiculed her for such a stupid remark. She would have been up half the night explaining those few words, “A person like you.”

  9

  No surprise. Alois decided to go back to Der Alte after all. Why not? He was a realist, he told himself, and so was used to bad odors. After all, one had to deal now and again with the Devil. (My devils snickered as they told me this.)

  Alois paid his visit on the next Sunday and, once again, took Adi with him. This time the boy paid attention to the route. It was but a mile away, and so he knew he would be able to find the hut again by remembering the forks of the path. All the while, he was filled with uneasy excitement. A woe as large as a loaf of bread had settled in his stomach, yet perched above such heaviness, his heart felt most alive. He knew he would not tell his father that he planned to visit Der Alte on another day and very much on his own.

  “Yes,” he kept saying to himself, “I will not be afraid to walk there. But not in the night, maybe not. There are too many spirits in the woods then.”

  For Adi, the second meeting between Der Alte and his father turned out to be even better than the first. If, at the start, they spoke about the marketing of honey and Adi could hardly follow, the
conversation grew interesting once business was done. That was because the old man could not stop talking about the mysteries within the mysteries of bees. “Yes,” said Der Alte in a most resonant voice, “I never weary of contemplating these tiny creatures, with their immortal honey and their near-to-immortal sting. There are such subtleties to their keeping.”

  A rich discourse ensued. If Alois was hardly able to speak, he was nonetheless not too displeased, for he would use it tomorrow night at Fischlham. A gift for the dolts! Adi, in turn, listened with care. The words he could not understand lived in his mind by way of their sounds.

  “Can we,” asked Der Alte, “ever pay enough attention to this work of Creation? It is so full of genius. These little devils come to us from the Good Lord’s divine and curious aesthetic—nature’s wisdom expressing itself in this most bizarre form.”

  Der Alte went on. He could go on! References to God’s ballet, God’s gymnastics, God’s investiture in wonder and awe. Der Alte was like many of our clients. We encourage them to praise God. In the highest. Always.

  For that matter, he went on for so long that Alois was, once more, repelled. Too much time had elapsed without exercise of his own voice. Moreover, he did not like the look in his son’s eye. Those blue eyes, so similar to Klara’s, large and alive. There was reverence in them now.

  Alois managed finally to interject a word.

  “Why don’t you take us into the kitchen, and show the boy your viewing box?”