The Castle in the Forest

by Norman Mailer

  It would have bothered Klara even more if she had been aware of Adolf’s secret desire. It was to hit Edmund as hard as he could and not be punished for the act. Alois, Klara, and Angela were always carrying on about how blue were Edmund’s eyes. Yet his own eyes, Adolf decided, were a nobler blue. Besides, Edmund’s face looked squashed together. How he would have liked to squash that face a little more whenever his parents called his little brother cute.

  Edmund was always receiving praise for the concern he showed for Paula, whereas Adi felt that he had been the first to see how Paula was not too bright. He could have told them, but no, his mother and Angela were impressed instead with how much Edmund loved his little sister.

  Klara was even glad that the big, sweaty blacksmith, Preisinger, was down there in his shop hammering away because Adi liked him and stayed there a good deal. That was better than trying to keep watch on him when he would sit outside her kitchen waiting for Edmund to run by so he could stick out his leg and trip him one more time.

  6

  At this time I had to move from Austria to Switzerland, and was active in Geneva for the next month overseeing the transmogrification of a petty criminal into an impassioned assassin.

  Given the variety of clients I was developing in the environs of Linz, I had to return to Austria more than once to take note of their condition and so was able to stay close to events at the grain mill in Lambach, but I will not speak of those matters until I tell a little about my assignment in Geneva. To those readers who are, by now, wary of these expeditions, I can promise that this time I will not be absent from young Adolf for more than an interesting chapter or two.

  Moreover, a few pages of the text to come will quote Mark Twain, even if he was never my client—I would not have dared to make that attempt! In truth, if such a possibility had existed, the Maestro, given his admiration for great writers, would probably have looked to explore such a seduction on his own.

  In the event, Twain, a most complex man, was not considered suitable material. Some of his associates were, however, and so I knew enough about his activities to respect the passion with which he wrote about the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth in Geneva on September 10, 1898. Married in 1854 to Franz Josef, she had long been considered the most beautiful and cultivated queen in Europe. Her favorite poet, for example, was Heinrich Heine. What added to the lady’s exotic status was that after the double suicide in 1889 of her beloved son, Crown Prince Rudolf, and his young mistress, Baroness Vetsera, the Empress dressed only in black. That tragedy, known to all of Europe as “Mayerling,” was an event in which I had played no small part. Indeed, that may have been why I was chosen to shepherd Luigi Lucheni around Geneva after he had been sighted as a putative assassin.

  “He’s a dreadful piece of work,” the Maestro said, “but made to order for us. A most unbalanced little malefactor. He sees himself as a serious philosopher and is sincere in his belief that only the most exceptional individual deeds will leave a lasting influence on the public. So, go to it!”

  I worked with Luigi Lucheni. I expanded the gaseous irresolutions of his psyche, then compressed such inflammable vapors until they were as focused as a blowtorch. Assassins need many quick magnifications of their ego if they are to be ready at the murderous moment.

  I did not fail. Lucheni, an impoverished young man, chose to become an anarchist after he came to live with the Swiss. In Geneva, he found revolutionaries who accepted him, at best, with misgivings. His fellow Italians chose to call him il stupido (which doubled the daily compression of his furies). It was of help to me that he was being ridiculed by those whom he had expected to applaud him. “Convince them by way of your actions,” I kept counseling. “You are here among us to take the life of someone who is very high among the oppressive classes.”

  “Who is this person?” he asked.

  “You will know when the person is pointed out.”

  Poor Empress Elizabeth! She was so proud and so poetic that she allowed only a few bodyguards to escort her when she was on vacation. Even then, they had to stay at a remove of ten paces from her person. It did not matter that strangers were bound to approach. Invariably, it would be a tourist asking for an autograph. So, as she stood by herself on a promenade along the banks of the Rhone, Lucheni came up, took out a sharpened rat-tail file, and thrust it into her heart.

  He was immediately apprehended, his quarters were searched, and his diary examined. All the world soon knew that he had written: “How I would like to kill someone—but it must be someone important so it gets in the papers.”

  He might have chosen Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, who was present in Geneva then on a visit, but so was the beautiful Sisi—Empress Elizabeth. Sisi, I knew, would count for more. Even as I had led the anathematic priest by his long nose to the gateway where Adi was smoking, so did I direct Lucheni to Empress Elizabeth.

  If it is discomforting to the reader that I usually present myself as a calm observer, capable of a balanced narrative, and yet am also able to abet the most squalid acts without a moment of regret, let it not come as a surprise. Devils require two natures. In part, we are civilized. What may be less apparent on most occasions is that our ultimate aim is to destroy civilization as a first step to obviating God, and such an enterprise must be able to call on one’s readiness to do what it takes—a fine expression I picked up years later from a minor client who worked on a film crew.

  In any event, the immediate effect of the deed was exceptional. I will, however, leave that description to Mark Twain himself.

  7

  The author was then at Kaltenleutgeben, a small Austrian town forty miles from Vienna. By way of the failure of his investment in a new linotype machine, Twain was bankrupt.

  So he left his home in Hartford, Connecticut, and traveled through Europe giving popular lectures for fees large enough to pay off many of his debts. Resting in Kaltenleutgeben when the murder of Elizabeth occurred, he wrote the next day to a friend: “This murder will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from now.”

  I cannot begin to speak of the elation with which I read those words. My own opinion of the importance of the deed had now been confirmed by a master of prose. Indeed, Twain was so powerfully affected that he soon composed an essay full of the incomparable flow of his language. Although, for a myriad of reasons too labyrinthine to catalog, he chose not to publish it. I, however, came into possession of these pages by way of one of his servants.

  The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and tremendous the event becomes…. One must go back about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one…. “The Empress is murdered!” When those amazing words struck upon my ear in this Austrian village last Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice was cursing the perpetrator of it.

  …And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and value go; a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without talent, without education, without morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human polecat. And it was within the privileges and powers of this sarcasm upon the human race to reach up—up—up and strike from its far summit in the social skies the world’s accepted ideal of Glory and Might and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes to us what sorry shows and shadows we are. Without our clothes and pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams
. At our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

  And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often forget—or try to; that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one way or another all men are mad and one of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed…. It is this madness for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship and the thousand other dignities…. It has made kings pick one another’s pockets, scramble for one another’s crowns and estates, slaughter one another’s subjects; it has raised up prize-fighters and poets, and villages’ mayors, and little and big politicians, and big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions, and banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons. Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the nation, or the planet shouting, “Look—there he goes—that is the man!” And in five minutes’ time, at no cost of brain, or labor, or genius, this mangy Italian tramp has beaten them all, outstripped them all, for in time their names will perish; but by the friendly help of the insane newspapers and courts and kings and historians, his is safe and will thunder all down the ages as long as human speech shall endure! Oh, if it were not so tragic, how ludicrous it would be!

  I rushed to present this to the Maestro. I do not know that I had ever taken myself so seriously before. I knew that I was, at last, an actor in history.

  He was scathing. “I may value great writers,” he said, “but look how Mark Twain exaggerates the event. It is hysterical. One thousand years! Sisi will be forgotten in twenty.”

  I did not dare to ask, “Does the event serve no large purpose?”

  My thoughts were heard. “Oh,” he said, “it’s a bit of help. But you, like Twain, are much too impressed by mighty names. They count for so little once they are gone. I’d like to clean the snobbery out of you. It’s not the name. Only an exceptional client that we develop ex nihilo—or virtually ex nihilo—can affect history to our advantage. But for that, we have to build him up from first brick to the last. Killing Sisi offered no such value. It will not be conducive to ongoing social unrest. Khodynskoe is still serving us, whereas knocking off Sisi? I tell you that if I were a gourmet picking a perfect peach off the tree, I might be able to enjoy a few minutes of gastric excellence. That would be analogous to the pleasure we can take because of your nice work with Luigi Lucheni. But you must not lose your sense of measure.” Here, he did smile.

  “There was one nice moment,” he said. “Our great author did recover his good sense on the last paragraph.”

  Twain had also written:

  Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination, we must concede high rank to the many which have described it as “ordained from above.” I think this verdict will not be popular “above.” If the deed was ordained from above, there is no rational way of making this prisoner even partially responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him without manifestly committing a crime.

  “Yes,” said the Maestro, “when it comes to being aware of us, that good fellow, Mark Twain, must have been so near to saying ‘ordained from below.’ Thank God, he didn’t!”

  How the Maestro could laugh on these rare occasions when he felt merry.

  8

  I had, as I related, been at a distance from Lambach until after the assassination, and by then the Hitlers no longer lived in the grain mill nor even, indeed, in Lambach. They had moved to a larger town (Leonding, pop. 3,000) which, at first, was much to Klara’s satisfaction, for it was the result of her subtle manipulation of Alois. That was novel. It had taken her years to begin to understand how to manipulate her husband. God-fearing, she did not like to use calculated tactics. Until they lived at the mill, it never occurred to her that she might make Alois jealous.

  Indeed, Klara had never been able to believe that she was worthy of her husband—he was still so preeminently an uncle. But, at last, she came to realize that he might even need her. Even if he did not love her in large measure, he did need her.

  Armed at last with this thought, she was able to recognize that Alois might be old enough by now to feel jealous. She, in turn, so long as she broke no Godly injunctions but merely bent them a bit, might, yes, might, make Alois jealous enough to wish to move away from the mill.

  This possibility resided in the form of the big, soot-covered man on the ground floor, the blacksmith, Preisinger. Fascinated by him, Adi often spent hours at a time watching him work and listening to him talk. She could hear their voices even as she worked in her kitchen on the floor above, and the sounds that came up were curiously engaged with those she made—the splash of water from a pail to a basin seeming to be answered by a few ringing blows on an anvil.

  She knew why Adi was eager to be with the blacksmith. The man worked with fire. That was exciting, even if she was not about to ponder why fire pleased her so. If she had known since childhood that God was everywhere, well, so was the Devil. As long as one did not oblige oneself to follow every thought, then the Devil could have no access. God would be there to protect your ignorance.

  So it was enough for her to understand that Adi would be full of a sense of mystery as he watched the blacksmith heat a piece of iron until it was white-hot, at which moment another piece, also white-hot, could be attached. Out of such melding would come more complex joinings ready to become useful tools—for everything from forging carriage axles to mending broken ploughs.

  Soon enough came an occasion when she had a reason to visit below. The water pump in her kitchen needed a repair on its cylinder. The crack was soon mended, but to her surprise, she stayed a little longer and talked with the blacksmith. Then he invited her to come back whenever she would like a cup of tea.

  To her amazement, this big bull of a man, this Preisinger, had nice manners. He not only treated her with the greatest respect, but he could also speak well, considering that he was as uneducated as herself. He did not brag, but did leave the impression, which she found most agreeable (even as she had once had just such sentiments about Alois), that he was a person of natural importance. She could hardly believe how pleasing it was to listen to him as she sat in the one good chair of his shop while Adi stood beside her close to transfixed.

  Preisinger’s trade was not only engaged with farmers in the area, and occasionally with travelers whose horses were having trouble with a shoe, but, as he explained, many merchants in the area depended upon him for odd repairs. Moreover, he could diagnose many an equine ailment. “I have been able to act, Frau Hitler, as a veterinarian. Yes, I can say that. Because sometimes I have to know more than the vets.”

  “Can you really say that?” asked Klara, and blushed at her own straightforwardness.

  “Frau Hitler,” answered Preisinger, “I have seen valuable animals hobbled to where they could barely walk. And for a simple reason. The veterinarian, however good a fellow he might be concerning other animal diseases, did not know as much about a horse’s hoof as was necessary.”

  “I suppose that is true,” said Klara. “You have had so much experience.”

  “Young Adolf will tell you. There are market days when I shoe as many as twenty horses, one after another. No stopping.”

  “Yes,” said Klara, “how much work must come rushing in when there is ice on the ground.”

  To which he answered, “I see that you understand these matters.”

  Klara had to blush.

  “‘Give me a better grip on the ice,’” Preisinger now said. “I hear that every winter. Over and over. Once, on a freezing day, I had to shoe twenty-five horses, and every one of those farmers was asking me to hurry up.”

  “Yes, but Herr Preisinger would not agree,” said Adolf. “He told me, ‘Speed is speed, yet one nail gone wrong, and that horse will never trust you again.’” Adi’s cheeks were flushed. He could not tell Klara what else the blacksmith had confessed. “Young fellow,” Preisinger had said, �
�there were nights when I couldn’t sit down because I had the horse’s name on my behind.”

  “The horse’s name?” Adi had asked.

  “His hoof. I can recognize horses by their hooves.”

  “You can?”

  “Old Clubfoot. Old Crookedhoof. What name would you like? I will find it for you on my backside.”

  He had laughed, but then, seeing that Adi was bewildered, Preisinger was quick to add, “I am joking. Only joking. But a good blacksmith knows that you can get kicked for your trouble.”

  “How often does that happen?” the boy asked. He was so obviously seeing the event in his mind that Preisinger decided to remove himself from such images.

  “No longer,” he said. “Now it is not even one time a year. In this work, you have to be very good or you don’t last.”

  With Klara, Preisinger preferred to discuss how he might compound his own special caulk for the hole left by old nails—he was proud of the various kinds of problems he was ready to solve. While he spoke, she looked at the occasional imprint of horseshoes on his dirt floor, there in the dark dust on the earth floor. She certainly did like this man. She could share his pride in the sea anchor he was making for a rich man—no, no ordinary problem, an anchor—one had to be certain there were no weaknesses between the ring, the stock, the crown, the flukes, the palm, and the shank. She did enjoy the sound of such words. “The palm and the shank,” she repeated.