The Castle in the Forest

by Norman Mailer

  Once there, they spoke of the oncoming weight of this first anniversary—good men in the grip of sorrowful emotions. Then Mayrhofer did something he had never done before. He said: “You must promise not to punish the messenger.”

  Alois replied with confidence, “You would never be the bearer of ill tidings,” but already he could feel stirrings in his chest.

  Mayrhofer said, “I must ask, do you have an older son who shares your first name?”

  Alois seized the Mayor’s forearm so hard that he bruised it. Mayrhofer freed himself with an unhappy smile. “Well,” he said, “you have punished the messenger already.” He held up a hand. “Enough,” he said. “I have to tell you—a report came through today that circulates through the district. Your son is in prison.”

  “He is? For what?”

  “I am so sorry. It is for theft.”

  A low guttural sound came forth. “I cannot believe it,” Alois said. But he knew it was true.

  Mayrhofer said, “You can visit him should you so desire.”

  “Visit him?” said Alois. “I don’t think so.” He was full of sweat, and on the edge of losing his good manners.

  “The hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to disavow my oldest son,” he managed to put together. “Mayrhofer, you understand, we are such a good family. My wife and I have been careful to raise them properly. But Junior was the bad apple in the barrel. If I had not disavowed him, the other children would have suffered. And now the three who are still alive”—he caught himself, he did not sob—“will turn out very well indeed.”

  That evening, at Klara’s insistence, Adolf had to show his report card to Alois. Now, witnessing the expression on Alois’ face, she felt as if she had betrayed her son.

  In tones sufficiently somber to pronounce the onset of war, Alois stated: “I gave a vow to your mother. It was at her request. I said that I would never whip you again. That was a year ago. We were thinking of the tragedy in our family. But now, you can be certain, I will break my vow. That is the only course to take when the vow has been dishonored by the person most protected by it. Come! We are going to your bedroom.” Once more, he was holding his temper. It broke, however, so soon as he took off his belt.

  At the first lash, Adolf told himself, “I will not cry out!” The blows were, however, so severe that he began to shriek. Alois had never used a leather strap before. It felt as if a tongue of flame was at the end of it. All the boy could think was that he did not wish to die! Indeed, he did not know what would destroy him first—this scourge upon his buttocks or the shock to his heart. At that moment, his father, seriously winded, stopped, pushed Adolf off his knee, and said, “You can stop crying now.”

  Alois went into his own depression—to live as long as he had and now feel no confidence in the poor remains of his male line.

  7

  Adolf was suffering true torment. He had dared to show his drawings to the art teacher. He had assumed the submissions would be chosen at once and would dominate the cork wall reserved for students. He had even meditated on how to phrase some quietly confident response to the praises he would receive. These fine moments would compensate for the poor marks on his first report card.

  I can admit that I affected the result. While Adolf had talent, it was nothing remarkable—I could see at a glance that he would never be an artist of large promise. (Young Pablo Picasso, for example, was already by 1901 a young man in whom we were most interested.) By contrast, young Adolf Hitler produced drawings just good enough to tack to the cork wall.

  “Prevent this,” was the instruction I received from the Maestro. “The last thing we need is one more artist full of sour spirit at his lack of large recognition. I say it’s better to put him into a real slump.”

  I was in position to accomplish this. Adolf’s art instructor was one of our clients. (Indeed, he bore a close resemblance to the mediocrity described by the Maestro.) By way of an altercation I developed between him and his wife, I gave him a fearful headache. Adolf’s work was seen through the light shafts of a migraine. None of the drawings were selected.

  He could not believe it. In that hour, he withdrew forever from the idea that he would ever look again for success in school. He would learn to live on his own.

  Of course, he would not, like Alois Junior, leave home, no need for that. Toga Boy still brought sweat to his back. No, he would continue to live among others while developing, unbeknownst to all, a will of iron.

  He continued to do poorly in school. The report card of his first full year, which he handed over to his father in June, showed a failure in two courses, Mathematics and Natural History. Poor Alois. He could not muster the energy to give Adolf a beating.

  That summer, knowing that he would have to repeat his first year, Adolf was equally depressed, but did manage to tell himself (with my assistance) that he comprehended the art of learning better than other students. He had the secret. He would retain only the essentials. Students were too ready to busy themselves with endless memorization of nonessential details. They were just like the teachers. They could only recite lists and categories. They were bores. They squawked like parrots. They acted as if they were truly intelligent whenever a teacher approved of what they said. They were the ones who got the good marks.

  He was considerably above such concerns. So he told himself. He was interested in the core of each situation. That was the valuable knowledge. So he would not subject his mind to the methods others used. That could only reduce the power of his mind.

  It was imperative to cheer him up. His best amusement these days had become his power to tease Angela. Physically, he was, at last, her equal in strength. So whenever she criticized him, he called her a “stupid goose.” For Angela, this was a dreadful term. She would even complain to Klara. She hated geese. She had seen them landing in the town pond, and to her, they were filthy. Angela had watched these geese as they crowded up on the banks, leaving their droppings behind them. She was, she told herself, more like a swan.

  I did allow Adolf one fantasy where he proceeded to imagine himself a teacher at the Realschule, dressed in elegant style, clear voiced, incisive, and regarded with admiration for his wit.

  ADOLF: Here is the essential, young men. Do not try to remember all the facts of every historical event. I would say instead: “Protect yourself. You are swimming in clouded water.” Most of the facts you have memorized are no better than debris which contradict other facts. So you will be in a state of confusion. But I can rescue you. The secret is to retain essentials. Select only those facts which clarify the issue.

  8

  On a lively night at the Buergerabends, one speaker, a portly man, offered the thesis that railway travel had affected long-established social relations. “Our sense of the world,” he declared, “has been turned inside out by the railroads. The king of Saxony, for example, is not in favor of such travel. As he put it recently, ‘The laborer can now arrive at his destination on the same train as a king.’ This is equal to saying that men who are well-off no longer travel more rapidly than the lower classes. Social disharmony could be an eventual consequence of all this.”

  Another member stood up to say, “I agree with my distinguished friend that many of these so-called improvements are of dubious value. Pocket watches are certainly a prime example. In these days, anyone can buy a timepiece at a reasonable price. Yet I still recall an era when it was a privilege to carry a fine watch. A person in one’s employ had to take note of the fine quality of your watch and chain. They would leave your presence respectfully. Now any roustabout can pull a piece of shoddy out of his pants and declare that his piece keeps better time than yours. Do you want to hear the worst of it?—sometimes that is true.”

  Laughter followed this remark. “No, gentlemen,” the speaker went on, “a cheap watch can be more accurate in this matter than our family heirlooms, which, after all, are cherished because they have been with us for so long.”

  One evening, the lecture was on
dueling scars. That left Alois wistful. He listened with full attention to varied opinions on the best location for the wound. Should one desire the left or right cheek, the chin, or the corner of the lips? He did, however, chime in toward the end by remarking that when he was a young officer in the Customs service, many of his superiors bore those scars and “we did respect them.” He sat down flushed. His remark had contributed little.

  On another occasion his feelings were hurt by a young sportsman (with a prominent dueling scar) who entered into a long conversation with him. The first auto tour from Paris to Vienna had recently passed through Linz, and the man with the dueling scar not only owned a motor car but had been in the race.

  Earlier on this same evening, the sportsman had enlivened a debate over the question of whether it was sensible to purchase an automobile, and the back and forth of oratorical heat stimulated fiery comment. Those who were opposed to motor cars spoke contemptuously of the dust, the mud, the uproars, and, worst of all, the fumes.

  The sportsman replied, “Yes, I know—these infernal machines are awful to you, but I happen to like the fumes. For me, they are an aphrodisiac.”

  This remark was received with hoots and howls. He laughed, “Say what you will, the fumes do offer a hint of debauch.” At which he dared to sniff his fingers. Groans and laughter were the response of the company. “You can rest content with your carriages and your stables,” he went on to say, “but I like traveling at high speeds.”

  “Oh, that is much too much!” someone called out.

  “Not at all,” the speaker told him. “The sense of danger is welcome to me. I am stimulated by the roar of the engine. The attention of those many pedestrians who used to admire a fine horse and carriage is now offered to the virtues of my iron monster. I see it out of the corner of my eye even as I rush by.”

  Alois was certainly impressed by this rich sport, who capped his argument by saying, “Yes, to drive a motor car does offer some peril. But it is also dangerous to rein in a maddened horse. I would rather risk my neck in a motor car than shatter my bones in an overturned coach. Or sit behind some old nag of a beast who secretly loathes my guts.”

  How they roared at that! Nothing worse than such a horse.

  Later, when the debate was over, the speaker chose to engage Alois in a quiet conversation whose concealed agenda soon became evident, since he chose to ask more than a few questions about Customs procedures. Alois was offended. Brilliantly full of himself at the podium, the man was now obvious in his motive. “You sound as if you are going to cross a few borders,” Alois remarked.

  “Indeed I am,” said the Sport. “But it’s the English I am thinking about. They say the English can be the worst.” He made a point of speaking in profile, so that Alois might be properly impressed with the dueling scar on his left cheek.

  It was a good jagged cicatrix, perfect for a man as handsome and self-possessed as this fellow, but work in Customs had offered its own sagacities, and so Alois could distinguish a genuine scar occasioned by the saber of a dueling partner hacking through the padding on your face and thereby leaving a bona fide laceration from a self-created dueling scar worked up by some ambitious toad looking to charm the ladies. A fellow like that would use a razor to open a wound on his face and then embed a horsehair in the gap. That could build the scar up into a welt high enough to dignify the rest of his career.

  When well done, such a scar might appear to be authentic, but Alois had already decided that this fellow had almost certainly used a horsehair. The scar did sit too perfectly on his face.

  So Alois said no more in return than, “I expect we are still just as good as the English if it’s a matter of spotting some joker who looks to bring precious objects into Austria without paying duty. Celer et vigilans,” added Alois. “That used to be my motto.” It was a happy prevarication—he had happened to memorize the saying just that afternoon. Celer et vigilans—quick and watchful. That ought to give the fellow some pause.

  “Numquam non paratus,” answered the Sport, to which Alois could only smile.

  His first act on returning home was to look up the meaning. “Never unprepared.” An old wrath came back to him for a moment. How he would like to get his hands on this man in a Customs shed.

  All the same, Alois was feeling expansive at dinner. The excitement of the discussion was still with him, and as he recounted his final observation on the dueling scars, Adolf did listen avidly. Someday he would have his own motor car. Perhaps, even, his own dueling scar.

  9

  To Adolf’s surprise, there came a night when Alois did take him to the opera. This event—they were to hear Lohengrin—had come about by way of an improvement in his report card for February of 1902. Due to his previous failure, the first half of his second year had been a repeat of the first half of the first year, and so he did receive a passing grade in every course. There were even favorable comments on his diligence and conduct. This occasioned Alois to declare, “A good sign. Once you allow conduct to be your first concern, the rest has been known to follow.”

  Alois was easing up on his demands. He had been ill. Two months earlier, in December of the previous year, 1901, he had had influenza, which frightened him. Once again he felt an overbearing need to be able to improve this recalcitrant son.

  So, in early February, soon after the second anniversary of Edmund’s death, Alois decided to try once again to come a little closer. Having noticed that Adolf listened with intense interest whenever the conversations at the Buergerabends were described, he was also pleased to see that Adolf would read all the newspapers that were brought home. Indeed, by virtue of a few remarks Adolf offered at the family table, Alois knew that some of his son’s fellow students (obviously from the more well-to-do families) did talk in recess about operas they had attended. Alois decided it was time to take the boy.

  It came as no surprise that Alois was also ready to speak derogatively of the Linz opera house. “To Linzers,” he told Adolf, “this opera house is a splendid building, but if you have spent time in Vienna and know, as I do, a true opera house, you would find the performance here not so impressive. Of course, coming from Hafeld and Lambach or even Leonding, I expect that you will think you are hearing high opera tonight. And, indeed, Linz has obtained the right to call itself a city and be proud of its opera house. Nonetheless, tonight will be in no way equal to Vienna. Adolf, if you prove successful in a career, then someday, perhaps, you will live in Vienna. That is when you will truly enjoy the heights of musical pleasure.”

  Alois was pleased with the speech. He had come to the point in his life where he felt that if much else was diminishing, the ability to express himself with the well-rounded criticisms of a true Buergerabender had certainly developed.

  So Adolf was taken to hear his first Wagner in a second-rate opera house. And despite his father’s comments, he was more than once enthralled. If he sneered at the entrance of the great swan who was towing Lohengrin’s boat onstage to rescue Elsa (for Adolf could hear the squeak of the boots made by the two men installed inside the swan), he was overcome by Elsa’s aria of welcome to Lohengrin. “I see in splendor shining, a knight of glorious mien…. Heaven has sent him to save me. He shall my champion be.”

  Tears came to Adolf’s eyes. Tomorrow, he would mingle among the students who spoke of operatic performances they had attended. During intermission, therefore, he listened to the comments of the most impressive-looking operagoers. “How fastidious of Wagner,” said one such man to another, “that he uses the violins and woodwinds rather than allow himself to be trapped by the harp. Wagner knows his celestial sounds. It is as if he is the first to have discovered them. Violins, oboe, bassoon, yes, but away with the harps.”

  Yes, thought Adolf, he would repeat this tomorrow at school.

  Alois, in turn, was off on his own meditation. Brooding over the skill of the upper classes, he decided that they had a foundation for their good fortune. They knew how to obtain proper installations for
their sons in the army, the church, or the law, and thereby could continue to be proud of the family achievements. Yet why conclude that he was not as good as them? Granted, he had started from a low place, but he was ready now to live with their point of view. They understood that the oldest son, able or not, must still be ready to fulfill the destiny of the family. That was not only true for the army and the church but could include government officials as well. Some bureaucrats, after all, did become ministers of state. If that had not been the case for him, not when a man had to start at the bottom of the ladder, still he felt entitled to one certainty. If he had had these advantages of birth, he would have made a fine minister. Now, should Adolf ever become a man worthy of respect, he would also be in position to rise above his father’s achievements. Listening now to this music, so true to his elevated mood, so vaulting, so ambitious, so bold, Alois allowed himself to shed in the dark a few happy tears upon a well-spent life, and these sentiments were now so finely mingled with Lohengrin’s final sounds that his palms were red from the applause he gave to the company of this second-rate opera house.

  Adolf, however, was not ebullient. Given the power of the last chords, he soon plummeted from a high and splendid mood into his familiar despondency.

  I would say this is one of our basic problems. We have more than our share of clients who can rise high into the intoxications of their private dreams but then plummet down to the ugliness of their real condition. So we have to calm them. Even as he was soaring into the empyrean with Wagner, the downfall of his confidence was commencing. Wagner was a genius. Adolf had come to that opinion instantly. Every note spoke to him. But could he say this was also true of himself? Or was he not a genius after all? Not next to Wagner.