The Castle in the Forest (7 page)
penditure, but all the same, needless. Besides, he was disappointed in Fanni. His new wife was not as ready to face other people as she ought to be.
Moreover, she was a nervous mother. She insisted on having the second baby in Vienna. A midwife would not be as spiteful there, she told him. Who, in her situation, asked Fanni, could trust any woman from Braunau? More expense.
Anna Glassl, with all her faults, had been a lady—he would, he decided reluctantly, never be able to say the same for Fanni. It was not that he expected it of her, not a farmer’s daughter, but still she had once shown progress in such directions. Now it was all going backward. When he first knew her, she moved well, she was quick, she charmed the guests of the inn even as she served them. He thought she was a most witty creature for a waitress.
Now she yelled at the servants—all the fire in Fanni had gone to her temper. Their rooms at the inn were not properly taken care of. When he suggested that they might call Klara back, Fanni carried on for all of one evening.
“Yes,” she told him, “then you can do to Klara what you did to me. Poor Anna Glassl.”
Poor Anna Glassl! He came to realize that Fanni must now be dreaming about Anna. Could they not move forward as husband and wife? It was not the best marriage, he decided. You should not have to get into the same fight every evening.
She spent two weeks in Vienna before their daughter, Angela, was born, and in that time he had to pay for a nurse to take care of Alois Hitler, Junior. Before the week was out, Senior had seduced the nurse. She was fifteen years older than Fanni, heavyset, a hard worker once he got her to bed, but he could sleep because she got up in the middle of the night without complaint when the boy was crying for his mother.
Up until then he had been faithful to Fanni. Now the only way to make the nurse more palatable was for him to alternate her with the cook. Fanni came back from Vienna looking weak and tired and, before long, knew all about it. She did not scream at him. She
wept. She was not well, she confessed, and there he was without patience to wait for sick people to mend. He was a brute, she told
him.
They had been living together for close to three years before they could marry, but now, by the time Angela was a year old, Fanni was seriously ill. Signs of a deepening disorder were everywhere. She would pass from fits of temper to hysteria, then to loss of interest in her husband, plus an incapacity to take proper care of their two children. A doctor told her that she had the beginnings of tuberculosis. Klara was brought back from Vienna to be with Alois Junior and Angela even as Fanni moved out of the inn to a small town called Lach in the midst of a forest called Lachenwald, “Laughter-in-the-Woods,” but neither the name nor the good forest air had the power to restore her. In Lach she stayed for the ten months before her end.
BOOK III
Adolf’s
Mother
1
I
n those months, Klara visited Fanni more often than Alois did, and the wound they had left in each other all but healed. On the first visit, Klara had fallen on her knees before the bed where Fanni rested and said, “You were right. I do not know if I would have been true to my vow.” In turn, Fanni wept. “You would have been true,” she said. “Now I tell you to give up your vow. He is through with me.”
“No,” said Klara, “my promise must remain! It has to be stronger than ever.” She had a moment when she thought she might at last have a true understanding of sacrifice. This left her feeling exalted. She had been taught to search for just such a pure state of the soul. Those teachings had come from her father, that is to say, her father-in-name, old Johann Poelzl, who was sour on all matters but Devotion. “Devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ is all of my life in each and every day,” he would tell her—he was indeed more pious than any woman in Spital. At many a meal, after saying grace, he would tell Klara (especially once she passed the age of twelve) that to give up what one truly desired was the nearest one could come to knowing the glory of Christ. But to attain such moments, one must be ready to sacrifice one’s dreams. After all, had God not sacrificed His Son?
Klara was soon trying to relinquish her desire for Uncle Alois, f hat fever had not gone away during the four years she worked tor Anna Glassl, nor over the next four years serving the old lady in Vienna who alternated between doting on Klara and counting the silverware. She was one old lady who had the real heat of
suspicion—it irritated her when the silver count was correct (as it always was) because paranoia that cannot be confirmed is more difficult to bear than a loss from outright theft. The old lady was secretly proud of the perfection with which this young servant kept house for her—it spoke of respect for her mistress—yet the honesty made her irritable.
Years earlier, in payment for her one cardinal sin with Alois, Johanna had turned into a very good housekeeper, and Klara responded to such duties. It was as if the mother and daughter believed that what was left of the family—given the ghosts of all those dead children—depended on offering ceaseless attention to the daily skirmish against mud, dust, ashes, slops, and all crusted plates, cups, pots, and cutlery.
By now, Klara was never lax. Each household task required respect for the labor even when one knew how to do it well. Sacrifice, however, was different from such work. Sacrifice was an ache that lived next to her heart. If she wanted Alois, if she dreamed of Alois, she was still obliged to find a way (once Fanni’s two children had been put to sleep) to keep him at arm’s length. There was not a night in the inn, the best inn of Braunau, the Pommer Inn (to which they had moved), when Alois was not staring at her. Slightly drunk from the three steins of beer he took into himself each evening with one or another of the Customs officers before returning to the Pommer for the meal Klara had cooked in the kitchen of the hotel and brought up to their lodgings, he would eat with full gusto, saying not a word, just nodding to demonstrate his enjoyment. Then he would stare at her in the privacy of their sitting room, his eyes wide open as if to share his thoughts. The recesses of her body were soon fingered by his imagination. Her thighs burned, her cheeks burned, her breath wanted to inhale his breath. If one of the children cried out in sleep, she would jump up. The sound was equal to a cry from Fanni come to her all the way from Laughter-in-the-Woods. Afterward, a cramp of disappointment would be sure to follow.
Alois was often on the point of describing to his drinking asso-
ciates how he loved her eyes. They were so deep, so clear, so full of the desperation to have him.
Why not? Alois kept to his view that he was one exceptional fellow. Whom did he know besides himself who was as ready to claim his indifference to religious fear? That was its own kind of bravery. He often made a point of declaring that he never went to church. Nor would he confess to a priest. How could a run-of-the-mill priest be equal to him? He had his allegiance to the Crown and he needed no more than that. Would God be about to punish a man who served the State so well?
Just the week before, a cousin had inquired whether his son, now of age, would be happy working on the Finance-Watch. Alois had written back:
Don’t let your boy think it is a kind of game because he will be quickly disillusioned. He has to show absolute obedience to his superiors at all levels. Second, there is a good deal to learn in this occupation, all the more so if he has had little previous education. Heavy drinkers, men who get into debt, and gamblers and those who lead immoral lives cannot last. Finally, one has to go out in all weather, day or night.
Naturally, he felt equal to the sentiments in the letter, nor did he have to brood about “those who lead immoral lives.” Immorality, Alois knew, was not to be confused with the details of your private life. Immorality was taking a bribe from a smuggler, whereas private life was too complicated for judgment. He did not know to a certainty that Klara was his daughter—after all, he did not have to trust Johanna Hiedler Poelzl’s word. What, after all, was the point of being a woman if you could not lie with skill?
Sie ist hier!
True, or not true?
All the same, she might be his daughter.
Alois knew why he didn’t have to go to church, nor to confession, he knew why he was brave. He was ready to take the same forbidden road that drunken peasants and adolescents blundered into
while sharing a bed. But he, unlike them, would not look back in fear and penitence. He would just do it. Yes.
Which he finally did at the end of a short evening that had been much like all the other dinners when he had looked at her with no deceit in his expression and no activity but to stand up now and again with his pants in full profile, his proud bulge ready to speak for itself. Then he would poke the fire and sit down and look at her again. On this one night, however, he did not say good night as she put her hand on the door to the children’s room, where she, too, was sleeping, but instead, strode forward, caught that hand, kissed her on the mouth, and brought her to his bedroom and his bed, even as she begged him in a low uncertain voice to do no more, “please, no more,” whereupon he proceeded to lay a track with his hand, so veteran at insinuating his fingers through the defenses of garments and corsets, all the way to the nest of hair she had so long concealed. And there it was, much like feathers—downy—much as he had expected. Half her body was on fire, but half was locked in ice, the bottom half. If not for the Hound, he might have stalled at the approach to such a frozen entry, but then her mouth was part of the fire and she kissed him as if her heart was contained in her lips, so rich, so fresh, so wanton a mouth that he exploded even as he entered her, ripped her hymen altogether, and was in, deep, and in, and it was over even as she began to sob with woe and fright and worse—in shame for the throb of exaltation that had shivered through her at a bound and was gone. She knew that this had been the opposite of sacrifice. Nor could she stop kissing him. She went on and on like a child raining kisses on the face of the great adult beloved, and then there were other kisses, softer, deeper. He was the first man she had ever kissed as a strange man rather than as a relative of the family, yes, the wrong kind of exaltation. She could not stop weeping. Nor could she stop smiling.
2
S
o Klara was now his lover, his cleaning woman, and the nursemaid to Alois Junior and to Angela. On many a night she was also his cook—unless (having hired one of the hotel maids to sit with the children for an hour) they went downstairs to the dining room of the Pommer Inn, there in full display as uncle and niece, the middle-aged Customs officer in uniform and his demure young mistress. No one in Braunau was fooled, no matter how often she might call him Uncle. It was enough to stir a boil of outrage in the onlookers that he could sit there as if he were Franz Josef himself, ready to claim, “In company with the Emperor, I, too, have a lovely mistress.” On any night that he took her downstairs to dine, it never failed—he would make love as soon as they came back, his voice so hoarse he could hardly speak. “I am your bad uncle,” he would say in the thick of the embrace, “your very bad uncle.”
“Yes, yes, my bad uncle,” and she would cling to him, hardly able to distinguish pain from what was seeking to become pleasure—a most unholy pleasure. “Oh!” she would cry out. “We will be punished.”
Who the hell cares?” he would growl, and that brought her closer to the unholy pleasure.
Invariably, she would weep when it was over. It was all she could command not to scream at him. Inside her was all the congestion of all that had not quite come to pass. She felt so guilty.
Now it was Klara’s turn not to go to Mass. She was working for the Devil (so she knew!). She felt as if her finest impulses were now bringing her nearer to the Evil One, yes, even the loving care she
gave to Alois Junior, and to Angela. The more she adored them, the worse it must be. Her tainted presence could pollute their innocence.
Then, there was Fanni. Klara had not told her but knew she must. Because if Fanni did not know now, she would certainly find out so soon as her life ended, for then she could watch from the other side. Fanni would be left with the intolerable thought that Klara never cared enough to tell her.
Yet in the last week of Fanni’s illness, when Klara did confess, the answer was brief: “This is my punishment for sending you away four years ago. That is fair.”
“I will take care of the boy and girl as if they were mine.”
“You will take better care than I would,” said Fanni, and turned her face away. “It is all right,” she said, “but you must not come to see me anymore.”
Then Klara knew once again that she lived in the grip of the Evil One. Because if at first she was hurt, she soon felt furious that Fanni was still ready to send her away, and the anger was present on the day that Fanni was interred, a very long day, since Alois did not bury Fanni in Braunau. He had chosen Ranshofen (On-the-Brink-of-Hope), where they had been married. This was not from sentiment but annoyance. The word in Braunau was that he had bought Fanni’s coffin months before she died. The townspeople were saying no less than that he had found a true bargain in advance (a mahogany job confiscated from a smuggler at the Customs gate). In truth, he had only bought the damned crate ten days before her death. It was not as if he had sat on it for months. So he could not forgive the gossip. Moreover, the tragedy of death was overrated. So many times, it was like saying goodbye to a friend who has outworn every welcome. He did not plan to visit the cemetery too often. His eyes were on Klara for tonight. By evening, after the funeral, he could not stop looking at her. Those blue eyes—so much like the diamond in the museum!
In bed on that hot August night, Klara’s life received another life. It had traveled directly to her heart, or so she felt. For her soul