The Castle in the Forest

  He even held Klara in his arms, which was seldom his habit, and when he woke up to honor the alarms of his bladder, he almost kicked over the chamber pot. In the dark, what with his unfamiliarity with a new bedroom, he was stumbling around, and Klara was giggling. Then she wrapped her arms around him as he came back to bed. “I am happy,” she said. “I think this will be the place for us.”

  “Silence!” he growled. “Don’t be a goose! One does not make silly predictions.” Yes, he could feel the earth of the farm, all those nine acres to the rear and to the front of them, and felt just as superstitious as any of the peasants of his childhood. A person should not be as ready as Klara to speak out with good feelings to the empty night air. In any event, not aloud! Was the night so empty after all? Who knew what might be there to listen?

  In the morning, she could sense his impatience to be done with the unpacking. It was obvious. He wanted to go out and walk his grounds. So she took over the larger part of the immediate tasks while he gave the children a tour of the barn, Adi and Edmund huddled close to him before the animal immanence of the two horses, the cow, and the prize sow that had been part of the purchase price. Those animals were huge, and the sow was close to overpowering in odor.

  Now Alois told Adi and Edmund to go back to the house and help their mother. That was a joke. Klara would have to milk the cow, feed the pig, curry the horse, and attend to the henhouse, but he needed to walk his lands alone. He had to make more than a few decisions. So, once again, he studied the condition of the fruit and walnut trees. When he had last seen them, there was more than a little snow on the ground, but the trees looked healthy, and the large branches did appear to have integrity—strong, reasonably straight, not too many tortured shapes to suggest the aftermath of crazy storms when the trees were young.

  In truth, he realized now, he had hardly studied the place before. Enough that the price was reasonable and the house owned a fine view. He had had to be in a hurry—he could not expend days in travel back and forth from Linz.

  All the same, he was not so much at ease with his purchase as he had anticipated. Walking the meadows and mounting the one small hill of his new domain, he found the land was less extensive than he remembered, no larger, really, than what it was, nine acres, a good-sized parade field. On the other hand, three or four of those acres would make a decent but manageable potato field. Should he give another acre to beets? Could he plant this year? That would be the question. He could not get going until the end of June, the beginning of July, but Alois Junior would be back with them, his school year finished, and, yes, maybe they could take on some late plowing.

  All this while, he felt disappointment. He had to recognize—once again—that he could not cultivate his bees, not this summer. The brunt of the project would have to wait. Honey gathering began in April and hardly lasted into September. One had to be there at the beginning. So he must wait. All right, he would have nine months now to prepare, counting at least from the time when he would be back here again, permanently, in June, late June, and an unexpected and most unpleasant shiver of anticipation came to him at this thought. Did he know what he was doing? That was one thought he needed to force to the back of his head. He had been in control of his feelings for many years, and he was not preparing to let go now.

  5

  By the first of July, Klara was visibly pregnant. In seven months, assuming the baby was born without incident, there would be a total of eight kids alive or dead who had come into existence because of Alois. Of course, if he so desired, he could add a few not exactly accounted for—he had known a number of cooks and chambermaids who had managed to conceive with what might be called mixed male parentage. And yes, whenever one of them said she was pregnant, he had agreed that he could be the true father, but then, hadn’t she also been with Hans and Gerhardt and Hermann and Wolf? With rare exceptions (like Fanni) those women were not in a position to argue. It was enough to give them a decent gift.

  Here in Hafeld, he was face-to-face with the other side of such achievements. Through the heat of July, in this farmhouse up on the hill, he had to look at five faces every meal, from Klara all the way down to Edmund, sixteen months old and already starting to talk. By January, there would be another child. He was used to living with people’s faces in front of him, more new faces than most people had to encounter every day, but now, it was always the same mugs. He was not used to dwelling with such questions as whether Edmund, for example, had come up with a new phrase or was just gurgling out old globs of sound.

  Managing the farm was another matter. He could take pleasure in Angela’s work. For a twelve-year-old who had been putting cold cream on her hands ever since she was eight—a little city girl, ready to be spoiled—she was now, to his surprise, decent help. She was always currying the two horses, and washing down the cow even when that hefty lady didn’t need another bath. She would also get Adolf and Edmund to laugh at the hearty contentment to be heard in the full-gutted sound of the sow every time they approached with food. Rosig (Pinky) was large for a pig, large even for a prize pig, and seemed happy in her smelly wallow with its pink rosette tacked above the stall, a prize from the summer before they bought the farm. By next winter, when all the new work wouldn’t be weighing on them, Angela wanted to prepare Rosig once more for local competition. Yes, his girl, Alois decided, was a prize herself. Angela even took pains to keep the manure of the farm animals separate. She made a point of carrying each collection to a different pile. Why? Because, she declared to Klara, “My father would want it that way. Nice and neat.” She even succeeded in getting Adi to take up a part of the slack. While he could be counted on to throw a tantrum, Angela would ride it out. Then the boy would follow her, his nose up to heaven in horror, but nonetheless carrying a second manure pail.

  His school year over, Alois Junior arrived at the farm by the beginning of July. For a short period, no one could surpass him at work. Right off, he was splendid with the horses, particularly Ulan, a stallion five years old. Alois was proud of how quickly Junior took to the saddle. The youth was always ready for the joy of a quick canter up the hill and down, accompanied by full screams of excitement from Angela and Adi. Yet he was also available to work the plow with the dray horse, Graubart. Before too long, they had turned up three acres of hard soil pasture for the potatoes, the same sprouting seed potatoes Klara had bought and stored in the root cellar a week after her arrival. Alois Junior worked harder for two weeks than his father would have believed.

  Of a sudden, this flurry fell off. Bad news arrived in a letter from the school in Passau. Alois had failed half of his courses. He would have to take those studies over again.

  “I won’t go back,” he told his father. “The teachers are so stupid that we laugh at them.”

  Yes, the boy must have been brooding for these two weeks over the bad school news but had not said a word, just kept working hard. In that time, they had tilled ten inches deep into the three acres chosen, a stubborn, resistant soil, after which they laid the seed potatoes in those shallow trenches and covered them lightly, each of the sprouters a foot apart, each furrow less than a yard away from the next, but that had been only the commencement. Next came the labor that went into weeding and fertilizing. Bad memories, fifty years old, came back to Alois. He now encountered white grubs and wire worms, and had to watch as the earliest potato leaves were nibbled into green lace by aphids and beetles. Every day one had to go back for more weeding. Soon enough, watering became an ongoing problem. One could only dig a few inches down for the irrigation canals. Go deeper and potato roots would be mangled by the shovel. These shallow trenches soon filled, however, with silt. Hours had to be spent carrying pail after pail of well water up the slope to the meadow. On one of those afternoons, Junior disappeared. He was out riding Ulan. Alois put Angela to work in his stead, and for the rest of the working day, she carried the water, heavy duty for a girl her size.

  That night, Alois gave his son a tongue-lashing in front of the
others. “You are,” he said, “very much like your crazy mother. Only with you, worse. You have no excuse. Your mother, by the end, was out of her mind, yes, but at least she had once been a hard worker. You are lazy.” If the episode had happened even a year earlier, Alois would have given him a beating, exactly the apocalyptic variety that leaves a scar on the heart, but now the boy was wild enough by the look in his eyes to offer Alois pause. So he did not strike him. Which, he came to decide, was a mistake. The boy’s head should have been ringing from one hell of a wallop. Now Junior might be able to think that his father could be a little afraid of him, maybe a little, yes. For a fact, Junior kept reducing the total of his hours—a true city lad doing summer labor. Well short of sundown, he would ask Alois to let him take Ulan for a ride.

  The trouble, Alois told himself, was that as a father, he was not hard enough. Under all the bite, he had a soft heart. The truth was that he adored Alois Junior. The boy was so attractive. Restless, yes, and like his mother, victim to terrible moods. He was much too prideful, and in full flight from getting a decent education. Yet he could be as charming as Fanni when he chose to be. He reminded Alois of how well she used to move. He even felt pride at how quickly his son had gotten on good terms with the stallion. Alois himself hesitated to ride him. It was truly a long way to the ground for a heavy man. But Alois Junior could saddle up with all the éclat of a prize cadet—the sort who used to promenade along the best streets of Vienna wearing the boots that Alois had made for them in those years, all the way back when he had so admired such well-turned-out young men. Memories returned of those officers strutting on the Ringstrasse with their handsome ladies, even as he, the apprentice, had dreamed of finding an elegant and lovely young milliner for himself, yes, the old dream! They would start a shop offering the finest handmade hats and most exceptional boots, a stupid dream, but now Junior reminded him of those cadets. Such a striking young man. He was not at all like little Adolf, full of hysterical temper, or tiny Edmund, full of snots.

  So Alois could not bring himself to refuse when Alois Junior would ask for an hour off. Ulan, after all, had to be exercised. And the horse did love his young rider. But not the father—whenever Alois approached, the beast would show his teeth in an unmistakably evil grin.

  6

  On one warm evening in August, Alois Junior took another unpleasant liberty. This time, Klara was infuriated. The youth was at table ready for their evening supper, but Angela was not. She was in the barn currying Ulan’s wet hide after her brother had put the charger into a gallop on the way back from the woods and then provided too brief a walk-down to allow the animal to cool. Klara could not believe such selfish behavior. It was one of the few times in their marriage when she spoke sharply to her husband. She was now in her sixth pregnancy, and he was no uncle to her, not at this moment. “You allowed your son to leave such work to Angela? That is certainly not right.”

  Alois Junior spoke up instead. “Angela likes wiping Ulan down,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “I may not know horses so much,” said Klara, “but I am still ready to say that he who rides the animal has the duty afterward. The horse sees a difference. Even if you don’t.”

  “You know nothing about the subject,” said her stepson. “When it comes to horses, you are ten degrees less than zero.”

  “Silence!” shouted Alois. “And keep your mouth shut for the rest of the meal. Not one word.”

  Coming into the fray several steps behind Klara, he had to show mastery. “Yes, silence,” he repeated. “I call for it.”

  “Jawohl!” shouted Alois Junior.

  Now Alois had to ask himself whether he was being mocked or obeyed. “I will repeat,” said Alois. “You are to be silent for the rest of the meal. Not one word.”

  Alois Junior stood up and left the table.

  “Come back,” said Alois. “Come back, sit down, and be silent.”

  There was a pause, and then he did come back, but in the pause was all the suggestion of what might be yet to come.

  They finished the meal without another word. Angela came in flushed from currying, started to speak, and then did not. She sat down, her face still moist from the quick wash she had taken with the dipper, and put her face to the food. Sitting next to her, Adi was so full of excitement and foreboding that he was stiff with fear he might soil himself. And Klara? She ate slowly, pausing often, her spoon in the air. She was filled with an unruly desire to upbraid her stepson again, and then—no small impulse—upbraid her own Alois as well. She said nothing, however. To interfere with two men who were in such a rage was no territory to enter. Edmund, little lip-dribbling Edmund, began to cry.

  That offered a solution. Klara picked him up and left the table. Then Alois rose and quit the room. Angela and Adi gathered the plates for washing, and Alois Junior continued to sit at the table, poised within his silence, gravely poised, as if he had converted his father’s order into a species of reverence addressed to himself.

  That night, Alois Senior could not sleep, and by the end of the next afternoon he quit his labors early. For the first time in quite a while, he went to the only tavern in the area, a full mile away at Fischlham.

  He had hesitated whether to go. The company was certainly less to his taste than the old beer cronies in Linz. Besides, he knew enough about farmers to anticipate the nature of his reception. He could hear certain thoughts in advance. “The peasant who tries to act like a millionaire,” they would say behind his back. Or, as easily, the opposite—“this rich idiot who wants to play at being a peasant.”

  He had visited a couple of neighbors in January, when he first looked at the house he was to buy, and had asked a few questions. They had not trusted him much. He expected that. They were not about to talk to a stranger who could choose not to buy the farm, yet might repeat enough of what he had heard to leave the owner offended by their gossip. So Alois was only told the good news: land good, just a few animals but excellent livestock, prize sow, good orchard—yes, and walnuts, that was easy money once a year.

  Alois had not bothered to believe them. Nor to disbelieve them. He had wanted the farm. He had assumed it could not be as good as it looked, and, of course, it wasn’t. Already the big cow who had been giving fine milk every day had come down with udder trouble.

  He did bring this matter up at the tavern in Fischlham. He needed to. He was looking for a few opinions on the respective merits of the veterinarians in the district, and used it as a calculated opening to stimulate the farmers into a bit of candor about other things as well. Maybe he would not be perceived forever as a retired fool. So he listened to their guarded opinions about the local veterinarians and learned nothing he could count on. Next, he talked about his land.

  When he told them that he had planted potatoes, they looked uneasy. In the most indirect manner, it did come out that he might have been wiser to consider beets.

  “I planned to put in one acre like that, but not this first year. Too much at once.”

  They nodded. Farming and work. Yes. The oldest marriage. One must never do too much at once.

  They were certainly slow-spoken. It took an hour of staring at the unadorned wooden walls of the tavern, fretting all the while over the one spike of a splinter in his behind (a gift of the dried-up wood of the tavern bench), before one of them would come forward with the muffled hint that this land on which he had planted potatoes should have been given to beets. That was because last year’s crop had been wheat. Now they spoke of a variety of wheat whose species was unfamiliar to him, but that was what the previous owner had been planting these last three years. Who knew? The soil could now be depleted. They did not say as much; they just drew on their pipes and drank their beer and looked sad. Worst of all, as he could tell, the sadness was hardly for him, no, it was offered to the outrage done to the earth now owned by another rich man, an interloper trying to be a peasant.

  The smell of the tavern became unpleasant. He could not locate the odor that mingled with
the beer, but it was impure—sour milk? Old manure? A compost pile outside the door? What he resented most about this quiet dun-brown wooden den was that there was not even a hint of schnapps in the air, no, not even one good town drunkard.

  The evening did not prove, however, to be a loss. He learned the name of an apiculturist who lived in Hafeld. And, for further consolation, the walk home was agreeable. The late summer moon was out, full and orange, a harvest moon. He began to feel some pleasure from his beer. Tonight those pints must have stored themselves in his stomach, ready only now to dispense some goodness. He had a long splendid urination by the side of the road.

  Next morning he was back in his gathering gloom. He had to live with the disappointment of his three acres of potatoes. He would probably end with half a marketable crop. His drinking companions of last night (who in memory now smelled just like the Fischlham tavern) were right. The earth had been injured by three years of wheat. He knew as much whenever he dug up one or another early potato. And now he felt a few twinges in his gut. Was his heart acting up? Sometimes he felt as if this long-trusted organ—such a hearty companion—was forcing itself up into his brain. Yes, headaches.

  Given the work yet to be done of digging up the potatoes and carting them to market in Fischlham, he ended by hiring a day laborer for the week, a stupid fellow, yet, on balance, the man probably offered up as much useful service as Junior. How was the boy going to end? Would he yet be a criminal? Alois could certainly conceive of him in something like the French Foreign Legion. Dark thoughts, but they had their appeal. When he was young, he would have made a good soldier of that variety, ready for anything. Or was that nonsense? There was something in the boy that was wilder than himself. Was that why, these days, they always had to speak to each other as if they were up on tiptoe?