Here is a sample from the dining room at the Gasthaus Streif:
ANNA GLASSL: I see you are looking at her again.
ALOIS: I am. You have caught me. If your eyes were not so beautiful, I would have to say that you own the eyes of an eagle.
ANNA GLASSL: Why don’t you catch up with her after we eat? Just give her a good one for me.
ALOIS: Your mind is wicked. I like it when your tongue is so crude.
ANNA GLASSL: Cruder than it used to be.
ALOIS: Anna, you are exceptionally wise, but, in this case, you are wrong.
ANNA GLASSL: Look, my dear, I have put up with chambermaids and cooks. You have come to bed smelling of onions on many a night. And that is better than sniffing laundry soap. But I don’t care, I tell myself. The man must remain amused. Only, why do you still try to insult my intelligence? We know the girl is beautiful. At least once in your life make love to a waitress who does not look like last night’s pudding.
ALOIS: All right, I will tell you the truth. I like her looks, yes, a little bit. Although she is not truly my type. No, she is not. But in any case, I would not go near her. One hears the worst talk. I don’t even want to tell you because you like her.
ANNA GLASSL: Like her? She’s a tart. She’s a tart in training. Your true type.
ALOIS: No, she is diseased. I have heard that she has an infectious disease between her legs. I would not go near her.
ANNA GLASSL: I do not believe you. I cannot believe that.
ALOIS: Do as you choose. But, I can promise you, she is the last girl for you to worry about.
ANNA GLASSL: Who then do you want me to worry about? Klara?
ALOIS: You have a splendid sense of humor. If we were not in public, I would laugh out loud, and then you know what I would do. You are so attractive, so wicked. You would even send me out to kiss a nun.
5
Finally, Fanni told Anna Glassl that she was two months pregnant and soon to show. For Anna, that was the end of the marriage. For Alois to tell her that the girl had a disease. When all the while he knew she was pregnant—unforgivable! Besides, Anna Glassl was more tired of Alois by now than fearful of living alone. It was truly exhausting to muster up her remaining arts in order to pretend to be a virago at dawn. By now she craved peace. She even decided that her jealousy had been some last inoculation against what was worse—precisely the chill distaste for a mate that seeps in even as jealousy loses heat. So she moved out. Since they were Catholic, divorce was not possible. To obtain even a legal separation, Anna, by Austrian law, had to declare not only their incompatibility but state in writing that she felt a direct aversion to him. Alois was obliged to read this. The phrase stood out in the document like a boil on one’s chin. It irked so much that he showed his copy to drinking friends. “Look, she speaks of a personal aversion. This is nothing less than outrageous. If not improper, I could tell you how much aversion was there. On her hands and knees so soon as I would say, ‘Get ready.’”
They would laugh and move to other subjects. He was in a state of irritation these days for more reasons than Anna Glassl’s departure. Fanni and he were now living together in the same suite of rooms at the Gasthaus Streif. That was fine with him: he was the first to say that he was never attached to the past. Then he discovered that Fanni was not pregnant—she had only thought she might be. Or was it that she had had an early miscarriage? She was resolutely unclear.
He thought that was a terrible lie to have told him, but what could he do? He had never known such pleasure with a woman. Of course, Fanni was soon as jealous as Anna Glassl, and her ears had perfect pitch when it came to hearing any trace of desire in his voice for another woman. Soon enough, she stove a hole in the well-guarded vessel of his future plans. Klara, she told him, would have to go. Otherwise, Fanni would.
This was too much disruption for Alois. Fanni would soon be truly pregnant, or so he expected, given the hints he took from the declarative surge of her womb at the happiest moment, which billowed through him even as he was racing full stream into her—not the sort of conclusion he usually came to with other women. (Except once—so long ago—with Johanna.) Besides, he was certainly ready for a child, preferably a son, to carry on his name. Yes, when he was not in the midst of his best moments with Fanni, he thought often of the oncoming time when she would be six or seven months along, and it would be Klara’s turn. The likelihood of future complications did not deter him. It was in the nature of his work to be able to handle more than one problem at once.
As for scandal, he did not worry. Not unduly. In Braunau, he was used to being a center of gossip. The townspeople might complain to the stars above that he was living with a common-law wife, but that would go nowhere. He saw himself as equal to an officer garrisoned in a town to which he owed nothing. He received his money from the Finance-Watch in Vienna. So long as his work proved flawless, this faraway arm of the Hapsburg government would hardly care how he acted in his personal life.
Having risen to the highest level of the middle ranks, there he would probably remain. His job was secure. The Customs needed him. After all, it took years for an official to become as practiced as himself. In turn, he needed the Customs. How could he ever find another job that paid as well? He had developed into the perfect instrument for what he did, but that was not a skill to be used for anything else. He was fixed therefore in his job, and the Finance-Watch was locked in with him. So, devil take the townspeople. What they said might rankle, but it would not interfere with more interesting pursuits. One girl would bear his child, and the niece (who trembled in front of him when he spoke) would become his mistress. Of course, she would be more than ready when the time came. Why else did she quiver? It was because the niece knew he could teach her all the things she did not know, and did not even dare to think about.
This was the secret project into which Fanni intruded. No girl named Klara was going to keep working for them.
“You are mad,” Alois answered. “Can’t you see? Klara would be happier in a convent.”
“Your interest is not in her happiness, but yours. She must go.”
“Do not speak to me that way. You are young enough to be my daughter.”
“Yes, I am, and I have heard the Polish people say that a father should never make love to his daughter or she will lose all respect for him.”
Klara had to go. He could not relinquish what he now had in Fanni, not for the uncertain promise (when all was said) of a transformation from angel-nun to all-compliant madly loving niece. No, that was hardly guaranteed.
6
After Klara left, it was Fanni who suffered the most. Gone, now, were the confidences they had offered to each other. There had been much for both to learn—they were so close and so different. It ended, however, because Klara was not good at lying. She turned beet red with embarrassment when Fanni would hint at what went on between Uncle Alois and herself. (Klara having called him Uncle, Fanni had taken on the habit.)
“Confess,” Fanni would say, “you, too, want to be in bed with our Uncle.”
“No,” Klara would reply, and feel as if her cheeks would blotch if she did not tell the truth. “There are times, yes, when, yes, please, I want that. But you must know I won’t, I never will.”
“Why?”
“Because he is with you.”
“Ach, that,” said Fanni, “would not stop me for a minute.”
“Maybe you, no,” said Klara, “but I would be punished.”
“This is something you know?”
“Please, I know.”
“Maybe you don’t,” said Fanni. “I told Uncle I would die if I let him give me a baby, but now I think in this other way. I want a baby, I am near to having a baby.”
“You will,” said Klara. “And trust me. I would never be with Uncle Alois. You are his woman. That is my vow.”
They kissed, but there was something within the aroma of the kiss that Fanni could not trust. Klara’s lips were firm and full of character,
but not completely. That night Fanni had a dream where Alois made love to Klara.
Before she left, Klara wept just a little. “How can you send me away?” she asked. “I gave you my vow.”
“Tell me,” said Fanni, “what is the foundation of this so-holy promise?”
“I swear it by the peace of my dead brothers and sisters.”
It was not the best reply. Fanni had the sudden thought that Klara might also be concealing a witch in herself—she could, after all, have disliked her brothers and sisters, some of them, anyway.
By way of the Finance-Watch, Alois made proper arrangements for Klara in Vienna. She would obtain clean and gainful employment in the house of a modest and elderly lady. (Alois was more than ready to protect her chastity.) So, now, after four years of good and honest work at the inn, sleeping each night in the smallest of the maids’ rooms, Klara packed her belongings into the same modest chest she had brought with her on arrival, and left the Gasthaus for new employment in Vienna.
If Fanni was now more at ease with Alois, the best of moods could nonetheless vanish in no more than the interval it took to close her eyes and open them. How could she be certain that her distrust of Klara had been honest fear? What if it came from spite as cruel as the pain of a bad tooth? She knew she was full of spite. That was why she called herself a witch.
Even as she had foreseen, she was truly pregnant now. If that offered contentment, she continued nonetheless to feel remorse. She had banished the sweetest girl she knew, and there were days when Fanni was on the edge of asking Klara to return, but then she would think: What if Alois comes to prefer Klara? Then the girl might not be faithful to her vow. How unfair that would be to the unborn child!
Fourteen months after Anna Glassl received the decree of separation, Fanni gave birth to a boy whom Alois without hesitation named Alois. They could not, however, call him Alois Junior—not as yet. The name still had to be Alois Matzelberger, and this bothered Alois Hitler. He went through a period of remembering what he had taken pains to forget—that a child could feel as empty as an empty belly when he had to walk around with no more than his mother’s last name. Now Alois Senior went to bed every night cursing Anna Glassl.
He was not a man to give all of himself to a curse. He considered such an act equal to spending a private horde of gold. Nonetheless, he would deliver his curse every night, and it had venom to it. So he was not all that surprised when Anna died. And most suddenly! This curious event did not occur until fourteen months after Alois’ son was born and Fanni was very much pregnant again, but Alois still reckoned that his anathema might have had some effect. He saw it as an expensive payment for a necessary conclusion—expensive because there could always be unforeseen consequences.
Indeed, Anna’s death certificate stated that the cause was unknown. This convinced Alois that it was suicide. He did not like the thought. He was no superstitious fellow, not, at least, as measured by his disbelief in the near presence of God and the Devil. Rather, as he was ready to explain over a stein of beer, he placed his faith in the solid and intelligent processes of dependable forms of government. God, no matter how august and faraway, would look, doubtless, upon government in the same manner that Alois did—as the human fulfillment of divine will, provided such will was exercised by scrupulous officials like himself. Alois had not absorbed this idea from Hegel, Alois had not read a word of Hegel, but then, where was the need? He and Hegel were in agreement—the power of this idea had to be there for all to breathe. To Alois, it was self-evident.
In accord with such a premise, Alois preferred, therefore, that death have a clear-cut end. It could come from a burst appendix or by way of consumption, even as Maria Anna, his own mother, had ended. Suicide, however, left him uneasy—he liked to fall asleep quickly (as he put it to his drinking companions) “with a fart and a snore.” Anna Glassl committing suicide was one thought to keep him awake. He would have gone to her funeral but he did not care to subject this new nocturnal uneasiness to the sight of her face in the coffin. So Alois stayed away. That was another tasty item for the town’s gossip.
All the same, no matter how Anna Glassl had ended, she was, at least, no longer there. So he could marry his common-law wife, his new lady, Franziska Matzelberger, which he did. The second child was now a good seven months along in the womb, and Fanni’s belly was beginning to look as big as the prize melon in a field. He was forty-six, she was twenty-two, and the wedding took place in another town, Ranshofen, four miles away and four more uncomfortable miles back for the pregnant bride.
She had sworn she would not have the ceremony in Braunau. It was not only the eyes of the women. Young men snickered as she went by.
Alois was annoyed. It cost extra to transport by hired carriage the two Customs officers he had invited. This was no serious expenditure, 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
In 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 u
p 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. That fever had not gone away during the four years she worked for 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.