Free The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer Page B

Johanna), was a hunchback. This occasioned some corner-of-the-mouth humor between two of the Customs officials. “Yes,” said one, “the question is whether Alois will think it is good luck to rub her hump.”
    â€œDon’t talk so loud,” said the other. “I hear this hunchback has a terrible temper.”
    There was music. An accordion was played, and Alois and Klara did their best to dance, but Alois was stiff legged. To stand all those hours on duty did not make you an artist for the dance floor.
    Others followed. Customs officials and their wives. One of them had a son old enough to dance a vigorous polka with the recently hired maid for the newlyweds, a girl with crimson cheeks and merry eyes named Rosalie, and this Rosalie had also prepared a roast leg of veal and a roast suckling pig to place in the center of the wedding feast.
    She had also thrown too many logs on the fire. The rest of the dancers soon gave up. The room had become much too hot. Half in annoyance but half in exuberance, Alois kept teasing Rosalie, “Oh, you are the one who is in a hurry to burn up a man’s goods, are you not?” and Rosalie would cover her cheeks with her hands and giggle.
    Rosalie’s eyes would open wide when she was teased. It was no small matter that her breasts were undeniably full, and now were heaving in the aftermath of the polka. It did not need even that much to convince Klara. Alois was ready for his next diversion. She would remember this night for all the years to come, those years of sorrow when the child Gustav she was carrying on this night and the two who were to follow, Ida and Otto, were all to die in the same year, Gustav at two, Ida at one, and Otto only a few weeks old.
    Johann Nepomuk also noticed the warmth of the room and the look in Rosalie’s eye. “Get rid of that maid,” he whispered to Klara, but she did no more than shrug. “The next one could be worse,” she whispered back.
    Nepomuk had a terrible nightmare after the wedding party. His heart felt ready to burst. He could have died that night in his bed but instead he continued to live for another three years. There is no organ more resistant to rupture than the heart of a tough old peasant. Nonetheless, he never felt the same, a cruel punishment for an old widower who was trying to hold on to what was left for him. Death, when it came to him at the age of eighty-one, arrived with the same epidemic that took away the children.

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    D iphtheria had come into their family like the Black Death.
    Mucus welled up from the throat of the two-year-old and the one-year-old, an up-pouring of green phlegm, thicker, heavier than the mud of Strones. Noises rasped forth from the boy and girl, sounds uttered with the tortured authority of an old man and an old woman working their lungs like galley slaves to clear a straw’s width of passage. Gustav died first, Gustav, always sickly, a two-and-a-half-year-old who looked like the ghost of Klara’s lost brothers and lost sisters, then Ida went, Ida, fifteen months old, certainly the blue-eyed image of Klara, going three weeks after Gustav. Both deaths came back to the mother in the blow that soon followed. That was Otto’s end—Otto, just three weeks old!—lost to a galloping colic that gutted him. The stench of a baby born to die in its first weeks of life settled into Klara’s nose as if her nostrils were another limb of memory.
    She had no doubt whose fault it was. Alois had been close to the Evil One. But such a matter she could understand. A boy in Vienna all alone and he always wanted so much. Of course! But for herself, there was no excuse. She had desired a family where children did not die but grew to their full age, and yet she had been unfaithful to the Lord God Almighty on the night Gustav was conceived, yes, and that secret pleasure she still looked to find on nights when Alois chose to make love as a change in his diet from