The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

she allowed her distrust of him to take on new force. Never had Alois encountered jealousy so passionate, so far-ranging, and so much to the point. Yet he felt ready to deal with it.
    While he considered his first quality as a man to be dedication to his work—to the cleanliness of his personal appearance, and the punctilio he presented in each and every working hour, he had not stood for years at a border post looking to root out the attempts of travelers and merchants to cheat the Hapsburg Crown of its tariff without learning a good deal about false presentation and outright mendacity. Now he was having to exercise such abilities himself in order to divert Anna from another girl he had taken to visiting on the top floor of the inn.
    There was an old Viennese joke that to have a flourishing society, both the police and the thieves must keep improving at what they did. He thought often of the remark. It was true for Anna Glassl and himself. The more acute her sense of what he might be up to, the finer were his lies.
    She had cause for distrust. There were days when he made love to each of the three women he could look upon as regulars. In the morning, full of the bounty of sleep, he would take care of his wife, and in the afternoon when Anna Glassl was napping and his off-duty time coincided with an hour when the chambermaid washed their floors, he usually enjoyed the coquetry of her hips as she, down on her hands and knees, slung a wet cloth from side to side—
    truth, he rarely saw her face at such times. And in the evening after Anna Glassl had gone to sleep, there was Fanni.
    So if he was ready to wait for Klara Poelzl, it was because his nocturnal and, for the present, true interest was with this waitress at the inn, a nineteen-year-old named Fanni Matzelberger, who was voluptuous but lithe, and—by every good measure—smoldering. He had learned to strip his eyes of all expression when she crossed the room, but she did have an irrepressible turn to her hips that spoke to him—Fanni was a good girl who did not want to be so good.
    Indeed, as he soon learned by visits to her attic room, she was a virgin of the most tormented sort, a maiden in the old peasant tradition: She had kept the formal entrance to her chastity intact but the same could not be said of its neighbor. This was not all so agreeable for Alois. The Hound was too large to permit a good poke into “the smelly and the damned” (or so he would characterize it). Fanni would moan in a very low voice (in order that the rest of the attic not hear) but they were both suffering. All the more intense became their embrace. In the heat of the hour, they loved each other, a not uncommon reaction when the carnal ore is considered to be contraband.
    He told himself that she was no more than a good-looking daughter of a prosperous farmer—she did have a decent dowry—but he also told her that he loved her. She said, “Enough to give up your wife and live with me?”
    “I will give her up,” he said, “when you give me something else!”
    No, she must remain a virgin. So soon as she was ready to do what he wanted, there would be a child. She knew. Then there would be another child. Then she very well might die.
    “How do you decide such things?”
    “We have gypsies in my family. Maybe I am a witch.”
    “What a remark!”
    “No, you are a bad man and I am a witch. Only witches put their mouths in forbidden places. Now I am afraid to go to confession.”
    “Stay away from priests. They are there to suck your blood. They are the ones who will leave you weak and good for nothing.”
    They argued round and round about whether she should or should not go to confession. She was tempted to let him win, and then, given the force of his desire, she did give it to him, she gave it up, and proceeded to tell him one month later that she was pregnant. Had the time come, she asked, to tell his wife?
    He no longer trusted Fanni. He did not think she would have become