The Castle in the Forest Read Online Free PDF

For your penance I give you five hundred Our Fathers and five hundred Hail Marys.”
    That was identical to a penance the priest had given earlier that morning to a schoolboy who had treated himself to an underhanded spit-in-the-palm masturbation in class (a most stealthy act!) and then rubbed his spit and semen on the hair of the boy in front of him, a small boy.
    Johann Nepomuk contented himself afterward by confessing to the same priest upon occasion that he still had lewd thoughts concerning the mare but was careful to do nothing about it. That took care of confession, but the continuing absence of Alois caused Johann Nepomuk Hiedler to live in an agony of love. He had wept like a biblical father and torn his shirt when he found his son and daughter in the straw. He knew that he had just lost the boy. The brightest light of nearly every one of his days, that lively young face, would have to leave. To the shock of the other women in the family, Alois was sent away that night to a neighbor’s house and in the morning was put on a coach to Vienna.
    Nepomuk did not tell Eva, but then, he did not have to, because Walpurga, at her father’s insistence, was kept at home for the next three years. The young woman’s marriage with Romeder, empty of courtship, had to be arranged. Yet Eva, while as alert to the chastity of her daughters as a drill sergeant studying the precision of his platoon on dress parade, would still nag Nepomuk to allow Walpurga to walk on Sunday with a girlfriend.
    â€œNo,” Nepomuk would say. “The two of them will wander into the woods. Then boys will follow them.”
    On the day he stalked the boundary line with Romeder, he was burdened each time he struck his daughter’s new husband. What an injustice he was doing to his new son-in-law. Ergo, he hit him harder. A marriage was being founded on a lie. Therefore, no trespasses should be made on the land of the neighbor. That would be a sacrilege against the earth. How Nepomuk mourned the absence of his son!

3
    A lois did well in Vienna. With his good and agreeable face, he was taken on in a shop that made cavalry boots for officers.
    He now served young men who carried themselves as if their bodies, their uniforms, their decorations, their footwear, and their souls had been fabricated by the same awesome source. Their confidence in their personal appearance had much to offer Alois. These men, he observed, looked to be at ease with the beautifully dressed ladies they escorted. On Sundays, he would rarely miss watching their promenade. The women’s hats were so finely wrought. He had the passing thought that if he met a young milliner, they could open a shop and young couples of the best and highest classes would visit their store hand in hand looking for splendid boots and stylish hats. It was the only business concept he was to have for many a year, but he did play with such a dream because beautiful ladies stimulated him. He loved young women. He had had such contentment playing with his stepsisters, which is to say, as only Nepomuk knew, his half sisters.
    He met no young milliner, however, and the idea gave way to a better one. He could never be a cavalry officer, since that depended on being born into a proper family, and he came from a place where more was known about a pig’s habits than the scent a man should put upon his handkerchief. Alois would not aspire to what was not there. But one thing he knew—he was able to live on good terms with Vienna. No one back in Spital had been as ready to improve himself. Early on, then, he understood his own ambition—he wanted to spend his life in a decent uniform and be admired for his posture. And his intelligence. He was certainly not stupid, he knew.
    At the age of eighteen, after five years in the boot shop, he applied to the Austrian Finance Ministry for a position in Customs, and was accepted. In another five years, he had risen to the rank of Finanzwache