10

Even as brother and sister came away from the grave, some mourners began to pay attention to Angela, who was embarrassed by knowing how red-faced she had become. How could she avoid that? She was trying to speak of how terrible were her parents’ feelings. “It is so frightful a day for them—they are both in bed. They are too weak to move.” On she went, embarrassed yet excited to be the center of this occasion.

Once they were alone, however, and could walk off into the forest, Adolf did say, “Why do I know that my mother will not come to my funeral?”

Angela berated him: “Klara is the finest person I have ever known. The kindest. No one is more good! How can you say something like that? She is suffering for your father. He loved Edmund so much!” And when in payment for this remark, Adolf looked venomous, she added, “As well he should. Edmund was a beautiful child. I cannot say that of you. Even on this day of your brother’s funeral”—she had to repeat it!—“you still have an unpleasant body odor.”

“What do you mean?” he answered. “I took a bath. You know that. You even forced me to. You said, ‘Going to the funeral, smelling as you do? Get into the tub,’ and I told you it would take too long to boil the water. What did you care?”

He had had to use cold water. It had been a splash and a wipe, no more. Maybe he still did smell. “No,” he said now, “I forbid you to speak that way to me. I do not have an unpleasant odor. I did take a bath.”

Angela said, “Bath or no bath, Adolf. You just may not be a very good person.”

He was so furious with her that he stepped off the forest trail into the unpacked snow. She, just as angry, followed him. The moment they were out of earshot of any person who might have been at the service, she yelled at him so loudly that he ran off, “Not a good person! An awful one! You are a monster!”

Alone in the forest, Adolf began to have fears of his own death. It was so cold in the snow. He was recalling the look of terror in Edmund’s eyes as he listened to the tales of the Grimm brothers.

When Angela caught up with him, they walked home silently to find that their father now had a red and swollen face. He turned to Adolf and said, “You are now my life.” He embraced him and began to weep all over again. How false were his words, thought Adolf. His father still believed that Edmund was the only hope. He could not even pretend that anything else was true. “I hate my father,” Adolf told himself once more.