4

Adolf’s life would now change for the worse. Linz was five miles away and twenty times larger than Leonding. A trolley car was available once an hour, but Klara expected him to walk, and it was a long hike across fields and forest before reaching the Realschule.

Each morning, he would be reminded in one or another manner by his father, his mother, or even Angela that he was the only son left, and the family must be able to count on him. Before long, he loathed the Realschule. It was a forbidding edifice on dark days. Gone was the pleasure he had taken at school in Hafeld, in Lambach, and in Leonding, where he would excel. Now the halls were ready to share his gloom. He thought often of the day when Alois, weeping over Edmund’s death, had nearly suffocated him with the force of his embrace, all the while repeating, “You are my only hope.” Such hope was reeking of tobacco. Would the atmosphere even listen to such a lie? This recollection, so full of misery and mistruth, was now attached to the portals of the Realschule.

His classmates, for the most part, came from prosperous families. They carried themselves differently from the farm boys and town boys he had known for the last few years. So he did not believe his mother when she told him: “Your father is the second-most-important man in Leonding. And the first, the Mayor, Mayrhofer, is his good friend.”

He doubted that their importance reached to the outskirts of Linz. Why, the Mayor, who, according to his mother, was the most important man in Leonding, also sold vegetables in his store—a most elevated Mayor! Adolf had not been in the school for a day before he felt uncultivated. In recess, he overheard two students speaking of the merits of the opera they had been taken to by their parents the night before. That was enough to give him pause, and he had to wonder what they might say about him. “This Hitler, he has to walk all the way here from Leonding.” Yes, on rainy days, he could take the trolley, but only if his parents gave him the pfennigs to afford it. An outlander! So many of these boys from Linz had never even seen Leonding. They assumed it was mud-ridden. And then he could hardly stay after class and make friends when he had to plod back to the Garden House. His mock wars in the forest had become possible now only on Saturday. There was no time to train troops.

Before long he was overcome again with the old question. Was he responsible for Edmund’s death? Once more, he chose to talk to the trees. But the conversations had become orations. He inveighed against the stupidity of his teachers and the stale aroma of their clothing. “They are earning a pittance,” he said to a stately oak. “It is obvious. They cannot afford to change their linens. Angela should smell these teachers. Then she would respect her brother!” He had other topics. To an old elm, he declared, “It is supposed to be an advanced school, but I can say that it is a stupid place. It is uncouth.” He could hear the leaves murmuring in assent. “I have decided to devote myself to drawing. I know that I am excellent at capturing every detail of the most interesting buildings in Leonding and in Linz. When I show these drawings to my parents, even my father approves. He says, ‘You are an excellent draftsman.’ But then, he must spoil it. He also says, ‘You have to learn more about perspective. You have not found the right size for the people who walk in front of your buildings. Some could be eight feet tall, others are pygmies. You must learn to draw bodies to scale. The people must be in proportion to the size of the building and to their distance from it. Pity, Adolf, that you cannot get this right, because your drawing of the edifice, taken by itself, would be an excellent sketch.’”

Of course, half praise from his father was worth more than all of Klara’s loving approvals. It proved his point. Art was worth pursuing, not scholarship. “Scholarly work,” he told the next grove of trees, “is pretentious. That may be why my teachers show a lack of interest in my possibilities. They are snobs. They dance disgustingly over boys who come from rich families. The air of this school, therefore, has become intolerable to me.” What he did not tell the trees is that the only students who would have anything to do with him during recess happened to be the ugliest kids in class, or the stupidest, or the poorest.

He believed in the wisdom of these old trees. They seemed as wise to him as full-grown elephants.

Some mornings he would dawdle and so be obliged to take the train from Leonding to Linz. That bothered Klara. It was not a large expense but it was unnecessary when the sun was out. She had a gnawing sense of loss whenever money was disbursed heedlessly. Coins spent in such a manner fell into a well that was dry at the bottom and so made an awful clatter.

Still, on those many mornings when he did have to walk, his route would take him across fine old meadows and he soon became interested in the forts on the way, particularly after he learned that these crumbling towers were left over from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, when the Austrians had lived in fear that before long, Napoleon was bound to march his armies across the Danube. So they had built these watchtowers. One morning, thinking of the workers who had put them up, and the soldiers who had inhabited them, he became so excited that he had an ejaculation. Afterward, he was languid, but joyous. He was, of course, very late for school and was sent home with a note for Klara to sign. She did not know whether to believe him that he had missed the train.