recollection was shared by the two men, even if there was not the smallest shift of expression between them. They were all present for the business at hand, Alois, Nepomuk, Romeder, and the two witnesses who had been brought along from Strones. Since none of them but Alois knew how to write, the others signed the document with an XXX. They said they had known Georg Hiedler and that “in their presence and repeatedly” he had admitted to being the father of this child. The mother had stated the same. They swore to that.
The priest could see that, legally speaking, very little was correct. Each of the witnesses’ hands had shaken with a good bit of godly fear as they put down an XXX. One of them, the son-in-law, Romeder, could not have been five years old when Anna Maria died. Of course, she would have told all to the five-year-old! Moreover, Johann Georg was also long dead. Given such a dubious case, a more careful proceeding would be appropriate.
The priest did what he had been doing for years—he certified the paper, even as he kept smiling with his old and toothless mouth. He knew they were lying.
He would not, however, insert the date. On the yellow page of the old parish registry of June 1, 1837, he crossed out “Illegitimate,” put Johann Georg’s name in what had previously been the
blank space, and smiled again. Legally speaking, the document was shaky, but it did not matter. Which church authority in Vienna would challenge such an alteration? The word was to encourage certified fatherhood no matter how late in life it arrived. Already in some districts of Austria, illegitimacy was up to forty births per hundred. Of that forty, could even half be free of one or another unmentionable family matter? So the priest, disapproving of these loose procedures even if he was bound to accept them, chose not to inscribe his own name. If it ever went wrong, he could disavow the paper.
Then he spelled each of the witnesses’ names by choice, inasmuch as there was no agreement on orthography from province to province—one reason why Hiedler eventually became Hitler.
Now that Alois had his new name, he decided to stop off for an hour in Spital rather than continue on immediately in Nepomuk’s cart to the railroad station at Weitra. The change from Schicklgru-ber to Hiedler was sufficiently agreeable for him to feel an upsurge in the happy region below his navel. This was, he knew from long experience, one of the gifts his nature had given him. He was as quick as a hound to sense when female company happened to be near.
Was it Johanna who had put him on the alert? She lived next door to her father, and at this moment Alois glimpsed a woman looking out the window. But, no, that could not be Johanna. This woman looked older than his wife. Now he was in no hurry to visit.
Yet his steps took him to the door. Once again, the Hound had not betrayed him. For if there in the doorway was Johanna, prematurely deep into middle age, beside her was a girl of sixteen. She was the same height as himself, with the nicest and most agreeable features, modest, well formed, with a good head of abundant dark hair and the bluest eyes he had ever seen—they were as blue as the light that once reflected from a large diamond he had seen behind a glass in a museum exhibit.
So soon as he separated himself from the powerful hug and whole set of steamy kisses Johanna left with her honest saliva on his
mouth, he took off his cocked hat and bowed. “This is your uncle Alois,” Johanna said to her daughter. “He is a wonderful man.” She turned back to him and added, “You look better than ever—there is even more to the uniform now, yes?” And she pulled her daughter to her. “Here is Klara.”
Johanna began to weep. Klara was her seventh child. Of the others, four were now dead, one was a hunchback, and her son, now nineteen, the oldest remaining, had consumption. “God never ceases punishing us for our sins,” she said, at which