I could have hit him, I was so indignant. Showered with blessings by Aunt Sophie and taken into the house like her own child, he was still disdainfully labeling us “goyim,” undisguisedly expressing how stupid and clumsy he considered us all. He noticed my response and he gave me a brazen grin: “Your aunt would like it if I became one of you, right? She’s given me Rilke to read: ‘Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night …’ I should live so long. I’m reading Krafft-Ebing. Now, he could help you. He might explain what your uncle really wants when he keeps riding out with you, beyond the farm and deeper and deeper into the forest.”
Wolf himself eventually explained it to me. Not only was Uncle Hubert suspected of homosexuality, but people had ideas about him and his friends, the rough hunting buddies who moved into the tower during the winter, those “last heroes and warriors” of a free, virile, wind- and-weather-beaten world of peril and daring. It was generally accepted that his friendships were relationships of homoerotic love, and my friendly, good-natured, apple-cheeked kinsman was the laughingstock of the town, which viewed his well-rounded behind as the very symbol of sexual deviance. What about his model marriage with Aunt Sophie? Was I really so naïve as I seemed? exclaimed Wolf; didn’t I know what to make of Stiassny’s presence in the house for all these decades? What else was Aunt Sophie’s spiteful refusal to have anything to do with his father, Dr. Goldmann, but an act of revenge? There was an ever-festering memory that the doctor’s wife, my friend Wolf’s mother, had had an affair with Stiassny. “You goyim always try to act like you ain’t got no potz and your women ain’t got no cunt between their legs,” said Wolf.
I cannot describe the profound repugnance I felt during the next few weeks, not only toward Wolf Goldmann but toward just about everyone. Not even Haller, the blacksmith, was excluded, ever since Wolf had told me that Dr. Goldmann had once sewn up a serious injury on Haller’s penis, a wound obviously made by human teeth and hardly by a woman inept in such amorous practices but, rather, in a passionate action by a man upon the member of the disciple of Hephaestus and the German descendant of Wieland. I almost threw up the next time I went into the smithy to cast lead pellets for my slingshot. Holding out his callused palm with the pellets he had found in the garage, Haller winked and asked, “What do I get for keeping my mouth shut the other day?” Wolf Goldmann had explained that sexual perverts regard boys our age as downright tidbits.
I was homesick. I missed my mother. Her sickly, high-strung sentimentality might be disquieting; but her feelings were probably deeper and steadier than those of her older and more robust cousin, who, however, was obviously no less rapturous, no less susceptible. Although repelled by the thought, I told myself that an encounter between my mother and Stiassny would have led to an incomparably more passionate and more poetic relationship than — if I were willing to believe Wolf Goldmann — the one between Stiassny and Aunt Sophie. Nonetheless, everything in me rebelled against the idea that my mother could lie in Stiassny’s arms and that I could speak about her and her lover as unabashedly as Wolf did. Now my hotheaded father’s somber passion for hunting became the escapism of an absolutely pure and noble man who preferred the loneliness of the raw universe of mountains to the filth of the lowlands. I myself wanted to withdraw from the world’s dubious hustle and bustle. I spent a lot of time in the tower, working on the syllabus for my makeup examination.
For the sake of old friendship, which was going to end anyhow the day we went to different schools, I once more followed Wolf Goldmann to his home. His father was out for the day, making calls in nearby villages, so we had all the time we wanted to look at his office undisturbed. Finally I had a chance to have a good look at the famous skeleton: it struck me as sinister because its bones were so shiny I couldn’t believe they had ever been hidden in a human body. But even more I was fascinated by an electrostatic machine, which was meant for nervous ailments. As Wolf explained, the patient was made to hold two metal rods in his hands. They were connected with the electric current, which could be regulated from low to very high voltage, giving him either a gentle tingling and prickling or a powerful shock.
Wolf wanted me to try it, but I was too cowardly to grasp the rods. “What’s wrong?” he asked derisively. “The goyish hero isn’t big enough for a little tickling?” He took the two metal rods into his hands and nodded at me to switch on the machine. “Push the little button forward — but slow!”
Later on, I was unable to tell what had driven me to push the switch not slowly but with a brutal thrust up to the highest degree. But at the moment, in any case, the effect was comicaclass="underline" Wolf reared up, twisted convulsively, kicked his legs without really managing to move them, and his red hair stood on end like a scarecrow’s. What delighted me most of all was his pleading look when he held out his hands with the metal rods, trying to get me to liberate them. All his smug self-confidence was gone and his ram-face was now the face of a sacrificial lamb — the face of the slaughterhouse cattle his grandfather had grown rich on.
Despite later accusations, I do not believe I hesitated long before pushing the switch back so that he could drop the rods. In any event, when I released him, he was on his knees, holding out the hands from which the metal grips had fallen, and piteously crying, “My hands! My hands!”
The summer was waning, while I was virtually suspended in my relatives’ home — or, in the parlance of the dueling fraternities, I was “under beer blackball.” That is to say: I lived in a generally shared awareness of having committed a transgression of which I most likely could not exonerate myself, no matter how hard I dueled. True, Uncle Hubi resolutely took my side, treating my delinquency as a bagatelle — which it was, when all was said and done, for after a few weeks Wolf Goldmann’s precious pianist-hands were as agile as ever. But Wolf’s insinuations about my uncle’s secret motives for his friendliness toward me made me suspicious, no matter how hard I tried not to think of them. Involuntarily I withdrew from Uncle Hubi, too. Aunt Sophie treated me with an even, cool matter-of-factness. She did not mourn her dream; she let everyone know that it had simply been a dream and she had awoken from it. For, needless to say, Wolf Goldmann no longer came to the house. His father treated his hands very carefully with special massages and baths, and then sent him back to his mother earlier than scheduled. Nor did Wolf come to say good-bye to Aunt Sophie, much less to me.