The Autumn Castle Read Free Page B

Dom—its dark spires pointing toward the broad sky—on
     a summer afternoon that stretched on for miles. I wandered between the exhibits, clutching my mother’s fingers in one hand,
     and a sticky ice cream in the other. Such an array of painted faces: some plain with round black eyes and pointed noses, some
     so garishly colorful that even I could sense their brightness; clown faces, girl faces, boy faces, cat faces, elephant faces;
     spindly legs, silk feet, straw-stuffed arms, antique lace, and stiff linen. I was swept away by the sea of ghastly wooden
     smiles and laughing fur eyebrows. One doll in particular caught my eye as it was the exact image of my mother, but without
     her stern hairstyle and clothes. This little doll had perfect ringlets and a pretty frilled dress. Oh, I cried for that doll!
    “Mama,” I said (in German, of course, as it is my native language), “if you do not buy that doll for me I shall die.”
    “Nonsense,” she replied, dragging me farther into the exhibit.
    She did not understand that I needed to possess it, to have a version of my mother with pretty curls and a frilly dress. I
     hated her for dragging me away from it. We stopped in front of a display of an automaton, which from the front looked like
     an ordinary doll but from the back was a mass of whirring wheels and gears. The doll’s owner—a hefty, mustachioed man dressed
     like a nineteenth-century traveling salesman—wound it, and the doll began to bounce up and down, its arms scissoring through
     the air and its head bobbing, its mouth articulating silent words. Then the mustachioed man placed a peanut on the table in
     front of it, and the doll bent down to pick it up. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen and all the way home to our
     farmhouse at Niederbüren I pictured that automaton over and over, and in my mind the face of the mother-doll became imposed
     over it, for it was often that I had seen my mother pick up the objects that my father and I left behind us when we had tired
     of them.
    I secluded myself in my bedroom that evening, drawing plans for a mother-doll. A life-size automaton shaped like a woman,
     who could pick up my toys and could not speak. That, I thought, would be the perfect wife for me. I was not interested in
     women then, and I’m not now. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I am interested in men either. I have never experienced
     the faintest twinge of the sexual urges with which the rest of the world is obsessed. I believe it to be a legacy of the genetic
     damage suffered by our family, and I have never envied the passions of others, as they too often lead to vulnerability.
    I shelved my plans for a mother-doll or a wife-doll, partly because I was a mere boy with no idea how to build an automaton,
     but also because soon after this occasion I saw my first faery, and it had such a profound effect upon me that most childish
     thoughts were permanently driven from my mind.
    My parents had told me about faeries, and about the special connection our family had with them. I had taken for granted that
     one day I would meet one, and perhaps thank him or her for our good fortune. I imagined they would look like the faeries in
     the books in my bedroom: tiny people with little wings and sparkly eyes. I didn’t know then, as I do now, about the many different
     breeds of faeries and how vastly they differ from one another; the complexities of their bodies that I now understand so intimately.
    On this day, on the day I saw a faery for the first time, I was playing with my toy boat in a puddle on the banks of the Weser.
     It was the first fine day in a week, and the grass and trees were clean, washed. I was concentrating hard on the boat in front
     of me. In my imagination, I was making an Atlantic crossing. A shadow fell across me and I looked up to see a man smiling
     at me.
    “Hello,” he said, “that’s a nice boat.”
    My body had never before performed such a complex reaction