Frost: A Novel (10 page)

•   •   •

In the course of the night, the wallpaper pattern in his room became more and more of a hell, full of terrible scenes of disfigurement. It finally put him under toward daybreak. And that was the time when, out of exhaustion and revulsion against everything and himself, he fell asleep. But no. Masks approached him with accusations that shredded his brain. Human detritus. Voices grew loud, but made no sense. “And all they are is ornaments formed from primitive cactus designs. I expect I look for horror every night, here as everywhere else. That’s my only way of accounting for the fact that it comes out at me every night. The whole room is coated with these scenes. You know, they even do their writhing and wallowing on the ceiling. I have to get up periodically. To check the door’s closed. Locked. I was surprised here once before. And that’s so much worse.” Lurid pictures would assail him “from behind” if he tried to lie on his front, so as not to have to look at the wallpaper pattern.

He spoke while we were sitting downstairs in the public bar. There was nobody else there. The landlady had gone to the village, to order beer from the brewery. Last night, she ran out of beer, because there was a colossal bout of boozing and guzzling, which drained every last drop from her crates and shelves and displays. It was all gone. There wasn’t so much as a slice of bread left over. Until three in the morning, the whole building was shaking with the men’s laughter. If we went out, we had to leave the front-door key on the left window seat, hidden behind the beam. The cold has got worse.
In the morning, the windows were white and opaque. Flowers and faces had formed on the panes, “masks of destruction,” as the painter called them. We couldn’t see out. Hundreds of dirty glasses, jugs, and bottles had been scooped onto the bar. A few items of clothing forgotten by the workmen were left hanging on the door and the wall. Shabby. Containing crumpled bills, handkerchiefs, photographs, and combs, as we were later to discover, the painter and I, when we went through them later on.

The smell of the booze-up, whose occasion remained obscure, was still hanging heavy in the bar, in the whole of the building. It was too cold for anyone to think of airing the place out. In the kitchen, there was utter chaos. Suddenly, the windows trembled, the walls twitched from an explosion down in the valley that felt like “a smack in the face of the air.” “They’re blasting a great hole in the mountain,” said the painter. “They’re making a second reservoir.”

There was construction going on down there on such a scale that you couldn’t say “how it was possible.” The engineer had told him some numbers. Dates. Dimensions. “Staggering,” said the painter. “Over a thousand workmen are crawling around like ants down there.” And indirectly the work would occupy and pay the wages of tens, of hundreds of thousands. “The money invested here goes into billions.” The state knew how to exploit its sources, and apply its science. It was “glorious.” But down there, “and not just down there either, there is a development in progress that will turn everything upside
down.” Technology was continually revolutionizing itself. “Come on,” he said, “let’s step outside. Perhaps we’ll be able to see something.”

We went outside. But there was nothing to be seen but a thickening pall of gray in front of our eyes. “I want to see the funeral today, from my vantage point over the pass,” he said. “They’re burying the grocer.”

Eighth Day

Today I cleared the path of snow from the inn to the road. The landlady called me a “kind gentleman,” and she twice brought me large glasses of slivovitz when she saw me leaning on my shovel, resting. She said: “I would never have thought you were so strong.” I said I was used to physical work. Circumstances had repeatedly led me to perform physical work. Doing physical work, so as not to go out of my mind over my studies, that was something she could well understand. “It hasn’t snowed as much as this in years,” she said. She pointed south toward the mountains, which were obscured by clouds. She went in, and came out with a salt beef sandwich. “If you work, you’re going to need something to eat,” she said. She was pleased I was clearing away the snow, because she wouldn’t have gotten around to it. “That would be a pity,” she said. When she saw the painter coming out of the inn, she left me alone, and went in past
him. It looked as though she wanted to avoid him. She didn’t want to be standing there with him. That was how it appeared anyway.

It was unbelievable what I’d managed to do in such a short space of time, said the painter. He had been watching me from the window. “If you hadn’t volunteered,” he said, “no one else would have done it.” Unusually, he had slept that night, he said, and he stood behind me, which bothered me. “Unusually, I slept. ‘Sleeping’ with me means merely that I don’t go pacing my room all night!” From the degree of his morning pains, he could predict the pains of the evening to come, and the night. “It will be a terrible evening, and a godawful night. But it can’t go on much longer, I’m sure of that.” Decades ago, in the capital, he had “belonged to a snow-clearing troop. Three schillings eighty per hour, under a carbide lamp.” My snow-clearing reminded him of those bitter times. “The time I was more dead than alive. I was often on the brink,” he said. “But what a wonderful time that was, compared to today … at least, soon to end in my death.” I barely listened. He felt like going to the café in the afternoon. “Will you accompany me? Down to the station? There are new editions of the weekly magazines.”

Then he briefly described how he had once met himself as someone else. “Have you had an experience like that, ever?” he asked. “When I went up to myself, I naturally wanted to shake my hand, but then I suddenly pulled it back. And I knew why.” I cleared the last of the snow, and took the shovel back in the house. The painter waited outside for me. When
I came back, he said: “The young man just has to pick up a shovel to feel alive. But what does the old man do?”

Life was like a forest: you kept finding signposts and markers until, all at once, there weren’t any. And the forest is never-ending, and hunger only ends with death. And you keep walking through clearings, you can never see past those clearings. “The universe can feel oddly constricting, under certain circumstances.” But to show someone the way to where he was now, if the person didn’t happen to know it already himself, that was something he was no longer prepared to do. “I work with my own notions, elaborated by myself out of chaos.” One would have to understand what he meant by “bitterness,” by “fundamentally,” by “light” and “shade,” and “poverty
tout court.”
But who understood. And yet, one might sense what sort of areas he was in. What was causing him grief. Perhaps more than he realized. “Knowledge distracts from knowledge, you know!” People in uniform bothered him. “I hate the police, the rural constabulary, the army, even the fire brigade.” All of it gave him a sexual stimulus that he preferred not to entertain. He can’t deal with any of it, whether it’s railway employees, or actual soldiers. Officers disgust him. For their inhumanity, “which is bred into them to exacerbate it.” But they repel him as much as they attract him. “Yes, they attract me too. I’ve told you why. Problems that are stifled in the smell that makes way for the images.” Then: “In the age when I was susceptible, women tended to attract me more by their defects: older ones, ugly ones.” He had always been stirred anyway by absence, it drew him with an infantile, forbidden passion. He had never been clear about anything. “Clarity is something more than human.”
He seeks and propounds simplicity, and detests it at the same time: always wanted to break clear of it. The certainty with which he devotes himself to quiet is no less than that with which he espouses disquiet, without him being able to tell you why. He decided: and also for the obverse. And yet it’s always him as well. Perfectly circumscribed by what defines his point of view. “Is that mad?” he asks, after explaining a certain set of affairs, as if it had been a room in an infinitely large building. “Incompleteness always makes what I wanted to reach fall in on itself.” To put the ground under his feet behind him, he walked, he moved, no matter where, no matter how: “but I can’t put the ground under my feet behind me.” It was a law of nature … sleeping and thinking and all the things in between, pushed in between, extruding from between—they were all distractions from himself. And yet there was no method for distracting him from himself. “Of course it’s all sterile because it’s all been mapped and well-established; and what I say is so basic as well.” The place where you see that it’s all ridiculous keeps recurring, each time you looked out the window, or looked into yourself. Wherever. “And then one time you pull off your great coup: you end it!”

“When they present themselves, everyone I know looks the same. What’s within them looks the same too, whomever it belongs to. Everyone has the same. I find that repulsive. When I say ‘dismiss,’ a smell remains that darkens everything.” He said people were, initially reluctantly, later without any objections, bearers of various occupations, holders of opinions with varying top speeds and fuel-efficiency quotients. “A simple country girl as much as a CEO.” Of limited
feeling and mind, the individual no longer mattered. “What’s the point if the most cunning, not the wisest, get the best seats? If they take out insurance policies in the millions? Future prospects worth millions? Hearsay? Hairsplitting? Balderdash?” We were preceded by a reputation that killed us.

“Many ideas turn into lifelong disfigurements,” he said. The ideas often surprised one years later, but sooner or later they would always make the one who had had them look ridiculous. The ideas came from a place they never left. They would always remain there, in that place: it was the place of dreams. “The idea doesn’t exist that can be expunged or expunge itself. The idea is actual, and remains so.” Last night, he had been thinking about pain. “Pain doesn’t exist. A necessary illusion,” he said. Pain wasn’t pain, not in the way a cow was a cow. “The word ‘pain’ directs the attention of a feeling toward a feeling. Pain is overplus. But the illusion of it is real.” Accordingly, pain both was and was not. “But there is no pain,” he said. “Just as there is no happiness. Found an architecture on pain.” All thoughts and images were as involuntary as the concepts: chemistry, physics, geometry. “You have to understand these concepts to know something. To know everything.” Philosophy didn’t take you a single step nearer. “Nothing is progressive, but nothing is less progressive than philosophy. Progress is tripe. Impossible.” The observations of mathematics were foundational. “Oh, yes,” he said, “in mathematics everything’s child’s play.” And just like so-called child’s play, mathematics could finish you. “If you’ve crossed the border, and you suddenly no longer get the joke, and see what the world’s about, don’t see what anything’s
about anymore. Everything’s just the imagining of pain. A dog has as much gravity as a human being, but he hasn’t lived, do you understand!” One day I would cross a threshold into an enormous park, an endless and beautiful park; in this park one ingenious invention would succeed another. Plants and music would follow in lovely mathematical alternation, delightful to the ear and answering to the utmost notions of delicacy; but this park was not there to be used, or wandered about in, because it consisted of a thousand and one small and minuscule square and rectilinear and circular islets, pieces of lawn, each of them so individual that I would be unable to leave the one on which I was standing. “In each case, there is a breadth and depth of water that prevents one from hopping from one island to another. In my imagining. On the piece of grass which one has reached, how is a mystery, on which one has woken up, and where one is compelled to stay,” one would finally perish of hunger and thirst. “One’s longing to be able to walk through the whole park is finally deadly.”

I met him behind the hay barn, huddled on a plank of wood. It was already dark, and he said he had heard me approaching from the pond. “I know your walk exactly.” People like himself, who generally kept their eyes closed—“in itself another preparation for death”—had an extraordinarily keen sense of hearing. “You were still a long way off, but I could hear you. You slowly approached my grumpiness. Did anyone ever tell you you don’t walk like a young man?” It must strike me as odd to find him here behind the hay barn. In fact, he was displaying one eccentricity after another. “True, isn’t it, everything I do is eccentric? I hunkered down here, because I could
no longer stand. I’m afraid your suggestion of the compress”—it seemed to me he said the phrase with a certain relish, and repeated it several times to himself, as if poking his head out of a foxhole—“your suggestion of the compress was a poor one. My swelling is still there. I was right, it can only be a matter of the worst case. Before long, I won’t be able to walk at all. I hope you’ve revised your opinion that there was nothing to it?” He lapsed into a long disquisition on his illness, which was spreading “in positively philosophical fashion,” between his brain and his foot. Essentially, it was an affirmation of a “holy science.”

He had walked through the larch wood and then to the pond—“there are only two walks here, the one or the other”—and had actually been meaning to go down to the station, to supply himself with newspapers and “give himself a fright. Newspapers are the only luxury I have. What human beings no longer are, what nature never was, newspapers now supply me with: a little variety, a little distraction.” In the newspapers, he found confirmation of many of his theories. Newspapers constituted, effectively, the world, all of it, the world and the cosmos, in every issue he opened. “The world isn’t the world, it’s a zero.” Every day, through the agency of the newspaper, he was compelled to open the argument with himself. “In terms of the discomfort they provide to many, with every reason and justification, the newspapers are the only comforters of mankind.” Newspapers were to him what brother and sister and father and mother had never been. “What the world never was for me. Often the newspaper was all I had, for days, weeks, months, only the newspaper, it told me that everything still existed,
everything, you know, all around me and within me, all those things I thought were gone.”