Frost: A Novel (14 page)

Eleventh Day

People like the landlady didn’t understand values like respect and awe. She goes to church, but only because she doesn’t want to be rebuked. Because otherwise she would be destroyed, living among people who have got it into their heads that you have to go to church. Drowning among country people is a miserable way of drowning. They calmly watch their victim resisting, and the waves closing over their heads, as if it was the most natural thing in the world: letting an evil person, someone who doesn’t belong in their world, simply sink. Someone who didn’t take instruction from them, wasn’t persuaded by what they told him. Someone who struck them as odd from the outset, and therefore unworthy of sharing their lives with them: “The landlady is a stranger,” said the painter. She was always strange to them all, because her father came from a different region, a valley nearer the Tyrol. They describe someone like the landlady as vermin. The farmers do. And the farmers still rule here, even though their influence has been pushed back. Even though the proletariat has attained privileges that, three or four years ago, would have been unthinkable. The proletariat: all the people who, in the last three decades were washed into the valley, to service the cellulose factory, the railways, and now the power plant. “There are still the Corpus Christi processions,” said the painter, “and Ascension Day parades, but how much longer? Catholicism is on the wane. At least here. Communism is on the march. In a few years’ time there will
only be Communism. And then agriculture will be a dream. No longer leading anywhere.” He said: “But the landlady goes to church, because she still depends on the farmers. And she attends the Communist meetings, because she’s compelled to do that too.” But for her, the inn would surely have changed hands before now, because “her husband is a drunk who drinks more than he brings in, unless she slaps his wrist.” Always drunk, he lives the life of a “slimy bloated newt, from time to time lashing out.” He often lay in the garden with outspread arms, gaping mouth, and rolling eyes, as if he was dead, and merely swollen with schnapps and beer. Often he would call the cab to get a ride home instead of walking. He knows she holds everything together, that everything depends on her, and that it’s up to her whether she takes the thread he’s dangling from, and simply and brutally snips it, so he doesn’t send her away anymore. Rather, it’s she who can do as she pleases. If anything, it’s he who has to worry about being sent packing. But the property belongs to him, and that keeps her from putting her most radical plan into effect: to throw him out once and for all. Cannily, because he’s not stupid, he’s steadfastly refused to make over the property to her, as she’s often expressly called on him to do, he even refused to cede a part of the property consisting of the real estate, the hollow, and the inn, to her. So she’s probably always going to have him to deal with. “Often they dragged him over from the shady side,” said the painter, “where he was drinking on credit.” Every three weeks she went the rounds, to pay his tabs at all the places where he drank. She begged the landlords, her competitors in effect, to no longer serve him. But they always ignored her wishes. Any landlord has got to be pleased about slowly wiping out a rival. They even egged him on. And when he gets let out of prison,
it’ll carry on. Often, when she paid his bills, she would get to hear about other women who had eaten and drunk at his expense, and who “themselves had been rather generous”; but she was used to that, and of course she compensated. She is the daughter of a road worker, who, when he died, left just enough to cover his funeral expenses. Aged fourteen, she went to a dairy farm as a maid. She was always a good worker, and that was what got the landlord’s interest, and prompted him to bring her to the inn.

The painter Strauch is one of those who turn everything to liquid. Whatever they touch dissolves. Character, solidity, stability. “No one can see me, because no one can see anything,” he has said, and: “The principles that put millennia on the skids.” Or again: “Any activity is predicated on another, any meaning, any style. Wisdom on nonsense, and vice versa and simultaneously.” Breakfast is “way too ceremonial” for him, “it feels absurd to pick up a spoon. Meaningless. A sugar cube is an assault against me. Bread. Milk. A catastrophe. The day begins with insidious sweetness.” He hunkers down on his chair, which is far too low for him. But even there he towers over me. He looks down at me, his eye piercing. “To allow ingratitude to develop within one,” he says, “only to take note of a thing once one is certain what a terrible thing it is. Facts pile up, terrible facts too, and before too long you’re just the miserable little wretch trying to push the table back, which gets you a clip around the ears from above.” So great was reason that it too was “condemned to fail.” “Those two notions of mine, trotting along side by side like a couple of dogs, barking at everything.” Wanton destruction, to make contemplation a little easier. He whispers, and listens to the
walls shaking. “There is an obligation toward the depth of one’s own inner abyss,” he says. He pulls himself together, and it takes the brutality of simply getting up to bring him back to himself and out of himself. To some expression, like “It’s so utterly ghastly here!” He is dominated by himself, as by a lifelong injustice. By his destructive apparatus.

“There is little else but corruption,” he says, “but it’s impossible to eradicate. Opposition, a general opposition, a sign of youth, is growing weaker. The forces are shrinking. Everything is concentrated on getting through its allotted time … That’s got nothing to do with intelligence. In general, people on a lower level find it easier to deal with their surroundings. By and by it comes to your attention: the world around you, nothing but corruption, colossal misrule. On the whole the fools who can’t see that are small in number. One’s fellow humans? No more than a list of professions. What time is it? Half past four. Getting some air before going to bed is another sacred error. A smart observation: ‘the round fat face of the landlady, which has bounced off the engineer.’ Ah, the engineer,” he says. “You know, frost disfigures all men. Frost and women are the death of men. In the morning he sits over his blueprints, and doesn’t go mad. They’re all sitting around now. All these men sitting around will have to be paid: this sudden cold snap will cost hundreds of thousands! And no improvement in sight! If you ask me, I rather like cold, sharp winter days.”

The way he compares the inn with an Alpine village in Carinthia, and with a ballet dancer who has had just one
appearance in the opera and whom he describes as “a natural talent, but very dangerous,” is very illuminating. Or a vegetable trader who once gave him a smack because he thought he was stealing his tomatoes, with Napoleon III. It seems to me that even as he’s speaking about the woodcutter he watched dying, he’s already thinking about the tragedy of the four hundred mountain people who were abruptly killed in catastrophic storms. And then always himself. A sudden blast of wind forced him to the wall, and put him in mind of a celebrated acrobat. “He performed four somersaults between the backs of two galloping horses.” When he says “London,” he envisions the outer suburbs of Budapest. Sections of the lower Danube he attaches quite effortlessly to the upper Rhine. He swaps one delta for another. “In fact, that’s my sense of color,” he says. Certain mixtures of aromas play a part here. I can readily imagine him as a thirty-year-old, crossing the swollen plazas, and despising the dead, megalomaniac capital of the country. Anything provincial and dilettante as much as the “truly great” and the untouchable. His self-contempt is not based on ignorance; after all he was a city-dweller. Miles ahead of him he sees a lost thought return to him after years away. “Murder has a taste of honey,” he often thought. While his mouth talks about the ways of making paper, his hands are burrowing in his jacket pockets. He sees images faster than his body can catch them. “Every street debouches in my brain,” he says. He has turned a vast system of beginnings and significations into an edifice of thought where he tries to order the extraordinary chaos of history. “For decades, I’ve suffered from the most extreme attention, do you have any idea what that means?” If he talks about a tragedy, he shows no signs of the tragedy in his expression. When was it? “I’ve invented a notation of my
fears,” he says. Of the three who go to make him up, he doesn’t know which one he is here or there, when and where. “Being on the lookout doesn’t imply ill intentions, you know.” Everything was morbidly affected by the horrible, and “harmlessness has taken on all the tasks of destruction, do you see?”

He had been walking in the defile. At first he had found it difficult—“it took all my shattered strength”—to make his way up through the deep snowdrifts. “Branches leaped at my face like wild animals, you know!” But then he had moved almost at a jog, as before his illness. “I couldn’t stop. My head took control over me, if you must know!” Darkness had brought him to the defile. “I could have walked on, to the hay barn and further. But no, I had to walk up the defile. The defile that starts exactly where I saw the churchgoers emerge the day before yesterday. They were people such as I have yet to meet, from the shady side, as it seems to me, people from an era that ended millennia ago, great people, striding as if they walked past everything. Past a world that struck them as petty and spoiled. Past a later man, of whom they must have been warned. They reminded me of deer, so gigantic, so kingly, in the way they loomed up ahead of me. I ran into the defile, because I thought that would change my ideas,” said the painter. “With the help of the defile, I thought it would be possible to get some other ideas. I wanted to change the direction of everything, everything that had been as sad all day as episodes from my childhood, inaccessible, because you can never get out of them.” But he had been disappointed. A sudden snowfall surprised him in the middle of the defile. Then he sat down on a tree stump, “a quite rotten little
stump, just big enough for me,” to wait for it to stop snowing. “But how can you wait for it to stop snowing? And why?” Immediately persuaded of the stupidity of waiting for it to stop snowing, he had leaped up, and crawled back down the entire defile. “On all fours, like a wild beast that lives in the dark, in the gloom.” He had managed to get out of the defile in pretty quick time. “Even as a child, I used to be frightened of defiles,” he said. “While I was sitting on the tree stump, I had the feeling I was going to sleep, drifting off, you know.” With that feeling, he had been very happy. It mastered him, and he supported it, so that it got stronger. “Pleasure,” he said. “The way you can just fall asleep after a great exertion, the way great cities seem to shrink back as you dash through, or the claws of caged lions and tigers.” The way someone settles to sleep, all animal, he too had settled. And then he had suddenly become aware of the foolishness of waiting for it to stop snowing. And he had jumped up and away, first in quick bounds, then ever more slowly, barging through snow with his chest. “It would have been my grave,” he said.

He thought he had left his jacket behind in the public bar, and went back down to look for it. I saw him come down, but for some reason I couldn’t ask him what he was doing downstairs, having already once said goodnight. I could have asked him: “Do you need anything? Are you looking for something? What are you looking for?” But he was already at the foot of the stairs. “My jacket must be hanging in the public bar,” he said. I went into the public bar, and looked for the jacket, but couldn’t find it. I asked the landlady and some of the customers, but no one had seen his jacket. The painter stood in the doorway, observing me. I had the feeling he was
directing me to look for the jacket here and there; pushing me down to the floor, pulling me up to the great beam between the stove and the wall, from where you have a good view of the whole bar area. I didn’t see his jacket anywhere. The public bar was packed. A few other people helped me look. I saw a lot of new faces. The entire construction crew for the power plant seemed to be there: thousands of them! I felt I was drifting through a sea of fog. Individuals looked at me out of some rotting vegetation, it seemed to me. Like a jungle. I looked along the walls, but didn’t find any jacket. I wanted to be thorough, and looked on the floor again. The jacket might have fallen down, after all. The landlady stooped as well. “No, there’s no jacket here,” she said. I checked among the many workmen’s clothes hanging up on the walls. But no painter’s jacket. When I got back to the corridor, where I thought I’d find the painter, he had disappeared. Did he go up to his room? I wondered. But: he wouldn’t be able to get up as quickly as that. “Herr Strauch!” I called. No answer. Then I noticed that the front door was half-open. The painter was sitting on the bench outside. “I’m ignoring the cold,” he said, and disappeared further into his jacket, which it seemed he was suddenly wearing. “Where I found my jacket?” He had hung it on the front door when he returned from his walk, and forgotten about it. “Were you looking for my jacket the whole time?” he asked. You absentmindedly hung or left something somewhere, forgot all about it, and got into a terrible state as a result. “I think about what will be once everything goes black,” he said. “When there are no more colors, only black.” Then he pointed out a lot of stars to me, up there in the night sky, more stars than he’d seen in a long while.

Twelfth Day

In the morning he surprised me with the news that the swelling on his foot had gone. “There’s no sign of it,” he said, “it’s retreated, no doubt only to pop up somewhere else. You’ll see.” As he was standing in my doorway, I asked him inside. “If you don’t mind an old man fouling your room,” he said. He crossed my room to the window, and looked out. “You’ve got the same view as I have: darkness! Doesn’t it depress you? All these days? People like you spend years, decades, on the brink of depression. Then suddenly you fall in. Head first.” He sat down on my bed. “Lawyers make nothing but confusion,” he said. “A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he’s a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he’s always right.” He felt through his pockets again. “Jurisprudence creates criminality, that’s a fact. Without jurisprudence, there would be no crime. Did you know that? Unlikely as it may sound, that’s the truth of the matter.” He set his stick against my jacket, which I’d laid over the chair back, speared it as with a fork. “Youth is an ornament,” he said, “and ever more an ornament, and is always in any case refreshing.” He left my jacket alone. “Youth has no ideals; nor any masochistic notions, which will come later. Then, admittedly, with lethal effect.” He was still able to imagine what it was like, being young. “One imagines it’ll be better later on,” he said. “When everything isn’t ebullience, isn’t confusion,
isn’t cerebral. When everything is as distinct as the shadows inside you, with their hard, silent edges.” There were many mistakes he had only made because he was young. “Youth is a mistake.” The mistake of age, on the other hand, was seeing the mistakes of youth. “It can happen that a young fellow can cease to be young in the midst of his youth,” he said, and then: “Do you believe in Jesus?” which, he said, was much like asking: “Do you think tomorrow will be even colder than today?” He was going, he said, to take a walk down to the station. “First along the shady side. Then to the newspapers. Then the café. Let me think: couldn’t we visit the parsonage? Or the poorhouse? No, no, not that. But anyway, you’re coming. Aren’t you?”