Frost: A Novel (20 page)

Then set off on my journey. Back to my room at the hostel, with no light and no sunshine. I’ll fix myself something to eat, look at my watch, lie down and not be able to sleep, I’ll pace up and down the street, and open my books again. And what about the internship? What will it bring me? How much longer will I be at Schwarzach? What if the assistant is dissatisfied with me? If he thinks, oh dear, I should have given someone else the task, not him? And will I get five hundred
schillings, as I do every year? Even if I’ve been gone quite a long time? Wonder whether the matron knows? Yes, of course, she’ll be reminded of the fact that I’m not there at every mealtime. Now I think of the ghostly atmosphere in the staff room. There’s a radio there that hasn’t worked for years. A clock that ticks, but tells the wrong time. Vases with flowers that are long since dried out. A gray oilcloth spread over the long table, tacked down. Paintings on the walls, scenes from village life, done by a rather fetid academic painter. Books from the nineteenth century, unopened for decades. There I see down one side of the table the registrar, the assistant, the assistant’s assistant, the bonesetter, the pediatric surgeon. And on my side of the table the other two interns, the Greek doctor, the new med students. They eat in silence, and sometimes they draw a complicated fracture of the ulna on the table, or the position of an embryo, and the sister who carries in the food then wipes everything off once they’re all gone. I walk down the long passages, get lost at the end, where all the doors are suddenly locked and you can’t remember which way you came, I bang on a door, and already I’m thinking I’ll have to spend the night there, in that room, surrounded by locked doors. I hear footfalls, and I bang on the door with my fists, and the door opens, and the sister says: “Why, doctor, what are you doing in here?” And the sound of that “doctor.” Sounds how? And then I try and compare a human being with another human being, both with the same illness, and reacting to it differently. One dies, the other survives as if nothing had been the matter. And both had the same illness. I read, it’s almost dark, but I read in my Koltz, a section which explains about diseases of the brain, but the disease the painter has, which is a disease of the brain—what else would it be?—doesn’t appear anywhere in
Koltz. And we’re talking about a very new book, by a leading authority, just imported from the States.

And then I go to the chapel, only a few yards, because the chapel is built onto the hospital, or is it the hospital is built onto the chapel, I don’t know, both of them are several generations old, they have the same thick walls, and both give off the same chill. And then I cross the bridge, and I sit in the café, and I pick up a newspaper. And later, in the middle of the night, I am woken up, because “for you, doctor, an interesting case,” there’s a new admission. “A fractured atlas, with paraplegia.” I pull on my white coat, and follow the nurse who woke me down along the long corridors to the operating room, where the assistant is standing ready, just one or two preparations, and he makes the first incision. “There’s almost no light,” he says, and the operation gets under way. And continues perhaps until morning, and there’s no time to go to the staff room for breakfast. A head needs to be raised a little, a leg wants to be reset, a camphor injection is required, and a blood transfusion. The sisters perform astonishing feats. Never get to bed before eleven, and are back from church already by five, having been heard singing there at half past four. Everywhere, the great white tulips of their bonnets, which manage to flower where everything is dark with despair, where everything else is bleak and bare and inimical. The relatives of the patients who died overnight are standing between the elevator and the bathroom, holding in their hands the last possessions of their brother or sister. About to be dispatched to the cemetery administration. And the smiles of the young nurses put all sadness to flight. What will my future bring? What awaits me? Tomorrow! The day
after! I don’t want to think about what might be. What will be. What’s the future anyway? I don’t want to think!

I quickly took a letter to the assistant to the post office. There was the postmistress, a relative of the knacker’s, with her back to me, writing something in a ledger. “The painter,” she said, taking my letter and stamping it, “the painter hasn’t been by in a long time.” Earlier, he’d used to get mountains of mail, the postman had had so much to carry for him. And now nothing. Not one letter in all the weeks the painter had been here this time. “He doesn’t look well,” she said. “Yes,” I said, “he’s ill.”—“Ill?” she said. What was wrong with him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”—“Something serious?”—“Yes,” I said, “something serious.”—“But why doesn’t he get any mail?” That was nothing to do with his being ill. She seemed to think if someone is ill, they will need letters, more than if they’re healthy. What else does a person need if he’s got his health, she seemed to think. I don’t know anything about his postal arrangements, I said. Of course, I couldn’t help being struck by the fact that he got no mail. But I didn’t want to continue the conversation with the postmistress, and I went out.

Outside the post office, I thought: It must be a terrible thing for his housekeeper, not to know how he is. Where he is. And then I hurried across the village square. I climbed up the steps to the cemetery. There was the knacker, up to his belly in the earth. I had just come from the post office, I said. It was so quiet today, why was that. “I’ve never known it this quiet,” I
said. “Yes,” said the knacker, “it is quiet. There’s no wind.”—“No,” I said. And then I thought of something: “The landlord … How did the manslaughter case come about? You know, that business at the pub,” I said. “The manslaughter case?” he said. “Yes, the manslaughter case. What sort of man was he?”—“What sort of man?”

He had sat in the inn for a couple of weeks, but got rowdy every night, and often called for more to drink at three in the morning. And once the landlord had refused. Then the workman had lashed out with his fists. And the landlord with a beer glass. “It happens,” said the knacker. “They usually get up afterward and sit together and have a drink and get to be friends. Didn’t happen on this occasion,” he said. “But at first, people thought it wasn’t a crime?”—“Yes,” said the knacker, “at first.”—“Then how did it come up?”—“Yes,” said the knacker, “how did it come up?”

He picked up his shovel again, and went back to work. I went over to the children’s graves and looked at the photographs on the tombs. Whey-faces, I thought. Puffy faces. Dead faces. Faces attacked by birds of prey. When I went back, I passed the knacker again, and he stopped digging. “Isn’t it strange,” I said, “that it’s so quiet today?”—“Yes,” he said, “it often gets so quiet, you can’t hear nothing but your own heart beating.” I went down to the rectory, and headed off to the larch wood, away from the village.

•   •   •

Nothing, not one thing, was mute. Everything continually expressed its pain. “The mountains, you see, are great witnesses to great pain,” said the painter. He walked toward the mountain: “People always say: the mountain reaches up into heaven. They never say: the mountain reaches down into hell. Why not?” He said: “Everything is hell. Heaven and earth, and earth and heaven, they’re all hell. Do you understand? Above and below are hell, here. But of course nothing reaches into anything else. Do you understand? There is no adjacency.” The newly arrived Föhn showed up details on the shady side that normally were not seen. “You see?” said the painter, “all those shadows? They’re mountain goats, look!” He drew me closer. “Look!” he said. But I didn’t see any. “That mountain always put me in mind of a gigantic catafalque. See!” It’s true, the mountain does have the outline of a gigantic catafalque. “In summer I sit here for hours, and study it all,” he said. “Insight? I don’t think so. I just look at everything. So that it doesn’t kill me.” He now went on ahead. “Death doesn’t want us to occupy ourselves with it,” he said. “Come along, you go first. And that’s why I continually occupy myself with death!” Was I not cold? Was I not shivering? I wasn’t shivering. “In the Föhn, nothing seems to make sense. Everything you say seems nonsense. Religions dupe us about the fact that everything is nonsense, you know. Christianity is nonsense. Christianity. Yes. Prayer is a false state of consciousness. One that turns everything into nothing. Prayer. Absolutely.” But the human animal liked to live in such a false state of consciousness, with misleading impressions, “that pressed his head down to the ground. Suddenly, one renounces all falsehood. Renounces unchastity, chastity, weakness, the opposite of weakness, renunciation itself. Then everything comes clear. There have been such dark
moments in my life that left me unable to speak finally, and that are killing off and will kill off what existed in me, and exists in me, and will never exist again.

“I often tried to come closer to the truth, to this understanding of truth, even if only through silence. Through nothing. I didn’t succeed. I never got beyond the attempts. There was always an ocean in the way, my inability to tie her heart, as people say, to mine. Just as I never succeed in coming into harmony with the truth, so nothing in my life succeeded, except my dying. I never wanted to die, and yet never tried to compel anything more rigorously. To make the world die in me, and myself die in the world, and everything to cease as though it had never been. Night is much darker yet than any notion of night, and day is just a gloomy and unbearable interval.” He wanted to go home. We walked up the ravine.

“The policeman is another one enjoying carnal relations with the landlady,” he said. “I have made some observations. They fit my theory. I get up and go to the window and see the policeman. I hear a conversation outside, which woke me. An exchange between the landlady and the policeman. At first I thought the policeman was on duty. That maybe the landlady got him to come for some reason. But then I could see from the state of his clothes that he had spent the night with the landlady. His uniform was partly unbuttoned. He walked back to the village with his rifle on his shoulder. I noticed once before a certain tension between the policeman and the landlady. I wasn’t mistaken. The disordered clothing and the policeman’s whole manner indicate that something transpired
between himself and the landlady that night. I’m a light sleeper, I wake up at the least sound. That’s why I see more than others do. It’s not pleasant. My suspicion is confirmed: the policeman stands in for the knacker, when the latter is away. It’s strange the people that come together. One would have thought they must be mutually repellent, but no, they attract one another. The policeman is very young. Younger than you.” When we stood outside the inn, he said: “I had thought of asking you up to my room, but I won’t now. Perhaps we could put it off till tomorrow.” He opened the door and with his stick pushed me into the public bar, where a lot of people were sitting. It was twelve already.

“The walls are hollow. Even soft rapping will make itself heard down into the foundations,” he said. Since there was a rushing stream a hundred yards further on, the inn was subject to a continuous, but therefore all the more dangerous shaking. “The plaster in my room is crumbling,” said the painter. “The stucco rose pattern is cracked from top to bottom, and way beyond. There are great patches of damp. If you lay your hand on them, you will feel cold. The cowbells in autumn are said to have a deleterious effect on the fabric. You hear the water barrels down in the kitchen with a noise like thunder. Not to mention the beer barrels when they are trundled inside. Of course the termite labors day and night. But I like all that. It doesn’t scare me. Quite the contrary. I have the feeling I am at home.”

For the painter, everything is terrible. “Every so often new tunnels through the walls are completed, and then there’s a
trickle of sawdust,” he says. “If there’s a break in the cold, then the window frames creak, and the floorboards, as if they were exhaling.” Down in the cellar there was a crack made by an earthquake once. Clocks and paintings had rattled against the walls. Lamps shattered, some floorboards had to be relaid. Carpenters and masons were kept busy for four or five days. Apparently, Weng was situated on the eastern extremity of a fault line that came up from the south to the northern foothills of the Alps. In the vicarage cellar there was a rock split in two that one could view. “For the earthquake, it was the work of a single second,” says the painter. The rock had split asunder, the vicarage itself had sustained no damage whatsoever. Since that time, various stories had circulated about the “earthquake rock” in the vicarage. “Every place has its miracles. Did you know I once found a pair of blackbirds in the attic, dried and pressed together? A pair of blackbirds. Fossilized. As if their song were still filling the air.” Summer was “warm and full of apprehension.” Winter “cold and strange.” An elderberry bush had suddenly pushed through the rear wall of the house. “A jolt in the night. As if a hand had suddenly moved everything by one handbreadth … I was here once, it was the end of October, when I had the sensation that the song of birds that had been there all spring and all summer had frozen in the air. And was waiting for deliverance. For the first warm days … Profound shadows” were often projected by the inn. Just as the whole depression in which the inn is situated is fertile ground for dowsers.

There are many reasons for the painter to be in Weng. A sudden gust of an ill wind was enough to set him down here. The inn has always disappointed him. As he says, “It disappoints
even the undemanding guest.” It was a nook “where an existence can knit itself together.” He often thought of it as resembling a cemetery like the one at San Michele in Venice, “where the dead are stacked in layers … Have you not noticed the way people live in cemeteries? That big cities are big cemeteries? That small towns are lesser cemeteries? Villages yet smaller ones? That a bed is a coffin? Clothes are graveclothes? That everything is a readying for death? The whole of existence is a trying out for laying out and burial.” The idea of situating the inn on this deadly spot, “where nothing has ever stood,” was inexplicable. The landlord’s father was effectively given the site in the hollow. He won it in a bet. No one remembers what the bet was about. Leftover railroad ties were used in the construction of the house. Old bricks, laboriously tapped clean by the builders themselves. “Cement they stole from the storehouses of the cellulose factory.” They had the inn ready in four years. Three days after it was finished, the builder died. “Isn’t it always the way that people die when the house is finished? Or perhaps a little before? But always on the summit, or just below?” The landlady had been unable to pay for the railroad ties in ten years. “But when the state’s your creditor, you take your time,” he said. “The walls are so thin, you can hear people’s thoughts through them.” Their bad consciences. Upstairs and down. “The landlady sometimes goes around and swills out the dirt with bucketloads of water. Also the traces of slaughtering days at Christmas and Easter … Fresh coat of paint every fifteen years … The wallpaper patterns go from room to room.” Electric light had been introduced shortly before the last war.