Frost: A Novel (21 page)

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“Another reason I’m here is the abattoir smell that lingers over the village.” He went around in that smell with his pants belt pulled tight, as if to cut it off. “Sometimes my methods get to be too much for me.” There were a thousand references to the torment, the myriad awfulnesses, from the second you awoke in the morning. “The damp, infertile soil that the inn stands on … All imaginable diseases are continually germinating in this soil. It’s not possible to be so healthy that being here won’t cripple you inside and out.”

Among other things, he had occasionally worked as a substitute teacher, teaching at various elementary schools. “Conspiracies against myself.” Since, as was known, there was a monstrous shortage of teachers, he had always been able to find employment. It surprised him that he had never been called upon to take any sort of proficiency test, “not one.” The very first time he had put himself forward as a substitute, he had found himself hired. “I was hungry, I thought I would try and get something at a school I passed every day. They wanted to put me in a classroom right away, though they didn’t know the first thing about me. I said I hadn’t even written out an application. They didn’t want to let me go. Can you understand that? There were loads and loads of schools then, and no teachers. Far too few teachers. I handed in my application to the official in the local education department, who processed it immediately, in my presence. The official should have presented it to several other officials in the ministry, before it went to the highest authority for approval. In the event he took it up to his superior himself, who immediately gave it the nod. That same day I went back to the school, and was taken on. I was given a classroom in
the school basement, with electric lighting on all the time. I moved schools several times a year. In between times I didn’t work. For as long as possible. As long as I wasn’t compelled to have any dealings with the art world. Sooner go back to school than have dealings with the art world. Sometimes I needed support from my brother, who always had extraordinary ties with extraordinarily influential individuals. He was useful to me, even though I never approached him for help. Of course, I never told him about being a substitute teacher. But as you know, word gets out … It’s impossible to do anything without word getting out, without it becoming public knowledge. Public knowledge in particular in those circumstances where what you most fear is something becoming public knowledge …” In fact, he had no aptitude for dealing with children, he was incapable of teaching them anything. “But the school authorities never asked me about any of that. They took me without a single question. Asked me only whether I was happy with the money I would have earned, had I decided to stay. The children bossed me … The tragedy of it was that the children bossed me from the start. Even though they were frightened of me. Of course the relationship between teacher and pupils is far from ideal,” he said. “Children are monsters … Powerful and cruel, like monsters.” The only way he had been able to restrain them had been by showing them from the outset how unpredictable he could be. “I beat them too … But it hurt me. It hurt me so much, I was frightened of myself.” His way home after class had been “paved with fear.” In spite of which, it had been the best thing for him, being a substitute teacher. Rather than using his art to pay his way. “I always hated the art world.” Accusations against the world around him had always really been accusations against himself. “Everything is
your own fault. The things that make you suffer are your own fault. You can always make an end. If you don’t make an end, you suffer. Suffer horribly. Stop suffering, and make an end, why don’t you?” he said. During his lessons, “which might have been taught by anyone who could count up to fifty, and speak and write three correct sentences, for instance the sentence: ‘I leave home with my father, and come back alone,’ or: ‘My mother is kind to me,’ or: ‘The days are bright, but the nights are dark,’ I read my Pascal all the time. You know Pascal! Even then I read nothing but Pascal!” It was a remarkable thing that he had only ever taught in ancient, dilapidated, already half-shut-down schools. “Even the way I spoke should have warned those responsible against taking me on, against getting involved with me.” But one shouldn’t overestimate substitute teaching either. It was basically “a martyrdom which I suffered in patience, because everything else would have been much worse.” There had been frequent complaints from parents to the headmaster. “They complained about all kinds of things. And the heads had no option but to have me transferred. To request a transfer for me. Then I would be transferred.” After two years he might find himself back at a school which he was all too familiar with “from many fits of weakness.” “But basically they just used me as a stand-in for sick teachers.”

“Substitute teachers have no rights,” he said. “And they only make about two-thirds of what a regular teacher makes.” There was admittedly a trade union for substitutes. He had never joined this union because he had never in his life joined any organization, group, or collective. “It would be doing such violence against myself, it would no longer be me,” he
said. The substitute teachers’ union had kept trying to force him to join. “Even though I was only an occasional substitute … Just imagine, they sometimes waited for me in the street. They made threats against me.” But they didn’t know how stubborn he could be when it came to sticking up for one of his principles. “In addition to the substitute teachers’ union, there was also a ‘substitute teachers’ association,’ which was an informal initiative on the part of the substitutes. They meet every Saturday afternoon. Apparently they pass resolutions. What resolutions? I have no idea what resolutions. How they mean to oppose their union. How to support their union against other unions. How to oppose the school authorities. The state. Their enemies. Anyone they feel is doing them wrong.” Apparently, there was also a “substitute teachers’ fund,” for the support of the widows and orphans of substitutes. “I’ve got nothing against such support … But basically I don’t care how worthy a cause can be, I’m not joining …” He was already disgusted when the journal
Substitute Teacher
occasionally peeked out of his mailbox. “They sent me that twice a month. Whether I wanted it or not. I never paid for it. I never ordered it. And I’ve never read it.” To his pupils—“they all had the same face”—he had always been presented as “the new stand-in.” “Psychologically, it was a smack in the face for me …” The first thing he had said to his pupils had always been: “Fresh air! Open the windows, let’s get some air in here! This classroom needs air! Windows open, open!” Then he had asked them to say their names. When a name was incomprehensible to him, he asked for it another time, “better articulated,” and written up on the board. “Most of the pupils weren’t able to write their names.” He had always taught first grade. “On one occasion, a second grade. But that made me ill.” It had been
irresponsible on the part of the school authorities to put him up in front of new first-graders, as their first teacher, because “the first teacher you have is the decisive teacher.” In fact, he had never hated anything in his life as much as classrooms, and the teachers in those classrooms … “But that’s what you must do, those things that you always loathed, those things that always repelled you.” His most worthwhile hours as a substitute teacher had been spent taking his classes to a park. “We are instructed to go to a park with our classes once a week, and explain to them everything that grows there: flowers, trees, shrubs … to tell them the country of origin of the respective flowers and trees and shrubs. I never told them the name of one single flower or tree. Nor gave them one country of origin. Not of a single flower or tree. Because I am opposed to the enlightenment of children where plants are concerned, in fact, where nature is concerned. The more you know about nature, the less you know about it, the less worth it has to you. The keen ones, who came to me with the names of flowers and trees and the names of their countries of origin, I simply told to shut up.” He had always sat down on a bench and immersed himself in his Pascal, and let the children do as they pleased. “I just had to be sure no one got hurt. Or lost.” The summer months had been the most pleasant. “I also liked going to the swimming pool with my children … At the time I was reading a lot of Maupassant and Poe and Stifter. If they got too loud, I shot them an angry look. Threatened them with punishment. Mostly, the look was enough. They were scared of me, even though, as I’ve already said, they bossed me about. Most of them were spoiled, and I tried to unspoil them. I tried. But there’s not much you can do in such a brief time as I tended to spend in my schools … The system needs to be changed. Turned on
its head. Do you know that our schools are among the most antiquated in the world? It’s a scandal! Take the appearance of our schools, crumbling, neglected, dilapidated, well, that’s what they’re like on the inside as well. We should really be concerned about the sort of kids that come out of them!” The parents’ complaints that were regularly sent to his various headmasters generally referred to his “offensive opinions,” which he was accused of “ramming down the children’s throats,” like “medicine.” “ ‘Offensive’ didn’t mean anything indecent or anything. They just used it to refer to anything they disagreed with.” They complained that he talked to his classes too much. “Then others complained I talked to them too little.” He had never been opposed to children’s jokes. “But they never made that many jokes in my classes.” In the first year of elementary school, the children were usually even more apprehensive than the teachers. “A large proportion aren’t really at school at all, they’re in a state of terror … School buildings are just premises of terror for them. The fear of school is the worst fear there is. Most people are ruined by it. If not in childhood, then later on. It’s still possible to die from fear of school at sixty.” He had imagined, when putting himself forward as a substitute teacher, that he would escape from his solitude, which he had been simply unable to master. “But in front of my classes, I was more alone than ever … Thoughts of suicide came to him once in the middle of a lesson. I still remember the classroom and the circumstances. I remember the children. As a substitute teacher I had the advantage of a certain sum of money that was paid to me on the fifteenth of every month … But of course a life as a substitute teacher is simply atrocious.”

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The landlady now puts a compress on his swollen ankle. I finally induced him to allow it. “As hot as possible, and about a quarter of an inch thick,” I said to the landlady. “You sound as though you know what you’re talking about,” she said. The painter just mocked me. He only put up with the compress so that I would leave him alone. “It’s the first time I’ve allowed such a young person to tell me what to do, and agreed to such a senseless procedure.” And he laughed. It was the first time I had seen him laughing. He was like someone who hadn’t laughed for years. For decades. Someone who’s never had anything to laugh about. He’s laughing now, I thought, for all those years. His laughing tired him out. It was as strange to him as an incision in the belly is to most people. “What are you doing with me?” I stand by his bedside and watch the landlady smear the blackish-brown ointment on a rag of linen. Quite proficiently. She lifts up the painter’s leg, and wraps the rag around it. “Not too tight,” I say. “What a palaver!” says the painter. The landlady says: “Now you’ve got to lie there and be quiet, Herr Strauch!”

The painter asked her what there was to eat. “I can’t eat that!” he said when she told him. I look at his room. It’s so dark, it’s almost impossible to see anything. When the landlady goes, he sighs very loudly. His room is bigger than mine. Much gloomier. That’s because of the drawn curtains. Which I took down on my first day. “I always keep mine drawn … If you like, you can borrow my book. Borrow my Pascal!” I say I have my Henry James. “Ah yes, your Henry James.” He lies there like a corpse. “Are you interested in poetry?” he asks me. “Not really,” I say. “I’m not interested in anything made up,” he says. There’s a clock ticking somewhere. I look for it,
but can’t see it anywhere. It must be in the commode. Smell of the washstand. The stove is glowing, but it’s not creating any heat. “I’m always cold,” he says. “What is it that makes pain unbearable? What is pain, if not pain?” It’s so quiet, his breath almost bursts the window. I look at his yellow face in the dark, now not saying anything anymore, so I say “goodnight,” and go.

Sixteenth Day

I want to make a record of the fact that Strauch had a dream last night, “a dream,” he said, “a dream that had nothing in common with all my other dreams. I have to tell you, it was the dream of a terminal unhappiness, a dream of ending, of a simply overwhelming ending. I dreamed of a color, which doesn’t distinguish this dream from others, my dreams, I may say, all begin with a color, I assume a primary color, one of the three or four—are there four?—primary colors; thereafter, the dream mutated rapidly and extremely purposefully into the relationship between colors, where all colors have the same significance, all of them still toneless, into the darkness of the colors, into their blackness and their luminosity, toneless, soundless, then suddenly, accelerating into a sound, a solitary linear sound, and then: the sounds gained as the colors receded, suddenly this dream, profoundly unlike all my other dreams, was only sound, not to say: music, though that is inapplicable in this instance, misleading, distracting. There was a sound, it appeared, with no beginning and no
end, it was there, and it developed into an ambitious, an infernal sound, I can think of no other way of saying this, I don’t have the words, you understand, even though I strain my memory I haven’t the words, a sound, and then a monstrous noise, such a monstrous noise I could no longer hear anything: in this space, which was and is an endless space, one of many such endless spaces (a notion that always means to destroy me!). In this space, in which black and white were spoiled, brutally spoiled by an amusical-celestial force roaring and shrilling, two policemen were tumbling, tumbling as if in space, suddenly there were three of them tumbling, I can’t really say they were floating, actually they were tumbling as in the clutches of a fantastic, all-embracing, immodest rigging-loft in a theater, in the immodest, fantastic, all-embracing theatrical rigging-loft of infinity …”