Frost: A Novel (22 page)

Toward evening, there was a blizzard, and I watched waves of snow blow against the window. While the window had initially darkened from the approaching blizzard, once the snow started to fall, sheeting against the inn, it grew very light. I was reading in the newspaper about people who were demanding this or that, or who knew this or that, and some others who neither demanded nor knew anything, of cities that were sinking, and heavenly bodies that were no longer far away.

The landlady was home, and her two daughters were doing their homework in the kitchen.

•   •   •

The knacker is doing his rounds, I thought, the engineer is issuing orders across the river.

The rector is sitting in his rectory, and the butcher in the pitch black of his abattoir.

The cobbler is running his thumb along a seam.

The teacher is drawing his curtains, and feeling afraid.

They are all afraid. I thought of Schwarzach.

All at once, I’m standing in the operating room once more, and lifting up a dead head. I take the elevator down into the basement to pick up a pair of crutches, and then back up to the third floor, where someone wants the crutches.

I think of my mother. She will be wondering: why isn’t he writing? They will all be wondering why isn’t he writing. I don’t know the answer. I can’t write to anyone. Not even the assistant!

I look out the window again, and see nothing. That’s how violent the snowstorm is.

•   •   •

Then I hear voices in the hallway, the first of the workmen, brushing the snow off their clothes, stamping their boots so hard the whole building shakes.

But it’s still much too early to go down for supper. When I hear the voices, I picture the men, I see their faces, though some remain dark for me, and don’t acquire definition.

I read my Henry James, without understanding what I’ve read: I seem to remember women following a coffin at a funeral, a railway train, a destroyed town, somewhere in England. The noise of the customers slowly transfers itself from the hallway to the public bar. Now everything sounds a little more muffled. A door is yanked open, falls shut. Then it sounds as if a barrel is being rolled somewhere. A couple of men are laughing while they wash and brush up in the kitchen, where the landlady always leaves a jug of water and a towel out. The blizzard is unremitting. I get up and go downstairs.

In the hallway I run into the painter. No sooner had he got out of the village than he found himself caught up in the blizzard. Suddenly he hadn’t been able to see anything, the snow had wrapped him up like a bunch of rags, “rags of snow … During the blizzard, I had such thoughts, no, not thoughts, but access to thoughts, access to some mysterious, usually
unavailable landscape … Lots of closed doors, you understand … I knocked on them, and shouted and yelled, and finally pounded them with my arms and legs. These scenes and the concomitant facts, this dereliction …”

He was very agitated. “Unworthy, you know. I’m unable to explain myself, the truth, the propensity for the truth is so difficult, that human faculties aren’t sufficient … it’s all a matter of fragments, suggestions, all of thought is just one never experienced clarity … for nothing. So much material. Those vast proportions! This unworthy orientation … all human misery struck me as luminous enough! A blizzard is certainly a deathly process … but what is a blizzard? How does it come about? A mutiny, miraculous … my account is nothing but fear, nothing but a child’s fear of an uncommon spectacle …” The engineer had come upon the painter lying on the street, and lifted him into his car, and taken him along. “But for the engineer, I would have lost my life in the blizzard,” he said.

The policeman had got to that point where hormones suddenly grab hold of the entire organism, and youth vanishes in the flashing of an eye. “This fine face,” said the painter, “how much longer will it remain fine? Will it be spared the general disfigurement of all life? No. Some bestial quality makes its way across such a face by night, and leaves its marks on it: first of all dimly, then unignorably, and finally remorselessly. In the end, we will turn away from such a face, because we are unable to bear it anymore, and we will search for another one, not yet disfigured, still beautiful. Then we will be similarly
fascinated by this new face, until it takes the same course as its predecessor. And so on with all faces. Incidentally, the policeman has many of the same traits as you. But I’m sure that’s just youth, just generic youth.” Then: “When I was your age, I had already seen a lot, and had more or less withdrawn from everything. By the time I was twenty-three, I was pretty much done with everything. That’s an alien feeling to you, I can imagine. You haven’t yet withdrawn from anything, not conclusively. Nor has the policeman either. I’m discussing a juncture, a block, a barrier for certain pursuits … a moment of the sort I mentioned earlier in our discussions … where everything falls apart, you know, where your voice is sodden, and the pee soaks into your pants, even when you don’t want it to … The policeman’s just as quiet as you. Always was. How do you get to be a policeman? How do you get to be something so revolting? A uniformed official. How? Just by slipping into the uniform? Slipping into the loathsomeness? At first reluctantly, shall we say, but then habitually, and finally with something mechanical and everyday about it, even with a feeling of belonging? Belonging to what? The people at the inn are poison to that policeman. But he’s long infested anyway. He’s given up reading books, given up anything that’s nothing to do with the police. Grubby characters are forever trying to sully the others, that’s what makes them grubby; and sooner or later they always succeed, as we may see with ghastly clarity. Just as I’m going around with you now, so previously, a year ago, or earlier this year, up until a few weeks ago, I was going about with the policeman, but now he’s withdrawn, doesn’t often come to the inn, at night, and I know what he’s come for, but you only ever see him stepping out of the shadows, only notice him once he’s given you a fright. I think he’s lost, well lost.”

•   •   •

He explains how memory shifts from unconfined joy to sorrow, and light turns into darkness, just as morning becomes noon, noon afternoon, and afternoon evening. How homecoming comes to feel like escape once did. How neglect and incapacity make for torment, bitterness, and despair. “What’s the danger?” he asks. Putting it to use? Putting what to use? A man watches a woman who only lately was delighted with herself, with him, now falling like a stone into the wretchedness of pregnancy. Her voice is suddenly tired, and her heart jaded, she just wants to be left alone. Strength of character starts to fade, there is nothing left. Antipathy hurts quite amazingly. Serenity becomes disfavor, then open hostility, then killing and letting live. The jolly climb to the peak ends up in the inn in the valley with aggravated assault. A happy, enchanting turn of phrase suddenly brings about a quarrel. It’s the machinery that thinks and that governs the man. Admiration turns into reproach, character swiftly and reflexively into lack of character. Dreams turn into the destruction of dreams, and poems turn into piles that are driven home. He knows how morale comes to grief, and primal happiness turns into a lie. How a mean instinct finds its way into a million receptor centers, and wipes them all out. “Who knows anything about the moment, but everything shrivels up in a moment, the extinction of everything is the work of a moment.” He explains the air to me which drowns one color, and allows another to climb into the unbearable. “With my grandparents,” he said, “where happiness came and went, and often stayed for hours, unobserved of course, there we could marvel at the way a filthy mood suddenly took control, which froze everything that made up this mood, and finally
ensured that it was forgotten: the walk in the woods, the sleigh ride over the frozen lake, the reading aloud, the clean pure water. A hand moved, and there was no contradiction.” Just as crimes and accidents were brought on by great happiness. “The result of thoughtlessness, which can be so beautiful, it can move mountains. Compared to a wind, which will suddenly expose a tree. With the sea’s rough justice. It’s baffling how everyone calls for a lasting happiness,” he said. “Since all anything has is resale value.” Ornaments that charmed entire Sundays would suddenly turn into grotesques, just as people turned into animals and vice versa, enough to put anyone to flight. Blue went black, and black to blue. Top turns to bottom. Just as a street turned into another street, no one quite could say where. “A man never knows the decisive moment.” Everything flowed like rivers which were condemned by nature to carry greater or lesser quantities of water.

During the blizzard, a fire broke loose in the neighboring village, which turned a large farmhouse to ashes. The site of the fire is five or six miles’ distance from Weng. A lot of people ran over there, even while the blizzard was still raging, fires exert an irresistible pull on people. They leave everything standing and have nothing but the inferno in their heads. When I met the painter in the entrance, he said: “Did you see the knacker charge in here? He says the fire was started by an electric spark. Did you see him giving his information? He plunged in the way a herald in Greek tragedy does. Typical of people,” he said, “both dementing and demented, just as they both govern and are governed. The knacker and the landlady, they’re both good examples of fires as they go through the
people. You see,” he said, “on the one side there’s the bearer of news, on the other the receiver of news, the astonished, the sensation-hungry. It takes the landlady to give any importance to what the knacker has to say. Then the landlady takes over the knacker’s role, and then others take her role, and his, and eventually an entire population is busy with the news …” The fire had cost the lives of hundreds of pigs. Men with cloths wrapped round their faces had tried to rescue the pigs who had broken loose, but then the pigs had run back into the flames, cows as well, ducks, all the poultry had gone up in flames. Everything burned or choked in the fire. The fire engines completely helpless, because all the wells are frozen, none of the streams carry any water … In the space of a few seconds, huge flames had sprung up, which were kept down by the clouds. There had been a flickering in the sky that they all had seen. Albeit, there had been nothing to see from the inn. You can’t see anything from here. You can’t see anything from the hollow. “A terrible fire! The Weng fire brigade have come out, didn’t you hear?” I didn’t hear anything. “No one in the inn heard anything. Nothing is heard in the inn, everything passes overhead. You have to imagine the dry wood, the hay, the straw barn was like a glowing cube of fire, as it finally broke apart. Hoses without water, fire chiefs standing by helplessly, their crews unrolling the hoses, and then no water … Where was it going to come from? Unimaginable, people are so helpless. A colossal scene as the roof frame comes crashing down! I saw such a thing once before, in a Bavarian village, when I was walking down the road, completely blinded by snow, trying not to suffocate in it, when all at once sparks were spinning round my head, more and more sparks, not just white flakes, but red also; I ran in the direction from where the red flakes seemed to be
blowing … Left of me, up on a hill, I saw a burning roof frame behind the wall of snow. The whole horizon was on fire. Perhaps I was thinking of rescuing someone or something, but the spectacle was ringing in my ears and warming the soles of my feet! As I soon saw, I was the first person to discover the fire. Great waves of heat washed up to me. I was still a hundred yards from the fire when I heard creaking and groaning and breaking and finally also screams, and then suddenly alarmed people were running around,
out
of the fire, or
into
the fire. Picture it to yourself: it was night, people were in their beds, they ran as they were, in their nightgowns and nightshirts in the snow, burning torches falling down in the snow, it hissed the way it does when you extinguish a burning candle in snow, you know, and then the roof tree came down! At first it seemed to buckle, and then it came down with a tremendous crash. And then there was the bellowing of the cattle that weren’t able to get away, because the doors were all pinned shut from the incredible pressure from above. The whole thing happened very fast, in under twenty minutes. The firemen braved the flames, pulled people out, but they were already half-dead, or fell down dead in the snow. It was pure chance that I saw it at all, it was because I was late getting home, from the house I was living in at the time I wouldn’t have been able to see anything, it was built in a hollow, like the inn. As it transpired, the owner of the house and his wife both died in the flames. And another three or four other people as well, who were working there. A couple of the servants were taken to the hospital with burns, and received treatment for months, and in one case, as I learned, for years. Their lives, of course, were ruined. When the knacker came dashing in, I immediately remembered that fire, I’ve never forgotten it. Then, as now, there were rumors
of arson. Now, as then, poor people set off for the site of the fire with their rucksacks, to try and pick up pieces of beef and pork and scraps of poultry. Emergency slaughters were carried out on the spot. You know, anyone’s allowed to help himself to a burned carcass. Whatever was there to be picked up, people picked up. There are people who are just waiting for a fire to break out, and then head off there immediately, sometimes in cars, to try and loot whatever they can. They turn up with slaughtering tools, with axes and knives, and they chop everything into pieces. A fire is an extraordinary spectacle! A grotesque spectacle!” At ten o’clock, I was still sitting in the public bar, because the knacker couldn’t stop talking about it, he kept starting over afresh, all the while missing tricks he could have picked up, because he had a king or an ace or whatever, and then the engineer came by, he had been at a dance somewhere, and he reported it was arson. There were people being questioned already. A group of police and court investigators was at work, and would be at work all night. A large insurance deal that had been concluded only the day before was almost certain proof that the owner had set fire to his own house.