Frost: A Novel (23 page)

Seventeenth Day

It was arson. But it wasn’t the farmer, as everyone supposed, who set fire to the house, but one of his farmhands, who didn’t know the insurance was in place, and who wanted to damage his master. It is known why: there is talk of a “relationship”
between the farmer and the farmhand, of which the farmer’s wife, who also died in the blaze, was informed. And so the farmer stands to receive a large sum of money. Apparently, he wants to invest it in a factory in a Tyrolean valley, and not have anything more to do with agriculture. They found his wife at the back of the house, crushed by a falling beam. The assumption is that she ran back into the building to find her little boy, but the little boy was faster than she was, and got out of the room by himself; then, as she rushed back out of the house, having avoided the flames and smoke, the beam fell on her head. In the dark they clambered over her body several times without realizing it, they supposed she was in the building, under the wreckage, among the animals that were burned to charred ruins, blackish-brown lumps of matter, with horns or hooves protruding from it in some cases, looking as stiff and rigid as cast iron, and giving off a frightful smell, which I now seem to remember having smelled around the inn as well. Our policeman had to force people away, strangers come to loot, with his rifle butt, and even hit the odd one a blow over the head, when they refused to do as they were told. A doctor had arrived, but too late. They were able to save the tractor, on which the farmer had driven clear of the burning house. The landlady is going to the wife’s burial, she knows the family. “A large farm,” she said. As a girl, she had once been employed there, with her sister. “The whole of one summer.” Now they are looking everywhere for the farmhand who started the fire. The policeman duly went up to the inn early in the morning to ask questions. But no man who answered the description of the wanted man had ever shown his face in her inn, the landlady said. The arsonist comes from Carinthia, “where all bad lots come from,” as the landlady says, and had only been
working at the farm from late fall. The police think he may have gone home, but they want to keep an open mind. It was his day off, and he was wearing his Sunday best before leaving the house. Afterward, during the fire, the farmer had recalled that he had taken his little suitcase with him as well. Generally, such people, once they have perpetrated their crime, tend to turn up at friends’ or relatives’, and are found by the police. They would see where they found him, if they found him at all. But usually they find people like that in a matter of days, if not hours. Because they won’t have gone very far, they don’t have the means. Or the courage either. They will hide out in a hay barn or a wayside hut and will be found, half-starved or completely starved. If the farm had burned down just a day earlier, the farmer wouldn’t have stood to get a single cent for it. Whereas now he’ll receive an enormous sum. The fire-setter must have miscalculated by just one day. “You know,” the painter said, “the whole country, as you see, is full of criminals. Full of murderers and arsonists.”

“It’s oppressive,” said the painter, “really oppressive today. The smell of the fire is everywhere. Do you feel like going up and having a look? I don’t myself. If there were a sleigh, but there aren’t any sleighs. It’s too much trouble.” He had sat in the kitchen of the poorhouse and talked with the mother superior, and some of the kitchen women. “They make soup from potato peels,” he said. Gypsies had passed through the village, and been given a hot meal at the poorhouse. “They came with a horse and cart. Part of a larger group that stopped down at the station. From Croatia. The mother superior gave them all bread and a medal. The Gypsies are left over, left over from a world that’s sick of itself. They
wanted to sing, but the mother superior didn’t want any singing, and so they didn’t sing, and they packed the bread in their cart, and drove off …” He said: “And then I went through the village. But the weather, as the teacher likes to say, is stupid. The newborn are dying all over the place. Emergency slaughterings are undertaken every day. I’ve heard the butcher giving out orders nonstop. His wooden clogs against the aluminum tub of blood. The glistening of the calf’s intestines as he pulled them out. The warm, sweet smell of them! You know, they still brain them here, they refuse to shoot them, the way they do everywhere else. One man grabs hold of the ears and tail, the other clubs it down. I expect you’re familiar with the sound of an animal collapsing onto the cement floor of an abattoir. The mountains are suddenly so near, you think you’ll hit your brains against them. The whole village is littered with tufts of hair and scraps of hide. I tell them to tidy them away, and shovel snow over the puddles of blood, but who listens to me. In the countryside, the paths are always sodden with blood. I went into the butcher’s and told him he should get his apprentice to sweep the hair away from the entrance to the slaughterhouse, and cover over the bloodstains, and then I didn’t leave till the fellow had swept and covered it. The butcher said there was going to be a big lavish affair in the next village because of the farmer’s dead wife, they had come and placed orders with him. And that was why he had been doing some fresh killing. He needs to supply them tonight.” They had a sledload of meat to deliver to the community center in O.

We had reached the place where the Klamm suddenly opens out. It was a long way round, but Strauch was dead set on
going there. I had read him a sentence from my Henry James book, and he interpreted it in the most wonderful way, this incomprehensible, to me incomprehensible sentence, which kept me awake all night (I have to say, I was never in all my life afflicted with this restlessness, I had gone down from my room into the public bar, and then walked out of the house into the cold air, into the “graveyard chill,” I wandered into the ravine, I had thrown a jacket over my nightshirt, slipped into my trousers, and was walking “into the unconsciousness of things”; but I am unable to explain any of it, I can’t write anything down that happened, neither of that nor of anything else)—when the painter interpreted this Henry James sentence to me, and the Klamm lay in front of us, the snowed-in approach to the Klamm, he stopped suddenly and told me to stand two paces behind him. He didn’t turn to face me, even though he suddenly started talking to me. “You see,” he said, “this tree comes on and says the line I told it to say, an incomprehensible line of poetry, a line that will turn the world on its head, a so-called line against God, you understand me! This tree walks on from the left, the cloud comes on from the right, the cloud with its softer voice. I view myself as the creator of this afternoon drama, this tragedy! This comedy! Now listen, the music has come in right on cue. The music plays on the difference between my words and all others. Listen, the instruments are perfecting it, my tragedy, my comedy, the instruments, all the high-pitched and low-pitched instruments, music is the only mistress of the double killing-ground, the only mistress of the double pain, the only mistress of the double forbearance … Music, you hear me … language approaches music, but language hasn’t the strength to circumvent music, it has to directly approach music, language is nothing but weakness, the language
of nature as much as the
language of the darkness of nature
, as the language of the depth of leave-taking … You hear me: I was
in
this music, I
am
in this music, I am made of this language, I am contained in the quiet poetry of this afternoon … Do you see
my theater?
Do you see the theater of apprehension? The theater of God’s un-self-sufficiency? What God?” He turned to me and said: “God is a cosmic embarrassment! An immense embarrassment of the stars! But,” he said, and set his index finger against his mouth: “let’s not talk about that. I want the tree to finish its lines, I want the stream to finish its lines, I want the sky to finish its lines, and I want Hell to master the rationale of its fires, to the very end. I want these fires, you must know. I want these shadows, I want these shadows to kill … to kill each and every thing … I have compassion with this tragedy, with this comedy, I have
no
compassion with this tragedy, this comedy, this self-invented tragicomedy, with these self-invented shadows, with these torments of shadows, with these shadow torments, with this endless sadness …” He said: “Such a spectacle is a product of absurdity, of divine absurdity, such a spectacle, you see, you must know, is nothing but laughter … And now listen,” said the painter, “the world arises into the air from its own dark, just as air, just as the water in the air, the relation between the air and the other air … Yes,” said Strauch, “and now I’m going to clap my hands, quite simply clap my hands, I’m going to clap my hands and bang my head against the most sensitive point of the universe, and the whole thing was just a specter, just a specter of a ghost, you understand, just a ghostly specter.” We walked into the village. He said: “Sometimes exhaustion comes into my head like a self-dispersed theater, like something endlessly musical-demoniacal, and destroys me. It
destroys me on the way to inability to be myself, on the way to the smallest, most remorseful tranquillity in my memory, and my ravaged heart.” He said: “For me it might have been enough simply to say, tree, forest, rock, air, earth; but for you, and for the world around, that’s not enough … You suddenly find yourself manufacturing a trauma, a drama, a comedy, a worm’s cast of a comedy … And sometimes nature will wring one’s neck,
nature without simplicity
, and then you see: the endless complications of terrible nature. Then, finally, everything is incomprehensible, ever more incomprehensible! All I had wanted to say was: ‘Here comes the tree …’ Nothing more. ‘The air is learning its lines …’ Nothing more. Come on, let’s go, and let’s not be scared anymore.”

“The depredations of the forest are spoiling the balance of nature,” he said, as we were standing by the edge of the larch wood, there where you can plummet down vertically into the river, opposite the “sarcophagus.” “If these human assaults continue in their present exploitative fashion for another hundred years or so, then wherever we look in the world, we will only see these ghastly scenes of dying forests.” He said: “Each time I look at it, this landscape looks uglier to me. It’s ugly and menacing and full of wicked memory particles, a landscape that can really dismember a man. With its glooms and its savage herds and its accumulated devastation where the workers are being put upon. Unexceptionally malignant ravines, cracks, stains, disheveled shrubs, split trunks. All hostile. And regardless. On top of everything else, infested with the stink of cellulose. The birds fly up completely helplessly in summer, not knowing where they’re going, and then
there’s the darkness of the actual rock face: you’d think you were suffocating. Nowhere is the cold so great, nowhere is the heat so unbearable. This thinking that it’s all death, you know, this gloom, the monstrously generic nature of it all … without question, death is the limitless, the most successful moment is death … All future hope is in death.” Then: “What is the mass that misunderstands death? What are the crowds that foolishly antagonize it? The crowd is always there, and moves into itself, into its restricted districts …” He went into the larch wood, and told me to go on ahead of him. “I have often seen policemen gallop up on tall horses, and rain blows down on the masses: it’s a recurring image: the way they lash out at unprotected heads with clubs and rifle butts. The way the crowd closes ranks, shows first horror, then fight. How, only lately dominated by the police, they now dominate the police, who are still raining blows on them, you understand … The crowd is a phenomenon, the phenomenon of the man in the crowd has always fascinated me. The crowd exerts a morbid pressure on the individual to want to join it, to have to join it, you know … Disgust at being a part of it, disgust at not being a part of it. Now it’s the one form of disgust, now it’s the other … But people are always the crowd, always the mass. Every individual is the crowd and the mass, even the one who’s pinned between tall cliffs, who’ll never get out from between them, who’ll always remain high up and out of it … But this mass man, this crowd man, you know … It’s extraordinary to be part of a crowd! To know that that’s what you are: part of a crowd!” He said: “Shouldn’t we go to the curling arena? The people here have three passions: curling and whoring and playing cards. Did you understand the point of the game yesterday? You were freezing. You should have worn a thicker scarf.
Don’t you have a proper woolen scarf?” He stomped over to a pile of brushwood, and motioned to me to follow him. “Look!” he said, and he lifted up the brushwood. There lay four or five deer, pressed together, frozen, with glazed eyes. “You’ll find refuges like this all over the place, they are always death traps when it’s as cold as it is this year,” said the painter. And I remembered the time when spring came, and I dragged together lots of deer carcasses with my brother in the great forests, and buried them. Often they were half eaten by foxes, and only their heads and skeletons were left.

Today there was a letter from the landlord. Probably his letter was to confirm the receipt of the money that the landlady, on the insistence of her lover, the knacker, had sent him, I thought. Then I went around a long time with this letter, and kept wondering what would happen if I opened it and read it. But that would be a crime. So I didn’t do it. The landlord’s handwriting made me think about him and his life a lot. I felt that everything that went on in this person is doomed to be unhappy. And I can imagine him getting driven ever deeper into his sadness and his hopelessness, like a boat with an unconscious man in it, being pushed by the current ever nearer to the brink … At first I was unable to account for the way the knacker supported the landlord, by almost forcing the landlady to send the money he asked for, and how he keeps on supporting the landlord, even though the landlady is his mistress … Now I probably know why, though I’m not able to express it. I keep hearing how nicely the prisoners are doing in prison, but they can’t be doing so nicely that they don’t find it a terrible affliction, wherever they are and whatever they’re there for and under whatever the circumstances
are, to be locked up … That handwriting shows you the whole misery of that condition, you can see it right away … I kept looking at the handwriting, and went round and round the hay barn. I wonder whether the landlord has another request now? I thought. What will he have to write to her about? He surely can’t know what she thinks about him, and how she opposes him, acts against his interests, quite apart from her unfaithfulness, which he knows about. And about the knacker too. It’s a terrible situation. In my agitation I go to the cemetery, to look for the grave of the workman whom the landlord killed. I walk up and down, and then I’m standing in front of a snowy mound, with a cross stuck in the earth. But no name. Nothing. That’s surely it, I think. I stand there and I feel like crying. In fact, I did cry. And then I quickly went into the chapel, but it was so cold in there, and so stupidly quiet, that I could get no peace, and I went out into the cemetery again. Roofs all round. Houses, with smoke pouring out of them. I felt utterly miserable. Then I ran into the knacker, coming over with his cramp-irons and shovel from the rectory, walking through the graves toward me. He must have seen me. What was I doing there; it wasn’t usual to find a person in the cemetery at this time. I wasn’t doing anything, I said. Nothing at all. I was bothered. I couldn’t ask him whether that mound was where the workman was lying. “No,” I said, “I’m not doing anything.” I must have struck him as very disturbed. I was disturbed. Then with the letter in my hand, I ran to the inn, and gave it to the landlady.