Frost: A Novel (27 page)

That night, because I couldn’t sleep, because I was thinking about myself, and could find nothing to deflect my thoughts, I got up and went over to the window to look outside. But I could see nothing. It felt unbearable in the room, so I slipped on some clothes and shut the door behind me and went downstairs. There was a dim light on in the hall. I thought I might step outside, and perhaps walk up and down the street a ways. A long time ago, when I was a child, I had often woken up in the middle of the night and gone for a little walk, along a pier, through a piece of forest, and felt afraid; but it was me who was responsible for that fear, and that was the state I wanted to induce this time as well; maybe the larch wood? I thought. But as I made to open the front door, I saw that it wasn’t locked, the bolt hadn’t been thrown, and then I spotted a light coming from the public bar onto the opposite wall; there was a light on in the public bar, maybe someone had heard me, but I couldn’t think who would be in the public bar at this hour; I didn’t know what time it was, but it seemed late enough for me to assume that everyone would be in their beds. To begin with, I didn’t want to go in the public bar, then I gave myself a little talking-to, and I opened the door. There in the corner, next to the bar, in the place where I myself liked to sit, I saw the knacker and the landlady sitting
together. It looked as though they were having an argument, but I wasn’t taken in by that, in fact they had just slept together, as I could tell by looking at their rumpled clothes, and their faces, which were ashen and drained. On the table stood some half-empty beer glasses and scraps of bread. The knacker’s boots were on the table. He must have pulled them off when they lay down on the bench together, I thought. The landlady was disheveled. All this I could see at a glance. I didn’t want to linger there, but the knacker asked me to sit down with them. They had been having a conversation about the situation with the inn, he lied, and took his boots off the table, and slipped them on, and the landlady sat up straight and picked up one of the glasses, and drank some beer. Sometimes you just wanted to stay up all night, said the knacker, at night you had wonderful ideas sometimes, and conversation was easier as well. Would I like a glass of beer, he asked. I sat down at the table. It was cool in the public bar, and I suddenly felt chilly. The knacker stood up and drew me a pint. He set it down on the table, and sat down again himself. The landlady was thinking of selling the inn, said the knacker, while her husband, who, as the painter would probably have told me, was in prison, was opposed to the idea. The landlady wanted to leave the region altogether, where, not least on account of her husband, she was not well-liked. Her children didn’t have an easy time of it either. If it was up to her, she wouldn’t stay there a day longer than she had to, and she wouldn’t mind if she never saw the place again. But that, apart from the fact that the landlord is opposed and always will be opposed to the idea, was “unlikely,” said the knacker, and apart from that it was hard to sell
such an inn
. It had nothing appealing about it, and wasn’t in good condition either. “Quite apart from its location,” said the knacker. “The
landlady is chiefly concerned with the future for her children, which looks pretty bleak in Weng. And above all she’s afraid of her husband returning from prison, and picking up his life where he left off, where he had to leave off.” He had written her that he had every chance of being released in the next couple of months, “for good conduct,” and that he would then “straighten out” the inn. The family, the knacker said, was in a rather wretched way; no one understood the others. Nor was the landlady the sort of woman her husband needed. She would be destroyed by such a man. She was continually sending him food parcels, the knacker said, and he didn’t even thank her for them properly. “But you have to help someone like that, who’s been taken out of society, and held up to all as a criminal, don’t you?” he said. Yes, I said, you had to help someone like that, never mind what he’d done, what his present situation was, what he had on his conscience, and even what he might have done with you or to you. You always had to help prisoners. Not point your finger at them, but help them. You always knew what you could do to help. The landlady had sent her husband woolen socks, for instance. But “she’s as certain as she can be of anything that once her husband is released and comes home, he’ll do something awful to her. He’s going to kill her,” said the knacker, “not least because he knows that she gave evidence against him that landed him in prison.” Anyway, once the power plant was up and running, and no more construction workers came to eat and drink, they might as well shut up shop, because the locals don’t come. Previously, wedding parties and funeral feasts had been held here, as in other inns in the locality, but all that was finished now. Not one farmer came here anymore, and not their sons either, who, as was understood, weren’t so put off by “that kind of thing.” “When the
power plant’s finished, we’ll be finished here as well,” the landlady said. But the landlord didn’t want to go. “It’s where he’s from,” she said. She’d like to chuck the trade altogether, and maybe move to the city. She would make her way there. You could always find a job if you looked. There was more work available than ever. She had never felt at home in the valley. She had come unwillingly in the first place, and then only because she had a bun in the oven. All of which wasn’t quite true, but it sounded persuasive enough, and I listened attentively. The knacker said: “In the city, a woman can find a type of light work that doesn’t take it out of her so much. A factory job, for instance. Something like the cellulose factory in the valley, where the women don’t ‘overdo it,’ and get decent enough wages. You can keep a couple of children on the money.” Anyway, she was over the worst with the children, and before long, one or other of the girls would find herself a husband. Everything would be fairly straightforward, without the girls’ father. And with that they got to the sentence that, once the landlady had said it, froze the atmosphere, the sentence: “Oh, if only he weren’t around anymore.” The knacker tried to draw attention away from the horror, and said: “They’ve introduced a bonus system at the cellulose factory”—and had I heard anything about it. But he could see I hadn’t followed him. In the end, he said: “It’s pretty hard for a woman to have to live with a man who’s inclined the way the landlord is.” Yes, it was hard, I said. The landlady now got up and went into the kitchen, and came out with a big cake she had baked, that was still warm. “I’ll cut it right away,” she said, “this is an occasion.” And she cut the cake and said we should each take as much of it as we wanted. “It’s better with raisins,” she said. In the evening, she had been very tired, after washing up she had had to sit down
for a while, and during that time she must have dropped off, but only for a little while, ten or fifteen minutes, then her daughters had woken her, and she had had to go round the back of the inn to take a look at a snowman they had built. But the snowman had given her a fright, and she had run back inside. “The girls didn’t understand why I got such a fright,” the landlady said, “but it was a terrifying snowman. The girls didn’t know what they were doing.” Then there had suddenly been some custom, a couple of workmen had come in, already drunk, who “had poured as much beer into them as they still had room for,” then the policeman had shown up and scared them off, but then some others had come, and a couple of strangers after midnight, it was one o’clock “when the last of them was gone.” And then she suddenly felt more awake than she had all evening. And so she and the knacker had decided not to go to bed at all, but to sit up in the public bar till morning. “Yes,” I said, “it can be a helpful thing to spend a sleepless night.” And with that I stood up, and they said they would stay sitting there, as they’d said, until morning, and I went up to my room and fell asleep immediately.

Twentieth Day

I get up at six, as I am used to doing, and light the stove. I always prepare the fire the night before. It’s still dark, but light enough to wash. The cold water is very invigorating, and I feel like taking a walk right away, into the village and back, or up to the church and back, or only as far as the larch
wood. But if I did, I know I would wake everyone in the building. The landlady would forbid it. So I sit at the window and look out, and see nothing but a tree trunk and the snow and in the snow the tracks of deer and dogs and chickens, and I read my Henry James, which is good distraction for me. Then, when it’s time for breakfast, I head downstairs to the public bar, and wait for the painter so that he doesn’t have to eat breakfast by himself. I am always hungry in the mornings. The landlady runs back and forth and hurries her girls off to school. When they’ve gone, the engineer and the knacker, who both stay on the second floor, leave the inn. Often guests appear by eight whose arrival I missed the night before, arriving late and moving off early, tramps and traders and other restless individuals, who’ve turned in for a night’s sleep; usually they’re badly dressed, wearing some cheap suit material, with no mittens, often they only have summer shoes, but some others pay with big notes and order up a breakfast I would never dare to for myself, with eggs and bacon, and they even order a glass of wine to go with it, and they pull newspapers out of their pockets, and lean back, and look every inch the well-informed citizen. Sometimes I see women too, yesterday for instance, relatives of people in the village, who can’t stay over with them, because their relatives don’t have enough beds for them, and they go out right away on an empty stomach, into the village, where their breakfast will be waiting for them.

After breakfast, I go out to the village with the painter, we buy something, and we stand around in the square, and decide where we’ll take our walk later in the morning, and where in the afternoon: “Shall we go up to the church?” I say,
and the painter says: “The church? But we went there only yesterday.” Then I say: “Let’s go to the larch wood then!”—“The larch wood?” he says. “But we were in the larch wood only yesterday.”—“Then why don’t we go down the ravine. Or to the station, even!”—“Yes, let’s go down to the station,” the painter says then. “The station is the only place there’s any point in going to, because they sell newspapers there. If any place has any point to it, if there’s any point to anything. Is there any point?” Then we’re standing in front of the cobbler’s window, and looking in, and thinking how cheap the shoes are here. “But they’re not worth much,” says the painter. “See, they’re not even real leather!” Then we go over to the village hall, where the painter is greeted nicely. “Everyone knows me here,” he says. “And they’re nice to me because they’re hoping for further sums of money from me. But they’re not getting any more money from me. The vicar maybe, but not the parish. They don’t even put up new public benches.” The old benches are worn out, but the community won’t put up new ones. Then we’re between the two oldest buildings, the schoolhouse and the butcher’s shop, and looking down the valley: “See,” says the painter, “this is where you have the worst ugliness in front of you. Look at those railwaymen’s cottages! Look at the power plant! Look at the cellulose factory! Look at the people running around this way and that, like vermin! Look, there’s the doctor’s house. The architect’s house. The brewery! The railway station. Look!” He’s tired. He says: “Do you know what’s on the lunch menu? No?” And: “You should have seen me on these mountains ten years ago. I was so limber. Up that one! Up that one! See that white speck up there, right at the top, that’s a chapel, I climbed up past that chapel all on my own, over to the Hochkönig, that range you can’t see from here. But from
the distiller’s house on fine days, then you can see all the jags of those limestone peaks.”

We eat lunch together. Then the painter goes for a little nap, and I take out my Henry James. I often read for several pages, without understanding what I’ve read. Then I read them again, and see that what I read was good. It’s all about unhappy people. I shut the book and go over to the window and make notes, I write down whatever comes into my head in whatever way, then I hear the painter emerge from his room downstairs, and call me. I go down, and before long we’re on the way to the larch wood, or the church, or already deep in the ravine. The painter talks, and I listen. I understand little of what he says, often he speaks too softly, as if talking to himself, or else I don’t understand it because it doesn’t seem coherent, or else because I’m too stupid. How am I to understand a sentence like this one: “The earth might be clear, I feel myself stuck between its hinges, without regard to myself, you understand!” Many times he stopped, because what he said had exhausted him. From time to time he asked me something. For example: “How do you find boredom? What do you think of the state? What’s the difference between me and you? Is it scale? Will you be staying here long? Is there a difference between you and me? Do you believe in the miracles of mathematics? What do you do when you go to your room? Do your parents have a large garden? What plants grow in it? Is it cold where you live? What do you do in the evenings? Is your father a reader? How can you think of contradicting me? Oh, I know you didn’t mean to contradict me! Do you pay as much for a glass of milk as I do? Are you surprised the landlady didn’t ask you where I was
yesterday? How often do you think I’ve been to Weng? Did your father say that? And you like the city? This book? Your sister, you say? Not the theater? And the earth, you think, will remain undiscovered? Are you afraid? No? Yes? Humanity? An idea?”

T
HE
S
TORY OF THE
D
EAD
W
OODCUTTER

He says: “That grisly experience, you know, I wanted to tell you about it last night, but you were already gone. The business with the dead man. Now, remember, I’m taking the shortcut. I walk for some time. I’m in a fairly good mood. I stop by the fence. I get to the tree, and I see a couple of people turning to look at me, and I see them just as I turn round myself; maybe I turned and saw them because I felt them turning to look at me. But it seemed odd to me that I didn’t notice them pass me. Because they must have passed me, otherwise they couldn’t have found themselves at the spot where I saw them when I turned round. Do you follow? I must have been lost in thought when I passed them, quite oblivious to their being there. They were strangers. It seemed to me, not well equipped. Not for this type of country. Probably trippers from somewhere. Maybe they had come up from the city. Their jackets were city jackets. They seemed very ‘cultured,’ that was my impression. Anyway, I started to wonder about those people, and then I thought whether I should take the ravine, or the road, that is, if I was going as far as the road. No, I’m not going to turn back here, I said to myself, I’ll take the next shortcut, which leads down from the other side of the larch wood to the river, and I walk at a fast pace, and come out behind the station. I intended to go to the
café. First of all, though, I think, I’ll go to the station and pick up the newspapers. Dusk was falling. I walk up to the bridge, and see this man in big boots, you know, one of those woodcutters, who are everywhere to be found at this time of year, with their shining boots and their tight leather caps on their heads, their woolen mittens, and the terrible incessant cracking of whips. One of those knickerbocker types with a horse-drawn sleigh, laden with fir logs. In the first week, they drag them down the mountain streams, and in the next, they get them to the station, or to the sawmill, or to neighbors. I look across to him and am just thinking along the lines I told you about just now when he asks me the time: ‘Half past four,’ I say. I still see him clearly before me: a young face, but already chewed up, pale, streaked with the cold. I ask him where he’s from, where he’s going, and he tells me. He’s from the shady side, he says. I say: ‘Aha, from the shady side,’ and I make to go on. And in the way that you promptly forget some people that you meet, I promptly forgot all about him. I want to get over to the station quickly, and all at once—I’m at the end of the bridge now—I hear a sound I can’t describe to you; but the sound is such that I find myself running back in the direction of the sound, and I see this man I was just now talking to, this young lumberjack, only now he’s lying under his sleigh: he moves his hands a couple of times, his legs are already stiff. Dead. Now people start arriving, from the railwaymen’s cottages, from the station, from down in the village, before long there are lots of people clustered round him. I bend down to him, and I see he really is dead. He already has that color in his face, yellow, yellow-black, and rigor mortis. On the ground I spot a pool of blood; the people want to drag the sleigh out of the way, but I stop them, because you’re not supposed to tamper with anything
at the scene of an accident: ‘Get back!’ I say, and I brandish my stick at them. The horses were quite calm. I see the boots gleaming, because of course the lamp is swaying over the dead man. You know, just a moment ago I was talking to him … ‘Half past four’ … Then a doctor came. They carried the dead man into the village a ways, and laid him on a garden wall. Then took him into the house. Went back to the sleigh to pull it off the bridge, and into the village. Then they spent a long time standing around the pool of blood, as the temperature fell. On the river, you know, in the middle of the bridge … When I came back, with my newspapers under my arm, they were still standing around the pool of blood. He had skidded, and the sleigh had run him over and crushed his thorax. I couldn’t get rid of the smell, the smell of death. And you know, by the time I was back up through the larch wood again, at eight o’clock or half past, under the full moon, I saw those people again that I saw on my way down to the station earlier. They were in the same place. When I looked across at them, they were laughing to themselves, as if they were cold. It felt eerie. Especially after the episode with the dead man. I had to go a long way round, so as not to encounter those people. Terrible people, you know, in their city clothes, and stubbornly continuing to laugh.”