Frost: A Novel (28 page)

It starts to get dark at three o’clock already. The light leaves the east, and moves across the sky, till it goes out there too. Turns black almost. In the ravine, the painter often starts to skip. I notice canine qualities in him. For example: he sometimes turns his head like a big dog whom his master has told to sit. Twice I spent an afternoon on my own, went to the village, then down to the station, and around the cellulose factory.
I tried to find the shortcut in the dark, but didn’t manage, and had to retrace my steps up the road. I was relieved to see the first lights, and then to find myself back in the village. On the way to the inn, I felt scared. I don’t know what of, suddenly there were people standing in the road, walking up to me, but they didn’t address me. The previous afternoon, which I had again spent alone, because the painter had stayed up in his room—“I want to try to write something!”—I ran into the landlady. Walked with her up to the hay barn. On the subject of the painter, she said she had known him “to dress with more elegance before.” She wanted to know whether I didn’t find anything curious about “artist Strauch.” “No,” I said, “he doesn’t strike me as being at all curious. How come?” She didn’t say anything, and walked over to the farm where she got milk. Supper doesn’t take long, it has to be bolted down before it gets cold. Also because they’re waiting in the kitchen, to be able to wash up the dirty plates and cutlery. During supper, I think over everything that happened to me today. I also think about how I ought to write to the assistant. But there’s nothing more difficult than that. I’m unable to express myself as I would like, in my head everything looks different from how it is on paper. On paper, it’s all so dead. I run up to my room, and write down this and that, but it’s as though I were killing it all in writing it down. There’s nothing left of it.

“Terminal illnesses compel their carriers to acknowledge them. I have had many occasions to observe this for myself,” says the painter, “and the medical-scientific literature bears me out. The terminally ill patient enters his terminal illness, first with astonishment, then with meekness. A terminal illness
gives the sufferer the illusion of being a world unto himself. Terminally ill patients fall for this deception, and thenceforth live in the deception, live in their terminal illness, in the illusory world of the terminal illness, and no longer in the world of reality.” The illusory world of a terminal illness and the world of reality were contrary notions. The terminal patient no longer trusted the real world, but entered the illusory world of his terminal illness. Terminal illnesses “are rhythmic religious conveniences. People enter them as they might enter an unfamiliar garden. You know, in terminal illnesses there is often a protracted process, a sort of institutionalized terminal feeling in the patient—and then, suddenly, dramatically,
there is death
. Terminal illnesses are like exotic landscapes. An internal process of the inner egoist.” He says: “There are very eccentric valleys here, and these valleys contain manor houses and castles. You visit these manor houses and castles, and you tell at a glance: the world you come from has no business here. You have to picture it to yourself as profoundly unreal,
like the deepest reality
. Doors open on people sitting in exquisite costumes, people enthroned, as if cut out of an imaginary painting, and when you make a move toward them, to touch them perhaps, they suddenly come to life. If you’re addressed by one of them, you have the sense of never having heard a human voice before, never a language, having always been ignorant of the art of listening to someone speaking, of saying a word or two yourself, basically you don’t know the first thing about words. And you don’t speak, you are just astonished, and you listen: everything is made useful and conformable, there are no errors, chance and evil are eliminated. Simplicity like a clear blue sky arches above one’s thoughts. Nor is there anything fantastic, even though everything is sprung from the
imagination. Simple wealth, human warmth without a trace of criminality. Of dispute. Continual ongoing closed season. Cool reason and well-situated concepts and heart. Solid faces, built to last. The air lucid with thought, and competence exclaims: ‘My God.’ Gradually the turns of phrase and expressions reach a climax, the cleverness giving you pause. Laws apply here, intellect and character are pleasantly conjoined. Logic is converted to music. Old age is suddenly capable of beauty, youth feels like a row of foothills. The unfathomable truth lies on the bottom.”

Twenty-first Day

His sentences are oar strokes that would propel him forward if it weren’t for the powerful current. Sometimes he pauses, falls silent and listens, as though to check whether his present situation might not have been replaced by its successor. “It’s impossible to direct anything.” Things still in the future and the distant past all pull on one string with him, sometimes ten times in the space of a single sentence. He is a man who thinks continually of great losses, without any detachment. The sea surfaces in him, and in the sea is a boulder, part of an enormous sunken city, the end of an unanticipated story, far in the past. Death knots his net … Colors that are nothing but extrusions of flesh narcotize him philosophically … The adducing of extremes, so as to be able to spit them out. Tensions between eerie subaquatic scenes. The word “yoke” occurs frequently. The word “true”—but also “untrue” and
“unreal.” The word “ear of corn” may acquire the same meaning as “the whole of our welfare state.” They are his eyes that speak, they enact his thought, they pitch wildness and quiet alternately at the disquiet of others. The painter is such an oddity, I think, that no one understands him. Not a type. Always reliant on himself, and always rejecting everything coming at him, he has taken advantage to excess of all possibilities. To look at him is to look at the millennia. “Mountains, you know, can serve as telescopes, through which one can see into the future.” Or “inhumanly human.” He is able to irritate people, where there are no people. To suppress effervescence, where there is no effervescence. “Isn’t that an animal speaking? Am I not vermin?” Everything purposes the acceleration of his decay. Everything indicates a decisive childhood which was soon injured, a “stung nerve center,” an organically fertile double significance of insanity.

I met the painter in the company of the policeman. When I said I felt like a walk in the ravine, and the painter felt like accompanying me, the policeman took his leave. He stamped through the cornfield toward the curling rink, where children were playing. The policeman was telling the painter that at Wagner’s pub the previous night there had been a fistfight between locals and some showmen. The showmen had had a lot to drink, and not wanted to pay, they had tried to slip out through the back door, but were caught and finally overpowered. The policeman, who had happened to be at Wagner’s at the time, threatened them with his gun, and then they allowed themselves to be captured. One of the showmen managed to escape in the direction of the larch wood. Another was found near the pond. In the course of the fight,
a couple of farmers’ boys had received head injuries, and the policeman had been kicked in the stomach, which still hurt. Now the showmen were sitting in the lockup, and they will be brought to trial. For stiffing the barman, and several counts of grievous bodily harm. During the burial, they had had to take the cobbler’s apprentice to the hospital. He had been floored by a punch. The doctor, who had traveled up to the village to see to the injured, diagnosed a serious concussion, with fracture of the skull, and spinal injuries. No mention of any possible paralysis, thank God.

It had all started with singing and dancing, said the painter. Then there had been a sudden exodus from the bar, and the farmers’ boys had only needed to look at one another to understand “what was afoot.” They left by all the different exits, to block off the escape routes for the showmen. “The showmen have parked their trailers down outside the railway station,” said the painter. The police sealed and confiscated the trailers. They wanted to go down to Carinthia, where they came from. Deformed women and deformed animals were their principal objects of display. Cows with six legs, or two tails, of the sort you got sometimes. “That always brings in the public,” said the painter. “A woman with two noses, irresistible!” Now the animals and the women have to be looked after at the public expense, because the showmen are behind bars and are therefore unable to look after them. Also, fires needed to be lit in front of the trailers, to keep the women and animals from freezing to death. The trailers were under strict guard, because it was feared the escaped showmen might try to move them. The showmen had gone to Wagner’s with the explicit intention of not paying their tab.
At first they had bragged about the money they all claimed to have in their pockets. Some of the farmers’ boys had been under the impression that they had seen the showmen with money. The policeman, however, as he had said, had been on to them from the start, and with rather more than the usual suspicion one perforce entertains of showmen and artists and people like that. He had had his eye on them the whole time, even while they were dancing and singing, but not seen any grounds to intervene. Not until they left the bar. “Lucky,” the policeman said, “that the farmers’ boys didn’t pull their knives. Otherwise there could have been a massacre.” But as it was there had only been fists and boots, whereas stabbings were very often fatal. “Every one of the farmers’ boys has been involved in a stabbing before now. It was a miracle that none of them pulled their knives. Maybe they thought they could polish off the showmen without recourse to knives.” And they were proved right. “The one who comes out of it worst in the end is Wagner, the landlord,” said the painter. “The showmen didn’t stint themselves, they ate and drank of the best, and they ordered whole rounds for other customers as well.” Wagner might confiscate their trailers, which would be “scant recompense” for his losses, and even then the police don’t think he can expect to be awarded them. He thinks, if he has the animals slaughtered, he can make up his losses. The trailers were only good for transporting hay, you couldn’t load wood on to them, they are too rickety for that. Anyway, the policeman reckons the trailers plus contents will fall to the state. They’re considering what to do with the three disfigured women, probably they will send them back to Carinthia, where they come from, tomorrow. And now of all times, when there are so many burials going on, this matter with the showmen! The policeman says they are being fed
from our inn. They shout and make noise so that they can be heard all over the village. The children go and make faces at them in the village square. “Tomorrow they’re being taken to be arraigned,” said the painter. The policeman had handcuffed one of them, the others had had to have their hands tied with clothesline. There had been a huge stir in the village. All of a sudden all the lights had come on, and “people had gawked out of the windows.” A second policeman had been sent for from the lower guard post in the village. “Now the two of them have to sleep in the passage in front of the cell,” said the painter, “though of course there’s not much hope of that, given the way the arrested showmen are drumming away on the door.”

We were already deep into the ravine when we decided to turn back. He had had a pain-filled night, said the painter. “Each time I try to do something to diminish the pain, I end up making it worse. The unendurable doesn’t really exist,” he said, “because the unendurable would have to be death, and death isn’t unendurable. Do you understand.”

T
he
S
TORY OF
T
HE
T
RAMP

In the larch wood he ran into a tramp. His first thought had been that it might be the escaped showman, but the tramp was nothing to do with that. Not at all. The painter had been startled, because he had failed to see the tramp, and tripped over him. “Like a corpse lying in the middle of the road,” says the painter. A hypothermia victim, he had thought, and taken a step back. From the man’s clothes, he could tell he wasn’t
from here. Where is he from? “Striped pants, you know, the sort that circus people wear, particularly circus directors.” Assuming the man was dead, he had tried to flip him over with his stick so that he could see his face, “because the fellow was lying facedown. It’s natural to want to see someone’s face,” said the painter. But no sooner had he applied the stick to the “dead man,” than he had emitted a scream and leaped to his feet. “Oh,” the tramp is said to have said, “I was just playing dead, I wanted to see what happened when someone comes across somebody else, lying flat on his front like a dead man, in the road, in the middle of the forest and the middle of winter.” With those words, the tramp had got up, and brushed down his pants. “If you think I’m the escaped showman, you’re mistaken, I have nothing to do with those showmen. You don’t have to worry about that. Let’s shake!” He held his hand out to the painter, and introduced himself. “He gave me such a complicated name that I was unable to remember it,” said the painter. “Then he buttoned up his coat, which must have come undone. A dignified but completely reduced appearance,” said the painter. “It could just as easily have been a trap, I mean, God knows whom I could have encountered.” That was no one’s idea of a joke, the painter had said, one did not simply play dead, that was a prank, a silly prank of the sort teenagers might indulge in, to give their parents a fright. “Just imagine if the shock had given me a heart attack!”—“Then I would have run off,” the tramp is said to have replied. Anyone could have a heart attack at any time. “Yes. Of course.”—“No involvement from any other party would have been suspected,” the tramp is supposed to have said. “Of course not,” the painter. In any case the road was full of tracks, who would have taken the trouble to trace all the different footwear. “No, of course not.
If you should happen to be in financial straits,” the painter is supposed to have said, “then I must point out to you that I have no money. I am a poor man, and my situation is miserable.”—“Oh,” the tramp is supposed to have replied, “I’ve got enough money.” He was amazed that the painter should take him for a robber, was it perhaps the fault of the circus pants he was wearing. “Oh, no,” the painter is supposed to have said, “I’m an artist myself.”—“It’s remarkable how little understanding is displayed by people one would expect to have a lot of understanding,” the tramp is supposed to have said. Besides, he did not dislike the painter. “When I heard someone approaching, I lay down in the road. It was just an experiment.”—“An experiment,” the painter is supposed to have said again. “Yes, an experiment. And what happened is exactly what I thought would happen. I listened to every step you took. The way you walk, it’s as though you were on deer hooves,” the tramp said. “I had a fantastic image of you in my head as you approached. A completely fantastic image of you!” His pronunciation was a little northern, it might be that he was from Holstein or Hamburg. “A deer is coming to present itself to me,” he said, and: “That was pure poetry.” The painter: “I understand.” What profession did the tramp pursue, inquired the painter. “I am the owner of a movable theater,” he is supposed to have replied. “The way you’re dressed, one would have thought you’d just come from some rather dubious society piece,” the painter is supposed to have said. “You’re not a million miles out there,” the tramp: “I appeared in this costume three hundred times in Frankfurt am Main. Till I could stand it no longer, and ran away. You should try playing the same part in a play three hundred times, and a pretty boring play at that, a so-called George Bernard Shaw play, and you’ll go crazy too.” But he was
surely a man who could live by his jokes. “Oh, I should say so too. I have always lived by my jokes.”—“And how do you propose to continue now? Since, as I am forced to assume, you are pretty much at loose ends, drifting here and there? How do you mean to continue?”—“I never asked myself that,” the tramp is said to have answered. Since he, the tramp, the theater manager, the director of a so-called movable theater, had no children, it wasn’t so very difficult to live “unto the day.” But was that entirely realistic, said the painter. Men of his (the tramp’s) type had freedom, disrepute, and humor written in their faces. “I am said to have picked up a few magic tricks from my father,” the tramp is supposed to have said, “that everyone likes. For instance how to make my head disappear. It’s very easy.” He could do a demonstration, “if the gentleman cared to see,” and the painter did care, and the tramp duly made his head disappear. “The man only extended as far as his Adam’s apple. What I say is true. It may strike you as thoroughly implausible, but it’s as true as the fact that I’m standing in front of you now. The whole appearance of that tramp … And just imagine this whole scene taking place in the middle of the larch wood, where we take the fork down into the ravine …” Then, in a trice, the tramp’s head was back in its original place. “That’s just a simple trick, making my head disappear,” said the tramp, “what’s harder is playing ball with your own legs.” Of course the painter wanted to see that magic trick as well. And suddenly the tramp’s legs came down from the sky, and he hunkered down on the ground and played ball with them, kids’ ball games. While he was playing, he said: “I’ll stop right away if you feel scared.” The painter could feel a shiver, but he still said: “No, no, I’m not scared.” He was, as you say, astounded by what was put on for him. “I have never seen such consummate
magic tricks,” he said. “Now I’m too bored to go on,” the tramp is supposed to have said, and he stopped. “The thing with the head was as baffling to me as the other one, with the legs,” the painter said, “can you imagine it? Of course, as with everything, there must be some sort of knack to it!” All Paris had lain at the tramp’s feet, and if he felt like it, it would lie at his feet again, only he didn’t feel like having Paris lying at his feet again. “I’m bored.” In London he had been presented to the queen. If the gentleman would like it, he would be happy to give him the address of his movable theater. “It’s small, but exquisite,” he is supposed to have said, “and it can go into action anywhere you require.” It was the most exquisite of theaters. The most exquisite theater in the world. But one day he was fed up with magic tricks—“it’s so easy to get fed up with magic tricks”—and had turned instead to pure, true art, the sort of art that isn’t dependent on magic tricks. Now, he was sure the gentleman would love to know which was harder, to perform magic tricks of the sort he had just performed, and which were unquestionably among the best in the world, or else to act in straight theater, to put over a true art form, then, as exemplified by the theater, an art without tricks, as for instance, “playing King Lear.” They were both equally difficult, one was harder than the other, but it was a better thing to act in a play than to perform tricks, he personally found acting far more satisfying, and for that reason he had magicked up his movable theater “out of thin air,” as he said. “Though, of course that too was a stunt, a sort of trick,” said the tramp. Acting, moreover, was highly intellectual, whereas performing magic tricks wasn’t intellectual at all. Only the trick itself was. “Of course it always comes down to the audience.” And he said, supposedly: “The audiences for my magic tricks are a thousand times dearer to me
than the audiences who watch me acting.” The audiences for his tricks would know right away what it was that was so astounding to them, whereas the audiences for his acting never seemed to know. “Theater audiences are invariably disappointing. Audiences for magic tricks never are.” And yet he would rather act, even though he was better suited to doing tricks. “Theater audiences don’t make me any happier than magic-trick audiences,” he said. “Audiences for magic tricks are as they are. Theater audiences are never as they are, they are always as they ought not to be, they want to be as they are not …” The audiences for magic tricks were never so stupid that they failed to realize how stupid they were, but theater audiences were, if anything, more stupid. “Most actors are so stupid they don’t even notice how stupid the audiences are. Because in general actors are even more stupid than audiences, even though an audience is infinitely stupid.” Why did he not demonstrate any more magic tricks, the painter wanted to know. “Magic tricks of themselves are not satisfying,” the tramp is supposed to have said, “but a play can be satisfying in itself.” He didn’t know, anyway, why he now preferred acting to demonstrating magic tricks. Right at the moment, he wasn’t doing one thing or the other. “But I will demonstrate my magic tricks again!” he is supposed to have said, “and Paris will lie at my feet again!” Then he supposedly asked what the quickest way down to the station was. “Go down the ravine,” the painter told him. Then: “I’d like to know at what age magic tricks of themselves are no longer satisfying.” The tramp reflected briefly and said: “That’s different in each performer’s individual case. But often the magic tricks are no longer satisfying, even before they have been mastered,” he is supposed to have said. The painter offered to accompany the tramp part of the way down the
ravine. “I know my way around here,” he is supposed to have said. “You lose your footing somewhere, and you’ll break a leg. Come with me!” Before they parted, the painter asked him: “What was it that prompted you to try that silly nonsense out on me?”—“Silly nonsense?” the tramp is supposed to have answered. “You mean, playing dead in front of you? That’s a passion of mine, that’s all.” And then he suddenly disappeared. “He was as supple as you’d expect a performer of magic tricks to be,” the painter said. “I’ve never met anyone like that, who claims to be the proprietor of a ‘movable theater.’ Or do you think I’ve made up the whole story?” I think it’s true myself.