Frost: A Novel (29 page)

Twenty-second Day

That night, I made a grisly discovery that confirms something the painter merely assumed. After the building had been in silence for several hours, I suddenly heard the knacker under my window. A guest had moved into the room next to mine, who was gone in the morning, and I thought he would have heard the noise the knacker was making outside the landlady’s window and get up, because I could hear him stirring, I could hear it through the wall. But then there was quiet in the room next to mine. I went over to the window, and I could see the knacker outside. The landlady had opened her window to let him in, and helped him get inside. Then he reached down, and hauled up the rucksack, which he had left outside in a heap of snow. I had the sense he might have a carcass
in the rucksack. The thought that he might have a carcass in his rucksack would leave me no peace, and I decided to go downstairs and listen outside the landlady’s door, and, perhaps, I thought, hear something from her conversation with the knacker that would either reinforce me in my suspicion that there might be a carcass in the rucksack, or alternatively might set my mind at rest, because there would clearly not be a carcass in the rucksack. I don’t know why I was so set on knowing. There would be nothing unusual about the knacker carrying carcasses about with him in his rucksack, it’s part of his job. I slipped into my pants and vest, and went downstairs. I had to exercise care. The painter was asleep. The new guest was asleep too. Everyone was asleep. I could hear the knacker in conversation with the landlady. He had been delayed at the crossroads, he was saying, by a certain party well known to them both from earlier times. This man had drunk away all his money, and now asked him for the train fare home. The knacker’s passing this way was a sign from heaven. “Just like that, in the middle of the night,” said the landlady. “I expect he was at the Oberwirt’s,” said the knacker. I was afraid the door might open, and they would see me standing in the doorway. The landlady said: “So he’s back in the area now!” And the knacker: “No, he won’t be back again!” The man had said he would pay him back by mail. “He’ll not pay you back!” said the landlady. “Not him. What was he doing here anyway?” He couldn’t tell her, said the knacker, it sometimes occurred to a man in the middle of the night to go back to a region with which he had had some previous association. “He’s to blame for everything,” said the landlady. “It was him who turned you know who into a criminal.” She meant her husband. “Even when they were at school together, he was working to turn him to the bad. He’d
better not show his face anywhere I can see it.” Then she suddenly asked whether the knacker had brought what he had said he was going to bring. “Yes,” he said, and behind the door I could clearly hear the smack of the carcass on the floor. “Such a beautiful dog,” said the landlady. I was appalled. She would clean it right away, she said. Then I heard the two of them go down to the kitchen together. I went straight up to my room. Was unable to sleep, though. Now I know she cooks with dogmeat, I thought. The painter always said so. And he’s right.

In the morning I wasn’t sure I might not have dreamed the whole thing with the dog’s body. But no, I really had heard what I thought I had. I shuddered to think of it, but at the same time I resolved not to tell anyone this story, which still struck me in the light of a dream. It would be grist to the painter’s mill if I told him. Even the fact that I had heard the knacker making noise outside under my window, and got up, and went over to my window; if I had told him the whole story of this nocturnal experience, and my sensations in the course of it, it would have confirmed him in much, not just his theory that the landlady had been using dog- and horsemeat in her kitchen for a long time. So the knacker takes carcasses round to her inn. Probably infected pigs too. Things have lost their power to disgust me. But I’ll be sure to look closely at the landlady’s meat dishes in future. I won’t eat minced meat in any form, or sausages, or stews; larger pieces of meat that are whole on your plate are easy to identify as pork or beef or veal. It would be a calamity if I told anyone of my observation. Presumably the landlady pays the knacker a pittance for the meat in his rucksack, but maybe, and this is
perhaps likelier, she doesn’t pay him a penny for it. She has a lover, then, who is at the same time the cheapest imaginable supplier of meat. The painter was always struck by the fact that the landlady’s butcher’s bills were so low. And this is the answer to the riddle. I must on no account tell the painter of my nocturnal experiences. Looking back on it, I was quite transformed by what I saw and heard that night. Had I ever before got up at night and gone to the window, to investigate sounds whose provenance I knew, and knew to be harmless? And then putting on clothes, and going downstairs! And eavesdropping at the bedroom door! Taking risks that only a madman would take! I really was scared of being found out, too, as I stood listening at the landlady’s door. That such things are possible in dreams, even in the dreams of otherwise sane individuals—in dreams, all things are possible—I know; but this was no dream. All morning I was agitated, and the painter detected my agitation, on the walk to the village and in the cemetery, it wasn’t his story with the tramp, those “bewildering instances of endless eccentricity” were confusing to me too, but they were not the spur—it was the story of the dog’s body. I ate nothing at all at lunch. I only drank a glass of beer, and the painter asked me if I was ill. “No,” I said, “I’m not ill.”

“One keeps descending, among the low,” said the painter, “then lower and lower, far lower than them. What I say is true: the finer traits of humans have always been repugnant to me: I have had to brush them away, I never wanted to come in contact with them. Periodically, throughout my life, I have descended into the low, squalid world. I always felt I belonged there. And so I remained there. And the low world,
you know, isn’t low, and the squalid world not squalid, at any rate the low world is never as low as the other, nor the squalid as squalid. Hence too my preference for poverty, for rejection, you must know. Because when I was poor, I was also a man who seemed to have some value to myself, even if I walked in filth, and was filthy myself … But that’s just something I say to myself …” He said: “Imagine a tree that you expect to bear fruit once again, and that disappoints you by not bearing any more fruit.” Almost all lives had been disappointing in such a way. “Wherever you look, trees that no longer bear any fruit.” The human race was the unfruitful thing, “the only unfruitful thing in the whole world. It serves no purpose. It can’t be made into anything. It can’t be eaten. It isn’t a raw material for some process outside itself.” He was a pessimist, which was something ridiculous, something finally much worse. And beyond that, more ridiculous still. “The brain says one thing, and the rest of the body says something else, and what ends up happening is something that neither the brain nor the rest of the body is happy with.” From out of himself he had gone into the world, and been through the world back to himself. “It’s in myself, as I know, because it’s deeper than the world.” The knack of switching himself off was something he had often managed to achieve between opening his eyes and closing them again. “Too much respect at the beginning, and too much hatred and revulsion later on. First of all the drive to get to know certain cities, and then the drive to forget all those cities again. Men like rats, chopped up by street sweepers’ shovels. Too many negotiations with humans have done me in.” Unusual interests: “Investigations, the ideals of investigations, the ideals of friendships followed successively by being delivered of the ideals of investigation, being delivered of the investigations
themselves, of the ideals of friendship, and finally of the friendships themselves.” For years, it had all been nothing more than “eavesdropping on suffering.” In split seconds, eternities of disappointment. In his permanent condition of dupe, the human was relegated to being his own arena.

Earlier he had been able to catch charmed words like balls, the word “creation,” first off, then the word “chemistry,” then “instinct,” “painting,” and last of all “murder.” The ruin of mankind had been a child’s dream. And everything settled then. Father and mother exemplars of unhappy, irresponsible, no longer amendable actions on the part of instinct, emotion, the devil. “In winter, pain falls in the form of snow, did you know that?” Songbirds sing pain. “The weak man has no law that will protect him.”

The landlady was astonished at the numbers who turned out for the funeral of the farmer’s wife, who, as the fire was destroying her house, was crushed by a falling roof beam. From everywhere, from the remotest valleys, they came, relatives and acquaintances and the merely curious. The funeral procession had been so long that not all the mourners had got into the graveyard. A number had had to wait outside on the cemetery steps during the service, and in the square in front of the church. Never in her life had she seen so many flowers and wreaths. She had been most interested to see the widower, but had only caught sight of him once everything was over, and managed then to exchange a few words with him, having once been in service to him. “He’s much more dignified than he used to be,” she said. As there were so many
relatives around, she had to move off. But she was invited to the funeral meal, which was taking place in three inns at once, because one wouldn’t have had enough room for all the guests. The food had been better than for any corpse she could remember. The band, having just played a funeral march by the graveside, had struck up in a rather more cheerful vein outside in the square, which had been “heaving with people.” In the cemetery itself, the mourners had trampled on all the graves, they had pushed their way forward to the grave itself, so that they could peer down into it, but no one had been able to see anything worse than a plank. “The cemetery in S. is three times the size of the one in Weng,” she said. Of course a lot of people from Weng had been to the funeral as well, especially “money people.” Because she owned no black coat, only a gray one, she had been a bit embarrassed to begin with, but later she forgot all about it. “I was the only one in the place who wasn’t wearing a black coat.” They had loosed off rounds while the coffin was being lowered into the grave, just like at New Year’s. The vicar and the mayor had made speeches, but she hadn’t been able to hear a word. Her daughters had pushed their way in among the black-clad people through to the open grave, and mingled with the relatives of the dead woman, which earned her some furious looks, even before she left the cemetery. The revels went on till five in the morning, till everything had been eaten and drunk. But she had set off for home at eleven. “I was pretty drunk too,” she said. The knacker had taken her back in his sleigh. I heard them, how he unloaded her, and how she tried to detain him, but he left anyway. Last night she had gone down to the station for a bunch of immortelles which she left on the dead woman’s coffin, once there was no one around to see. What had been of most interest to her
was the food the various landlords had prepared, for the most part following
her
recipes. Their vicar had joined in the dancing, and been pretty free with suggestive remarks as well, she had been surprised to see a vicar, “a man of God,” carrying on in such a way.

“People need to taste the whip,” said Strauch, “the knout of the executioner.” He urged me to put on sturdier shoes, he found it unbearable to see me in such “luxury items” as the shoes I had on every day. But I have no sturdier shoes. I own just two pairs, a pair of boots for the winter, and a pair of ankle-high shoes for summer, which I left at home. “Things change here very quickly,” said the painter, “quite without notice. Suddenly it’s so cold, it can freeze your sinuses. A sudden blow, and you go from one thing to the opposite.” He didn’t think it would snow any time soon, but there would be an iron frost. He could tell by all sorts of things, by plants, by everything, that a frost was in the offing. “A terrible frost. You can see it in the trees and rocks. You can hear it, when you hear the animals.” And one day everything would freeze, “and be dead. The world as presently constituted. Even the air will go rigid, and the snowflakes in the air.” When he was walking out of an inn once, in the Tyrol, where he used to go at times, “into the clear country,” as he says, he suddenly jammed his stick into a pig that had frozen solid. He had wanted to drive the beast on, but the stick was caught fast in the pig, as if it had been made of snow. When he pulled out his stick, the pig made a squelching noise, which disgusted him. “The frost eats everything up,” said the painter, “trees, humans, animals, and whatever is in the trees and the humans and the animals. The blood stalls, and at great speed.
You can break apart a frozen human like a piece of stale bread.” He said: “Did you notice that country people never wear a coat, no matter how low the temperature? At least not here, in this region. In the flatland, yes, but not here. In the lower Alps, but not in the Alps proper. The men put up their collars, the women come down from the mountains in their folklore outfits. Even at twenty below zero.” The cold drew people together as much as the beasts in the sty, around a dish or a book. “Cold is the most sharp-witted state of nature,” said the painter. Schoolkids usually got no further than an outcrop of rock, and then they turned back, for fear of freezing to death. Or the schools were closed on account of the low temperatures. People died in midsentence. In the middle of a cry for help. The stars flashed like nails driven into the night sky. “Air composition that makes reason ring out like the tongue of a bell.”

Had I ever had a frozen limb or digit, he wanted to know. “There are many men who have been marked by frost.”—“No,” I said. “In the war, I should tell you, men had the feet freeze off their legs, and the ears off their heads. By thinking on a certain subject, a condition that may be thousands of years away, or at the very least a beautiful memory, it is possible to generate warmth in oneself, even heat, but only to a certain, finally unsuccessful, degree. Even those soldiers who burned with homesickness during the Russian winter campaigns were not enabled to survive by their homesickness.” He said: “When the days get that cold, I sit in my bed, and stare at the frost flowers on my window, that in a succession of miracles evoke landscapes from painting, from nature, from inner despair, only to crush them again, and to draw
from them such truths as, to my conviction, are dispersed in their hundreds of thousands and their millions in our lives, and portray more than an intimation of a world that lies alongside our familiar world, a universe we have failed to recognize.”