Frost: A Novel (31 page)

Twenty-third Day

“I find the inn insufferable, you must know,” he said. “But I have an instinctive yen to expose myself to it, to expose myself to everything that is directed against me. Where there is putrescence, I find I cannot breathe deeply enough. I always want to breathe in the odor of humanity, you understand.” He had always been at pains to strike up a relationship with the world around him, “which is a deeply contemptible undertaking, of course.” To stay close to the things he hated had been his endeavor from the start, “to wander around like a dog among human legs, perfectly meaningless, surrendering to my sense impressions.” Then, like a dog, they had always kicked him. “It’s true,” he said. “Always drowning in the midst of people, but never going down. Wherever there are people, the necessary sweating out of lust!” He had always told himself: “I keep steering clear of murder, homicide,
suicide. It drives me crazy.” The sound of the workers eating their soup was for him “a dull, distant ringing of bells, portending nothing.” Each time he set foot in the inn, he felt disgust. But then he raised his head, “far beyond himself,” so as to beach himself “like an ocean-going vessel onto the desert of humanity. Like a sportsman, I show off my injuries,” he said. “I settle down between walls of meat that warm me. Then the unbearable turns into something physically soothing for me.” He thinks he is successful in passing himself as being like everyone else, but he is not successful. He thinks he is unobtrusive, but that makes him all the more an alien in their midst. “Do you see the big chunks of bread floating in your soup? I am reminded of the end of the world. A grand vision, you know, is founded on a very small observation.”

“You are molested wherever you go,” said the painter. “It’s as if everyone had conspired to bother you. An instinct that rages through them all like a wildfire. Against you. You wake up, and you feel molested. In fact:
the
hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast! When you go out on the street, you are subject to the gravest possible molestations. You are unable to shield yourself. You lay about yourself, but it’s no use. The blows you dole out are returned a hundredfold. What are streets, anyway? Wendings of molestation, up and down. Squares? Bundled together molestations. And all that inside you, you know, not at some distance from you! And all for some insane purpose! And you’re not able to cling on anywhere for assistance. The whole of life, put together from
cries for help, an interminable thought, interfered with by happy humans, workmen, simple housewives with shopping baskets, you know! The begetting of children goes to your head! Women’s desire to conceive? The molestations are so grave, you do nothing but hold your hands over your head. There is no protection for the human. Questions only aggravate the situation. In an emergency, questions might save you from punishment, but only for a time. Honest, open faces turn out to be traps, spring landscapes turn out to harbor plagues. You have already inhaled too much poison to hope to be able to escape. There is no help, you know, there are no untried means, not ‘art,’ not ‘obsession,’ nothing. Insomnia might be a mitigating factor, except that it produces the same consequences as dull-wittedness. You see: I simply have the thought that I was such and such, and that burdens me. Seeing the inn burdens me. Seeing myself. Seeing you. Because that means playing a part, and that burdens me. But kicks are not merely inventions of a shared external world. No. And darkness is often a flowering ceremonial, processions of morbid beauty flit across it, a dizzying arrogance … I suffer at the hands of the above-average, you must know. From the objections of nature, from rights that are anathema to me. I always draw the short straw.”

“And then this alternation between absolute sluggishness and the disappearance of my process into an unplumbed, bottomless region only available to the insane … And yet, I have to say I have never complained, never complained … even the most intractable situation I have successfully negotiated by obstinate refusal. Sometimes I have even succeeded in returning from such straits into health. Now I no longer
believe in such a solution: it would simply kill me from behind my back. The inn is dark, and the humans go around in their terrible fevers, sunken, mysterious, unable to die, you know, while things outside are even darker. While everyone in the inn is asleep, the pressing hostility outside increases. I am of the view that there are no extraterrestrial influences involved. It’s an appalling thing to me to know that I may be infecting you with my illness, and just as appalling to feel how necessary you are to me … and since I am, as you know, a master of restraint, and have always been able to confine myself to the tiniest limits … now do me the favor and tell me what you think of me, I mean, tell me the truth and don’t leave me in this ridiculous torment … You can go your ways, I don’t want to claim ownership of you, I don’t want you to be irritated with me … The pain, you know, the pain in my head drags my earlobes down to my knees.”

“The tragedy” was not always tragic, wasn’t always perceived as tragic, “even though it always is a tragedy … The world isn’t moved by tragedy.
Nothing is tragic.”
The ridiculous was “more omnipotent than anything else.” Within the category of the ridiculous, you might find “tragedies like mine shafts, when you didn’t have a light.” There was despair in the ridiculous. “It is,” said Strauch, “as if the terrible thing
were true.”
He dropped his stick, and I stooped to pick it up for him. “Everything always strikes us differently on every occasion. Frost for instance,” said the painter, “in one man it’s chilblains, in another it’s a little town in summer … And finally, as we know, frost may also signify the
end of a world empire.”
It strikes him as practical to wear puttees, and he says: “Why did people ever stop wearing puttees? You can’t
buy puttees anywhere nowadays. And ordering them made costs a lot of time and money and nerves.” Every new acquisition was such a problem for him that he ended up not acquiring it after all.

“It’s a monstrous thing that tragedies always contain monstrous tragedies within them.” He says: “What is a state of panic? Is a state of panic when something is approaching that you know very well or that you
don’t know at all
, and are afraid of for that reason?” The word “monstrous” sounds quite hollow the way he uses it. Sometimes he uses the word “morbid” as he comes after me. “Isn’t monstrous misery the same thing as monstrous happiness? The monstrous vulnerability of connections in the brain …?” Man was “in his fact,” and: “There are only bailiffs and those who are afraid of bailiffs and who would like nothing better than to become bailiffs …” and: “The sky would get goose bumps if it knew something we didn’t. Eerie? That’s the many-dimensional darkness in the evening between the cliff faces.” When he stops, and laughter spills out of him, then everything is indeed eerie. When, as he does today, he jabs his stick into my back, and says: “Now walk down into the hollow! Walk!” And I suddenly see the lights of the inn ahead of me, no more than a dozen paces away.

Tomorrow is the funeral of the woodcutter who was run over by his own sleigh. The landlady got a death announcement from his family. Here, fatalities are announced on
parte
slips, which are pinned up on doors. Where the deceased are local people, you often see these
parte
notices on every door,
as now, when the
parte
notice of the farmer’s wife and the crushed woodcutter appear on every front door. They are big cards, edged in black. On them, it says when the deceased was born and the day he died. Whose child he was, and who his next of kin are. Where he is buried, and where a mass is being read for him. His line of work is also given. All the relatives are given with full names. The woodcutter has been laid out for days already in his parents’ house on the shadow side. The landlady got herself ready bright and early, and went down the ravine across to the shadow side, to pay her respects to the parents of the dead man. He was engaged, and in another three weeks, he and his fiancée were to have married. It was all prepared. But not the funeral, which needs to be arranged hastily and very differently. His bride was spending night and day kneeling at the bedside of her fiancé. Just praying, wouldn’t eat anything. The landlady had spoken to the boy’s parents. “A young man in the pink of health,” she says. The dead boy’s parents had asked her to stay for lunch, but she had to be back at ten, to start cooking. A lot of blood had flowed out of the corners of his mouth, she says. “It was thick and brown.” The loss wouldn’t have been so grievous, “if he hadn’t been the only son, now lying dead in his room, under the shroud that his mother sewed and decorated for her own use at some future date.”—“When an only child dies, then it’s as though the parents are dead as well,” the boy’s mother is supposed to have said. The young deceased was said to have been cheerful “and better educated” than most of his age. Had even read books that no one else had read, and the bride was prettier than all the other girls. His father had forbidden him to drive up to the clearing again, but he wouldn’t be put off. Now the father was blaming himself. “I should have forbidden it flat” were his words. The
woodcutter lived to be twenty-two. Each time someone dies who’s younger than yourself, it’s a frightening thing. Why? They wondered whether to bury him in a black or a white coffin, in the end they settled on a black. All at once. They still lay his place at table for him, where he would have eaten if he’d got back alive. The landlady said: “I don’t suppose there’ll be as many people at his funeral as there were for the farmer’s wife’s funeral.”

Twenty-fourth Day

There were a lot of people at the burial of the young woodcutter. The landlady had got a good spot, and stood and wept in front of the open grave for the duration of the ceremony. “I like a good cry,” she says, “when I’m at a funeral.” The woodcutter’s coffin was shouldered by four of his erstwhile school friends. The preacher said something about “a short but God-pleasing life.” His fiancée stood between his parents, all three of them veiled. Everyone filed past the open grave, swung the holy water sprinkler, only the painter and I remained at a suitable distance by the wall. Before the relations could approach us, we left the cemetery by the front steps, and stood to one side of the village square. The band was playing a march, and the feeling was that of all country funerals that don’t pass off in silence. Even while the burial was in progress, we could hear through the open windows and doors of the restaurant the clinking of pots and pans for the funeral feast. Barrels were tapped. The ham steamed as
the rind was pulled off it. I thought how back home in L. funerals pass off in exactly the same way. Maybe things are even a bit more pretentious, because they have more money there. And then I remembered the way it was when some poor devil died. Someone from the poorhouse, or down on the building site, or in one of the railwaymen’s cottages. Someone who “doesn’t belong”? I’ve seen one, and even if I hadn’t, I could have imagined it easily enough. Then, with a minimum of fuss, and with no printing of any
parte
, because there’s no money for any
parte
, a pine coffin is stained, and the dead man is pulled out of bed, and nailed into the pine coffin. There’s no thought given to possibly laying him out. Where would they lay him out? In the poorhouse? In the railwayman’s cottage? In the power plant canteen, even? In the main office of the cellulose factory? No, he’s hurriedly nailed into his coffin, even before the preacher’s informed, if indeed he is informed at any time, because often enough they don’t think of the preacher, and why should they? and the knacker digs a hole, probably it’s two meters twenty deep, because those are the stipulations, and at seven in the morning, the coffin is lugged to the hole by the knacker and the sexton, and no one is in attendance except maybe a few people who happen to be up and about, and then it’s lowered into the hole, and covered up right away. A workman has to reckon he wouldn’t get so much as a dog attending his burial. Unless it’s a case of a regular industrial accident, then part of the crew would attend, and the engineer would say a few words; but if he dies on his own time, outside of office and factory hours, no one will bother about him. And if he’s married, then his wife will stay home, because it’s too cold for her, or the kids are sick. And why should anyone come out for a burial at all? “A big burial,” said the painter on the way home. “Strange, I
was the man with whom the woodcutter had his final conversation. No one knows that.”

I shivered.

During the burial, I remembered the man the knacker met at the crossroads, probably where the road from the larch wood branches off down to the river. I imagined the man as in something of the same predicament as the landlord. Probably he too has been locked up several times already. Neglected from childhood, perhaps an orphan, abused by older children, beaten by his teachers, exploited by the tradesmen he was apprenticed to, and finally made a monkey of by landlords. The nature of his relationship to the landlady is not certain. No doubt, she knows him pretty well; the way she responded to everything the knacker told her about him, she must have “loved” him at some time. Didn’t the knacker mention some “act of vengeance” that will prove ruinous to the suddenly reappeared man? He had only loaned him the money because he talked fairly convincingly about a job he had started. A job in a railway foundry, thirty kilometers upstream. The knacker remarked on his poor clothing. From something he said, I was able to deduce that the man is unmarried. He must have had a hundred jobs in the course of his life. Bedridden for years from a bullet wound incurred during the war. “So he’s hanging around here again!” the landlady said, and: “He’s the one who turned him to the bad!” Those are serious allegations. While the cemetery was heaving with people, pressing us, the painter and myself, back against the wall, I saw a man who “knocks on all doors,
and isn’t admitted anywhere,” till he’s completely plastered, when they scrape him off the roadway like a mole. I could ask the painter whether in addition to the landlord and the landlady and the knacker there isn’t a fourth party involved somehow. Then the painter might say that he’s the principal figure in the whole drama, where these four people are tangled up for better or worse. No, I don’t want to get him onto that. And maybe the painter doesn’t know anything about anyone who’s “to blame for the whole thing,” and “should take care never to show his face around here again.” The painter pushed me toward the exit, and with his stick propelled me down into the village square. “I’ve just been thinking about a line in Pascal,” he said: “It’s the line, ‘our nature is motion, complete stasis is death.’ ” He said: “When I come out of that sentence, I’m completely disoriented.” When the funeral people came down from the cemetery, the painter wanted to stay in the village square. He felt like hearing “one or two pieces of music” that were announced by the band. It’s very cold today, and we had to keep stamping our feet on the ground to keep them from freezing. “Actually, it’s a nice custom to leave the dead behind to the sounds of music. To shake them off with a funeral feast.” The band played, and the sounds of firecrackers rent the air.