Frost: A Novel (32 page)

Then I remember about the knacker and the dog’s body in his rucksack. My behavior that night was more than peculiar. For days I tried to account for it to myself. I had been in a state of extreme agitation that I now find difficult to imagine. Everything has gone, and all I know is that it was once a certain way, and I am left with a feeling of revulsion for the food
served in the inn. The following morning, I really could smell dogskin in the air. Because I knew the landlady was on her way to the cemetery, I went into the kitchen and the pantry, which unusually was not locked, but I didn’t find anything. Everything was neat and tidy, which in itself was unusual. She will have stashed the meat and the hide in the cellar, I thought. And the cellar was locked. As the painter says, she always carries the key to the cellar on her person. The thought of what things she might keep lying around in her cellar filled me with fresh revulsion. But then the painter called for me, and, keeping a couple of steps in front of him, I set off in the direction of the village, in the direction of the cemetery. Lots of farming people. Once again, I had occasion to observe that the men did not wear coats, just suits or jackets and pants made out of various puke-colored materials. A fully occupied sleigh overtook us. I thought about the game the landlady was playing with the knacker, and the knacker with the landlady. I said to the painter: “How old do you think the knacker is?” I couldn’t imagine him being any particular age. “He’s a man in his prime,” said the painter. “In his prime, then,” I repeated, and simultaneously asked myself what that meant: “in his prime.” When is your prime? “Is he forty?” I asked. “He might be forty,” said the painter. “Why are you so interested in the knacker?” It had just occurred to me to ask him what age the knacker might be, I didn’t especially know why. “Something suddenly occurs to you,” I said. “Curious that I was the last person to speak to the woodcutter,” said the painter. “He was an ordinary-looking man. And so many people are going to his burial. His boots were shining, because the lamp was directly above him. It had been dark for many hours.”

•   •   •

While the burial was in progress, I several times thought of the noise that the dog’s body had made as it landed on the bedroom floor.

On the way home, he got going on the state and the government and neutrality, provoked by an idiotic remark of mine. The state was the state as conceived by Plato, or it was no state at all. “There is no state. The state is impossible. There has never been a state.” As far as our own state was concerned, then, aside from the fact that it wasn’t a state (“no longer a state!”), it was something as ridiculous as a “squeaking little rhesus monkey in a big zoo,” in which, naturally enough, only the well-fed and beautiful specimens of lions and tigers and leopards attracted any interest: it was their roaring. Only roaring counted, squeaking was ridiculous! It was “only the great roaring” that counted! The squeaking would be roared down! The great roaring will roar down the ridiculous squeaking! Our head of state was a “co-op manager,” our chancellor “a market-day brothel attendant.” The people had the choice of butchers, apprentice electricians, dully blown-up waistcoat wearers, between grave-robbers and grave-robbers’ assistants. Democracy, “our democracy,” was the biggest swindle. Our country sat heavily in Europe’s gut, completely indigestible, like an “ill-advisedly swallowed clubfoot.” Even “our dance is dead, our song and dance is dead! All repro! All frippery. The whole thing scandalously destructive frippery. The nation is really a national disgrace! You know, this squeaking, which, faced with the roar, the big roar, should just shut up! Nothing but squeaking! Ridiculous,
high-pitched, dangerous squeaking! Folly and megalomania are now partners, squeaking partners, you know, hand in hand dancing their way down into the abyss, perfectly common or garden-variety squeaking partners, delusions born of feebleness, delusions born of repugnant squeaking!”

“Everything is barbarous kitsch. Yes,” said the painter, “the state itself is cretinous, and the people are pitiful. Our state is ludicrous. On top of everything, the pretense of musicality. Petit bourgeois sordidness … it’s too revolting: a layer of scum on top, and the general, galloping dullness of the population … we are at a stage of absolute degradation. Our state,” he said, “is a hotel of ambivalence, the bordello of Europe, enjoying an excellent reputation, especially overseas.”

The extent of his misfortune, he said, had suddenly revealed itself to him, “on a day whose date I could tell you now, and also the persons with whom I had contact on that day; city-dwellers, metropolitans, all of them with strong roots in whatever it was they did, in a factory, or a profitable art gallery, or in the backwash of some invention they made, and that earned them large sums of money, or people who were just happy, and didn’t especially know why, and didn’t care either, it didn’t occur to them to wonder why, people with whom I stood in eventually abrasive and stultifying and repugnant relationships, that by and by degenerated; I would spend whole nights at the homes of these people, they showed me mountains of photographs, emptied brains full of dirty jokes at my feet, and I had to laugh, and I did laugh,
and I drank and laughed and slept, often on their floors, and then I once more had to invoke the name of art, and I was so pitiful that it seemed to draw them to me, this pitifulness that showed itself in me drew them to me, they took me here and there with them, and they wanted to weld me to their lives, till the moment happened, on that day when I saw I would have to stop, not turn back, because there is no turning back, but I stopped, I quite simply stopped, and far away from those people and their habits and their possessions and their opinions, far away from their world, which didn’t fit with my world, I began to go forward by myself on a different plane, from one hour to the next, when I clearly saw I didn’t belong anywhere, not in the place I had just fled, for good, and not where I came from, and not where, without exactly knowing why, I wanted to get to, in the direction of which I was moving, like an escaped convict I ran off, I zigzagged away so as not to fall into the hands of my pursuers …” It had been his misfortune not to belong anywhere, “no longer to have anything at all.”

“You know,” he said, “when you’re suddenly walking through the streets, from one meaningless thing to the next, through streets all of which are black, and the people are black, and they float as quickly and darkly and clumsily as yourself past you … You are standing in a square, and everything is black, suddenly everything inside you and outside you is black, no matter where you look at it from, black and stirred smooth, and you don’t know what stirred it, and everything is broken … You still recognize an object here and there, but everything is broken and smashed and ripped; for the first time you prop yourself on a stick, which you’ve
only ever used as a weapon before against humans or dogs, but now you prop yourself on it, and you seem to be floating in a sea of lead, and here and there you make out some new, further blackness … people don’t know, is it the coming of spring, or is it the end … the great letters on the department stores coming toward you, having joined forces against you in a great rabble, a great rabble of a revolution, they ruin everything in you, where nature and creature turn to you for help, you try to make your way, in a yet more desperate condition … You see humans and you call out to them, with no shame you alarm these humans in this atmosphere, which is continually being teased by the cardinal points … and you have buttoned up your jacket, and everything in you is tense, and your head is afraid of bumping into things … all those handbags and sticks, those hundreds of thousands of handbags and sticks … you think you have come down a very long way in the world, just as those others have come up, and in your disgust you don’t know what to do … those crowds of people unleashed by precisely advancing clock hands … You seek refuge on a park bench, but it is already full of people cleverer than you are, they occupied all the benches from early morning on, and are reading enormous books, and eating extensive paper-bag lunches … the whole pathos of government employees hits you, the whole meanness of state pensions … and you wedge your head between your knees, and try not to sink … and you hear the world writhing in your own headaches, in grotesque cramps, in the terrible violence of the air … In your room you are menaced by shards of memory, they are birds, unbelievable black birds, endowed with incredible force … This incredible state of emergency, this synthesis of rejection by the world and alienation from the world, in which you suddenly find yourself,
without any bearings, this condition that lands you in every conceivable human procedure … The police and the vegetable truck, they’re all coming for you, as though to destroy you … the voice of the people … even as a child I could feel that devastating procedure in my brain … this people that darkens the passages of my ears … and accompanying all these impressions, you must know, each time I touch the ground with my stick, I knock a hole in my skull, everything is like being condemned to ceaseless torment by a metronome on Föhn days …” He often uses the word “suicide” now. In every sentence. With his great thumb that, when he stretches it, contains every ounce of his strength, he crushes himself, his surroundings, just as one might crush a beetle on a table or cabinet.

“I have no use for myself anymore,” he says. “I’m just ordinary. As ordinary as the rest of the world. Gagging on ordinariness.” On the rug under his feet, which “has always been pulled away. My awakening, like my going to sleep, ordinary. Even my dreams are ordinary. And I of all people, thought I had a claim to more-than-ordinary dreams. The nightmares I have are the nightmares of my childhood. Gruesome, when an old man has to dream them again. It’s no pleasure. Advanced astonishment, nothing more, and always alone. On my left there is you, and in my right, my stick. The two things that keep me together. I trust you’re not angry with me? My original concept, I don’t know what it is anymore, maybe you know … And then the disqualification of the rest of the world … the impossibility of coping with talent … The whole person just black propaganda against himself. Is
that right …? I try to understand myself, you know, and I know that things are getting worse: it was always that way. Attrition of the muscles in the brain. And everything I see a reflection of myself, sometimes broken by a powerful stream of alien thought.” I think it must be easier to stitch up a leaky intestine than to make these observations. I could read the whole thing back, but I would only give myself a fright. The way he says: “Everything is black.” Everything as though determined for no one but himself, and as if he assumed the others were all wearing earplugs. Even the way he wipes his shoes with the rag he always carries in his pocket, the way he tries to prove everything with his Pascal, though he knows there’s nothing to prove. “Nothing is jocund,” he says. And then the smell of frying meat greets us in the public bar.

It was possible to drift on a raft with other people for years and years, pressed together, body against body, in a tiny space, without coming to know those people any better. “The darkness around one must be equal at moments to the darkness later on, that turns to stone inside us, at the end. Petrifies our blood, like the veins in marble.” Quiet filled rooms with its curse, and day and night, at all times, there were hordes of “casualties of quiet.” Strauch says he wouldn’t be surprised to learn one day that he had really been someone else altogether. “To learn,” he says, “that a faulty adjustment toward me on the part of nature kept me from ever gaining admission to myself. Possible, no?” He got on to a certain happy time of his youth, and then right away buried it again: “The little creeks that refresh us, are they not produced by storms?” Before going to sleep, humans stared
at the foam-tipped waves, “futilely, mindlessly, not yet in dream.

“Youth is its own message. What happens afterward is without significance; a mode of fabrication, nothing more.” But to complain about it was pathetic. And pathos constituted age. Age
was
pathetic. “At any rate, age isn’t merit, much less triumph.” You could find yourself waking in a setting that was made up of all your previous settings, “more and more settings.”

Over recent weeks, he had called on many government offices, to see what information was kept on him there. “There were many things I wanted to have corrected,” he said, “but they turned me away, even threw me out,” he said. In such a way one was thrown out by thunderstorms, and wound up in the sea, pointless and purposeless.

I recalled how I had come by my internship in Schwarzach. Honsig had drawn my attention to it. In the dissecting room. How there was a hospital, not too small, not too large, with all kinds of possibilities. There was a registrar, and an intern, and other doctors, and nursing sisters. Situated at a major railway junction, and at the intersection of several highways. Many accident victims, widely famed for lung operations. A hospital that was continually bursting at the seams, summer and winter alike. The surrounding country offered sports facilities: skating, skiing. Good people, both from the medical and the personal point of view. Free board, and a quiet room.
The place was bland and claustrophobic like all mountain towns. It was near the source of a river that suddenly turned north, where it’s a little less bleak.

I think of Schwarzach, and what there is there. Houses, almshouses, a church. And the hospital. A couple of barber’s shops in competition with each other. A waterfall cuts the place in half. You see a lot of pregnant women, as you do in Weng. Not so many workers, because there is no industry. But just as many railwaymen. Postal workers. At any given moment, Railway Wrestling Competition, Railway Shooting Competition, Railway Ski-Jumping Competition, Railway Swimming Competition. St. Nicholas’s Day: a bunch of apprentice lumberjacks, butcher’s boys, and milkers put in an array of gruesome masks, with horns and braids, twisted ears and noses, gap teeth and split tongues, and set upon the bystanders, knocking over old people, beating up children, and, because it’s a centennial festival, are not brought to court for it. Heavy thunderstorms and ensuing landslides continually alter the face of the town. The same bleakness in the houses as there is in houses everywhere. Men standing around, sitting around, in black jackets buttoned up to their Adam’s apple, watching the waterfall, cursing their womenfolk. In the small hours, the “wild” workmen. Deafening noises, that make you shut your windows … Visiting theater groups as well. The air is damp, and the children have rickets, they’re all weak in the pleura and the bronchia. For no reason anyone understands, the water supply is the cause of a lot of illness in the place. The milk, though, is rich and fresh, because it comes straight down from the mountain farms up above.