Frost: A Novel (33 page)

Twenty-fifth Day

T
HE
A
NIMAL
R
USTLING
S
CUM

“…  and so I made the most extraordinary discovery,” said the painter, “one of those discoveries that hit you like a bolt from the blue. You must imagine, my exhaustion of today had already reached its apogee, I was continually threatening to keel over, I was hanging on in the knowledge that I would otherwise drown, I made a pitifully helpless impression, I even screamed, and tore up my sleeves. Look!” he said, and he showed me his sleeve, and I could see, yes, the sleeve was ripped, there was even a big piece of sleeve missing; he was walking quickly now, and he was saying he thought the landlady would sew a patch of some other material over the missing piece—“one of those crap materials they go around in here in the country,” he said—and he suddenly grabbed hold of me, and knocked me into the ditch, which I hadn’t even seen, the snow was deep, I was up to my knees in snow, it was a water drainage ditch, as I noticed right away, into which, with my superior strength and weight, I had also pulled the painter. “The icy water has established itself inside my boots,” said the painter, once we had both pulled ourselves out of the “groin prison,” and: “Imagine a man remains motionless in such a position, he’d freeze to death in seconds, from the feet up, there’s a ruthlessness and thoroughness in this inimical cold that’s terrifying and indescribable.” But he
didn’t want to let himself be diverted from his extraordinary discovery by this minor incident, I for my part tried to distract him too (we had spoilt our walk by now, had to head back before, as the painter said, “the cold brought out a new illness in us,” back to the inn, where they would surely have lit a fire by now, and the painter had said: “There are circumstances in which the landlady tries to dupe me, and she hasn’t started heating yet, she dupes me by only lighting my stove just before my return, which is flagrantly in breach of the agreement I made with her, and is explicitly directed against me. By only lighting the fire at a time when she expects me back, my room doesn’t get warm, my room doesn’t ever get warm, it should be heated all the time, all the rooms in the inn are cold, cold, cold rooms, you understand, these appallingly inimical rooms”), but he pulled me close to him again. “I mentioned my extraordinary discovery,” he said. “I suddenly saw, as I was emerging from the ravine, that the stream, you see, was red. I thought: a phenomenon, a natural phenomenon! But immediately I understood: blood! And I thought: That’s blood, by God, that’s blood! I couldn’t trust my eyes, but the entire stream was full of blood! Now, I felt like running back upstream, I wanted to and I felt like it, I was even duty-bound to run upstream, because what I saw was without question the product of a crime, as I very clearly saw, a human crime, ‘a wonderfully hurried rhythm of blood’ inscribed itself before my eyes, I wanted to run back upstream, but you know that’s not possible, I found myself in a tormenting position: to know with perfect clarity, and to see, yes, also to see, that a crime was in progress, who could say how far upstream, perhaps no more than a hundred paces (it could be no great distance to this crime), the quantity of
blood was quite extraordinary (it was a first-class spectacle), the blood-red stream running through the white snow blanket, and all scratched by the black branches, by these wild black branches … All this just a momentary impression, the work of seconds. I wanted to call out. I didn’t call out. My attempt to make my way upstream was doomed to failure, I was up against such a huge impossibility that I was condemned to failure, I expect you’re familiar with the sensation: you want to take a certain path, and you’re unable to take a single step along the way, the brain gives its signal, the brain is like a whip against the body, but the body is an extraordinary instance of insubordination … But I did have one idea: I ran back into the ravine, and crawled, crawled, I say, crawled on my belly toward the stream, perhaps a hundred yards upstream of the place where I made the discovery, I looked back where I had crawled, and I saw: an animal! I saw: a monster! I saw a humiliation of fins! I was too crushed to be able to get up and make my way to the stream through the undergrowth. But, in order to encompass what I just related to you, I felt an extraordinary access of strength. The idea that there was a crime in progress here, or rather, further up, where that terrible garish blood sprang from, gave me such superhuman strength I no longer believed was possible. Well,” said the painter, “all at once I heard a sound, a sound not from nature, a click as of a jackknife shutting, the sound of a blade, a rasp, a screech. I pressed myself down in the snow and tried to get some warmth into my shoulders by means of that particular turning of my head that I once described to you. All purely instinctively. Suddenly only my sense of hearing was functioning. I heard a scraping and the sound of gravel on railway ballast. The snapping-off of gigantic snakey
leaves. Finally I heard the river being waded across three or four times. I immediately thought: men, men poaching fish, I thought, and crawled out of my hiding place. I was glad to be given the certainty that my discovery corresponded to fact, that my sense of color hadn’t deceived me, that this mountain stream was not just a blood-red stream in my brain, not just some deranged precipitation within my thought processes, that what I saw in this section of stream was not caused by some mirage or unlucky human chance, but was in fact fact, like lightning suddenly trumped by thunder. What I now saw, having crawled as far as the bank of the stream, was so horribly ridiculous: the heads and tails and midsections of cows. The warmth and softness of freshly slaughtered meat was still in the air, the opposition between chilly void on the one hand and warm void on the other; the emetic of fear on the white canvas of snow, an unrepeatable scene: the chewed and shattered and sliced anatomy of dehumanization by Heaven and Hell. As I say, only a scene, and behind it, on the other bank as though out of range, the miscreants, fled and fleeing.”—“The cow slaughterers,” I said. “We are talking about common livestock thieves, men and women, presumably from one of the neighboring villages. In among the scraps of meat, the stains of blood, the bone and cartilage and bowel, were signs of footsteps made by men and women. There was a headscarf lying there, I pocketed it as evidence,” said the painter. I was shivering and soaked to the hips as we walked in the direction of the inn, which we were neither of us able to see, because suddenly the fog had swathed everything, “down to the most rudimentary contours of the world.” The painter said: “I want to call the scene ‘slaughter,’ in the moment I beheld it, everything seemed to
soak into the picture. I could clearly see the butchers’ fleeing footprints. One could see also the tracks of the livestock they had stolen. One could see the darkness of the planets, and the low proletarianism of murder. I saw the word ‘innocent’ on the ground, in the snow, this low code, you must know, and the word ‘meanness’ clearly in the sky. One thing was strange: even as the severed limbs and organs were still twitching, my interest instantly transferred itself to the process of rigor mortis, which here was being enacted in a million variations. I stooped and pressed my hand into the blood and mixed it with snow. I threw red snowballs! I threw red snowballs! Picture the scene. At first I prudently forbore to open any of the great eyes that were lying around, all of them strangely closed, I avoided the spectacle of those large, docile cow’s eyes. I forbore till the moment when I was no longer equal to the temptation to give myself over to the sympathy that any thing animal has with the human, and I opened one of the cow’s eyes, one of those gigantic, stalled, chilled, bloodless orbs. The thieves,” said the painter, “had proceeded by a scrupulous plan. Everything took place in a spot that hardly anyone but me has ever seen, one of the most inaccessible of spots, perhaps the most inaccessible spot there is. I still have not reported on what I took in. Of course I ought to go to the policeman and inform him. Probably word of the incident has already got out. Because, as I saw later, the ravine was full of blood too. The policeman walks through the ravine. The churchgoers walk through the ravine. They all must have seen the blood. At a certain place, the blood seemed to branch off, the traces of blood, in the direction of the scene of the crime. The thieves must have been equipped with all possible slaughterman’s tools. I myself heard the sound of a knife snapping shut, there was
the beating of a hammer, of a mallet, the scrape of a saw, which suddenly broke off. They had heard me, they must have. They packed up the meat. They plunged into the stream. They waded across, once on the other side, they were in the relative security of the woods. There wasn’t the least thing I could have done about it. In my condition, a person in my condition is unable to do anything. Such a person can only flee, can only take flight, shrink back from the blood and the sounds of criminality. Baffling, the way the scene of the crime not only attracted me, attracted me with its natural horror, but was able to attract me. As I already said, I crawled up to it on all fours, like a beast. You understand: I was helpless against this setting, against this scene. The smell of slaughter, still warm, as under a bell jar,” said the painter. “And then this silence in which, had I not rubbed my face with snow, I might quite easily have suffocated. It was a question of three or four cows, I thought, there had to be three or four cows at issue, I thought, and I found three tails, three tails. And yet there must have been four cows, I thought. It was inexplicable to me, and I continued to think in terms of four cows. A small calf’s head lay in the bushes, already under water, bleeding dry. So there were three cows and a calf, three tails in other words.”

At the inn, the painter showed me the headscarf he had found at the site of the crime. We had just come in the door. In the darkness that obtained there even at midday, he fished something bloodied out of his coat pocket and showed it to me. I held it up in the light that fell through the narrow glass panel in the front door, and saw the headscarf. “That’s terrifying testimony, isn’t it,” said the painter; “it’s all too easy to
imagine the victims might have been human. And it wouldn’t even be too grisly, because one wouldn’t be able to laugh, not be able to burst out laughing. And when I saw the grisly chopped-up animals, I had to burst out laughing, I burst out into extraordinary laughter. Do you know what that means? It means horror demands laughter!” We went into the public bar, and from there to the kitchen, where we took off our jackets and coats, and above all our boots. And then we took off our trousers, and finally, called upon to do so by the landlady, and because the painter seemed to have no objection, our underpants as well. The landlady should sew a patch over the missing material in his sleeve, and make it good, said the painter. As we both stood facing the wall, while the landlady went up to our rooms, to find us some clean dry underpants and socks and pants, the warm air from the stove at our backs brought us back to life. “She (the landlady) is taking advantage of this incident to quickly light a fire in my room,” said the painter, “because as I said to you before she won’t have kept the room warm. We startled her by getting back so early. She just tricked me,” he said. “How could I be so stupid as to follow her instructions to get undressed in the kitchen, and make an ass of myself in front of her. I do feel an ass standing face to the wall, half-naked. Don’t you feel like an ass too, with your face to the wall like that, it’s a moronic and undignified state to be in, a couple of grimacing individuals facing a firing squad. We are being executed here!” the painter called out. He now had his coat wrapped round his legs and belly, and said: “Please to keep the incident with the cows to yourself, just as I’ll keep it to myself. To make such witness precipitately public, and in such an unpleasantly disagreeable case as this, can only lead to the nausea of a trial by public
opinion. I prefer to avoid that. I would ask you not to waste a word on it. Not to anyone. Not the least suggestion of it.” Then he said: “This is now the period of murder conspiracies, the farms are wiped out by the snow and cretinism. The gangs unscrew the padlocks on the barns, and gag the livestock. The air is slashed by the whistling of their sticks.”

Once changed, he hunkered in the hallway and read to me from his Pascal. It was always “about the whole tragedy,” he said, I didn’t understand what he meant by that. Always about “a single coarse act.” He said: “Factor in lethality.” And: “Death renders everything infamous.” He was continually leaving, only to get out at some city of thought, interrupting his journey; he had a destination “that would permit of no arrival, that discourages any arrival.” I went up to my room and said to myself, but aloud, so that it bounced off the walls and its echo struck me: “I can’t stand any more of this!” I lay down. I leafed through my Henry James, without giving the writer a thought. Got up. Walked to and fro. Lay down again. I detested the shamelessness of a sentence I had come across in the middle of my book somewhere. I threw the book to the floor. Everything stinks, I thought. Suddenly everything was just stench, even the merest notion, the merest, most distant notion was stench. Then I went downstairs, and sat down at the extra table. Everyone was eating with great appetite, even the painter showed such an appetite that I was disgusted by it. I could eat nothing at all, and even let my soup go cold. When the painter had gone up to his room, I stood in the kitchen and joined in the discussion that must have been in progress for some time between the landlady
and the knacker. It was to do with rich people, and hunting parties. They came three or four times a year and chased with hounds, and there were a lot of wild shots into the bushes, and you often found natty buckles and belts and ear protectors and single gaiters in the woods and on the gravel. Sometimes the nobility (the painter said “the gentry”) suddenly took over this “dirtiest corner of the world.” What were the rich? they asked themselves. They didn’t know either. It got to the point that they would automatically have to hate wealth, so as not to find themselves excluded by it. Then I remember a sentence the painter came up with yesterday: “Poverty can stare up at wealth, and that’s as near as it gets.” The knacker was often taken on by the hunting parties. Various venerable old families would assemble “in a spirit of megalomania, to shoot holes in nature.” Last night, the painter described hunting as “divine sense with trivial human markings.” I said to the knacker: “Have you been hunting in the Klamm valley at all?” The Klamm was a particularly sought-after hunting terrain, said the knacker, it still had a reputation for wolf barks from the olden days. I remembered happy hunting expeditions myself. As a child I had often gone along on hunts, high and low. “The hunt is the only institution between the world powers, man and beast, beast and man, man and man, beast and beast, not to involve sadism,” my father had once said. To avoid the painter, I tried to slip into my room as quietly as possible. But he heard me, and summoned me to him in his room with his call: “Come along!” which was a strict command. I stood in utter darkness. “Feel these walls,” said the painter, “having to freeze between walls like these is an act of catastrophic lunacy. Now sit down!” He pushed me down onto one of his chairs.
“Everything is actually without words,” he says, “it is as wordless as it is loathsome, as conscientious as it is condemned by sense.” He wanted to have my company. I could feel it. Everything he said was like forcing me into his coat, and buttoning me into it for all time. But in that state of torment he said: “Leave! Leave! I want you to leave!” And he forced me out the door. “It’s a mistake to count on people. It’s a grave mistake to count on anyone at all. I have always made this mistake. I have always made this most glaring of mistakes, I have always counted on people!” he said. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I ran downstairs and out of the house. Once I was out in the fresh air, I soon recovered myself. I had the feeling the painter, this man, Strauch, had me in his power again. “All right,” I said, and I went to the cemetery. And: “All right,” and I went back. All the way I saw nothing and thought nothing, except that the painter had me in his power. Forced me into his pictures, into the world of his fantasy. Me, his feeble observer. I felt imprisoned. But even that fantasy, I thought, is a fantasy of the painter’s. I am no longer myself. No, no, I thought, I am no longer myself. It drove me wild, this violence was a sudden induration against which I kept banging my head. But isn’t that metaphor, that sensation in my brain, isn’t everything I think and see and speak and revile—isn’t it all Strauch’s? In the afternoon, I tried to sleep, and couldn’t. I saw myself helpless and entrapped in sentences and perspectives of Strauch’s, in his “morbidities” and “absurdisms.” I continually heard myself blurt out the man’s phrases. Not until dusk, when our walk was almost finished that we had gone on together, was I able to push myself off from him. As from some fatal shore. I don’t know, is it all nonsense? Is what I’m writing now nonsense,
because I’m writing far into the night, in the “boundless ignorance of darkness.”