Frost: A Novel (34 page)

Of course they had all heard about the poachers and the slaughtering by now, and the knacker had to set off up to the stream, and stuff the remains of the cows into sacks, and carry them off. He had gone up there with the mayor’s horse-drawn sleigh, I could have gone with him, but in the end I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t have seen much because it had started snowing again. He had broken the horns off the skulls, and brought the tails along. He described everything differently than Strauch, but what he said was confirmation of what they both had said about the episode.

The people were pretty agitated, there had been quite a spate of cows being stolen, and slaughtered by some flowing water or other. “I should say there were three cows and a calf,” said the painter down in the public bar. The knacker looked at him, and asked him how he knew. No one knew that, apart from him, the knacker. “It was a hunch,” said the painter, “just a hunch.” And he said to the knacker: “Well, didn’t you find six horns, three tails, and four heads at the place?” “Yes,” said the knacker, that was right, but he hadn’t told anyone about it, or given out any figures. “You must have without realizing it,” said the painter. The knacker was mystified.

There was talk about the cattle thieves until far into the night. The painter told me the whole story again, but now that I
was hearing it for the second time, I found it repulsive, thoroughly repulsive. I just simply felt disgusted, I had the feeling the painter was reveling in the story, in this, to him, for whatever appalling and unfathomable reason, so extraordinarily congenial story. The landlady put the tails in the pot right away, and at lunchtime everyone was eating the soup from them without any show of disgust. I wasn’t disgusted either, and I ate the soup. He had thrown the many fresh bones to the dogs, said the knacker. They laughed about the soup, “for which we have those thieves to thank!” they said. They almost couldn’t eat for laughing. But they did, they ate it all up. All of them, they ate it all up. The painter ate in silence. He looked as though he were sitting on a big secret. And of course he knew more about the whole episode than any of the others. But he remained true to his resolve. He didn’t tell anyone that he had heard the thieves, perhaps even seen them make their escape into the forest. “A black scurrying of bodies and a bestial lugging of sacks of meat across to the other side,” he had said. He is not wholly sure whether his impression is the product of fact, and not imagination. “But it’s not just imagination,” he said. The talk was of other instances of poaching in recent times. No trace of the “poaching scum” had ever been found. Not the least trace. “We won’t make any headway with this latest case, either,” they said. “No,” the painter had said. “The snow will cover over all footprints. The thieves are counting on the snow. The snow will cover their crime.” The engineer, who had now also come to the table, said he had noticed something at lunchtime that might lead to the apprehension of the culprits. “Traces,” he said. Then, two hours later, the traces had disappeared. Even at lunchtime, there had been “not the minutest lead.”

Twenty-sixth Day

“I lay in my room all night, on the floor, if you must know. Another man might have called out, or knocked for help. If only the cold hadn’t been so intense, coming through the floorboards,” said the painter, “there was an intense cold coming through the floorboards. I freeze, because my head takes away all the heat from my body. It doesn’t even have to be cold, I’m still freezing. I can pile on any number of blankets, I’ll still freeze. And then my head started to swell up like a balloon: everything transpired in a sort of half-waking state: my huge head was breathing in and out, and almost crushing my chest. My thighs were so cold that when I touched them, I thought they must be dead; and my legs and feet, which I normally keep moving, to get some warmth into them, you know … I couldn’t do it this time, and there was no way of getting myself warm … Can I hang on till morning? I wondered, and closed my eyes. But even closing my eyes was a painful intervention into my being. As for opening them again! I open my eyes more slowly than anyone I know, and I close them in the same way. My eyes, my mouth, my ears, are all terribly sensitive; because they are all so big, they cause me great pain. My collarbone and shins are covered by the merest layer of skin. The nerves have nothing to sustain or protect them. The hours pass more and more slowly, I find it increasingly difficult to get through a night. I can’t read my Pascal anymore either. Not one word. Nothing. Before long, I won’t be able to think of anything to make my
nights bearable. There are no pressure points in my body, not to mention my head, that aren’t extraordinarily sensitive to pain. It doesn’t matter what I do, my constant headaches will be joined by the pains I suffer when I move my foot anywhere, when I put my hand on something somewhere: it makes no difference what I touch it with and how, it will hurt, and I will be in pain. And then there’s the additional factor that incipient thoughts bat around the inside of my skull; each time, I think my head will break apart when I move from one subject to another. There is a continual imaginative assault, which is driving me half crazy. You must remember, no one has such self-restraint. Every object I see hurts me. Every color I am forced to take in. Every memory that surfaces, everything, everything. There isn’t anything I can look at till the end, because I would either be wiped out or driven crazy, in the way that everything strikes me as being so crazy already, that I’m like a cursed animal, do you understand! I’ve already crossed the line …”

“I have the feeling,” the painter said, “that my head is my body, and vice versa. Certain faint rowing motions with my legs, you understand, in the night … as if my head were filled with poison gas, as if I would feel the greatest relief if someone were to stab me in the head … then it would transpire that my head is made of some solid matter after all, it would split open … I am so afraid of encountering some hard object, some pointed object, it’s ridiculous … as if I had a giant tumor over my left eye. The yawning holes of my nostrils are the muzzle of a prehistoric beast. I have the feeling: my nose is made up of an infinite number of little sucker nozzles. In every one of these nozzles I, my explorer character,
is able to descend … the lungs, you know, no longer work by instinct, I am continually afraid they might tear. Whereas the lungs are the only organic part of me that doesn’t hurt. Which in turn frightens me, you see: what if one wing no longer stands the pressure, then there’s a chain reaction … such knowledge of the inner makeup of my body … I feel and empathize with every one of my internal organs … each organ is a firmly defined notion, a well-rounded pain … And the extraordinary … Liver, pancreas, kidney, those three torments, you understand … and then the torment of my head, which I have already described to you. Head torment and body torment, reciprocal, you understand, unyielding, you understand also: and then the whole subterranean empire of torments, the torments of the mind, and the free-floating torment of the soul … I could divide my head into millions of constituent parts and study its laws: that work of extermination! The brightly colored territory of my pains: no horizon, you know, no perception, no relief from unconsciousness …” He says: “I cling to people who have certain specific intentions, it’s a mental torture.”

And then: “The most promising plans, the most promising conditions, everything goes to rack and ruin, everything that contradicts absolute silence. And in you I seem to identify some admirable character traits … And you’re able to listen as well. As far as I’m concerned, I am of unimaginable hardness. Not laughter and tears, as people might think. No. Admittedly, at your age the greatest danger is the ability to make anything of yourself, and then not to make anything
 … Because, like all humans, you aren’t able to identify your moment. Nothing identifies its moment, that’s it! … where there’s a precipitate fall or climb, you don’t know … where it goes down into the practice of letting live and vegetating along. Most humans lose themselves in the sexual at thirty or so. And thereafter they just eat. I sometimes detect a certain astounding cleverness in what you say, a radical clarity, a philosophical aptitude that sources everything in a higher plane. And that’s the deadly thing.”

“It might be the sound of falling snow or the smack of a bird on the cobblestones, the possibilities are endless … Often, it’s just the smell of the millennia in my nostrils … I’m sure you sometimes come across some long-forgotten scene from decades past … You see a tree and you see a window, and in actual fact there’s no tree and no window, but a city and a country and a river and a man who wakes up, who dies, who shakes hands with you or gives you a smack … Isn’t that right? Those are the issues that have always preoccupied me. The sound of my stick on the road, the voice of the priest, or the groan of the knacker as he shoulders his rucksack … One might pursue one’s investigations into these matters indefinitely, take them to inhuman lengths, indecent lengths, into religion, and into the opposite of religion … Religion, you see: my tree, my stick, my lungs, my heart, my taciturnity, my attentiveness, my crippledom … Progress with these things makes it all so much more megalomaniacal, the advance in my brain, wherever advance is possible, only where there is no advance, you understand … Perhaps that’s what held me back from the ultimate! It’s a leading characteristic
of mine to be modest and self-effacing. You might be surprised to hear it, but that’s the way it is. Cause and effect are almost indistinguishable to me. Science, you know, I have nothing to do with, I resisted it all my life, it would be an abuse against my nature … of course I’m at a disadvantage in my sentimental preferences for the clear scenes of my past. And another thing: vindictiveness! The way the past is put together from vindictiveness is something that’s worth considering. One has nothing to cling to, and feels pointless … Is it that?” He says: “All at once my head had pushed everyone in the public bar back against the wall, all of them, even the ones at the extra table, the knacker, the policeman, the engineer, the landlady and her daughters, all of them. In my dream, you know. My head was suddenly bigger than the public bar, and it crushed them all. A firm lethal blow in all directions, into the reaches of the furthest walls. A terrible effect. But my head didn’t have sufficient force to destroy the inn. The juice of those humans that my head squashed, annulled, was running down my face. Objects and persons were pulped. And the feelings of the objects and persons, likewise. Their feelings too! My eyes grew dark. My tears mixed with the pulp, because of course I wasn’t able to move. In a corner of the public bar, between the bar and the window, my little body had found a refuge for itself, though it was horribly cramped. I was unable to breathe. The sweetish taste on my lips! I tried not to ingest the pulp, but I had no alternative. My tongue was able to push it away, but not the taste. I couldn’t breathe. My ears were flattened against the ceiling, you know, so I couldn’t hear anything. Since everything had happened so suddenly, I wasn’t able to warn anyone, not you, or the engineer, or the landlady, or the knacker.
I was terribly unhappy. I cried, because I had killed everyone. My head tried to break out of the inn, because it was afraid of suffocating. It was able to push the walls back slightly, but no air came in. There was no chink or crack, the walls gave like rubber. I went wild. With that, my head suddenly shrank back to its original dimensions, and the crushed persons and objects, the pulp, you remember, fell to the floor in large hard slabs … Then, these slabs were once more persons and things. They were sitting in their places, eating and drinking, and placing orders and paying, you know, and the landlady’s daughters were jumping over the benches as if nothing were amiss. I woke up exhausted and saw that I had misplaced my woolen blanket. I stood up and lay down again and wrapped myself up as warmly as I could. Then, between waking and sleeping, I made my next highly interesting, albeit traumatic discovery: the landlady was standing in my room, and was shooing away a swarm of birds from a tree that stood in the middle of my room. She clapped her hands, and the birds took to the air, and everything went dark … Then I got up, and tried a cold footbath. The footbath afforded me some relief. At any rate, I didn’t dream anymore. Maybe because I was sitting on my bed and browsing in my Pascal. Maybe.”

V
IEWS ON
H
EIGHT
, D
EPTH, AND
C
IRCUMSTANCE

“I must point out to you,” said the painter, “that just one step further on the thinking is completely different, that just one step further on existence is completely different; the virtues
and the issues are the same, there are the same inattentivenesses, and the same impressions, and the same causes, but the effects are terrifyingly different … It’s difficult to make myself clear to you, I could as easily be speaking to a tree, and I am in fact speaking to a silhouette, yes, a silhouette, to a concept flexible to the point of madness, but you are a person whose being is always acute. I should like to point out to you that, if you adduce the idea of a ‘bloodless landscape,’ merely adduce it, and blow it up like a balloon, like an enormous balloon, with incomparable lung power, with the lung power of an extraordinary universe, that it is then possible to move about outside the shadow side of our imagination … I confront myself with the keenest frost, which to the thought is true and acute, and pitifully ridiculous … I have been speaking in my cruel and hopelessly elaborate way, but listen now: I am undergoing a ‘chilling of my memory’ which I should like to call unjustified, or rather: I am distracting myself from within, purely so that I leave myself alone! Or rather: my brain is distracting from the relatedness of the world, distracting from myself, from the malice of inventions that have enabled me to exterminate myself … In the darkest places, only incomprehensibility carries any conviction, you understand, I should like to put you in the way of a fascinating metaphor, as you might cast adrift a dog on an endless ocean, as you set a bird deep underground, as you pitch a man in his memory; it’s not the height, it’s not the depth, height and depth are both laughable compared to the circumstance that the catastrophic is laughable compared to the benign … but for the sake of these notions of mine it is imperative that I must soon disappear, I must soon burn: I have always been attracted to the notion of burning, having to burn for my own sake has always been my secret version of personal
fame … If I fail to die, I thought, if I fail to be confused … if I fail with my ideas … You understand! … I get ready for my journey, and deceive the world … I pack my bags and deceive the world … I board a thousand trains and deceive the world … I distract it from the point where I’ll be arriving … Because the end is nothing more than the nausea that a decomposed human causes … Well, and even though the end is also a shipwreck, I will have to undergo that final stifling act of coition, that torment, that turns the calamity of my relinquished existence into a devilishly certain conspiracy. I’m not even thinking of dying,” said the painter, “I’m not even thinking of fame … I’m not even thinking of indecency, of the indecency of dissolution.”