Frost: A Novel (8 page)

The knacker also works as an undertaker. Now you run into him here, now there. He’s responsible for burying dogs and the cadavers of cattle and pigs, but also people. When he pulled off his army uniform, they, the council, gave him his two jobs, for which no one else had applied. Since he had never learned or been trained to do anything else, it was just right for him. He didn’t want to start being a woodcutter after the war, and he didn’t want to work in the cellulose factory either; he was too old for the railway, the post office turned him down, and there were no other possibilities. He has quite a bit of time to himself, and is almost always in the
fresh air. Once every other week he takes a trip into the city, he’s the only one of all of them who occasionally sees a little bit of the world. He digs graves, and shovels them over. He removes decomposed wreaths, and occasionally he earns a bit on the side by selling the cemetery compost to one of the farmers. In the course of his digging, he often comes across items of jewelry, which it is claimed he takes into the city to sell. Summer and winter he’s dressed the same, in a leather jacket and leather pants, which are tied round the ankles. During funerals, he has to stand against the church wall and wait for the ceremony to be concluded. As soon as the last people have left, he gets to work, quickly fills in the grave, which, once it’s settled, he tidies up: he pours black earth onto it, and cuts pieces of turf which he assembles into a neat hill. For that he often gets whole rucksacks full of meat and butter and sausage and weeks’ supplies of free eggs, which he sells to the landlady, or rather, she deducts them from what he pays on the last of the month.

Often he goes scrabbling around the cemetery for hours, lugging turf, the water-weight, and a whole set of narrow boards which he uses to measure. He makes no secret of the fact that he’s often up to his knees in water, because he has to dig graves to a prescribed depth of two meters twenty. They don’t believe him until they see for themselves. The clay soil, containing a lot of gravel, can no longer do anything to spoil his mood. At nine o’clock, he hunkers down and drinks a bottle of beer. When he walks out of the cemetery at five, having locked up the morgue at a quarter of, he has a tune on his lips. Everyone likes to hear his stories, even the ones he makes up as he goes along. You can see how one thing leads
to another with him, the way he always comes up with something unexpected.

“As knacker and gravedigger one is an important figure, a man they can’t treat like an ordinary Joe,” he says. Often he has a dog that was run over by a train in his rucksack, but he might just as well pull out some completely out-of-the-way item he found in an attic somewhere, like the pair of carved wooden angels he set up in the middle of the table yesterday, to drink a toast to.

The landlady was standing in the kitchen when I went to get some hot water. She was peeling potatoes, and her two daughters were stirring the contents of saucepans on the stove, or running to the woodshed for wood and putting it on the fire, or taking out clothes and brushing them clean. The landlady wanted to loan me a winter overcoat belonging to her husband. “You must be freezing,” she said, “what you’ve got isn’t more than a raincoat. The cold will cut right through that.” I told her I always wore a woolen vest, and I didn’t feel the cold. “That’s what you say,” said the landlady. “I don’t feel the cold,” I said. “Well, if you keep going around with the painter the whole time,” she said. “Yes, if I keep going around with him the whole time,” I said. She sent her daughters down to the cellar. “How long are you planning to stay?” I didn’t know. Usually, all her rooms were taken, “just not this year. Visitors don’t like to come when there’s so much noise. The people working on the power plant make too much noise.” But she didn’t make that much from her long-stay visitors. “You know, you can’t ask for that much from them … 
And then you have to have something to offer your customers in return … it has to be tasty, and generous portions as well … But the workmen, they bring in money all right.” Why didn’t I sit down. She pushed a chair under me. If the inn were anywhere else, she said, “but here, right where they’re excavating!”

Her potato-peeling took me back to my grandparents’ house, the doors that were always left open a crack, the smell, the cats that snuck around, the milk that sometimes bubbled over, the ticking clocks. She said: “It’s not easy being a student either.” It was something someone had said to her once, she didn’t mean anything by it. She had once been to the capital, and bought herself a few clothes. “I tell you, I was relieved to be heading home.” And then: “But I wouldn’t mind being in the city, not in the capital, but the city.” She has the legs of a washerwoman. Fat and dropsical and veined. The public bar cost twice as much to heat as it did last year. “Meat has tripled in price,” she said. And then she said something that utterly distracted me, put me in mind of a lake, a forest, a house in the flatland. Winter business was just the same as summer business. She was thinking of getting the building done up, getting all the rooms painted, replacing a lot of things that had gone out of fashion, “for instance getting in a new lot of wardrobes,” she said, “and new tables for the bar and new curtains and a new staircase, and the windows ought to be much bigger, I’d get the openings made as big as possible, to get some light into the place.” Then she poured hot water into a jug for me. She said: “But my husband doesn’t want any of that. When he gets out, that’s the end of everything anyway, you know. When he gets out …”
The way she said it. The way she said it, I couldn’t get it out of my head: “When he gets out …”

When the beer deliverymen come, the landlady stands in the doorway and sizes them up. I’m sure I’ll manage to get one or other of them into bed with me, is what she may have been thinking to herself. The deliveries happen at three in the afternoon, but already by late morning, she’s pretty excited, bustling about here and there, she tidies up the silverware drawer and mixes up forks and spoons, which makes for a little irritation at lunchtime. She sends her girls outside to see if the draymen aren’t coming. But they were always on time, and never got there before three. “Go and see if the draymen are coming!” she orders them. She opens the kitchen window so that she can stick her head out, but she can’t see anything, because of the way the little hill blocks the view of the road down which the draymen will come. She has known that from the very first day, but still she keeps looking out. If you ask her what she’s so excited about, she replies: “What do you mean? I’m not excited!” And she opens the main door at eleven, and loops the handle to a hook on the wall. “We need fresh air!” she says. “It’s stifling in here. The whole place reeks!” When the draymen draw up, she charges out and tells them how many crates and barrels she wants. They weren’t to make too much noise, she says, she had some sick and restless guests staying at the inn. She watches the draymen unload barrels and crates, and carry and roll them in. They wear large, thick, shiny leather aprons from throat to way below the knee, green caps on their heads, and keep the top buttons of their work tunics open even in winter. She asks for the first barrel to be lifted onto the bar and has the hose fitted
to it, and the first three, four, eight, nine glasses, sprouting on the bar like mushrooms, all of them full of froth, she empties into a jug for the draymen, and sets out bread and butter and sausage on the table for them. She sits down with them, and asks them questions: “What’s going on down there?” she asks.

They tell her what they know, an accident, a baptism, a fistfight at a Communist meeting, a case of infanticide, a raft on the river, “so big it couldn’t get under the bridge.” About how it’s getting harder and harder to drive up the mountain, especially with the snow not being properly cleared. “But there’s no one to clear it,” they say. They put away as much as they can, then they get to their feet, wipe their mouths with their sleeves, and go out, climb into their truck, and drive off. Then there’s nothing she can see but the brawny arm of one of the draymen, sticking out the open window. “They have it easy,” she says as she walks into the public room.

The landlady was an instance of someone not putting herself out because she doesn’t want to make anything of herself beyond the ordinary, unless it were something over time horribly repulsive, which doesn’t require any exertion, just a general letting-oneself-go. She sometimes appeared to him, the painter, at the foot of his bed, in spirit, the way an image appears, emerging from the subconscious, half dream, half reality, something you don’t like and that leaves you no peace: when he can’t sleep; when he hears noise “from down in the public bar”; on the path, often; in the forest, then with particular roughness against the landlady and himself. The image
had become a secret enemy of his, like other images of people who one day crossed his path and have long since forgotten him, and the moment they belonged to him. By nature, she was as lonely as thousands of others just like herself. Probably with just the same gifts for this or that as those others too. But thousands craned their necks to stare at him, when she craned her neck, as awkwardly and deceitfully as she did, with her timidity and her envy at odds. “Endowed with qualities that might lead to extraordinary heights,” but stifled at every turn, she lived for her physicality, for a game of hide-and-seek that she played with herself in the dark, held together by corpulence and a few simple phrases, no more than three or four.

The landlady knew what her game was. And at the same time she didn’t know. “The obverse of every side appears … Strong-willed, but not strong, because mean.” He said it as if throwing the thing he said it about in the trash. Somewhere far away. “Her knowledge is based on self-deception so primitive that it cannot be called intellectual. No different than with a dog or cat. Only more pampered. More dependent.” Then he gives a brief description of once having caught the knacker getting some substantial sum of money out of the landlady. “Back of the house. First in the lavatory, then outside under the tree.” Four or five hundred schillings: “Big denomination notes. I don’t believe thousands, so they must have been hundreds. Which he hurriedly stashed away in his pants pockets when I appeared.” The landlady said, supposedly: “You don’t have to give that back to me. My husband doesn’t know.” When was her husband coming out of prison? the knacker then asked. “If it was up to me, he wouldn’t be
coming out at all. I don’t want him anyway” was her comment. For nights the two of them had been together. “No passion in it,” said the painter, “purely out of shamelessness.” She, not he, was the driving force, pushing everything into repetitions of the same collapse. “Obtuse and blind, as women of her type always are.” She had been impatient to have her husband put away. Already when she was seventeen, a year after the wedding, she had had enough of her husband. Cheated him from that time forth. She always owned up to everything, if there was anything to own up to; she didn’t bother to keep secrets. “It was always her greatest weapon, the fact that she didn’t keep secrets. And she was never short of a little variety,” said the painter. “She just went around the corner. Straight into criminality,” said the painter. “In the mornings she would come up the mountain, at daybreak, not at all tired, in fact quite the opposite, refreshed. I often saw her, because there were times I would get up at three o’clock and leave the inn, and go on long walks. If I saw her coming, I hid. There’s no shortage of places to hide hereabouts. When she got back, her husband often wouldn’t even be at home. That suited her, because then she got to sleep in. They must have spent years not asking one another what they get up to, where they’ve been when they come back in the mornings. The children knew everything.” The painter said: “In order to land her husband in prison, she even traveled to S., to the public prosecutor. Because the landlord was this close to getting off scot-free.” The same night her husband was taken away by the police, she received the knacker. “He was already waiting by the tree,” said the painter. “But there were also times when he was nowhere to be seen. Then there would be an icy silence in the inn.” Apparently, she would send her daughters down to the village to get him. If they didn’t
come back with him, they would be beaten by their mother. “Punched and kicked,” said the painter. Apart from that, the landlady was “a creature that doesn’t mind the odd blow, skulks in a corner, and then comes out as if nothing had happened.”

For the last few years, the painter hadn’t had anyone except his housekeeper. She was sufficient for his so-called “physical requirements,” which others “exploited shamelessly,” but which became increasingly unimportant to him. “She doesn’t know the least thing about it,” he said. She was a woman with the necessary intelligence for a housekeeper, dressed carefully, and took herself off the moment it was required, without anything needing to be said. Unlike most of the other housekeepers he knew, she had only ever seen him as her employer. Two days a week. He felt that to be difficult for her. She was lonely. Didn’t know what to do with the rest of her time. He paid her over and above, and occasionally bought her tickets for some entertainment or other, for which she repaid him with especial care over his laundry, ironing, and keenness in the kitchen. She came from the country, and housekeepers who came from the country were always to be preferred. He hadn’t had her long, two or three years maybe, because before that he hadn’t been able to afford a housekeeper. At present, she was with her parents in T. The very first day after he’d given her her notice, she had driven to them. “A girl of forty-five,” he said. She had mastered the art of admitting visitors and escorting them out, like a highly competent mathematician. “But I hardly ever received visitors!” he said. It took her no more than two or three days to work out what his taste was, “the way I wanted
things to be.” He gave her a free hand. “She brought order to the worst of my chaos,” he said. “In artistic questions, she was ‘well-versed,’ knew her way about. Because she didn’t know the first thing about art: I always got my best criticism from her.” She was “equally good at polishing shoes and at the silent drawing of curtains, at smoking cigars and at puncturing the megalomania of artists … When she was with me, I understood what the rich were about. I suddenly understood wealth and mobility.” She told him what didn’t suit her more trenchantly, effectively, and agreeably than anyone had ever managed to say anything to him. “She wanted to put out flowers all over the place, wherever there was room, but I forbade it.”—“I don’t want hygiene to crowd everything else out!” he explained. And she got it. She opened the door for him, and closed it after him. Dusted books and walls in a way that didn’t cause him to protest. Posted his letters. Went shopping for him. Did all official business for him. Brought him news he would never have discovered for himself. “She made me hot and cold compresses and said thousands of times over that I was away, even when I was in my room, in bed.” He said: “Wealth is as good as poverty when it comes to producing clarity.” One morning, after he knew he had a fatal illness, he locked everything up, and last of all locked out his housekeeper. “She wept,” he said. “Now I won’t go back there. It would be like going back to a dump. I can’t go back, even if I wanted to: I’m finished.” He said: “It’s true, I didn’t have anyone at the end except for my housekeeper. As far as everyone else is concerned I might already be dead.”