Frost: A Novel (17 page)

The war had left its grisly traces up and down the valley. “Even today you keep encountering skulls or entire skeletons, covered over by a thin layer of pine needles,” says the painter. In the forest over toward the Klamm valley and behind the lake, also in the larch wood, disbanded regiments had been starved to death. “And then they froze. A few were able to get away, but only a very few, the others were already too weak to reach the villages. And the soldiers didn’t think of murder,” murder being a preserve “of the dark elements out of the East.” The convicts from the nearby prison had also wrought considerable havoc, and a lot of missing men who had broken out and never returned were found dotted about under bushes and rocks. “Often, it was children out blackberrying who would suddenly scream, and drag their mothers over to some spot overgrown with snakeweed. There they’d find a human being, naked, the clothes ripped from his body once years back. Hunger turns people into animals.” At the end of the war, the forests had been full of war gear; tanks and armored cars and cannon and motorbikes and cars had been junked among the trees all over the place. “Some
exploded when they were touched. Often the tanks contained the bodies of their crews, huddled together with torn lungs. People who opened the hatches made some grisly discoveries,” he said. “By and by people dared to disassemble the war gear, and they also started burying the dead soldiers—on the spot, because they didn’t want them in their own graveyards, they were too alien for them. When they touched them, the bodies disintegrated, they had decomposed in the air. In the hollows, children found bazooka shells, which tore them apart. There were little scraps of children, you know, hanging off the trees. You could find men in their prime ground up under the wheels of field guns, in the ravine there was a group of grenadiers with their tongues cut out, and their penises stuffed in their mouths. And here and there, there might be shot-up uniforms in the trees, and stiff hands and feet poking out of the pond. It took years before the locals straightened out the forests and the countryside as a whole. At first they only went out to collect foodstuffs they found in the tanks, and various other useful objects, uniforms, as I say, which they adapted for themselves and then went around in for years; and only then to bury the dead, or what was left of them, the remains, as they say, and finally they turned out with rakes and shovels to wipe out the traces. But the traces of the war are not yet wiped out,” said the painter, “this war will never be forgotten. People will continue to encounter it wherever they go.”

“What do you think the painter Strauch said to me today?” With this question that wasn’t a question the landlady surprised me in my room, having knocked and entered to make the bed. So doing, she picked up the pillow, tossed it up in the
air, and caught it a couple of times. She shook out the featherbed at the open window. “What do you think?” she asked, having made the bed, and as she wiped down the washstand and filled the ewer with fresh water, and my glass on the bedside table. She drew everything out that she did, so as to be able to tell me finally what it was that the painter Strauch—“still in bed, not yet dressed, even though it was nine o’clock already!”—had said. “He said he would surprise me one day by lying dead in his bed.” She had laughed and supposed the painter was having a bit of fun with her. But then she had seen from his expression that he meant it. “You know, I can’t be doing with that in my establishment, a corpse,” she said. And then she left my room, but came back in right away and said: “I forgot to close your window.” She closed the window and then stopped in the doorway, as though looking to me for some sort of explanation. “Isn’t it funny to try and frighten someone like that?” she said. “The painter’s a bit odd this time, I find. What’s the matter with him? Do you know?” I didn’t know, I didn’t have any idea. The painter was worried about something, but I didn’t know what it was that was worrying him. “He’s a different man from what he used to be,” she said. “But I’d be sorry if he was ill or something,” she said. And then she finally left my room, I heard her shouting for one of her daughters down in the passageway. When I went down later to stretch my legs, just once round the inn, because I had the feeling I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all unless I got some fresh air, and suddenly feeling tired, I wanted to lie down for an hour, so as to be refreshed for when the painter came for me later, when I was downstairs I went into the kitchen under the pretext of having to get a glass of water, which was fresher from the kitchen well, and there she was standing there in just her skirt, and hearing me coming,
she hurriedly tucked her undershirt into it, and I said, while I drew a glass of water from the well, which is a draw-well of the sort you generally only find on the outside of farmhouses, and not inside a kitchen, I said: “Did he talk about suicide at all?”—“About suicide?” she said. “No, not about suicide. That would be still worse. He only said I’d find him dead in his bed one morning. Perhaps he has the feeling he might have a stroke. He always used to worry he might have a stroke.”—“He was worried that he might have a stroke?”—“He surely wouldn’t kill himself in my establishment? I think he was just having a bit of fun with me,” she said, and, feeling sure he wasn’t having fun at all, but merely stating something I got to hear from him quite regularly, I drank my glass of water, and set off outside.

On the way to the church he kept stopping and drawing my attention to the fact that he was an old man, and I shouldn’t wait for him. “I don’t mind. Quite the opposite.” After he’d said that four or five times, the last time in a sharp tone of command, I simply left him standing in the middle of the slope, by the big tree stump that marks the boundary between two fields, and ran up as quickly as I could. I enjoyed the feeling of suddenly being free. Like a dog that’s slipped his leash. Up at the top I stood in such a way that he couldn’t see me, but I had a good view of him laboriously making his way up. It seemed to me he rested more frequently than the day before, when we had taken the same walk, and he had asked me the following question: “What sort of person are you? I can’t make sense of you. Tell me what you think. What you’re doing meeting me all over the place, and accompanying
me! Going around with me! Have you at least enjoyed a bit of a break? It’s the tension that’s the mystery. You’re a mystery to me, even though you’re a very natural and uncomplicated type!”—Watching him now, I thought a little puff of wind would be enough to knock him over. When he stopped, he marked the ground with his stick, Indian signs, he told me, that are incomprehensible to me. Some of these signs remind me of animals, a cow for instance, a pig; others are shaped like temples, or the courses of rivers. Circles. Other geometrical forms. Even up where I was, I could hear him muttering to himself. Like an old general talking to himself, and then turning to the army that will always be there in his imagination. And he looked, too, like someone bending over a staff map, with everything on it down to the least detail depending on him. He was talking in foreign languages as well, Asian words and scraps were flying through the air. The whole scene, with him the focus of it, reminded me of a painting I saw years ago once in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; I can even remember the room it’s hanging in: a river landscape by Breughel the Elder, where people are trying to find distraction from death, in which they are successful, but only, as the picture seems to be saying, at the price of infinite torments in Hell. The black of the tree stump, which shaded into the black of the painter’s jacket, and the black of his pants and his stick, was finally picked up by the black of the mountain peaks. When he was no more than a few feet away from me, standing on one of the last steps going up to the church door, I was afraid of him. I imagined him coming up to me from behind, and clubbing me over the head with his stick. When I looked in his face, that idea left me. Even though nothing about his face ruled out
such a possibility. “If you like, we can go in the church,” he said. And immediately after: “No, you go by yourself. I’ll wait for you outside.” I went into the church and sat down in a pew with a good view of the altar. I picked up a prayer book that was lying on the pew next to me. Leafed through it. Found a psalm. Read the psalm: “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. Gloria Patri!” And then: “Me expectaverunt peccatores, ut perderent me: testimonia tua, Domine, intellexi: omnis consummationis vidi finem: latum mandatum tuum nimis. Beati immaculati in via: qui ambulant in lege Domini. Gloria Patri.” I read the whole thing through again. A second time. And a third. But it was unbearable to me, I could make no sense of it at all, and I had to get up and leave the church. As I crossed the soft carpet to the door, I saw angels’ faces of incredible ugliness, and the nearer I got to them, the more fearsome they grew. When I stepped outside, the painter had disappeared. He had in the meantime made his way round to the laying-out chapel, which was attached to the rear of the church. From there, standing in deep snow, he called out to me: “Stay where you are, otherwise you’ll have a fright!” I didn’t know what he thought would give me a fright. Then it occurred to me that the chapel was used for the laying out of corpses from time to time. “There’s a dead man in the chapel,” he said, and raised his head up past the windowsill, which caused his hat to slip back over his neck. When he returned, he said: “A painted corpse. They have the most gruesome way of painting corpses here.” He wondered what had prompted him to go to the chapel at all. “It’s not curiosity,” he said. We were late getting back to the inn; it was one o’clock.

•   •   •

Strauch the painter is shorter than Strauch the surgeon. Strauch the painter is one of those cases where there’s nothing to be done with hammer and crowbar, with knife and saw and pincers and scalpel. So let the thoughts of modern science take their way, the inventiveness of many sleepless nights. Because this is a case of an error purchased and now almost entirely paid off by Death. Yes? A consequence of development which is no development, a consequence of matter. Of movement that is no movement. Something organic that isn’t organic. A point of departure that is no point of departure. Can’t be. Of an incurable illness. He continually scents danger. It’s clear that he continually feels himself under threat. Continually on the alert, in the same way as the world about him seems to him to be. So what is the organism? What is the contrast? Body and mind? Mind less body? Body without soul? What then? Under the surface? Above the surface? And on the surface? A shy destiny coming to an end, and what is it? But there are illnesses that are completely unrecognized. They have always existed, and always will exist. If one becomes curable overnight, another may become incurable overnight. One fewer is one more. Why? How? Is the causation any indication?

The painter said: “The priest is a gravely ill man. Yesterday, before coming back to the inn, I spoke to him. He asked me for money again. For the poorhouse. For the sacristy, you know. He is very well aware of my views on the church. He likes to walk in the snow for an hour. In summer, he sits by his pond, and catches nothing in two weeks. The church is
not overly generous with its employees. The church in the countryside is something like folk poetry. You see it on the trees and in the cellars and on the potato fields. Going around with children. Its laughter has a fiendish rhythm. It’s afraid of all ceremony, in particular it’s afraid of the bishop. You know, there’s something poetic about that. If you suddenly hear a man sobbing, then it’s the priest. Incidentally, he has an excellent library. Doesn’t know any sermons. He is so timid, a bird is enough to give him a fright. But if need be, he’ll go to visit a dying man at night, in the pitch dark, alone, with a lantern. Often to remote farmhouses, far up in the ice and rocks.”

“Enormous amounts of timber,” said the painter, “vast quantities of valuable wood go to waste up there. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of trees. The cellulose factory gobbles them up. By the time it reaches the valley, that’s all they’re good for. This whole landscape,” he said, “used to be simply a wild, wonderful biotope … Come,” he said, “I’ll show you a few types of tree that are particularly common here … Here is the spruce, picea excelsa, first and foremost, then the Scotch pine, the fir, the larch. The odd cembra pine. Come along, I’ll give you a few details, on broad-leaved trees, angiospermae, and conifers, the gymnospermae …”

At the outset it amounted to something, but even then it was already seeking to cause pain as soon as possible, the relationship between two young people who, short or long, but in any case suddenly, had come together, said the painter. “Before it turns into anything,” he said, “that’s when it’s
beautiful and precious.” Youth somehow “pulled off the stunt of fooling the world for a brief moment,” and for a few days and nights everything bore the appearance of happiness. I was thinking of S. and wanted to write her a letter at once, and just at that moment I also wanted not to write, and I tried to think of something other than her, but I didn’t manage, not till I was out of the village, not the whole way up the path, not in the ravine, and not in the inn; I said to myself: What was that anyway? Didn’t it finish long ago? What happened? And how and why was it suddenly over? At first not a day without her, then almost not a night without her, and then everything started to crumble the way it always crumbled, withdrew in two directions from two people, and was gone. And where did it go to? Often I woke up at night, in alarm. And followed a trail that suddenly ended somewhere in the forest, by a river, in a fire. I often, often asked myself what it is that creates the conditions that make two young people unhappy. I’m so young, and yes, it’s over! There was a coming and asking and establishing, and that’s how pitiless it was: the end. If I were to write again, she thinks, then it might start over. But it can’t start over, it mustn’t. “It’s a lie,” said the painter. I know what he meant: there’s a lie founded on another lie, and looking for refuge in a third: which is to say, bang in the middle of another person. I hadn’t thought of her in weeks. I went away from her as one might walk out of a shop, with the firm resolve never to go there again. OK. The painter said: “Then it’s like a couple of mountains that are separated by a rushing river.” Suddenly I noticed I had been singing, the whole stretch of the way to the cornfield. I was singing to mask over what I was thinking. But thoughts don’t leave when you ask them to, you can’t just usher them out.
On the contrary: it’s then that they really take root in you, and start to produce reproach and irritation all the way to infinity. If the afflicted one gets into this destructive process, he can become powerless whatever he does, wherever he goes. The painter said: “The most beautiful flowers are cut first; what help are clever gardeners then?” He pulled me further and further into gloomy thoughts that finally, mad as it seemed to me, as the noose tightened around me, prompted me to tear myself away from him. I ran off without a word to him, and then waited by the hay barn. I apologized. He was quite unfazed.