Frost: A Novel (2 page)

My assignment is highly confidential, and I think it was deliberately entrusted to me suddenly, from one day to the next. The assistant must have spent some time nursing the idea of charging me with the observation of his brother. And why
me? Why not one of the others, interns like myself? Because I often came to him with difficult questions, and the others didn’t? He specifically told me on no account to arouse the least suspicion in the painter Strauch that there had been any communication between himself, the surgeon Strauch his brother, and myself. That’s why I am also to say, if asked, that I am studying law, so as to divert attention from medicine. The assistant paid for my travel and board. He gave me a sum of money that seemed ample to him to cover everything. He demands precise observation of his brother, nothing more. Description of his behavior, of the course of his typical day; information about his opinions, intentions, expressions, judgments. A report on his walk. On his way of gesticulating, flying off the handle, “keeping people at bay.” On the way he handled his walking stick. “Watch the way my brother holds his stick, I want a precise description of it.”

It’s twenty years since the surgeon last saw the painter. Twelve years since their last letters. The painter describes the relationship as hostile. “Even so, as a doctor, I will make an effort,” said the assistant. For which he needed my help. My observations would be extremely useful to him, more than anything he had yet undertaken. “My brother,” he told me, “is unmarried, as I am. He lives, as they say, in his head. But he’s terminally confused. Haunted by vice, shame, awe, reproach, examples—my brother is a walker, a man in fear. And a misanthrope.”

This assignment is a private initiative on the part of the assistant, but I am to view it as part of my apprenticeship in
Schwarzach. It’s the first time that observation has presented itself to me as work.

I had intended to take with me Koltz on diseases of the brain, divided into “hyper-activity” and “lesions” of the brain, but in the end I didn’t. Instead I took along a book of Henry James’s, which I had started in Schwarzach.

At four o’clock I left the inn. In the sudden massive quiet I was seized by a feeling of unease. My sensation—of having put on the room like a straitjacket, and now needing to take it off—made me charge down the stairs. I went into the public bar. When, after several shouts, no one came, I went outside. I stumbled over a chunk of ice, picked myself up, and found an objective: a tree stump some twenty yards away. There I stopped. Now I could see lots of similar stumps sticking out of the snow, as if shredded by shelling, dozens and dozens of them. It occurred to me that, sitting on my bed for a couple of hours, I had been asleep. My arrival and the new setting had taken it out of me. Must be the Föhn, I thought. Then I saw a man emerging from the piece of forest a hundred yards ahead of me: undoubtedly it was the painter Strauch. All I could see of him was a torso; his legs were concealed in deep snowdrifts. I was struck by his big black hat. Reluctantly, as it appeared to me, the painter made his way from one stump to the next. Propped himself on his stick, and then pushed off with it, as if he were drover, stick, and animal bound for the slaughterhouse, all at the same time. But such an impression faded immediately, and I was left with the question of how to
get to him as quickly and correctly as I could. What should I say to him? I thought. Do I go up to him and ask him a question, in other words, do I follow the traditional method of asking about the time or the place? Yes? No? For a while I vacillated. I decided I would cut him off.

“I’m looking for the inn,” I said. And that was it. He scrutinized me, because my sudden appearance was more alarming than inspiring of confidence—and took me with him. He was a long-term resident at the inn, he said. Anyone coming to stay in Weng had to be either an eccentric or mistaken. Anyone looking for a holiday. “In
that
inn?” It wasn’t possible to be so callow as to fail to see immediately that that was absurd. “In this area?” Such a thing could only occur to a fool. “Or a prospective suicide.” He asked me who I was, what I was studying, because surely I was “still studying” something or other, and I answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “Law.” That was enough for him. “You go on ahead. I’m an old man,” he said. The way he looked frightened me for long moments, forcing me back into myself, the way I saw him the first time, so helpless.

“If you walk the way I’m pointing with my stick, you’ll come to a valley where you can walk back and forth for hours, without the least anxiety,” he said. “You don’t have to be afraid of being found out. Nothing can happen to you: everything has died. No minerals, no crops, nothing. You’ll find traces of this or that period, stones, vestiges of masonry, indications, no one knows what of. A certain arcane relation to
the sun. Birches. A ruined church. Traces of wild animals. Four or five days. Solitude, quiet,” he said. “Nature without any human interference. The odd waterfall. It’s like walking centuries before human settlement.”

Evening falls very abruptly here, as if with a clap of thunder. As if a great iron curtain suddenly cut the world in half. Anyway, night falls between one step and the next. The sour colors are drab. Everything is drab. No transition, no twilight. The Föhn wind sees to it that the temperature doesn’t drop. An atmosphere that causes the heart to tighten, if not to stop altogether. The hospitals know all about this air current: ostensibly healthy patients, full to the brim with medical science to the point that there is hope for them, suddenly sink into unconsciousness, and cannot be reanimated by any human agency, however skillful or ingenious. A climate that engenders embolisms. Bizarre cloud formations, somewhere far away. Dogs chasing pointlessly through lanes and farmyards, sometimes attacking people. Rivers stinking of corruption all along their length. Mountains like ridged brains, overly palpable by day, blackly invisible at night. Strangers suddenly getting into conversations at crossroads, asking questions, giving answers they never asked to hear. As if just then, everything was possible: the ugly approaches the beautiful, and vice versa, the ruthless and the weak. The striking quarter hours drip down on cemeteries and rooftops. Death takes a deft hand in life. Children fall into sudden fits of weakness. Don’t shout or yell, but walk under a train. In inns and stations near the waterfalls, relationships are formed that barely last a moment, friendships are struck up that
never come to life; the other, the you, is tormented to the point of murderousness, and then strangled in pettiness and meanness.

Weng lies in a hollow, buried among blocks of ice for millions of years. The roadsides favor promiscuity.

“I was never a painter,” he said today; “at the most, I may have been a decorator.”

There’s now a tension between us that is present on the surface and below. We were in the woods. Silently. Only the wet snow, pounds of it clinging to our boots, seemed to speak continually but incomprehensibly. Breaking our silence. Inaudible words present as thought, but not as speech. He always asks me to go first. He is afraid of me. He knows from stories, and from personal experience, that young people attack and plunder their victims from behind. The bland expression conceals the presence of tools of murder and brigandage. The soul, inasmuch as someone might feel like referring in such a way to this “transgressor of all laws,” because one happens to believe in it, steps out, but rationality, put together from suspicion, fear, and mistrust, makes an
ambush impossible. Even though I tell him I don’t know my way around at all, he makes me go on ahead. From time to time he mutters an instruction like “left” or “right” (and clears away my sense that he might be drifting off on thoughts of his own). I carry them out impatiently, and, as it were, in the dark. What was curious was that there wasn’t the least light to help orient me. It felt like rowing along, in the mind as well, and balance is both effortless and impossible. What would I do if I were all on my own? A thought that suddenly presented itself. The painter walked along behind me, like some vast encumbrance on my nerves: as if he was continually studying the implications of my back. Then he got short of wind, and told me to stop. “I take this path every day,” he said, “I’ve been walking here for decades. I could walk it in my sleep.” I tried to discover more about the reason for his presence in Weng. “My sickness and any number of other reasons,” he said. I hadn’t expected any more detailed reply. I told him as well as I could, in brief points, the story of my life, with spots of light or sorrow, and how it had made me into what I am—without betraying to him what, at the moment, I
really
am—and with an openness that surprised me. But it interested him not at all. He is only interested in himself.

“If you knew how old I am, in calendar terms, you’d get a shock,” he said. “You probably imagine I’m an old man, as young people are apt to. You’d be amazed.” His face seemed to darken into a deeper hopelessness. “Nature is bloody,” he said, “but bloodiest toward her own finest, most remarkable, and choicest gifts. She grinds them down without batting an eyelid.”

•   •   •

He doesn’t think much of his mother, and even less of his father, and his siblings had become as indifferent to him over time as he thinks he has always been to them. But the way he tells me, I can tell how much he loved his mother, his father, and his siblings. How attached he is to them! “Everything was always gloomy for me,” he says. I told him about a passage from my own childhood. Thereupon he said: “Childhood is always the same. Only to one person, it will seem ordinary, to a second benign, and to a third satanic.”

In the inn, they treat him with appropriate respect, as it seems to me. But once his back is turned, they all make faces.

“Their excesses have been noted. Their sexuality can be sniffed. One can feel what they think and what they want, these people, sense what forbidden things they are continually contriving. Their beds are under the window or in the doorway, or they don’t even bother with beds: they go from atrocity to atrocity … The men treat the women like pieces of tenderized meat, and vice versa, now one, now the other, depending on their respective imbecility. The primitive is everywhere. Some behave as if by prior arrangement, others seem to come to it naturally … their too-tight trousers and skirts seem to drive them wild. The evenings go on and on: it’s all too much. A few yards here or there, in or out, so as not to have to freeze … Their mouths are taciturn, the rest goes wild … day dawns, and you don’t know which way is up. Sex is what does for them all. Sex, the disease that kills by
its nature. Sooner or later, it will kill off even the deepest intimacy … it brings about the conversion of one into the other, of good into evil, from here to there, from high to low. Godless, because ruination appears first … the moral becomes immoral (a model of universal decline). The forked tongue of nature, you might say. The way the workers go around here,” he said, “they live for sex, like most people, like all people … they live to the end of their days in a continual wild process against modesty and time and vice versa: ruination. Time sends them on their way to unchastity with a slap. Some are more accomplished at concealing it than others. With the canny ones, you only realize when they’re all done. But it’s for nothing. All of them live a sex life, and not a life.”

How long was I proposing to stay in Weng, he asked. I needed to get back fairly soon, to prepare for exams in the spring, I said. “As you’re studying law,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll find it easy to get a job later. There are always jobs for lawyers. I had a nephew once who was a lawyer, only he lost his mind over stacks of files and had to quit his job in the civil service. He wound up in Steinhof. Do you know what that is?” I replied that I had heard of the institution “am Steinhof.” “Well, then you’ll know what became of my nephew,” he said.

I had expected a difficult, but not a hopeless case. “Strength of character, leading to death,” a phrase from a book I’d read early on, occurred to me, and made me think about the painter: How is it that all his thoughts circle around suicide? Is it permissible for suicide to be a sort of secret pleasure to a
man? What is suicide anyway? Self-extinction. Rightly or wrongly. By what right? Why not? I tried to focus my thoughts on the one point: is suicide permissible? I had no answer. None. Because people are no answer, and can’t be, nor is anything living, and not the dead either. By committing suicide, I am destroying something for which I am not to blame. Something entrusted to me, then? By whom? When? Did I realize it at the time? No. But an unignorable voice tells me that suicide is a sin. Sin? As easy as that? It’s something that will bring the whole edifice to collapse, says the voice. Edifice? What edifice? His watchword, whether asleep or awake: suicide! It will choke him. He is bricking up one window after another. Before long, he’ll have walled himself up. Then, once he can’t see out anymore, because he can’t breathe anymore, he’ll be persuasive: because he’ll be dead. I have the sense of standing in the shadow of a thought of his that is very close to me: the thought of his suicide.

“A brain is like a state,” the painter said. “Suddenly anarchy breaks loose.” I was in his room, waiting for him to get his boots on. “The greater and lesser assailants among the ideas” would form coalitions, only for these coalitions to be equally suddenly revoked. And “being understood, and wanting to be understood, are a deception. Based on all the errors of gender.” Contraries reigned for a single, everlasting night over the day. “Colors, you know, colors are everything. Which means shadows are everything. Contraries are very highly colored.” In many ways, it was like clothes: you buy them and wear them a few times, and then you don’t wear them anymore, at best you sell them, give them away, let them molder away in a chest of drawers. You move them to
the attic or basement. “In the evening, you may have a sense of what the morning will be like,” he said, “but the morning is always a surprise.” There was really no such thing as experience, not really. No continuity. Admittedly, there were ways of avoiding desperation. “These ways never existed for me.” At the moment, all the things on which life insisted were losing their value. “All endeavor is riding for a fall,” he said. Something was splendid, and the next thing was brutal, much more brutal than the first had been splendid. “The man who gets to the top of the tree is forced to realize there is no top and no tree. I was your age when I first grasped that nothing is worth the least effort. It both calmed me and unsettled me. Now it frightens me.” He referred to his condition as “expeditions into the jungle of solitude. It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks,” he said. He had never been short of privation, nor had he put himself beyond the reach of exploitation by others, nor could he. “I still put my trust in people even when I knew they were deceiving me, and intending to kill me.” Then he had kept himself to himself, “in the way that you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it’s a tree,” and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.