Frost: A Novel (21 page)

“Substitute teachers have no rights,” he said. “And they only make about two-thirds of what a regular teacher makes.” There was admittedly a trade union for substitutes. He had never joined this union because he had never in his life joined any organization, group, or collective. “It would be doing such violence against myself, it would no longer be me,” he
said. The substitute teachers’ union had kept trying to force him to join. “Even though I was only an occasional substitute … Just imagine, they sometimes waited for me in the street. They made threats against me.” But they didn’t know how stubborn he could be when it came to sticking up for one of his principles. “In addition to the substitute teachers’ union, there was also a ‘substitute teachers’ association,’ which was an informal initiative on the part of the substitutes. They meet every Saturday afternoon. Apparently they pass resolutions. What resolutions? I have no idea what resolutions. How they mean to oppose their union. How to support their union against other unions. How to oppose the school authorities. The state. Their enemies. Anyone they feel is doing them wrong.” Apparently, there was also a “substitute teachers’ fund,” for the support of the widows and orphans of substitutes. “I’ve got nothing against such support … But basically I don’t care how worthy a cause can be, I’m not joining …” He was already disgusted when the journal
Substitute Teacher
occasionally peeked out of his mailbox. “They sent me that twice a month. Whether I wanted it or not. I never paid for it. I never ordered it. And I’ve never read it.” To his pupils—“they all had the same face”—he had always been presented as “the new stand-in.” “Psychologically, it was a smack in the face for me …” The first thing he had said to his pupils had always been: “Fresh air! Open the windows, let’s get some air in here! This classroom needs air! Windows open, open!” Then he had asked them to say their names. When a name was incomprehensible to him, he asked for it another time, “better articulated,” and written up on the board. “Most of the pupils weren’t able to write their names.” He had always taught first grade. “On one occasion, a second grade. But that made me ill.” It had been
irresponsible on the part of the school authorities to put him up in front of new first-graders, as their first teacher, because “the first teacher you have is the decisive teacher.” In fact, he had never hated anything in his life as much as classrooms, and the teachers in those classrooms … “But that’s what you must do, those things that you always loathed, those things that always repelled you.” His most worthwhile hours as a substitute teacher had been spent taking his classes to a park. “We are instructed to go to a park with our classes once a week, and explain to them everything that grows there: flowers, trees, shrubs … to tell them the country of origin of the respective flowers and trees and shrubs. I never told them the name of one single flower or tree. Nor gave them one country of origin. Not of a single flower or tree. Because I am opposed to the enlightenment of children where plants are concerned, in fact, where nature is concerned. The more you know about nature, the less you know about it, the less worth it has to you. The keen ones, who came to me with the names of flowers and trees and the names of their countries of origin, I simply told to shut up.” He had always sat down on a bench and immersed himself in his Pascal, and let the children do as they pleased. “I just had to be sure no one got hurt. Or lost.” The summer months had been the most pleasant. “I also liked going to the swimming pool with my children … At the time I was reading a lot of Maupassant and Poe and Stifter. If they got too loud, I shot them an angry look. Threatened them with punishment. Mostly, the look was enough. They were scared of me, even though, as I’ve already said, they bossed me about. Most of them were spoiled, and I tried to unspoil them. I tried. But there’s not much you can do in such a brief time as I tended to spend in my schools … The system needs to be changed. Turned on
its head. Do you know that our schools are among the most antiquated in the world? It’s a scandal! Take the appearance of our schools, crumbling, neglected, dilapidated, well, that’s what they’re like on the inside as well. We should really be concerned about the sort of kids that come out of them!” The parents’ complaints that were regularly sent to his various headmasters generally referred to his “offensive opinions,” which he was accused of “ramming down the children’s throats,” like “medicine.” “ ‘Offensive’ didn’t mean anything indecent or anything. They just used it to refer to anything they disagreed with.” They complained that he talked to his classes too much. “Then others complained I talked to them too little.” He had never been opposed to children’s jokes. “But they never made that many jokes in my classes.” In the first year of elementary school, the children were usually even more apprehensive than the teachers. “A large proportion aren’t really at school at all, they’re in a state of terror … School buildings are just premises of terror for them. The fear of school is the worst fear there is. Most people are ruined by it. If not in childhood, then later on. It’s still possible to die from fear of school at sixty.” He had imagined, when putting himself forward as a substitute teacher, that he would escape from his solitude, which he had been simply unable to master. “But in front of my classes, I was more alone than ever … Thoughts of suicide came to him once in the middle of a lesson. I still remember the classroom and the circumstances. I remember the children. As a substitute teacher I had the advantage of a certain sum of money that was paid to me on the fifteenth of every month … But of course a life as a substitute teacher is simply atrocious.”

•   •   •

The landlady now puts a compress on his swollen ankle. I finally induced him to allow it. “As hot as possible, and about a quarter of an inch thick,” I said to the landlady. “You sound as though you know what you’re talking about,” she said. The painter just mocked me. He only put up with the compress so that I would leave him alone. “It’s the first time I’ve allowed such a young person to tell me what to do, and agreed to such a senseless procedure.” And he laughed. It was the first time I had seen him laughing. He was like someone who hadn’t laughed for years. For decades. Someone who’s never had anything to laugh about. He’s laughing now, I thought, for all those years. His laughing tired him out. It was as strange to him as an incision in the belly is to most people. “What are you doing with me?” I stand by his bedside and watch the landlady smear the blackish-brown ointment on a rag of linen. Quite proficiently. She lifts up the painter’s leg, and wraps the rag around it. “Not too tight,” I say. “What a palaver!” says the painter. The landlady says: “Now you’ve got to lie there and be quiet, Herr Strauch!”

The painter asked her what there was to eat. “I can’t eat that!” he said when she told him. I look at his room. It’s so dark, it’s almost impossible to see anything. When the landlady goes, he sighs very loudly. His room is bigger than mine. Much gloomier. That’s because of the drawn curtains. Which I took down on my first day. “I always keep mine drawn … If you like, you can borrow my book. Borrow my Pascal!” I say I have my Henry James. “Ah yes, your Henry James.” He lies there like a corpse. “Are you interested in poetry?” he asks me. “Not really,” I say. “I’m not interested in anything made up,” he says. There’s a clock ticking somewhere. I look for it,
but can’t see it anywhere. It must be in the commode. Smell of the washstand. The stove is glowing, but it’s not creating any heat. “I’m always cold,” he says. “What is it that makes pain unbearable? What is pain, if not pain?” It’s so quiet, his breath almost bursts the window. I look at his yellow face in the dark, now not saying anything anymore, so I say “goodnight,” and go.

I want to make a record of the fact that Strauch had a dream last night, “a dream,” he said, “a dream that had nothing in common with all my other dreams. I have to tell you, it was the dream of a terminal unhappiness, a dream of ending, of a simply overwhelming ending. I dreamed of a color, which doesn’t distinguish this dream from others, my dreams, I may say, all begin with a color, I assume a primary color, one of the three or four—are there four?—primary colors; thereafter, the dream mutated rapidly and extremely purposefully into the relationship between colors, where all colors have the same significance, all of them still toneless, into the darkness of the colors, into their blackness and their luminosity, toneless, soundless, then suddenly, accelerating into a sound, a solitary linear sound, and then: the sounds gained as the colors receded, suddenly this dream, profoundly unlike all my other dreams, was only sound, not to say: music, though that is inapplicable in this instance, misleading, distracting. There was a sound, it appeared, with no beginning and no
end, it was there, and it developed into an ambitious, an infernal sound, I can think of no other way of saying this, I don’t have the words, you understand, even though I strain my memory I haven’t the words, a sound, and then a monstrous noise, such a monstrous noise I could no longer hear anything: in this space, which was and is an endless space, one of many such endless spaces (a notion that always means to destroy me!). In this space, in which black and white were spoiled, brutally spoiled by an amusical-celestial force roaring and shrilling, two policemen were tumbling, tumbling as if in space, suddenly there were three of them tumbling, I can’t really say they were floating, actually they were tumbling as in the clutches of a fantastic, all-embracing, immodest rigging-loft in a theater, in the immodest, fantastic, all-embracing theatrical rigging-loft of infinity …”

Toward evening, there was a blizzard, and I watched waves of snow blow against the window. While the window had initially darkened from the approaching blizzard, once the snow started to fall, sheeting against the inn, it grew very light. I was reading in the newspaper about people who were demanding this or that, or who knew this or that, and some others who neither demanded nor knew anything, of cities that were sinking, and heavenly bodies that were no longer far away.

The landlady was home, and her two daughters were doing their homework in the kitchen.

•   •   •

The knacker is doing his rounds, I thought, the engineer is issuing orders across the river.

The rector is sitting in his rectory, and the butcher in the pitch black of his abattoir.

The cobbler is running his thumb along a seam.

The teacher is drawing his curtains, and feeling afraid.

They are all afraid. I thought of Schwarzach.

All at once, I’m standing in the operating room once more, and lifting up a dead head. I take the elevator down into the basement to pick up a pair of crutches, and then back up to the third floor, where someone wants the crutches.

I think of my mother. She will be wondering: why isn’t he writing? They will all be wondering why isn’t he writing. I don’t know the answer. I can’t write to anyone. Not even the assistant!

I look out the window again, and see nothing. That’s how violent the snowstorm is.

•   •   •

Then I hear voices in the hallway, the first of the workmen, brushing the snow off their clothes, stamping their boots so hard the whole building shakes.

But it’s still much too early to go down for supper. When I hear the voices, I picture the men, I see their faces, though some remain dark for me, and don’t acquire definition.

I read my Henry James, without understanding what I’ve read: I seem to remember women following a coffin at a funeral, a railway train, a destroyed town, somewhere in England. The noise of the customers slowly transfers itself from the hallway to the public bar. Now everything sounds a little more muffled. A door is yanked open, falls shut. Then it sounds as if a barrel is being rolled somewhere. A couple of men are laughing while they wash and brush up in the kitchen, where the landlady always leaves a jug of water and a towel out. The blizzard is unremitting. I get up and go downstairs.

In the hallway I run into the painter. No sooner had he got out of the village than he found himself caught up in the blizzard. Suddenly he hadn’t been able to see anything, the snow had wrapped him up like a bunch of rags, “rags of snow … During the blizzard, I had such thoughts, no, not thoughts, but access to thoughts, access to some mysterious, usually
unavailable landscape … Lots of closed doors, you understand … I knocked on them, and shouted and yelled, and finally pounded them with my arms and legs. These scenes and the concomitant facts, this dereliction …”

He was very agitated. “Unworthy, you know. I’m unable to explain myself, the truth, the propensity for the truth is so difficult, that human faculties aren’t sufficient … it’s all a matter of fragments, suggestions, all of thought is just one never experienced clarity … for nothing. So much material. Those vast proportions! This unworthy orientation … all human misery struck me as luminous enough! A blizzard is certainly a deathly process … but what is a blizzard? How does it come about? A mutiny, miraculous … my account is nothing but fear, nothing but a child’s fear of an uncommon spectacle …” The engineer had come upon the painter lying on the street, and lifted him into his car, and taken him along. “But for the engineer, I would have lost my life in the blizzard,” he said.

The policeman had got to that point where hormones suddenly grab hold of the entire organism, and youth vanishes in the flashing of an eye. “This fine face,” said the painter, “how much longer will it remain fine? Will it be spared the general disfigurement of all life? No. Some bestial quality makes its way across such a face by night, and leaves its marks on it: first of all dimly, then unignorably, and finally remorselessly. In the end, we will turn away from such a face, because we are unable to bear it anymore, and we will search for another one, not yet disfigured, still beautiful. Then we will be similarly
fascinated by this new face, until it takes the same course as its predecessor. And so on with all faces. Incidentally, the policeman has many of the same traits as you. But I’m sure that’s just youth, just generic youth.” Then: “When I was your age, I had already seen a lot, and had more or less withdrawn from everything. By the time I was twenty-three, I was pretty much done with everything. That’s an alien feeling to you, I can imagine. You haven’t yet withdrawn from anything, not conclusively. Nor has the policeman either. I’m discussing a juncture, a block, a barrier for certain pursuits … a moment of the sort I mentioned earlier in our discussions … where everything falls apart, you know, where your voice is sodden, and the pee soaks into your pants, even when you don’t want it to … The policeman’s just as quiet as you. Always was. How do you get to be a policeman? How do you get to be something so revolting? A uniformed official. How? Just by slipping into the uniform? Slipping into the loathsomeness? At first reluctantly, shall we say, but then habitually, and finally with something mechanical and everyday about it, even with a feeling of belonging? Belonging to what? The people at the inn are poison to that policeman. But he’s long infested anyway. He’s given up reading books, given up anything that’s nothing to do with the police. Grubby characters are forever trying to sully the others, that’s what makes them grubby; and sooner or later they always succeed, as we may see with ghastly clarity. Just as I’m going around with you now, so previously, a year ago, or earlier this year, up until a few weeks ago, I was going about with the policeman, but now he’s withdrawn, doesn’t often come to the inn, at night, and I know what he’s come for, but you only ever see him stepping out of the shadows, only notice him once he’s given you a fright. I think he’s lost, well lost.”