Frost: A Novel (23 page)

“The depredations of the forest are spoiling the balance of nature,” he said, as we were standing by the edge of the larch wood, there where you can plummet down vertically into the river, opposite the “sarcophagus.” “If these human assaults continue in their present exploitative fashion for another hundred years or so, then wherever we look in the world, we will only see these ghastly scenes of dying forests.” He said: “Each time I look at it, this landscape looks uglier to me. It’s ugly and menacing and full of wicked memory particles, a landscape that can really dismember a man. With its glooms and its savage herds and its accumulated devastation where the workers are being put upon. Unexceptionally malignant ravines, cracks, stains, disheveled shrubs, split trunks. All hostile. And regardless. On top of everything else, infested with the stink of cellulose. The birds fly up completely helplessly in summer, not knowing where they’re going, and then
there’s the darkness of the actual rock face: you’d think you were suffocating. Nowhere is the cold so great, nowhere is the heat so unbearable. This thinking that it’s all death, you know, this gloom, the monstrously generic nature of it all … without question, death is the limitless, the most successful moment is death … All future hope is in death.” Then: “What is the mass that misunderstands death? What are the crowds that foolishly antagonize it? The crowd is always there, and moves into itself, into its restricted districts …” He went into the larch wood, and told me to go on ahead of him. “I have often seen policemen gallop up on tall horses, and rain blows down on the masses: it’s a recurring image: the way they lash out at unprotected heads with clubs and rifle butts. The way the crowd closes ranks, shows first horror, then fight. How, only lately dominated by the police, they now dominate the police, who are still raining blows on them, you understand … The crowd is a phenomenon, the phenomenon of the man in the crowd has always fascinated me. The crowd exerts a morbid pressure on the individual to want to join it, to have to join it, you know … Disgust at being a part of it, disgust at not being a part of it. Now it’s the one form of disgust, now it’s the other … But people are always the crowd, always the mass. Every individual is the crowd and the mass, even the one who’s pinned between tall cliffs, who’ll never get out from between them, who’ll always remain high up and out of it … But this mass man, this crowd man, you know … It’s extraordinary to be part of a crowd! To know that that’s what you are: part of a crowd!” He said: “Shouldn’t we go to the curling arena? The people here have three passions: curling and whoring and playing cards. Did you understand the point of the game yesterday? You were freezing. You should have worn a thicker scarf.
Don’t you have a proper woolen scarf?” He stomped over to a pile of brushwood, and motioned to me to follow him. “Look!” he said, and he lifted up the brushwood. There lay four or five deer, pressed together, frozen, with glazed eyes. “You’ll find refuges like this all over the place, they are always death traps when it’s as cold as it is this year,” said the painter. And I remembered the time when spring came, and I dragged together lots of deer carcasses with my brother in the great forests, and buried them. Often they were half eaten by foxes, and only their heads and skeletons were left.

Today there was a letter from the landlord. Probably his letter was to confirm the receipt of the money that the landlady, on the insistence of her lover, the knacker, had sent him, I thought. Then I went around a long time with this letter, and kept wondering what would happen if I opened it and read it. But that would be a crime. So I didn’t do it. The landlord’s handwriting made me think about him and his life a lot. I felt that everything that went on in this person is doomed to be unhappy. And I can imagine him getting driven ever deeper into his sadness and his hopelessness, like a boat with an unconscious man in it, being pushed by the current ever nearer to the brink … At first I was unable to account for the way the knacker supported the landlord, by almost forcing the landlady to send the money he asked for, and how he keeps on supporting the landlord, even though the landlady is his mistress … Now I probably know why, though I’m not able to express it. I keep hearing how nicely the prisoners are doing in prison, but they can’t be doing so nicely that they don’t find it a terrible affliction, wherever they are and whatever they’re there for and under whatever the circumstances
are, to be locked up … That handwriting shows you the whole misery of that condition, you can see it right away … I kept looking at the handwriting, and went round and round the hay barn. I wonder whether the landlord has another request now? I thought. What will he have to write to her about? He surely can’t know what she thinks about him, and how she opposes him, acts against his interests, quite apart from her unfaithfulness, which he knows about. And about the knacker too. It’s a terrible situation. In my agitation I go to the cemetery, to look for the grave of the workman whom the landlord killed. I walk up and down, and then I’m standing in front of a snowy mound, with a cross stuck in the earth. But no name. Nothing. That’s surely it, I think. I stand there and I feel like crying. In fact, I did cry. And then I quickly went into the chapel, but it was so cold in there, and so stupidly quiet, that I could get no peace, and I went out into the cemetery again. Roofs all round. Houses, with smoke pouring out of them. I felt utterly miserable. Then I ran into the knacker, coming over with his cramp-irons and shovel from the rectory, walking through the graves toward me. He must have seen me. What was I doing there; it wasn’t usual to find a person in the cemetery at this time. I wasn’t doing anything, I said. Nothing at all. I was bothered. I couldn’t ask him whether that mound was where the workman was lying. “No,” I said, “I’m not doing anything.” I must have struck him as very disturbed. I was disturbed. Then with the letter in my hand, I ran to the inn, and gave it to the landlady.

I saw the landlady preparing food in the kitchen, bacon and sausage and apples and coffee all piled up on the sideboard. In
between times she went to the stove and the public bar, and she kept going into the pantry, because she’d forgotten something that she could bring out and lay on the sideboard with the other things. There was a blue bag of lump sugar. I stood in the kitchen, because I was waiting for water, which she’d put on the stove to heat up especially for me. Then she disappeared into her bedroom for a little time, and when she came back she had a pair of her husband’s warm woolen socks, which she set down next to the food. “Your water will be hot soon,” she said. Then I watched her pack all the food things in a big cardboard box. “Did you see the knacker anywhere?” she asked. “No,” I said. “He said he’d come and take the things down to the post office for me.” She wrapped the cardboard box in a big sheet of brown paper, and tied it up with thick twine, perhaps some old washing line. “That has to go out today,” she said. “It’s urgent.” She had the makings of lunch in big saucepans on the stove. She stirred one, then another, with a big wooden spoon. She fed the fire with more wood. “If it goes to the post office now,” she said, “it’ll go on the mail sleigh.” Would the parcel cost a lot to send? “No,” I said, “it won’t be very much.” The postmistress had used to be a friend of hers, and had spent years eating in her pub. “But our husbands forced us apart,” she said. She had divorced the postman, and married a worker at the cellulose factory, five years ago now. “It was always going to go wrong,” she said. “I would never have married him!” Then the knacker came in, with his rucksack on his back. It was good that she had got the parcel packed and ready, because he was just on his way to the post office. “I can’t send him any more than I’ve got here,” she said. He seemed very surprised that it was such a large parcel. “I put his warm socks in there too.” She went into the pantry and came out with some
bacon, which she cut up and laid on a piece of bread. That was for the knacker to eat. He ate up the bread and bacon. To me she said: “I’m sure your water’s hot now.” I had forgotten all about the water. I took the jug off the stove, and went up to my room. I thought the landlord probably wrote and asked for some more food. And for some warm socks. I was sure there had been dissent between the landlady and the knacker before the making up of the parcel. The knacker had a lot to carry.

“I could drill through my boots, you know that? I could. But I don’t want to. I’ve got the strength. But I’m not going to drill through my boots. It would be a pointless waste of strength.” We walk on. He says: “The whole world consists of pointless wastes of strength. I’m waiting for the end now, you know! Just as you’re waiting for your end. Just as everyone’s waiting for their end. Only they don’t realize they’re waiting and waiting for what I’ve always been waiting for, namely the end!” He reminds me of a church singer, who is suddenly called upon to
speak
loudly into the nave. “My end frees me! Me and my person. All the things that only exist in and through me!” His sentences echo back, as from the walls of a church. “That’s the extraordinary thing!” Then: “Vague, always vague! But I don’t intend ever to express myself with precision. I can imagine it must be difficult to make anything of these connections, omissions, sins of omission, accumulations,
obligations, verdicts … No, I don’t demand that! I no longer demand anything. Anything. Nothing from anyone! … A situation like the one in which I find myself is completely unimaginable. Of course, I don’t know anything either. That’s true. I’m a burden on you … I know your life can’t be easy for you either, but it’s a good deal easier than mine. To begin with,” he said, “you have all sorts of possibilities. You are able to enthuse about all sorts of things. The most banal things! You develop an array of gifts, of the sort that many people manage to develop, canny people, brutes, and then timid like wallflowers. You can do this and that and the other thing, and your head is stuffed full of all sorts of plans and future directions. All in all, you think you might want to do pretty much anything and have it in your power to do so. You think you’re in a circus, and because you’re so gifted and so popular, you can do anything in the circus that takes your fancy: any stunts, even the hardest, any tricks, even the meanest. You think you can walk on a tightrope, high over a drop, where the air is already thin … you think you can ride, put your head in the lion’s mouth, and take it out when the beast roars … acrobatics … stunts … you think you can do anything, and you also think, and you’re completely persuaded of that fact, that you can be the director as well … the circus director: fine, there are no limits, because you see none. It’s all unlimited, and that deadly subconscious feeling of being able to turn your hand to absolutely anything … till one day your first idea comes to you, and then a second, a third, and a fourth … one after another … finally hundreds and thousands, thousands of ideas: those are the painters, the newspapermen, the prison wardens and the prisoners, the policemen, the philosophers … heir, cow, tail, minister, director, you understand
 … till you end up not being convinced by anything … that’s what it is … Because you have your moments of this and that, and no character … how soon everything turns into nothing, unemployed, unskilled, mad, unemployable, manifesting the signs of idiocy … But all that’s just a point of view,” he said, “no deeper and no less deep than the crassest error.”

Existence was well used to torrents, but sometimes it tended to forget that, and was carried along: “But it’s always an existence,” says the painter. Years ago, he had been in Weng with his sister once, “in spite of herself. She hated the region. In wartime.” More and more, the valley became a sort of refuge for the pair of them. “Unlike then, I’m unprotected now.” His sister’s baby, “back then, behind the church wall,” she was pregnant by an apprentice well driller, had died in its infancy. “No one knows why it suddenly died.” That fact, and the fact that his sister had had no objection to having the baby—“to her it was a happy and unlooked-for chance to find herself, as it were, overnight, in a state of expectancy—she never got over it. After conceiving, she came to me with friendly traits she had never had previously. Suddenly my sister manifested a sort of previously repressed wildness. At mealtimes. When I met her for walks. In the dark sometimes. When she said ‘goodnight,’ you could see it. The precocious father of her baby became a jailbird. Involved in several rapes, in the end he was unable to avoid the scaffold. He was from Goldegg. At the time, he was just fifteen. But powerfully built, like all the young fellows here. Come over the mountain, and punch six bells out of all and sundry. It was a warm spring day. My sister was walking in the graveyard, as she often did. You could
hear the war from over the cliffs. The workhouse drew him in, the clogs of the prisoners at Garsten jail were like a marching band. I’ve got a photo of him. Over the years I managed to find out quite a bit about him, for instance that he fathered five children, who are all running around somewhere, living on farms. In workmen’s hostels. Who knows. Sometimes nature wants nothing but to test her strength on two people who don’t know what brought them together, why they belong together: there’s a sudden violence, favored by the climate in these parts, that switches off logic and emotion and thought for the duration. Often, it’s just an animal cunning that gets its way.”

His time as a substitute teacher came up again. “All my life, I’ve never hated anything as much as I hated teachers. Those teachers who always struck me as the embodiment of stupidity, the stupidity was drilled into their underpants. Also the generally dangerous ridiculousness, which further makes huge claims. For, as you must know, teachers make huge claims which take precedence over other claims. I so detested the teacher’s life, that I simply snubbed fellow humans whom I had known for some time but who had gone to become teachers. And there I was suddenly overnight becoming a substitute teacher. And on my own initiative! Just imagine my extremity! But I got out of that disgrace … A teacher is the mouthpiece of an entire generation. And you see: teachers make for calamities. Injustice and war. Of course, I was not a regular teacher, and I wasn’t on a regular pay scale either. Not a teacher in the strict sense. Only an occasional substitute teacher. So I wasn’t involved in that ghastliness.”
He had suddenly found himself a substitute, a sort of casual teacher, just as others, and he himself in past years, were casual laborers. He doesn’t see much of a distinction between casual teaching and casual labor. The principal difference being that the casual laborer is generally in the fresh air, whereas the casual teacher is always in stuffy classrooms. The casual teacher feeds the children with figures and signs, and the casual laborer feeds the cement mixer with buckets of water and sacks of cement. The casual teacher has to be careful he doesn’t fall off his little classroom platform, and the casual laborer that he doesn’t fall onto the pavement from the third or fourth story of a building. “The casual teacher is so pathetic that regular teachers look the other way when he walks past them. They stand around in the corridor with their hands behind their backs, and form up into a solid phalanx, so there’s no room for the casual teacher in their midst. If the casual teacher has a question, he has to go to the director, because the regular teachers won’t give him an answer. ‘I’m going away,’ the regular teachers tell their classes, ‘and a casual teacher is coming to fill in for me.’ They don’t say: ‘You’re getting a new teacher …’ And thereby they spoil everything for the casual teacher. For instance, casual teachers are not allowed to wear the white coat of regular teachers. At the most, substitute teachers are allowed to wear sleeve protectors. Of course I would never have worn a teacher’s coat in any case. Much less had recourse to sleeve protectors … Nor do substitute teachers qualify for a training supplement.” He had never known what to do with himself in the breaks, because the regular teachers all snubbed him. “The substitute teachers’ trade union wants to improve all the conditions that the substitute teachers are exposed to.
But the more it does, with its clumsy methods, the worse things are for substitute teachers. It’s a fact that the regular teachers’ union has much more influence.”