Frost: A Novel (24 page)

Today I wrote my fourth letter to the assistant, even though I haven’t had a reply from him to the first three. I drew a comparison between the painter Strauch and the surgeon Strauch. Inside and out, the two belonged to two quite opposed worldviews. They are two opposed worlds. Just as his brother and I are different. Different, not made of one and the same substance. The surgeon, who aims at a successful career. Who is either unfamiliar with despair, or else won’t have it anywhere near him. Only at a distance, where it can’t hurt him. Concerned, true, about the condition of his brother. But only out of his guilty conscience. He is not
quaking
.

An activity that fills his days and nights, to wit, surgery, which has also given him local celebrity, won’t let him think any more deeply, as humans can and sometimes desire to do, when they are basically unemployed, and therefore only concerned with themselves. In the operating theater, there is no thinking, only doing. After that, there is eating, and then sleeping, at the most there might be a little distraction in between times. Hardly any conversation. Hardly any variety. No moodiness. No melancholy. No troublesome memories. No women. The football pools. Down on the courts, a spot of tennis to counteract the unignorable signs of middle-age spread. No writing letters. No reading, with the exception of the specialist literature, as for instance the book
On the Etiology
of Smegma
, or
Cancer Research in America
. The envious, the imitator, and the admirer are zealously kept at bay. The subjects of conversation are cancer, lung disease, wasting sickness, cramps, embolism, sites of infection. Wine is drunk. There are whispered meetings with nursing sisters. Interns and surgical nurses are ordered around, suddenly in the middle of an operation, bodies are sewn up, rolled out, “they wash their hands of them.”

It so happens that a condition is fatal that was not thought to be fatal. It happens more frequently than one might imagine. Outside the hospital walls. No news leaks out that would have serious consequences. He, the assistant, knows how to talk to people: to the consultant, to such and such, to the patients. He is free with the
Du
form, but it doesn’t mean a great deal. He is said to have a steady hand. Even by his helpers during the operation. Defter with his scissors than with needle and thread. Bold. Decisive, where others dither around. If someone dies, the reasons for it don’t greatly interest him. A devotee of the chase, he has no interest in the twilight world of art. The things his brother used to do were always repugnant to him. The academic side of him has gone on developing. He hates aesthetics. Also dreams. He appears never to have suffered. One can observe an athletic arrogance in him as he strides out of the hospital. On Sundays he goes to church. He is careful not to believe any more than is prescribed. Communists approach him, because he has never mocked Communism. He has a reputation for “textbook operations,” of the sort that is useful to every doctor over time. The scuttlebutt is that therapy is no longer a labyrinth to him. During the operation he exerts a magnetic pull on the
instruments. The registrar has already designated him his successor. He is kind to me. Why? But then again, the way he deals with the scalpel seems highly artistic. Not just artful. He takes patients’ notes up to his room with him, the light is still on at two in the morning. He’s up at seven. You hear him. His footfalls in the corridor. Remarks have been attributed to him like: “Source the fantasy in the delusion …”—“Groundless screams” or “the word gentleness, which keeps recurring.” Not an enthusiast. Not a spoilsport, because not a player. A rock? For me, yes. Places where no one has yet been, where nothing has lived. Vistas that lie open. The surgeon, the competent one. The painter, his brother, the incompetent, I think.

When he took off his hat, I saw he had a wound on his head. He had lost his bearings at night, and hit a beam. “I crawled along the floor, not knowing where I was going. Then I tried to get up, and smashed my head against a beam.” I couldn’t have the least idea of what the night he had spent had been like. The fear of being “completely mad” had sent him plunging out of his room, “between three and four a.m., in blank despair.” Half-dressed, he had first gone downstairs, into the kitchen, then the public bar, where he had looked for something to drink. “But she keeps everything under lock and key.” Because beer bottles and juice often went missing, the landlady had taken to locking up her supplies. Guests at the inn had even tapped the barrel, and let half the beer run out. “I didn’t manage to find anything. Not in the kitchen, and not in the public bar,” he said. Then he had thought of the cellar, but on the way he had remembered that she always locked the cellar too. “As you know, she always keeps the key to the
cellar on her person.” Then he had gone back, and abruptly lost his orientation. “I didn’t dare turn on a light. If I turn on a light, I’ll wake everyone up. I didn’t turn on a light.… I expect I crawled around in circles.” The wound to his head had happened very suddenly. Suddenly he felt warm blood on his hand, and smeared his clothes with it. “On the floor as well … In the morning, I was the first one downstairs, at five o’clock, and wiped away the bloodstains I left behind. Even the doors were smeared. And the walls too.” How he’d got back up to his room he couldn’t remember. “I fell into bed when I was upstairs. So I was lucky I woke up before five o’clock, so that I could straighten everything out. Just imagine if the landlady had found my bloodstains everywhere! … I originally went upstairs to wash. Since I’d lain down in my bed in my clothes—I was simply too weak to get undressed—I got the bed all bloody as well. But that’s not unusual. I dabbed the wound with cold water, which felt good. Then I put my feet in the basin too. The pains relented. The burning got less.” That night, he had had the feeling the whole time that he had to hide “from something terrible.” He had gone over to the window and opened the curtains and looked out. “It was as if I were in an aquarium where the water had frozen. Everything in the aquarium was frozen. The trees. The bushes. Everything. Coated in whitish ice that was so clear, you could see the rocks beneath. At the least movement, for instance if I breathed, tens of thousands of cracks would form in the massive ice block that the world had turned into.” He had been stunned by the sight. “I had to turn away, it was so fascinating … I went back to the wash basin, and dipped my towel in the water, and tied it round my head. When I returned to the window, the scene had changed. No ice. No rigidity. Suddenly everything was living
and moving. And that was even stranger.” Then he sat down on his bed and, to distract himself from what he had seen, he tried to think of something in the past—“something jolly. A good moment, a single beautiful moment. But I could find none. If only I could have been able to watch a single amusing figure go by, in my memory! But no, there wasn’t the least thing to distract me. I was only able to muster a few shallow breaths,” he said.

By morning, the wound to his head had healed. I looked at it when he sat down to breakfast. It was healing, as if on a healthy person. Closing, as if drawn together with an invisible thread. He had reflected about himself all night, and come to various, “albeit unsatisfactory,” conclusions. There were so many ways in which one might look at oneself. From the surface. From the deep interior, “from way underneath.” From a thousand acute or obtuse angles. What one saw was so wretched. And simultaneously frightening. “A man writhing like a worm in all the mirrors he’s forced to look into.” The head wound, from which he had now almost recovered, had compelled him to reflect on human diseases. The human diseases of the body and the human diseases of the other thing. “What constitutes a disease in the first place?” he asked himself. “Do they even begin? Are they not perhaps there from the beginning? Where do they come from, if they weren’t always there? At what point can one say that they are perceptible? When are they imperceptible? When, where? In the place where they suddenly break out? What does ‘from the beginning’ mean? When would that be?” He had walked across the cornfield a ways. “I had the feeling my wound was electrically charged,” he said. “I was
thinking about the connections between pains. All the way, I was working on that one thought. But I suddenly didn’t feel like it anymore, perhaps because such horrible insights were coming to me, quite against my will. And getting stronger all the time. Suddenly wiped me out. Once again, I saw how pointless it is to pursue a strain of thought utterly, in the belief that one wouldn’t perish in it, as in a tunnel. Not suffocate in it.”

“As if doors were opening all over the place,” he said. “People and the likenesses of people, my whole defeat approaches me from all directions. I am continually repelling intrusions. Scraps of memories from the time I pursued my experiments, which were eclipsed by the comparable but more thrustful experiments of others. I thought quite a bit about my painting today. I attended exhibitions. I leafed through catalogs in my memory. Friends came to call. Sat with me for an hour or more. The studio suddenly appeared. The ghostly conversations. Suddenly all that nonsense—particularly attractive to women, who crouched on my chairs. Young men in tight trousers sprawled in the dark. Oldsters who wanted to buy into respectability in the form of art. The world is straightforward. I saw my windows blocked up with the rottenness of people who didn’t know why they were there, what they were about. Idealistic vaporings flattened themselves against my windows, while the cigarette smoke twisted upward. Those evenings still disgusted me years later. Those mornings. Those nights that lay between the evenings and the mornings like static orgies of philosophizing. Flesh against flesh. If I intervened, everything flew apart as if putrid, scattered like dust. I mustn’t give offense. Young
people came to inveigh against the old. Old people came to inveigh against the young. Everything came to me like a whirlwind that left behind only despair. I suddenly saw the detail of a landscape I painted the summer before last: a green establishing itself against blue. The forcefulness of it. Everything struck me like feral horses, after decades of domestication. And then a hand that wouldn’t do what it was told. Didn’t want to live, even though, finally, it
had
to live. Everything very spiritistic, you understand. The smell of coffee and the winy sentimentality that came with the private views. Incapable of anything more. Exhausted, even with sleep. ‘A masterpiece!’ they exclaimed, and that was it for a second or two. But only for a second or two, you understand: a river landscape, devastation, a city of martyrs. One celebrity betrayed the next, to eyes that saw more clearly than was good for them. Ghostly too, because the unattainable was so effortlessly reduced. Disparaged heroics, you understand. Snobbery just barely adjusted to mendacity. The most unprepossessing prepared to pass judgments only a king should pass. I had assembled a whole generation of usurpers about me in the form of those three or four or five or six people, who like me in their quest for scale had plunged into the poverty of their emotions. Rome was bandied about as if it were a mug of beer. The idea of fame was connected to the feebleness of the world around, the size of other shrubs bred behind high garden walls, so that they had to see what grew there and how to destroy it: to be capable of anything in the starred world. And then suddenly the people disappeared, art disappeared out of me, out of the studio, the studio itself disappeared, everything disappeared, and left me calmly striding out, if only for a few moments at a time, when I can take fifteen or twenty paces by myself. Without disgust.”

“The qualities of youth and the qualities of age are the same qualities,” said the painter, “but the effect they produce is entirely different. You see: the qualities of youth are not objected to in the young, but the qualities of old age are objected to in the old. A young man may tell lies without someone wringing his neck, but an old man who tells lies will have his neck wrung. A young person will not be condemned for all eternity, but an old person will be. A young person with a squint can appear droll, an old person with a squint is repulsive. In the case of the young person, they say, there is the hope that he may one day be cured of his squinting. In the case of the old person who squints, there is no hope of his ever being cured of his squinting. No, no possibility. A young person with a deformed foot excites our sympathy, not our disgust, but an old person with a deformed foot only excites our disgust. A young person with sticking-out ears may make us laugh, an old person with sticking-out ears embarrasses us, and we think: how ugly this person is, who has had these ugly sticking-out ears all his life. A young person in a wheelchair moves us. An old person in a wheelchair plunges us into despair. A young person without teeth can strike us as more or less interesting. An old person without teeth makes us ill, makes us feel like vomiting. Youth,” he says, “has it all over age, and it can do what it pleases. Its stupidity doesn’t repel us, its shamelessness is bearable. Old age meanwhile cannot afford to be stupid, without risking its
neck, and the shamelessness of old age is, as we know, the most loathsome thing there is. With the young person, they say: Oh, he’ll grow out of it! With the old person, they say: He’s too old to ever change! Whereas in fact the qualities of youth and the qualities of old age are the same qualities.”

In his time as a substitute teacher, he devised a method to counter his solitude and loneliness that turned out to be very efficacious. “I used to take sleeping pills,” he said, “and slowly boosted the number of pills I took. In the end, they had absolutely no effect on me, and I could have gulped any number of them, and still not have got to sleep. I repeatedly took such high dosages, I should have died. But I only ever vomited them up. Then I would be unable for days to pursue the least thought, and it was precisely this inability to think that got me through long periods of complete horror … You have to be careful you don’t end up living for longer than your natural lifespan,” he said. “Life is a court case which you lose, whoever you are, and whatever you do. That was decided before any human being was even born. The first man fared no differently from us. Rebellion against this only leads to deeper despair,” he said. “And no more distraction. From the age of thirteen, no more distraction. After the first sexual experience, no distraction. Do you understand?” The only variety was thunderstorms, “and lightning the only poetry.” He said: “Seeing as you’re locked up, locked up in solitary confinement, you’re increasingly thrown back upon yourself.” The questions one asked oneself slowly became one’s death. “But you know, we’re all dead anyway from the outset.” There were simply “no more forms of assistance.”
One lay on the floor of one’s cell, along with the shattered limbs of past millennia. “Deceits and subterfuges,” he said. Just as the handling of facts injected insignificance into the brain, whatever question one asked oneself. “Every question is a defeat.” Every question wrought devastation. Disinclination. With questions, the time passed, and the questions passed in time, “so meaningless that everything is just ruins … There, you see,” said the painter, “it’s quite black down there. Last night, I dreamed the workers climbed up the mountain, and flooded the village and the inn and everything. In their thousands and tens of thousands, they swarmed up here, and whatever didn’t belong to them, they trampled underfoot, or it was suffocated in their blackness. How calm it is now! Listen!” The butcher greeted us, and we greeted him back. The houses of Weng seemed jumbled together, as though crushed at the foot of the cliff. “Earlier,” said the painter, “I used to have no pity for human frailty. Any pain seemed to me unnatural! Suddenly I saw myself confronted with an abundance of frailty.” He said: “Will you be playing cards tonight? The knacker is a good cardplayer. The engineer as well. They’re all of them good cardplayers. I don’t know why I’ve always had such an aversion to cardplayers.” He muttered something about cretinism in the mountain valleys, in the high Alps. And then: “Our Father, who art in Hell, unhallowed be Thy name. No Kingdom come. Thy will not be done. On earth, as it is in Hell. Deny us this day our daily bread. And forgive us no trespasses. As we forgive none of those that trespass against us. Lead us into temptation, and deliver us from no evil. Amen. That one works just as well,” he said.