Frost: A Novel (27 page)

We eat lunch together. Then the painter goes for a little nap, and I take out my Henry James. I often read for several pages, without understanding what I’ve read. Then I read them again, and see that what I read was good. It’s all about unhappy people. I shut the book and go over to the window and make notes, I write down whatever comes into my head in whatever way, then I hear the painter emerge from his room downstairs, and call me. I go down, and before long we’re on the way to the larch wood, or the church, or already deep in the ravine. The painter talks, and I listen. I understand little of what he says, often he speaks too softly, as if talking to himself, or else I don’t understand it because it doesn’t seem coherent, or else because I’m too stupid. How am I to understand a sentence like this one: “The earth might be clear, I feel myself stuck between its hinges, without regard to myself, you understand!” Many times he stopped, because what he said had exhausted him. From time to time he asked me something. For example: “How do you find boredom? What do you think of the state? What’s the difference between me and you? Is it scale? Will you be staying here long? Is there a difference between you and me? Do you believe in the miracles of mathematics? What do you do when you go to your room? Do your parents have a large garden? What plants grow in it? Is it cold where you live? What do you do in the evenings? Is your father a reader? How can you think of contradicting me? Oh, I know you didn’t mean to contradict me! Do you pay as much for a glass of milk as I do? Are you surprised the landlady didn’t ask you where I was
yesterday? How often do you think I’ve been to Weng? Did your father say that? And you like the city? This book? Your sister, you say? Not the theater? And the earth, you think, will remain undiscovered? Are you afraid? No? Yes? Humanity? An idea?”

He says: “That grisly experience, you know, I wanted to tell you about it last night, but you were already gone. The business with the dead man. Now, remember, I’m taking the shortcut. I walk for some time. I’m in a fairly good mood. I stop by the fence. I get to the tree, and I see a couple of people turning to look at me, and I see them just as I turn round myself; maybe I turned and saw them because I felt them turning to look at me. But it seemed odd to me that I didn’t notice them pass me. Because they must have passed me, otherwise they couldn’t have found themselves at the spot where I saw them when I turned round. Do you follow? I must have been lost in thought when I passed them, quite oblivious to their being there. They were strangers. It seemed to me, not well equipped. Not for this type of country. Probably trippers from somewhere. Maybe they had come up from the city. Their jackets were city jackets. They seemed very ‘cultured,’ that was my impression. Anyway, I started to wonder about those people, and then I thought whether I should take the ravine, or the road, that is, if I was going as far as the road. No, I’m not going to turn back here, I said to myself, I’ll take the next shortcut, which leads down from the other side of the larch wood to the river, and I walk at a fast pace, and come out behind the station. I intended to go to the
café. First of all, though, I think, I’ll go to the station and pick up the newspapers. Dusk was falling. I walk up to the bridge, and see this man in big boots, you know, one of those woodcutters, who are everywhere to be found at this time of year, with their shining boots and their tight leather caps on their heads, their woolen mittens, and the terrible incessant cracking of whips. One of those knickerbocker types with a horse-drawn sleigh, laden with fir logs. In the first week, they drag them down the mountain streams, and in the next, they get them to the station, or to the sawmill, or to neighbors. I look across to him and am just thinking along the lines I told you about just now when he asks me the time: ‘Half past four,’ I say. I still see him clearly before me: a young face, but already chewed up, pale, streaked with the cold. I ask him where he’s from, where he’s going, and he tells me. He’s from the shady side, he says. I say: ‘Aha, from the shady side,’ and I make to go on. And in the way that you promptly forget some people that you meet, I promptly forgot all about him. I want to get over to the station quickly, and all at once—I’m at the end of the bridge now—I hear a sound I can’t describe to you; but the sound is such that I find myself running back in the direction of the sound, and I see this man I was just now talking to, this young lumberjack, only now he’s lying under his sleigh: he moves his hands a couple of times, his legs are already stiff. Dead. Now people start arriving, from the railwaymen’s cottages, from the station, from down in the village, before long there are lots of people clustered round him. I bend down to him, and I see he really is dead. He already has that color in his face, yellow, yellow-black, and rigor mortis. On the ground I spot a pool of blood; the people want to drag the sleigh out of the way, but I stop them, because you’re not supposed to tamper with anything
at the scene of an accident: ‘Get back!’ I say, and I brandish my stick at them. The horses were quite calm. I see the boots gleaming, because of course the lamp is swaying over the dead man. You know, just a moment ago I was talking to him … ‘Half past four’ … Then a doctor came. They carried the dead man into the village a ways, and laid him on a garden wall. Then took him into the house. Went back to the sleigh to pull it off the bridge, and into the village. Then they spent a long time standing around the pool of blood, as the temperature fell. On the river, you know, in the middle of the bridge … When I came back, with my newspapers under my arm, they were still standing around the pool of blood. He had skidded, and the sleigh had run him over and crushed his thorax. I couldn’t get rid of the smell, the smell of death. And you know, by the time I was back up through the larch wood again, at eight o’clock or half past, under the full moon, I saw those people again that I saw on my way down to the station earlier. They were in the same place. When I looked across at them, they were laughing to themselves, as if they were cold. It felt eerie. Especially after the episode with the dead man. I had to go a long way round, so as not to encounter those people. Terrible people, you know, in their city clothes, and stubbornly continuing to laugh.”

It starts to get dark at three o’clock already. The light leaves the east, and moves across the sky, till it goes out there too. Turns black almost. In the ravine, the painter often starts to skip. I notice canine qualities in him. For example: he sometimes turns his head like a big dog whom his master has told to sit. Twice I spent an afternoon on my own, went to the village, then down to the station, and around the cellulose factory.
I tried to find the shortcut in the dark, but didn’t manage, and had to retrace my steps up the road. I was relieved to see the first lights, and then to find myself back in the village. On the way to the inn, I felt scared. I don’t know what of, suddenly there were people standing in the road, walking up to me, but they didn’t address me. The previous afternoon, which I had again spent alone, because the painter had stayed up in his room—“I want to try to write something!”—I ran into the landlady. Walked with her up to the hay barn. On the subject of the painter, she said she had known him “to dress with more elegance before.” She wanted to know whether I didn’t find anything curious about “artist Strauch.” “No,” I said, “he doesn’t strike me as being at all curious. How come?” She didn’t say anything, and walked over to the farm where she got milk. Supper doesn’t take long, it has to be bolted down before it gets cold. Also because they’re waiting in the kitchen, to be able to wash up the dirty plates and cutlery. During supper, I think over everything that happened to me today. I also think about how I ought to write to the assistant. But there’s nothing more difficult than that. I’m unable to express myself as I would like, in my head everything looks different from how it is on paper. On paper, it’s all so dead. I run up to my room, and write down this and that, but it’s as though I were killing it all in writing it down. There’s nothing left of it.

“Terminal illnesses compel their carriers to acknowledge them. I have had many occasions to observe this for myself,” says the painter, “and the medical-scientific literature bears me out. The terminally ill patient enters his terminal illness, first with astonishment, then with meekness. A terminal illness
gives the sufferer the illusion of being a world unto himself. Terminally ill patients fall for this deception, and thenceforth live in the deception, live in their terminal illness, in the illusory world of the terminal illness, and no longer in the world of reality.” The illusory world of a terminal illness and the world of reality were contrary notions. The terminal patient no longer trusted the real world, but entered the illusory world of his terminal illness. Terminal illnesses “are rhythmic religious conveniences. People enter them as they might enter an unfamiliar garden. You know, in terminal illnesses there is often a protracted process, a sort of institutionalized terminal feeling in the patient—and then, suddenly, dramatically,
there is death
. Terminal illnesses are like exotic landscapes. An internal process of the inner egoist.” He says: “There are very eccentric valleys here, and these valleys contain manor houses and castles. You visit these manor houses and castles, and you tell at a glance: the world you come from has no business here. You have to picture it to yourself as profoundly unreal,
like the deepest reality
. Doors open on people sitting in exquisite costumes, people enthroned, as if cut out of an imaginary painting, and when you make a move toward them, to touch them perhaps, they suddenly come to life. If you’re addressed by one of them, you have the sense of never having heard a human voice before, never a language, having always been ignorant of the art of listening to someone speaking, of saying a word or two yourself, basically you don’t know the first thing about words. And you don’t speak, you are just astonished, and you listen: everything is made useful and conformable, there are no errors, chance and evil are eliminated. Simplicity like a clear blue sky arches above one’s thoughts. Nor is there anything fantastic, even though everything is sprung from the
imagination. Simple wealth, human warmth without a trace of criminality. Of dispute. Continual ongoing closed season. Cool reason and well-situated concepts and heart. Solid faces, built to last. The air lucid with thought, and competence exclaims: ‘My God.’ Gradually the turns of phrase and expressions reach a climax, the cleverness giving you pause. Laws apply here, intellect and character are pleasantly conjoined. Logic is converted to music. Old age is suddenly capable of beauty, youth feels like a row of foothills. The unfathomable truth lies on the bottom.”

His sentences are oar strokes that would propel him forward if it weren’t for the powerful current. Sometimes he pauses, falls silent and listens, as though to check whether his present situation might not have been replaced by its successor. “It’s impossible to direct anything.” Things still in the future and the distant past all pull on one string with him, sometimes ten times in the space of a single sentence. He is a man who thinks continually of great losses, without any detachment. The sea surfaces in him, and in the sea is a boulder, part of an enormous sunken city, the end of an unanticipated story, far in the past. Death knots his net … Colors that are nothing but extrusions of flesh narcotize him philosophically … The adducing of extremes, so as to be able to spit them out. Tensions between eerie subaquatic scenes. The word “yoke” occurs frequently. The word “true”—but also “untrue” and
“unreal.” The word “ear of corn” may acquire the same meaning as “the whole of our welfare state.” They are his eyes that speak, they enact his thought, they pitch wildness and quiet alternately at the disquiet of others. The painter is such an oddity, I think, that no one understands him. Not a type. Always reliant on himself, and always rejecting everything coming at him, he has taken advantage to excess of all possibilities. To look at him is to look at the millennia. “Mountains, you know, can serve as telescopes, through which one can see into the future.” Or “inhumanly human.” He is able to irritate people, where there are no people. To suppress effervescence, where there is no effervescence. “Isn’t that an animal speaking? Am I not vermin?” Everything purposes the acceleration of his decay. Everything indicates a decisive childhood which was soon injured, a “stung nerve center,” an organically fertile double significance of insanity.

I met the painter in the company of the policeman. When I said I felt like a walk in the ravine, and the painter felt like accompanying me, the policeman took his leave. He stamped through the cornfield toward the curling rink, where children were playing. The policeman was telling the painter that at Wagner’s pub the previous night there had been a fistfight between locals and some showmen. The showmen had had a lot to drink, and not wanted to pay, they had tried to slip out through the back door, but were caught and finally overpowered. The policeman, who had happened to be at Wagner’s at the time, threatened them with his gun, and then they allowed themselves to be captured. One of the showmen managed to escape in the direction of the larch wood. Another was found near the pond. In the course of the fight,
a couple of farmers’ boys had received head injuries, and the policeman had been kicked in the stomach, which still hurt. Now the showmen were sitting in the lockup, and they will be brought to trial. For stiffing the barman, and several counts of grievous bodily harm. During the burial, they had had to take the cobbler’s apprentice to the hospital. He had been floored by a punch. The doctor, who had traveled up to the village to see to the injured, diagnosed a serious concussion, with fracture of the skull, and spinal injuries. No mention of any possible paralysis, thank God.

It had all started with singing and dancing, said the painter. Then there had been a sudden exodus from the bar, and the farmers’ boys had only needed to look at one another to understand “what was afoot.” They left by all the different exits, to block off the escape routes for the showmen. “The showmen have parked their trailers down outside the railway station,” said the painter. The police sealed and confiscated the trailers. They wanted to go down to Carinthia, where they came from. Deformed women and deformed animals were their principal objects of display. Cows with six legs, or two tails, of the sort you got sometimes. “That always brings in the public,” said the painter. “A woman with two noses, irresistible!” Now the animals and the women have to be looked after at the public expense, because the showmen are behind bars and are therefore unable to look after them. Also, fires needed to be lit in front of the trailers, to keep the women and animals from freezing to death. The trailers were under strict guard, because it was feared the escaped showmen might try to move them. The showmen had gone to Wagner’s with the explicit intention of not paying their tab.
At first they had bragged about the money they all claimed to have in their pockets. Some of the farmers’ boys had been under the impression that they had seen the showmen with money. The policeman, however, as he had said, had been on to them from the start, and with rather more than the usual suspicion one perforce entertains of showmen and artists and people like that. He had had his eye on them the whole time, even while they were dancing and singing, but not seen any grounds to intervene. Not until they left the bar. “Lucky,” the policeman said, “that the farmers’ boys didn’t pull their knives. Otherwise there could have been a massacre.” But as it was there had only been fists and boots, whereas stabbings were very often fatal. “Every one of the farmers’ boys has been involved in a stabbing before now. It was a miracle that none of them pulled their knives. Maybe they thought they could polish off the showmen without recourse to knives.” And they were proved right. “The one who comes out of it worst in the end is Wagner, the landlord,” said the painter. “The showmen didn’t stint themselves, they ate and drank of the best, and they ordered whole rounds for other customers as well.” Wagner might confiscate their trailers, which would be “scant recompense” for his losses, and even then the police don’t think he can expect to be awarded them. He thinks, if he has the animals slaughtered, he can make up his losses. The trailers were only good for transporting hay, you couldn’t load wood on to them, they are too rickety for that. Anyway, the policeman reckons the trailers plus contents will fall to the state. They’re considering what to do with the three disfigured women, probably they will send them back to Carinthia, where they come from, tomorrow. And now of all times, when there are so many burials going on, this matter with the showmen! The policeman says they are being fed
from our inn. They shout and make noise so that they can be heard all over the village. The children go and make faces at them in the village square. “Tomorrow they’re being taken to be arraigned,” said the painter. The policeman had handcuffed one of them, the others had had to have their hands tied with clothesline. There had been a huge stir in the village. All of a sudden all the lights had come on, and “people had gawked out of the windows.” A second policeman had been sent for from the lower guard post in the village. “Now the two of them have to sleep in the passage in front of the cell,” said the painter, “though of course there’s not much hope of that, given the way the arrested showmen are drumming away on the door.”