Frost: A Novel (36 page)

Dear Assistant Strauch,
there is a perfectly ordinary dread, some way short of the greater dread that has your brother in its grip, pushing him into ever greater ruthlessness (ruthlessness principally toward himself). People avoid him. I avoid him myself, in my exhaustion, such exhaustion as I am incapable of describing, I avoid him, but then I am incapable of avoiding him. I am at his mercy. Forgive me! He thrusts his frailty at me and into me in the form of sentences, like slides into a projector, which then projects those terrors onto the blank and always available walls of my self (or his). Of course you want to hear more about your brother, and I will try to keep up my strength. Do you know about the Far Eastern languages he speaks? About his “Asiatic character”? About his time as a substitute teacher? These are all great and completely self-contained darknesses within his
perpetrated existence
. He was attacked as a child. By you. Do you know about that? Your brother is the opposite of you in everything, and then he became the opposite of that again,
you are
your brother, and then again
you aren’t
 … He lives in a
“world of conceptless concepts.” His stick in his hand has great significance for him. Far from being systematic, I want to draw attention to the fact that even today he is frightened of doors that slammed shut in his childhood. He also suffers “for generations of insomniacs”! His intellectual world always took place in cemeteries, “hung around cemeteries a lot.” Do you understand? Also of interest: his relationship to music, his horror of the state, the police, order. His outrageous pleasure in turning a question into a mutilated reply. Always the thought of the “hideous accidents on the street,” of “lurking family disasters” in the distant past. A liking for circuses, for revues, for all sorts of oddities. He talks of his “kingdom of merriment.” Did you never try to get close to your brother? By ruse? Because you are a doctor, and I think contact with him would have been important to you as well. Or did you, as I fear, never have any contact with your brother? He gets over his night by day, and vice versa. He always carries the
Pensées
in his pocket. I thought I would be spared your brother’s aggression. But now I feel the contagion of his logically galloping illness. What illness is it? Your brother grows darker in the measure in which he thinks the world and everything in and around him is also darkening. “The world is a progressive dimming of light,” he says. And, tonight: “Everything in me is dried out like the bed of a stream, like the bed of a stream of blood.” As the notion of insanity is not clear to me, but merely familiar, I am unable to say whether I think your brother is insane or not. He is
not
insane! (Mad?) No, not mad either. “Echoes of death” go making noise in his head. Today I saw him sitting on his bed, stark naked, and preoccupied with his body.

•   •   •

You will suppose I have been neglecting my duty, because I haven’t written to you for so long. You may imagine I am using your money to buy myself a nice holiday! Whereas in fact my stay here is a terrible chastening, chastening in the double sense of the word. The fact is that I am steeped in your brother’s thought. In his complaints against everything. I don’t—yet—have his illness, but I am steeped in ridicule. He shows me “the malformations of the earth’s surface, created by the malformations of the cosmos.” At this moment, everything looks pretty dark to me as well. You must excuse me, this letter is dictated by a rambling for which I am not responsible. It’s late. But I would still like you to think about the “childhood punishments” you imposed on your brother. About the “childhood lies” you spread about him, all the years of your growing-up and young manhood. I don’t know whether my task can simply be abrogated at the end of thirteen or fourteen days.

Since you have failed to reply to any of my missives, I must assume that, even if you cannot be satisfied with me, you nevertheless do not desire any particular change to the current pattern, and do not insist that I immediately go back. Besides, such a move would be entirely pointless. Of course, I am thinking in terms of taking up my internship in Schwarzach in due course …

Dear Assistant Strauch,
medicine is dark, these are only dark paths I follow with “exposed brain” through the byways of our science, which I
should like to term the glorious one of the sciences, as the ruler of terror among all the sciences, which, unlike ours, are pseudosciences, even though ours is no better than a protoscience itself. I can’t imagine its knowledge, it is only possible to feel it in all its presumed evolutions from our thinking. Medicine seems to me like a concatenated sequence of darknesses, intimately connected to superstition, bold incisions in the perhaps already lapsed geometry of the world. In the process, the substance, flesh, the nether possibilities of the organic, appears more and more insignificant against the only true natural, which is the illimitable dark. Our science is the one from which all others proceed and take their being. And, to quote your brother, with whom I feel an ever closer connection, founded on the stimulus of reversible ideas: “The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.”

I don’t want to go without writing down a few of your brother’s really remarkable sayings. Of course I won’t proceed systematically. That’s not possible for me. It’s a stage, which I am going through as well. Among other things your brother today said: “The tragedy is connected to all the other tragedies.” Also: “Worth is worthlessness, the calamity of worthlessness is the worthlessness of one’s world and of the world
unconnected to one’s own.”
He said that after coming round from a protracted period of unconsciousness, I found him lying in his room, you can imagine my consternation, my initial reaction was that he had suffered a minor heart attack. He said: “Everything is
nearly
black.” He was going through the “nitrogen of the primal condition of the devil.” In the evening he said: “The earth, the world, is bloodshot.” This is unusual. He had
always led an existence that “was both above and below any other existence, and had never approached his own
existential minimum.
”

Well, if one were able to establish overnight what our organs
are
. But perhaps you already have laid out in your mind in orderly fashion things that to me seem hopelessly entangled: perhaps an operation? Our science knows it, but doesn’t act on it, in accordance with the “terrible principle” of
“here as there, illusion!”

If only I could lay my hands on your brother’s “scrapbooks”! Did you know of the existence of these “scrapbooks” in which for many years, decades even, he has written down everything that preoccupies him?

I am only able to note down a few headings, and even that strikes me as contemptible and mad.

We played a game together today: to see which of us can reduce the other to tears! (This game, as I now know, was one you often played with your brother.) Your brother lost.

Dear Assistant Strauch,
Suicide comes from the womb, as you once determined: its realization begins to occur at the moment of the suicide’s birth. Everything your brother has lived through to date has been a “passion of suicide.” A pursuit to the death of everything that was particular about this particular human being.

•   •   •

Against such a background of “deafening generality” he now speaks incessantly of the “craft of suicide,” the action that will bring him to completion after a lifetime of suffering and preparation. It’s not possible to oppose the boldness of the idea that each individual suicide is the maturation of thousands of years of preparation. Your brother (who has now almost entirely stopped sleeping!) refers to motherhood as
suicidehood;
truly, the womb is the tomb. The breeding of a human being (thinking most rigorously of himself) is the decision of the father (first and foremost) and of the mother (as well) to sponsor the suicide of their offspring, the child, the sudden premonition “of having created a new suicide.”

“A devilish fear, you know, has always kept me away from suicide. Then there were thoughts arising out of the dark, the whole communing with self, very pronounced in my case. The conviction of my nature, the monstrous condition of spiritual development … Yes, I was always able to repel suicide, those innumerable cases of limitless disappointment, excess, criminality, heredity, these inhuman difficulties … You must know, like all humans, I have communed almost exclusively with myself in this difficult world, where there
are practically no laws … no way of contemplating … I was too little interested, you know, always a man of resolve, of contradiction, of fear …”

The material about Strauch (in my memory) is monstrous. What is written down is the best I can do. I am probably just about able to draw up a report. But it’s not possible to describe the condition of a human being in the same way as one can describe the state of an animal. My assignment advances my education. I’m certain it won’t benefit the painter Strauch. Why? The assistant will question me. I will be able to say things to him, and I can demonstrate the painter’s walk to him. I am now able to say what drew Strauch to Weng. Why he left Vienna. Why he burned his paintings. Why he hates so much. Why he runs into the woods. Stopped sleeping. Why! I am able to say what he says and how he says it and why it makes waves of insanity and revulsion. I am able to say what he feels when he sees the landlady, and when he sees the knacker with his rucksack. Why he is indifferent to so much and what, I know what is going on within him, who this painter Strauch is, this persecuted, ostensibly useless person, who on paper may have a brother and a sister and others besides, but in reality has always been alone, much more miserably alone than one will be able to imagine even after reading my report, alone in the way that a fly is alone in an apartment in a city in winter, being chased by the occupant and his cohorts, and finally is splattered against a wall, if these people feel hounded and maddened and under attack from this fly, so that they band together in their dwelling, and silently decide to kill it off,
that vile, monstrous creature, as they call it in their aggression, that poisons their air and their evening—not knowing what a fly is, and what goes on in one, much less a fly in a city apartment in winter. I have observed the painter Strauch, I have lain in wait for him, I have lied to him, because that is what my assignment called upon me to do, I have driven him crazy with my questions, much crazier than he was before, and I struck him on the head with my silences, on his head that he fears so much. I bothered him with my youth. With my plans. With my fears. With my incapacity. With my moodiness. I talk about death without knowing what death is, what life is, what any of it is … everything I do I do in ignorance, and I compound his ruin with my own. Ruin? And finally today I even tried to list the various modes of death for his benefit, which completely cast a cloud over him. “Suicide is in my nature, you must know,” he says. Swipes the air with his stick just as a monster that’s no longer a monster might swipe at the air where there is no heaven, and not even any hell. The air he swipes at is just air and nothing else, and, as I see, it’s not even one of the elements.

“One day you get home, and you know that from now on you have to pay for everything, and from that moment on you’re old and dead. One day, everything is finished, though life itself might go on for a while. You’re dead, and beauty and whatever happiness is and wealth, everything has withdrawn from you, forever.” The painter is talking to himself, not to me. In the village square, which we’ve unexpectedly reached, because we walked in a circle, and were lost in thought, he said: “Ghastly, that dog barking! I have always
hated it. Always been afraid of being bitten by a dog, and dying of rabies. Even on my way to school I ran the gauntlet of barking dogs! I felt cramps in my heart, you know. The dogs leap up at you, and knock you down with a violent swipe of the paw. The dog owners sic their beasts on people who have done nothing to them or their dogs. And then you have a terrible bite wound! The way that energized flesh jumps at you, it could easily kill you! Dogs …” said the painter, “butchers’ dogs, wolfhounds! Barking and yapping wherever you go! How I hate dogs! My sister, you must know, had a bite taken out of her thigh by a dog in a pub once. The landlord never even apologized! If at least he’d been upset! … A beast takes a piece out of you, and all your efforts are in vain! They can rip the pockets off your coat! Attack deaf old men from behind, who, a matter of days later, die of a heart attack. When I arrive here, the dogs go for me, and I need to raise my stick at them once or twice to persuade them to leave me alone. Without my stick, I most probably wouldn’t be alive!” After we had passed through the cemetery: “Peasant funerals are a ritual. The dead man is washed and wrapped in a shroud and laid out and unwrapped again and dressed in his Sunday best.” At his feet, they recite prayers that have been in existence for hundreds of years. The brothers and sisters take turns praying, and then the parents, the grandparents, the children, the children’s children. Or other relatives pray. They sing hymns with medieval words none of them understand. Or Latin. Pictures of the departed are hung throughout the house. His remaining possessions are put in order, and labeled with the name of the one who is to have them. They pray to him to intercede for them in heaven, as that is where they think he has gone. They
ask him questions, and receive his replies. They sprinkle holy water over him, “and invoke his name, as if he were one of the saints.”

It all went through my head: the showmen, the eccentric tramp, the movable theater, the dog’s body, the burials, the behavior of the landlady, her husband away in prison, guarded like a dog, slaving away for tripe and gruel, never to get used to wooden clogs and burlap but who might yet find some relief in his straw sack and handcuffs. The cold went through my head, and drove me half crazy. It was a crazy morning, blown apart by brass-band music. Beer and salt pork and Sunday suits stunned me with their peculiar human reek. The previous night went through my head. I thought how far away everything is. It can’t be really, but it is and that’s how it is and it doesn’t really matter. Today was the coldest day so far, and I wrote to the hospital for my winter coat, otherwise I would freeze. And the copy of Koltz, because I’m not thinking of leaving any time soon. I can’t leave now. Always the same walks, they tighten round you like a noose, and discipline your thinking. There’s a letter to my brother half written on the table, and the Henry James, which I’ve almost finished. It must be even colder outside. From one hour to the next it’s dark as well as cold. When I hear the painter wheezing up the stairs to his room, I feel sick. I should think about him seriously. Because I have to write my report. I’m not sure how old he is. His walk, what does it mean? The way he stands up and sits down? What he says and the way he says it! And me? How do I feel about him now? First and foremost, I’m a liar. Yesterday he looked at me sharply: “Law is what you said, isn’t it?” And I: “Yes, that’s
right. Law.” And then silence. It was pitch-black in the valley, and the air could hardly be kept out. Then it started to snow. We could hear shooting from the forest, from the shadow side. But it couldn’t have been a deer I heard as I made my way back to the inn alone. “The world is constricting in my heart,” he said. Is it that? If I write down such coarse things, it’s heartless of me. I have to. It’s only because I have to that I can. Are they conversations that I have with the painter? Hardly. Clues? Something morbid about all of it, as his brother said, “and still a terrifying distance.” Who’s to blame? But now I know pretty much the major phases of his life. Doesn’t help me. There’s always a lot of snowfall between him and me. I was thinking about the way he sat on his bed, looking at himself. His dreams. His illness, which is also “in opposition” to him. It was horrible hearing him talk to the railwayman yesterday. How he kept conceding that the railwayman was right about everything, even though he didn’t understand anything, not the first thing. How he always concedes now. Everything he says is concession. In fact, he’s powerless all the time.