Frost: A Novel (37 page)

Every age was always miles from the world which it always abused. Occasionally he found himself under attack from conditions in the remote past, a smell that had to do with afternoon coffee at his grandmother’s or the hens clucking on one of his grandfather’s farms. Or again the smell of a bakery in the city, where ladies ate cake. “The moments of the three-year-old haunt the thirty-year-old.” Now he sees them under conditions of a different terror. The trees of an avenue cool him down, they have to do with his homework in the second year of elementary school. Church visits, from
a different period of childhood, along with having to get up and go to bed at fixed times and solving math problems. The magic of incense and Gloria and wooden Madonnas that the priest commissioned from the carpenter next door. The time of learning to walk, and learning to contradict. The time of devout evening prayers. “If someone in the pub says a certain word,” said the painter, “it makes me what I was twenty years ago.” And then: “You’re not always the person you are.” Retreats, fundamental experiences, forgotten and renewed where they broke off: a forest, a church, a schoolyard. City and countryside alternated according to the whims of his parents and grandparents, his walking and thinking remained subject to the whims of politics: all of it a checkered retrospect. “All of it softened,” he says. “I could eat in such a way that was repulsive, even where repulsiveness was at home, and I could develop manners that would have impressed princesses.” He had played the highest and the lowest parts. “I have always been a genius at transforming myself.” He mastered, like no other, “the art of not drawing attention to oneself. A formal walk and formal meals, as much as eating off newspaper.” And it had never been just a game either: “I was the person through and through who had to eat off newspaper, and also the one who eats formally, but mostly I was the one who has to eat off newspaper …” His childhood, spent in institutions: schools and hospitals. Career conversations that were the despair of parents and grandparents. Occasionally also of the guardians to whom he was given for foster care. Funds dried up at the precise moment when he needed money, “more urgently than ever!” Took a job, a succession of jobs. “I always did the dirtiest work.” Attempts to slip in here or there, study, generally study. All failed. Lying in bed for weeks on end. Slinking along walls, too hungry to be
able to make a decision. Brother and sister withdrawn to their “secret world.” The deaths of grandparents, of parents. Retreat. The factory switches off all thought.

“I often get up in the middle of the night,” said the painter. “As you know, I don’t sleep. Picture my head to yourself. Once I’ve worked my way out of bed, I begin to palp my arms and legs, I slowly begin to move, which is very difficult, because I can’t find my balance right away. With this head, you know, as soon as I get up, I experience difficulties with my balance: I have to be careful not to get up too quickly. I stand there stark naked. I listen, there seems to be nothing moving outside, nothing inside, as though everything had perished. There are probably birds sitting on the branches, the blackbirds of winter, but they’re not moving. If you go over to the window and look out, if you have enough time, you can see the birds sitting there: fat bellies, incapable of singing. I don’t know what sort of birds they are, but they’re always the same kind. I try to walk up and down my room once or twice, without hurting my head too much with the strain of walking. Do you have any idea what it means to be someone who feels indescribable pain when walking and breathing at the same time? I sit down carefully at my table, and start making notes, notes about everything that preoccupies me. But I don’t get very far, after every three or four words, I have to stop … of course, it’s an alarming thing, trying to commit something to paper … but then there’s this idea that’s just come to you, and you feel convinced it’s a good idea, and it goes. The nights are my martyrdom, you know, I abbreviate them by contemplating my body: I sit in front of the mirror, and look at myself. It’s not always possible
to choke back highly pertinent questions. And so I experience quite lengthy periods of mere looking. It’s the only satisfaction I have; it lessens the pain; my head remains without uproar, without increase in heat and agitation. I get through the night, the terrible despair, you know, that appears in the walls when I scratch them with my fingers. You see,” said the painter, “my nails are all broken off. The pain from my head is so inconceivable that I can’t begin to describe it.”

On my return to Schwarzach, I read in the
Demokratisches Volksblatt:
“The unemployed man G. Strauch from V. has not been seen in Weng or environs since last Thursday. In view of the heavy snowfalls currently being experienced there, the search for the missing person, in which members of the police also took part, has had to be called off.”

That evening, I ended my internship, and traveled back to the capital, to resume my studies.