Frost: A Novel (6 page)

The knacker saw the painter on the track. Hunkered down. On a root. But the painter hadn’t even looked up at him as he passed. That had given the knacker a strange shock, and he had stopped and addressed the painter. “I’m working on a problem,” the painter is supposed to have said. Whereupon the knacker had turned to go on, but the painter had stopped him in his tracks with the single word “ice-cold.” “I’m trying out all sorts of things,” he is supposed to have said, “but all my efforts fail.” Then the knacker sat down with him, and began talking to him. Why not get up and go to the inn, and get the landlady to make him a hot cup of tea. The best thing would be to chase away the chill that was entering his bones with a couple of glasses of plum brandy. He is supposed to have had tears in his eyes when the knacker said, “Oh come, a painter like yourself surely won’t despair.”

He apparently told him once or twice more to get up, till eventually the painter saw that it was futile, and in the long term merely painful to remain sitting where he was. Then
apparently he said, “It’s not getting me anywhere,” and got up. And they walked along the track up to the larch wood. “He crawled more than he walked,” says the knacker. Then he allowed the knacker to drag him by the end of his stick as far as the inn. “I always knew there was something not quite right about the painter.” The knacker says it well-meaningly, and so impassively that a great deal of feeling comes through. “That was practically suicidal,” the knacker is said to have said to the painter. The observation that the painter had changed from how he was before, “when he had always been laughing, in particular when he was there with his sister,” he had already made on the occasion of his previous visit. “He was here briefly in late autumn.”

Earlier, he hadn’t been so withdrawn, so remote. Quite the opposite: he had participated in everything, and tried to behave exactly like the villagers, be as one of them. He had gone with them from pub to pub, and had a better head for drink than a good many of the locals. “He always used to take part in the drinking on Three Kings.’ ” And never had he got so drunk that they had to carry him home, like some of the others, even though he had had just as much as them. “He was a great eater of black puddings, the painter,” said the knacker. He had been to Goldegg for the ice-shooting, and in the Braugasthof, where they “unlock the virgins like so many wooden trunks.” “Contemplative but friendly,” that was how he’d always struck him before. The experience on the path had alarmed him. He told the innkeeper to put some extra wood in the painter’s stove. To “warm him up, as much as possible.” He had the feeling, the knacker, that if he hadn’t run into the painter, he would have stayed sitting where he
was, and wouldn’t have made it back alive. You could freeze “between one thought and the next.” You wouldn’t even notice. You would go into a dream from which you would fail to emerge. The painter seemed to be in bad shape, said the knacker. “He talked about some problem. But I don’t know what problem he was talking about.” He, the knacker, had always got along well with the painter. And the painter for his part had always enjoyed the stories he told about the war.

He has pains in his feet. These pains in his feet prevented him from walking as much as he usually walked, and as much as he wanted to walk. “There is probably a hidden connection between the pain in my head and the pains in my feet,” he said. It was well-established that there was a connection between the one and the other. “However hidden. And hence between other parts of the body as well.” But between his head and his left foot there was a very particular connection. The pains he feels in his foot, and that suddenly announced themselves one morning, were connected to the pains in his head. “It seems to me, they are the same pain.” It was possible to have the same pain in two different parts of the body, far away from one another, “and for it to be one and the same pain.” Just as one might experience certain pains of the soul (he continues to say soul, from time to time!) in certain parts of the body. Also physical pains in the soul! Now it was his left foot that was making him scared. (What is at issue is nothing more than a bursal inflammation on the inside of his left foot, below the ankle.) He showed me the swelling on the stairs once, when it was still dark. “Isn’t the swelling extraordinary?” he said. “Overnight, the malady in my head has moved down to my foot. Extraordinary.” He had been walking
for decades, a lot, every day. “So it can’t be a question of overstraining my foot. It’s got nothing to do with my foot. It comes from my head. From my brain.” The swelling was an indication of the fact that his illness was now spreading across his body. “Before long, I’ll have swellings like that breaking out all over my body,” he said. I could see right away that what he had was a common or garden bursitis, caused by yesterday’s long tramp along the path, and I told him the swelling was perfectly harmless, and had nothing to do with his brain, or the pain in his head. In medical terms, absolutely nothing. I had once had a swelling just like it myself. I almost betrayed myself. By the use of a certain expression, I would have become the medical intern I was trying so doggedly to keep concealed from him. But he seemed oblivious to it, and I said: “The formation of such swellings is perfectly ordinary.” He didn’t believe me, though. “You’re saying that because you don’t want to finish me off, at least not utterly finish me off,” he said. “Why not tell me the truth? That my swelling is extraordinary? You must think my swelling is extraordinary?”—“It’ll be gone in two days, as suddenly as it appeared,” I said. “You lie like my brother, the doctor,” said the painter. He said it with revulsion in his eyes. They flashed like cheap stones. “I don’t know why you would lie to me. There’s a lot of deceit in your face. More than I had thought up till now.”

He scrutinized me; he reminded me of a former teacher of mine, a man I’d dreaded, suddenly returned to life: “It looks like a plague boil,” he said. He felt the swelling, and called upon me to do the same, to feel the swelling. I pressed it, as I had hundreds of others before it, not all of them so harmless.
He has never seen a plague boil, I thought. His swelling has nothing, but nothing, to do with a plague boil. But I didn’t say anything. I let him pull up his sock again. Feminine softness of skin, I thought. On foot, face, and neck. It struck me as morbid, I’m not sure why. Pallor, shading into gray. The cells translucent. Disintegrating in places. Splotches of yellow, rimmed with blue. The surface structure reminded me of overripe pumpkins left lying on forgotten fields. That’s corruption.

“As far as the intensity of the pain is concerned,” he said, “these pains in my foot stand in no relation to the pain in my head. Even so, they share a common origin. There is no help against such an illness. These two pains, in my head and foot, between them form a common front against me.”

I can’t say that my decision to study medicine came out of any profound insight, no, it really didn’t, it came about because I was unable to think of anything I would really enjoy studying, and it came about really because I happened to run into Dr. Marwetz, who still imagines I will one day take over his practice. Even today I am unable to claim that the study of medicine is enjoyable, or that medicine itself is enjoyable. The reason I didn’t change my mind—what else would I have done?—was because I was always able to get through my exams satisfactorily. Not that I even had to try particularly hard, no, I seemed to do it all in my sleep. I always approached exams in a state of unpreparedness, and the deeper my ignorance, the better my results, and some I even passed with distinction. Now I am facing some tougher
exams, but I’m sure they’ll be just as easy for me. I’m unable to say why. I have never been afraid of any exam. And I enjoy the internship in Schwarzach. Not least because I was able to make a couple of friends among my colleagues. Because I have the sense I am needed. I get on well with Dr. Strauch too. He gives me to understand he would like to keep me. He hopes to be able to take over the registrarship, once the current registrar goes into retirement. In two years’ time. And promote me in his wake. I never thought about whether people study medicine because they want to help others. It’s nice when an operation turns out well, when something you try to do for someone works out. That’s really something. That puts everyone in a good mood, when something works out. And then you might run into the intern in a café or bar. My brother says it’s lack of imagination that makes me want to study medicine. Perhaps he’s right. But what is it really? A thing like being given the painter Strauch to observe and have its effect on me, how is that for me? Or vice versa? And isn’t it more than remarkable, to go to a man, a stranger, to introduce yourself to him, and then go around with him, to listen to what he says, and look at what he does, and write down what he thinks and proposes? The assistant characterized him pretty well, only a little superficially. But if I had to say something about the painter now, I don’t know what it would be. It would be nonsense. And where am I to begin, when I am asked? There’s no point in writing to the assistant. I was never any good at writing letters, least of all letters like that. The study of medicine inducted me into medicine so fast that I completely disregarded the imbalance. People say I’m “getting on well.” My parents are pleased that I’m making something of my life. But what am I making of my life? A doctor? That would be too peculiar.

•   •   •

Once it was already dark, I paced back and forth at the station, as far as the single-story barracks with the sign “Railwaymen’s Hostel.” There I saw men without their shirts, bending down over dirty basins, rubbing themselves dry with gray towels, then looking at their reflections in the mirror, shaving, sitting down on their bunk beds in their underpants and eating their dinners. Black railwaymen’s caps hanging on the walls, and from hooks on the doors coats, jackets, and shoulder bags with papers spilling out of them. Knives flashed through big hunks of bread, and beer bottles stood there, reflected in the mirrors over the basins.

I took a few strides back and forth, purely so as not to attract notice, but wherever there was a light I looked up. What if it was you in there, standing in front of a mirror, and chatting to others, and they didn’t realize that it was you, because you were like them? What if you had changed in such a way that brought you nearer to them? If I wasn’t me, I would be like them; that’s where those thoughts tended. I walked along between a couple of freight trains, to the end of the station area, and then back, counting the wheels, and imagined being crushed between a couple of bumpers and squeezing into a paragraph at the bottom of the next to last page of the newspaper, the place where they itemize fatalities of slight but morbid interest. And then the men again, some already in their army-style bunks. The windows have double glazing, everything is sealed shut. So they don’t freeze. There’s an alarm clock which will go off with an infernal rattle at four in the morning. Then they’ll crawl out of bed and slip their
pants on, because it’s colder than it’s supposed to be, and they should already be in the train, looking to see that all the barriers are down. And then there are the first schoolkids in the front carriage, sleepy and frightened, because they’re not sure that what awaits them at school isn’t going to be terrible after all.

I walked down to the station alone, it just takes me fifteen or twenty minutes at a rapid clip, I promised the painter I’d pick up a newspaper for him, but the kiosk was already shut. Also, it was a day on which not too many trains passed—in the time I was down there, there wasn’t a single one, apart from the freight trains thundering through. Facing the railwaymen’s hostel is a sheer cliff face, there are pines and firs, shrubbery, but you can’t see much of it in the dark. The river was raging, and filled everything with its roar. From the houses built on its banks, I could hear laughter, and then the sounds of an argument, but it didn’t develop, but became more and more subdued, and finally stopped altogether. The lights went out in the odd bedroom, until there was only a single one left illuminated, where I saw an elderly man sitting, raising his tattooed arm to turn off the light. By now I was shivering, and I walked as fast as I could, over the bridge and up to the inn.

“Every stone here has a human story to tell me,” says the painter. “You understand, I’ve fallen prey to this place. Everything, every smell, is chained to a crime of some sort, an abuse, the war, some piece of infamy or other … Even if it’s all buried under the snow just now,” he says. “Hundreds and
thousands of ulcers, continually swelling up. Voices incessantly screaming. You’re lucky to be as young and inexperienced as you are. The war was finished by the time you were ready to think. You know nothing about the war. You know nothing, period. And these people, all of them on the lowest level, often the lowest level of character, these people are all prize witnesses to the great crimes that were perpetrated. Further, there’s the fact that your regard has to break when it comes up against the cliff walls. This valley is death to any tenderness of feeling.” Then he says: “You know, I’m an irritant, I was always an irritant. I irritate you, the way I’ve always irritated people. It hurts you. I know, you’re often asphyxiated by my remarks … Here, I have the sense of the dissolution of all life, of all fixity, the smell of the dissolution of all imaginings and laws … And here, you see, conversations with people, with the butcher, with the priest, with the policeman, with the teacher, with these woolly hatted people … with this prototypical milk-drinker who mangles things before he says them, with that dreadful melancholic … All these people have their complexes. It might be a matter of bedwetting in childhood, or the patterns of the wallpaper in their nurseries, the rooms where they open their eyes for the first time. All those intimidated heads,” he says, “upcountry and down. The teacher reminds me of my time as a substitute teacher, it’s enough to make me feel ill. Emotional chill, yes, with the passing of the years one’s conclusions become more drastic, the curlicues are omitted in favor of a more rustic expression, in favor of forthrightness … And all wartime experiences, you know, everything these people have to talk about is to do with the war …”