Frost: A Novel (7 page)

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Everything was “appalled.” “Life retreats, and death emerges like a mountain, dark and sheer and unscalable.” He could even have attained great celebrity, great fame, but that hadn’t finally interested him. “I had enough talent to have become world famous,” he says. “People often hang a modest talent on a big drum, and become famous. Subtlety! It’s all the drum, all the big drum! I stayed aloof, I saw what the drum was, the big drum, and I was never popular. And since it’s come up between us: the war is an inexpungible inheritance. The war is properly the third sex. Do you understand!” He wanted to get down to the station again as soon as possible, to his newspapers. “Those smells,” he says, “the smells of unworthy humanity, you know, the smell of rot, of tramp, and the smell of the so-called wide world, the smell of leaving and being left, of arrival and the despair of having to leave. The human famishment of wanderlust has always tempted me.”

I walked with the policeman a ways. He immediately involved me in a conversation. He was going on duty and no end in sight, no change whatsoever. A promotion would lift him up in the pay scale, but the work would remain the same. Initially, he had wanted to go to college. His parents sent him to Hauptschule, then a couple of years of Gymnasium, from which they withdrew him, because his father thought he might make a fool of himself. “He hated the fact that I went to Gymnasium,” he says. An apprenticeship with a carpenter followed on the heels of Latin, the lathe after Greek exercises. That was his tragedy. And from then on things went downhill. From the moment he walked out of the Gymnasium, knowing: I’m never going to see inside there again. And
so, by the same token: I’m never going to be able to better myself. It had all been so perspectiveless, a gray, endlessly bleak day full of suicidal thoughts, high up on the hill that rises out of the middle of the city, from which he had wanted to throw himself down. But then there was the meeting with the carpenter. The very next day he slipped into his work overalls, and for four years he didn’t take them off. If it had previously been the Latin vocabulary that made his eyes swim, if it had been Livy, Horace, and Ovid, well, now it was the wood shavings, the sawdust, the presentation piece. But he went on to take the journeyman’s test, and stayed another year. Then, on the basis of an ad in the paper, he chucked carpentry, “just to get out of it all,” and entered the police service. He swiftly found himself in uniform, and woke up in a vast dormitory with thirty-two others, all embarked on the same course as himself. Then, after the exams, he reported for duty in the mountains. First posting was Golling. Next came Weng. A year ago, he took over from a man of forty who died of septicemia. “He scratched himself with a fawn’s bone.” Studying medicine, that would have been the thing for him. Becoming a doctor. That hit me unexpectedly and hard. I felt myself blushing. “Studying medicine,” I said. “Yes, studying medicine,” the policeman.

On his shoulder he carries a carbine, very new in its pale, creaking leather holster. What was it like, being a policeman? “It’s always the same,” he said. “Everything’s always the same,” I said. “No, no,” he said. He had thought: Policeman, that would be a job with a lot of variety, with a lot of arresting and locking up and detective work. “Which it is, but it’s always the same.” But it was healthy, I said. “Oh, sure, it’s
healthy.” And surely varied as well, if I think of the fights on the building site, and in the pubs. The manslaughter perpetrated by the landlord sprang to mind too, but I didn’t mention that. “I want to go to the city,” he said. “Oh, the city,” I said. The city afforded different possibilities. There were crimes there that people in the country didn’t know existed. There were major crimes in the country, but the bigger ones, the interesting ones, the ones “involving the criminal imagination,” they only happened in the city. “And the rural constabulary, where I am, isn’t the same as the police,” he said, “and so I have to stay in the country.”—“Yes,” I said.

Today, when I came back from the larch wood, the postman handed me the mail for the landlady. Three letters, one of them from her husband. When I saw the handwriting on the envelope, I thought at once of the landlord, and I wasn’t mistaken. When the landlady had taken the letters, she said: “Ah, one from him!” and she put all three letters—the other two were bills, something official—in her apron. At lunch, I concluded from a conversation between her and the knacker, who was helping her pour beer, that it really was a letter from her husband. He wanted her to send him some money, so that he could buy food, because the food in prison was very bad. The newspapers had recently been full of stories claiming how prisoners were living the life of Riley: from that time forth, new measures had been put in place. She should send the money to a certain individual working in the prison service, who would then act for him. I was sitting right next to the bar, and heard every word.

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The knacker said the landlady should immediately follow the wishes of her husband, and he named a sum too, probably the one that the landlord himself had suggested in his letter, but the landlady said she wasn’t about to send him anything. And what was the knacker doing anyway, telling her what to do? It was up to her, whether she was going to send him any money or not. The knacker said it was a natural thing to do. Besides, people would get to hear about it one way or another, when the landlord came out, and tongues would wag about the landlady not sending her husband any money, even though it was all “his money” anyway, all the property was in his name. It wasn’t right to desert her husband in such a situation. After resisting the reproaches of her lover, the knacker, for a long time, on wider-ranging issues as well, she finally gave in after all, but named a sum that fell far short of the landlord’s wishes. She said her husband had driven her “to the brink of despair” with his wildness and ill-discipline, the way he had failed to look after her and her daughter. And now he expected her to send him money, in prison? Other inmates weren’t sent money. Weren’t prisons there to starve and punish you anyway? You were sent there to reflect on what you’d done, over bread and water and hard labor. “But he’ll never change,” she said. The only reason she had married him was because she was already carrying his child. She hadn’t even known there was an inn. “Only for the sake of the child,” she said. The knacker was agitated. Each time she came back with empty beer glasses, he took it up again. She had always depended on him, and also the landlord had occasionally shown “a good side.” Not least it had been on her account, “because that was the way she wanted it,” that the landlord had been arrested and tried in the first place, and then got his prison sentence. Because nobody had been in
any doubt that it had been an accidental death that had befallen the customer who had been clubbed by the landlord. She herself had pointed out to the police that the wound to the customer’s head—he was a construction worker at the power plant—hadn’t been caused by any fall, but had been inflicted by the beer mug with which her husband had struck the man. Since the landlord had acted in self-defense, as became clear during the course of the trial, he was sentenced to only two years. “But he wouldn’t have been locked up at all,” said the knacker, “he would be running around the same as ever.” The landlady said back: “I can’t believe it’s you telling me that. When it was for your sake that I brought charges against him.” The knacker didn’t say anything. “Because I wanted him out of the way,” she said, “because we wanted him out of the way.” The knacker reckoned the landlady had been precipitate in bringing charges. The people in the village, all of them, were against the landlady, because they knew darned well that it was she who had gone to the police station to bring charges. The dead man had been in the ground for weeks already at that point. No one was talking about it anymore. Till, on her word, they got him out of the ground, and examined him thoroughly, and then started that “whole big case” against the landlord. If it hadn’t been clearly proven that he had acted in self-defense—and how often it happened in court cases that the truth is unable to establish itself, yes, is somehow deflected!—the landlord would certainly have been put away for life. Did she feel no compunction? the knacker asked the landlady. She didn’t owe him any reply, she said. She didn’t need to defend herself. Everything had been right and proper. “It was all by the book,” she said. And now, as the person responsible for his mishap, as had been shown, she didn’t even want to grant him his wish for a
few schillings, so that he could buy himself better food, or maybe just a little more of it? “All right,” she said, “I’ll send him some money.” The knacker demanded that she do so right away, he wanted to send it off himself. She said her purse was in the till. Before her eyes, the knacker pulled out a couple of bills, put them in an envelope, and wrote out the address.

In the great commotion, everything full of smoke and kitchen reek, the pair of them hadn’t noticed me. At a favorable moment, I stood up and went to join the painter, who was sitting by the window. “What’s the landlord like?” I asked. Without stopping to reflect, the painter said: “He’s bound to be a poor devil. That accidental killing business has ruined him. The landlady is the sole person responsible for his misfortune. When he gets out of prison and comes back to the inn, something terrible will happen. And of course the landlady is terrified of that.” Yes, she is terrified of it.

The knacker also works as an undertaker. Now you run into him here, now there. He’s responsible for burying dogs and the cadavers of cattle and pigs, but also people. When he pulled off his army uniform, they, the council, gave him his two jobs, for which no one else had applied. Since he had never learned or been trained to do anything else, it was just right for him. He didn’t want to start being a woodcutter after the war, and he didn’t want to work in the cellulose factory either; he was too old for the railway, the post office turned him down, and there were no other possibilities. He has quite a bit of time to himself, and is almost always in the
fresh air. Once every other week he takes a trip into the city, he’s the only one of all of them who occasionally sees a little bit of the world. He digs graves, and shovels them over. He removes decomposed wreaths, and occasionally he earns a bit on the side by selling the cemetery compost to one of the farmers. In the course of his digging, he often comes across items of jewelry, which it is claimed he takes into the city to sell. Summer and winter he’s dressed the same, in a leather jacket and leather pants, which are tied round the ankles. During funerals, he has to stand against the church wall and wait for the ceremony to be concluded. As soon as the last people have left, he gets to work, quickly fills in the grave, which, once it’s settled, he tidies up: he pours black earth onto it, and cuts pieces of turf which he assembles into a neat hill. For that he often gets whole rucksacks full of meat and butter and sausage and weeks’ supplies of free eggs, which he sells to the landlady, or rather, she deducts them from what he pays on the last of the month.

Often he goes scrabbling around the cemetery for hours, lugging turf, the water-weight, and a whole set of narrow boards which he uses to measure. He makes no secret of the fact that he’s often up to his knees in water, because he has to dig graves to a prescribed depth of two meters twenty. They don’t believe him until they see for themselves. The clay soil, containing a lot of gravel, can no longer do anything to spoil his mood. At nine o’clock, he hunkers down and drinks a bottle of beer. When he walks out of the cemetery at five, having locked up the morgue at a quarter of, he has a tune on his lips. Everyone likes to hear his stories, even the ones he makes up as he goes along. You can see how one thing leads
to another with him, the way he always comes up with something unexpected.

“As knacker and gravedigger one is an important figure, a man they can’t treat like an ordinary Joe,” he says. Often he has a dog that was run over by a train in his rucksack, but he might just as well pull out some completely out-of-the-way item he found in an attic somewhere, like the pair of carved wooden angels he set up in the middle of the table yesterday, to drink a toast to.

The landlady was standing in the kitchen when I went to get some hot water. She was peeling potatoes, and her two daughters were stirring the contents of saucepans on the stove, or running to the woodshed for wood and putting it on the fire, or taking out clothes and brushing them clean. The landlady wanted to loan me a winter overcoat belonging to her husband. “You must be freezing,” she said, “what you’ve got isn’t more than a raincoat. The cold will cut right through that.” I told her I always wore a woolen vest, and I didn’t feel the cold. “That’s what you say,” said the landlady. “I don’t feel the cold,” I said. “Well, if you keep going around with the painter the whole time,” she said. “Yes, if I keep going around with him the whole time,” I said. She sent her daughters down to the cellar. “How long are you planning to stay?” I didn’t know. Usually, all her rooms were taken, “just not this year. Visitors don’t like to come when there’s so much noise. The people working on the power plant make too much noise.” But she didn’t make that much from her long-stay visitors. “You know, you can’t ask for that much from them … 
And then you have to have something to offer your customers in return … it has to be tasty, and generous portions as well … But the workmen, they bring in money all right.” Why didn’t I sit down. She pushed a chair under me. If the inn were anywhere else, she said, “but here, right where they’re excavating!”

Her potato-peeling took me back to my grandparents’ house, the doors that were always left open a crack, the smell, the cats that snuck around, the milk that sometimes bubbled over, the ticking clocks. She said: “It’s not easy being a student either.” It was something someone had said to her once, she didn’t mean anything by it. She had once been to the capital, and bought herself a few clothes. “I tell you, I was relieved to be heading home.” And then: “But I wouldn’t mind being in the city, not in the capital, but the city.” She has the legs of a washerwoman. Fat and dropsical and veined. The public bar cost twice as much to heat as it did last year. “Meat has tripled in price,” she said. And then she said something that utterly distracted me, put me in mind of a lake, a forest, a house in the flatland. Winter business was just the same as summer business. She was thinking of getting the building done up, getting all the rooms painted, replacing a lot of things that had gone out of fashion, “for instance getting in a new lot of wardrobes,” she said, “and new tables for the bar and new curtains and a new staircase, and the windows ought to be much bigger, I’d get the openings made as big as possible, to get some light into the place.” Then she poured hot water into a jug for me. She said: “But my husband doesn’t want any of that. When he gets out, that’s the end of everything anyway, you know. When he gets out …”
The way she said it. The way she said it, I couldn’t get it out of my head: “When he gets out …”