Frost: A Novel (3 page)

How long was I proposing to stay in Weng, he asked. I needed to get back fairly soon, to prepare for exams in the spring, I said. “As you’re studying law,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll find it easy to get a job later. There are always jobs for lawyers. I had a nephew once who was a lawyer, only he lost his mind over stacks of files and had to quit his job in the civil service. He wound up in Steinhof. Do you know what that is?” I replied that I had heard of the institution “am Steinhof.” “Well, then you’ll know what became of my nephew,” he said.

I had expected a difficult, but not a hopeless case. “Strength of character, leading to death,” a phrase from a book I’d read early on, occurred to me, and made me think about the painter: How is it that all his thoughts circle around suicide? Is it permissible for suicide to be a sort of secret pleasure to a
man? What is suicide anyway? Self-extinction. Rightly or wrongly. By what right? Why not? I tried to focus my thoughts on the one point: is suicide permissible? I had no answer. None. Because people are no answer, and can’t be, nor is anything living, and not the dead either. By committing suicide, I am destroying something for which I am not to blame. Something entrusted to me, then? By whom? When? Did I realize it at the time? No. But an unignorable voice tells me that suicide is a sin. Sin? As easy as that? It’s something that will bring the whole edifice to collapse, says the voice. Edifice? What edifice? His watchword, whether asleep or awake: suicide! It will choke him. He is bricking up one window after another. Before long, he’ll have walled himself up. Then, once he can’t see out anymore, because he can’t breathe anymore, he’ll be persuasive: because he’ll be dead. I have the sense of standing in the shadow of a thought of his that is very close to me: the thought of his suicide.

“A brain is like a state,” the painter said. “Suddenly anarchy breaks loose.” I was in his room, waiting for him to get his boots on. “The greater and lesser assailants among the ideas” would form coalitions, only for these coalitions to be equally suddenly revoked. And “being understood, and wanting to be understood, are a deception. Based on all the errors of gender.” Contraries reigned for a single, everlasting night over the day. “Colors, you know, colors are everything. Which means shadows are everything. Contraries are very highly colored.” In many ways, it was like clothes: you buy them and wear them a few times, and then you don’t wear them anymore, at best you sell them, give them away, let them molder away in a chest of drawers. You move them to
the attic or basement. “In the evening, you may have a sense of what the morning will be like,” he said, “but the morning is always a surprise.” There was really no such thing as experience, not really. No continuity. Admittedly, there were ways of avoiding desperation. “These ways never existed for me.” At the moment, all the things on which life insisted were losing their value. “All endeavor is riding for a fall,” he said. Something was splendid, and the next thing was brutal, much more brutal than the first had been splendid. “The man who gets to the top of the tree is forced to realize there is no top and no tree. I was your age when I first grasped that nothing is worth the least effort. It both calmed me and unsettled me. Now it frightens me.” He referred to his condition as “expeditions into the jungle of solitude. It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks,” he said. He had never been short of privation, nor had he put himself beyond the reach of exploitation by others, nor could he. “I still put my trust in people even when I knew they were deceiving me, and intending to kill me.” Then he had kept himself to himself, “in the way that you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it’s a tree,” and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.

There are people in the village who have never left the valley. The bread delivery woman, for example, who started delivering bread when she was just four, and is still delivering bread now, today, at seventy. Or the milkman. Both of them have only ever seen the train from outside. And the sister of the bread delivery woman, and the sexton. For them, the Pongau is the equivalent of darkest Africa. The cobbler. They have
their work; nothing else interests them. Or else they’re afraid to take a single step outside. “A friend told me about the inn,” I said. How did a lie like that pass my lips? It was terribly easy, as though there was nothing easier than lying. And more and more. “I like visiting places I’m unfamiliar with,” I said, “I didn’t think twice about coming.”—“The air here has a terrible composition,” said the painter. “Suddenly circumstances will start to constrain your freedom of movement.” Why was it I had chosen this abode, and not another; there were other inns and pensions to be found. “And some down in the valley too. But they’re probably only for transients, people stopping for a single night.” It had all been my friend’s idea, I lied. I had traveled here, with a couple of addresses. “And your journey was without incident?” he asked me. I couldn’t think of anything that had happened on my journey. “You know,” he said, “when I travel, there are always incidents, mishaps.” Getting back to the village and the inn, he said: “I expect you’ve brought something to read, or something you’re working on with you. What have you got?”—“A novel of Henry James’s,” I said. “Henry James,” he said. “I came without books,” he said, “quite deliberately. That is, I’ve brought a couple of little things. But really just my Pascal.” He didn’t look at me the whole time, his walk was remarkably stooped. “Because I’ve shut up shop,” he said. “The way you do when you’ve seen your last customer out.” Then: “Here, it’s possible to make many observations that translate into cold, into self-loathing. If you like that: wherever there are people, you can observe them. Especially what they don’t do, which is to say, what does them in.” There was nothing here “deserving of the least respect.” It was all so unfathomably ugly and expensive. “I’m glad you dislike our landlady,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.” And he said
nothing more under that head. Not to have any pity, but follow one’s revulsion wherever it led, in many cases that was an ornament to reason. “She’s a monster,” he said. “You’ll get to meet a whole series of monsters here. Especially at the inn.” Did I have the ability to weigh up characters, a gift, “nothing to do with intelligence, which not many people have”? To imagine, say, a third character between two others, and so on … that was how he spent his time. “Not anymore. There is a chance,” he said, “that you might be intruded upon in the night. Then don’t be afraid: it will only be one of the innkeeper’s concubines who’s not familiar with the layout of the building. Or the knacker who seems to be night-blind. Broken bones and sprains of all types seem not to have prevented him from seeking out her bed at night.” The innkeeper favored everyone, except for himself, the painter. For instance, she would change the sheets every four or five days in all the rooms, except his. She never filled his glass properly, and if anyone asked her about him, she would come out with insolent lies. Only he had no proof, and so could not confront her. I said I didn’t believe the innkeeper would spread slanders about him. “She does, though,” he said; “she talks about me as if I were a dog. She says I wet my bed. When my back’s turned, she taps her head with her forefinger to indicate that I’m mad. She forgets there are such things as mirrors. Most people do.” She watered his milk. “And not just my milk either.” Quite apart from the fact that he suspected she had served him dogmeat and horsemeat for years. “She once told her children I was a cannibal. Since then her children have avoided me.” She had always read postcards addressed to him, and sometimes even steamed open his letters and absorbed their contents. “Time and again, she would know things I never told her.” Now he didn’t get any mail
anymore. “No more.” He said: “Quite apart from the fact that I am made to pay for everything two or three times over, because she assumes I have money. They all do here. Even the priest suffers from that misapprehension, and is forever approaching me for donations. Do I look as though I had money? Do I look well off?”—“As far as country people are concerned,” I said, “every city person comes with money, and it’s their business to take it off him. Educated people especially.”—“Well, do I look educated, then?” he asked. “The landlady bills me for things I never had. And she comes to me begging for money for meals for an unemployed man. Of course, I don’t turn her away. But I ought to. Why don’t I turn her away? She cheats me in everything. Nor am I the only one. She cheats everyone. Even her children.” Cheating could be fuel for a lifetime. “Or a spur,” added the painter.

“My first time in Weng, she was underage. I know she’s listening at the door. If I pull it open suddenly, I know I’ll see her face. But I don’t.” She was a slovenly washer-up. Her folded tea towels contained traces of beetles and cockroaches, and sometimes the beetles and cockroaches themselves. Even worms. On Friday nights she baked a huge cake, going back and forth between two men “she ruthlessly exploits. The knacker doesn’t know that one floor down, one of the guests is getting to suck on her tits in the same dishonest way.” She had recipes that went from mouth to mouth. “Dangerous and immoral as she is, she’s a good cook.” In her larder in the cellar and up in the attic, in among foodstuffs, sacks of flour and sugar, strings of onions, loaves of bread, piles of potatoes and apples, she kept evidence of her dissolution: men’s underpants, attacked by rodents and rot. “She
keeps an interesting collection of her trophies lying around at the top of the house and in the cellar. She takes special satisfaction, at times when there aren’t too many men around, in looking through her collection and reviving her memories of their former contents. She keeps the keys to these rooms always about her person, has done for years, and no one but me has the least idea of what these keys are there to open doors to.”

The painter Strauch spits out his sentences the way old people spray saliva in the air. I next saw him at suppertime. In the intervening hours I sat down in the public bar and watched them getting dinner ready. The painter came down rather too late for the landlady’s liking, after eight o’clock; by then it was only the regular seats that had drinkers in them. An awful reek of sweat and beer and dirty workclothes filled the room. The painter stood in the doorway, craning his neck to look for a place, and when he saw me, he came toward me, and sat down facing me. He told the landlady he didn’t want to eat whatever she’d cooked up that evening. She was to bring him a piece of spam and some fried potatoes. He didn’t want any soup. For several days past he had had no appetite to speak of, but today he was hungry. “I was cold, you see.” It wasn’t cold, quite the opposite really, but: “The Föhn, you know. Inside, I was freezing. That’s where it gets you, inside.”

He doesn’t eat like a wild beast, not like the workmen, not from out of some primal condition. He takes every morsel as a scornful remark against himself. The spam on his plate was “a piece of some carcass.” He looked at me as he said it, but I
didn’t show the revulsion he had hoped. I do a lot of work with dead bodies, and I’m not squeamish. The painter, of course, wasn’t to know that. “Everything people eat is pieces of dead bodies,” he said. I saw how disappointed he was. An infantile disappointment left his face in an expression of pained uncertainty. After that, he talked about the worth and worthlessness of people with me. “The animal quality,” he said, “that lurks inside people, and that we associate with raptors, waiting for a nod to leap at you, and tear you to pieces, that’s the same thing as the animal we see when we cross a street, like hundreds of other people, you understand …” He chewed, and said: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious. Often, of all the things you mean to say, that’s all that’s left, the sense that you had it in mind to say something malicious.”

Fourth Day

“You just arrive in a place,” said the painter, “and then you leave it again, and yet everything, every single object you take in, is the sum of its prehistory. The older you become, the less you think about the connections you’ve already established. Table, cow, sky, stream, stone, tree, they’ve all been studied. Now they just get handled. Objects, the harmonic range of invention, completely unappreciated, no more truck with variation, deepening, gradation. You just try to work out the big connections. Suddenly you look into the macro-structure of the world, and you discover it: a vast
ornament of space, nothing else. Humble backgrounds, vast replications—you see you were always lost. As you get older, thinking becomes a tormenting reference mechanism. No merit to it. I say ‘tree,’ and I see huge forests. I say ‘river,’ and I see every river. I say ‘house,’ and I see cities with their seas of roofs. I say ‘snow,’ and I see oceans of it. A thought sets off the whole thing. Where it takes art is to think small as well as big, to be present on every scale …”

It was insecurity that drove people to extraordinary feats. People who were really not good for anything were suddenly capable of everything. Heroes had emerged from insecurity. From fear, dread, despair. “Quite apart from the creations of art.” It wasn’t security that held sway, it was idiocy and inadequacy—and ordinary idiocy and inadequacy, at that. He makes these remarks during lunch. He sends back the beef, even though he ordered it; he wants salt pork instead. The landlady takes the beef and goes. We have a table to ourselves. The rest of the dining room is full. You’d think there wasn’t room for one more person. Chairs are brought out of the kitchen, the big bench is pulled out from under the window and extended by another couple of yards. And then there are still people hunkered on the floor, on boards put up across barrelheads. Friday, I think. Then, when there really isn’t any more space, some come up to our table. The knacker and the engineer first, then workmen come and beset the painter. The landlady, bringing him his salt pork, watches spitefully as they almost crush the painter. She makes another face at him behind his back, at him and at me as well, because she’s worked out that I’m on his side. That
makes me suspicious to her. She sees me as another one of the same sort. Since she detests him, she must detest me too.