Frost: A Novel (6 page)

“Memory is a sickness. A word pops up that reveals entire neighborhoods. Ghastly architecture. You stare into crowds of people: futile to approach them! The day is over.” Ninety-eight out of a hundred people had a compulsive delusion with which they fell asleep and woke up. “Everyone is continually wading through the depth of an idea, some a long way down, others even further down. Until the darkness shows them the futility of what they’re attempting; police cells with their afternoon quiet, full of sleep and the reek of prisoners. One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years. Cornfields like whirlpools: forests, meadows, country roads, sections of fairs, torn apart by the imagination, rivers rumble in slices, workers pull long blades through the brains of paupers.” There were quite literally ancient dreams, a so-called “science of simple people.” A law by which all things permanently repeat themselves, while at the
same time being unrepeatable. Everything at once in a cycle of permanent return, and terminally entropic. Joy attracts more joy, sins attract sins, exhibition exhibition, love love. “What connects me to myself is the thing that is furthest away from me,” and “time is no means with which to engage with time,” and “I am a victim of my theories, and at the same time their controller.”

He asked what that was: memories, scraps of singularities that one no longer understood. Memory stayed behind and carried on producing itself everlastingly, in the same form in which, not yet memory, one had first left it behind. As on a stage, people receded. Kept receding onto one and the same plane. His head was like the wings of an infinite theater. And? The volume would diminish, and finally also the impression “that the eyes have of the thing that, years earlier, they were forced to withdraw from. Over the years, all things become air.” Eventually, every so often, an image would surface out of the stream, become distinct and magnificent as the thing in which you despair. The past: childhood, youth, pain that is long since dead, is not dead, a piece of winter, a piece of spring, of summer—which summer?—whatever you loved most dearly. Gravel paths and roads, the burial sites of family and loved ones: men carrying a woman’s coffin, the whole thing darkening, draymen loading up barrels, brewery employees, cheesemakers, a broken bough in front of his parents’ house: the fear going down to the lake. The accumulation of coincidence turned what had been healthy into equally inexhaustible morbidity. “Everything in the world is just an essence of one’s self.” It was an effortless procedure for holding together a fantastic creature like a human being.
Memory was merely preference. “If not, it will destroy everything, even the toughest substance in oneself.” Madness, joy, contentment, stubbornness and ignorance, belief and unbelief were at all times at its disposal. “It’s pure pleasure, dissolving even death.” To stand in relation to memory as to a human being, from whom one might part from time to time, only to welcome him back with renewed cordiality into one’s home, that was the thing “that benefits the memory and the man who has it, more with each occasion.” Memory followed a plan that remained unexecuted. A plan. Many plans. Looking back, it seemed that, though capable of charity, it wasn’t always prepared to give. Caused birthday surprises, document forgeries. Turned funerals into softly resonant afternoon ceremonials. It pretended to be deaf, just as the world was sometimes deaf, and often addressed one in unwittingly harsh tones, in the manner of a beloved brother, say, asking after his sister. It grew increasingly refined, between the theory and the feeling of a human being, a character, and, it appeared, “always turned up at precisely the right time.” Never a lie. Calculation, yes. Not mind. Not stinting. Sunk way down in the possibilities of memory, a human being went around dumbly, deaf to everything that didn’t stir from memory. It was a perpetual “thinking and-immediately-feeling-sad,” not just for its own ends either: for “daily unclarity and daily despair.”

“I have such pain today,” he said, “that it’s almost impossible for me to walk. Every step is agony. You must imagine: that enormous head and these tiny shriveled-up legs … that have to support it. Way at the top that massive head, and right down at the bottom, incessantly those frail, weak little legs.
Imagine some liquid in your head, something like boiling water, suddenly stiffening to lead and striking against the inside of your skull. Now I have the feeling this head will never fit anywhere, not even in the landscape. Only pain. Pain and darkness. I can follow your words, I can follow the sounds of your feet. Some time, I know, my head will open. I have various notions of various endings,” said the painter. “If I permit it to come to a natural end; but I won’t permit it to come to a natural end. Suicide: primal thing in nature, quite naturally the hardest, toughest, nothing … the whole of development is confined to the investigation: the generations are seated in a sort of pretrial room … The pains in my head, at a fixed unscientific degree of unbearableness … you want to see in yourself what you are capable of: on the way to extreme insensitivity and oversensitivity in graduated torments up the pillar of pain at intervals of time … the temperatures given in thousands of degrees … I’m supporting a head in which the horizons are reeling. If I could offer you a hint which is more than a hint … I confine myself to the cursed propensities of age; and so it is possible for me to keep step with my agonies. You see those pegs,” said the painter; “I could happily drive every one of them into my brain! And my feet are hurting, my ankles. Everything. Nothing in me that is not in pain. You must think I’m a gigantic fusspot! But you can’t imagine what it’s like: suddenly everything swelling up and functioning on an enormous scale. Always the same roads,” he said, “it drives you crazy. Freely adopted pains that I find for myself, in addition. From clumsiness or calculation. From ignorance and too much knowledge. Freeze, because you forgot to take a precaution? … And then an infinite amount of raw data going through my head: things to do with journeys, with business, with uncontrollable, religious
schemes. You understand: everything is divisible! Just as: nothing is divisible! And the pain is driven on and up. It leaps more and more dementedly into the air. Capable of astonishing turns, it plunges down on me like a hawk. You hear?” said the painter; “you hear?” And I heard the dogs.

Seventh Day

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.