Frost: A Novel (11 page)

On the slope, under the big linden tree, where the humming of the telegraph wires is loudest, a few paces from the big power mast, he had been taken with a sudden nausea, and had hurriedly turned back. “It’s my foot.” He had had to drag his foot after him like a lead weight. “I had the feeling it was about to snap off.” At first he had tried to get to the inn by the shortcut, but then he had broken down, he said. With the last of his strength he had taken refuge in the hay barn, where he had hoped to be able to shelter from the wind. “Behind me I have warmth, the hay, you see!” Then, while thinking about his sister—“a very sad thought!”—he had been made aware of my approach—“that oddly crumbling sound.” “I’m happy you came along. Is it by chance, or did you happen to see me?” It was chance, I said. “As soon as I sat down, the pain in my foot eased. It moved up, to be closer to my brain.”

He’s forever complaining about the pain in his foot, “which is always at its worst when the pain in my head eases.” He had followed my advice that he should put his foot up at night, on a pillow, but “as you see, it was no use. Quite the contrary. The swelling has grown. It’s as though it was sucking up everything that’s in my body. The same sucking feeling, by the way, that I have in my brain.” He’s right, the swelling has grown. Because he’s walking the whole time. It’s maybe twice the size of what it was the last time I saw it. But no discoloration. His anklebone has completely disappeared. “The best thing you can do for your foot is not walk for a day or
two,” I said to him. “So it’s as simple as that, you think, to fight such a terrible illness?”—“I’m sure it will have gone in a few days,” I said, “disappeared.”—“Here, on my arm, you see, there are signs of swelling too,” he said. He pointed to a spot on his forearm, where there was supposed to be swelling, but I couldn’t see anything. I palped the spot, but couldn’t feel anything untoward. “Surely you can feel something’s on the way. You can’t have any feeling for illnesses.” His head was full of “indescribable conspiracies.” Pictures he sees, just as anyone does, suddenly spun round, were torn apart “in little scraps, you know. But I’m quite reconciled to the fact that everything about me is diseased. In the grip of illness. I don’t think the illness I have is infectious. As soon as I discovered it, I had the feeling it was incurable. Incurable,” he repeated, and stopped. We were walking in single file, as ever, me first, him following, first up to the village, then to the inn. “A patient recognizes an incurable illness right away. Usually he keeps his knowledge to himself. It looks quite different from anything curable.” His blood was full of so many poisons that you could “wipe out whole sections of cities with it.” These poisons kept forming little concentrations under his skin, anywhere they could find. “Hence the swelling on my foot,” he said. “Just as there are hulks of ships on the banks of great rivers, so there are poison deposits on the banks of my arteries and veins. Death can only mean the cessation of all my pains. Death means being rid of everything, and most of all, of myself.” There were no more issues to be settled between himself and his death. “The arrangement I have come to with my death is mutually advantageous.”

•   •   •

If the villagers could do what they wanted, they would spend their lives guzzling and boozing. You’d have to fear for their jaws, even now alarming quantities of food and drink dribble out of the corners of their mouths. The landlady sics them on her tripe and onions and boiled beef and steins of beer, it’s like siccing dogs on something you’re not quite sure about. She provokes. The painter is disgusted by the food and drink that the engineer and the knacker hurl themselves upon. Those who have sung, now wail. The engineer says something against the church, the knacker about an infected ox that some people in the village had chopped up and eaten. It so happened that yesterday once again he had been forced to go down the gorge and up the shady side to find a dead dog. People seemed not to be able to bury their own pets. They gave him a tip, and asked him questions. What was the origin of this or that. How did you get here or there, and what was it like. How you got out of there, they didn’t know either. “Yes, mysticism,” that’s the only thing the knacker knows to say back, “mysticism.” Or: “mystical influence,” and the now drunken engineer says: “The scholiasts!” and fiddles with a bone. The landlady can’t keep up with the orders, she struggles, kicks out at people under the table; either they don’t notice, or they misinterpret it. The ones who take a kick as a secret summons to join her in bed at such and such a time, they get it right. She’s sweating, and her chin glistens like the sausages she shoves in front of the policeman’s uniform, causing him to scoot back, and study his belly. “No, no!” says the engineer, “not the least idea!” He knew how to tackle granite, what to do with intractable people. “But I don’t use my fists!” he says, “I don’t need to do that. No, no!” And then there’s such a hubbub in the room that you can’t make out a word. The landlady’s daughters are slithering
from one man’s knee to the next. “An unpleasant odor,” says the painter, but he’s apparently still too weak to get up. “I just want to finish my drink,” he says. “It’s always the unforeseen that occurs—a party!” says the engineer. The less-well-off were jealous of the better-off, he says, and no one knows who’s in the box seat and who’s not. But in heaven there was enough space “for the last snotnose.”—“Oh, yes,” says the knacker, “there’s always room in heaven.” Sometimes he felt like a horseman trying to continue to ride without his mount, says the engineer, almost exploding with heat, “you hang in the air for a while, and you continue to make progress. But the moment you start to think you’re in midair, you go crashing to the ground, and everything’s gone to pot.” Then, when the plates have been taken out, they sing “Zu Mantua in Banden,” at a volume to shake the walls. The painter makes his way through the racket up to his room. It’s not till two in the morning that there’s any peace. Before that, there’s a lot of merriment and squalor and the great futility of everything.

Ninth Day

“Did you hear the drunks? Did you hear them after midnight?” he said. “I lay awake all night. Walked up and down. I even opened the window and let the air pour in, that terribly cold air. But it didn’t do any good. I thought I might go down and complain. But there’s no sense in that. I’d only encounter incomprehension. The thing that makes me most indignant
is that incessant door-slamming. Like continually being beaten about the head! There’s nothing worse than incessant door-slamming in a house. People slam doors without the least thought. It’s a trait of inferior humanity. Habitual door-slamming is even capable of killing someone. My whole day is wrecked if someone slams the door. But here they slam them all the time. Imagine yourself forced to live somewhere where they continually slam the doors! A place inhabited by habitual door-slammers! You’re up against it, I tell you …” He says: “Look at my little shoes, my little tiny shoes!” and he presses on one of them with his cane. And I look at his shoes. “My head is so swollen, I can no longer see my shoes. I have infinitely tiny shoes, and very rickety legs. Infinitely tiny, infinitely minute shoes! And what these legs have to endure, when I think of my head! I look like some sort of grotesquely swollen insect! My head is so heavy, a dozen strong men wouldn’t be able to lift it … but my legs, those tiny little legs, they can manage it. I always take a footbath in the evenings now. That helps. I can’t see anything with my head. It’s all gray. And yellow. And then the colors start to run, and I see nothing but pain.”

If he ran into a tree with his head, it felt like a swollen hand. “Do you hear? There’s a chainsaw installed in my head. That saw makes so much noise it could kill me! Great planks of wood are forever getting jammed in my head, I’m not exactly able to say where: way down, or right at the back … and then it’s the waterfall that’s making me black out. I can hear your voice, but only at a great distance, as though through a wall. Of course I know you’re walking along beside me. But it’s as though you were walking beside me a great distance
away. I can hear you. You’re tramping through the snow as I am. You drag me after you. You force me to walk with you. Force is what it is … Youth is always painless,” he said. We were between the church and the village. Sometimes we could see neither church nor village, because great swaths of fog were rolling through the valley. “Youth is barely acquainted with grief. Or oppression. Or hopelessness. But what I’m saying is wrong. When you’re young, everything is so much worse. The oppression is worse. The hopelessness. The pain. In fact, youth is inaccessible. No one can get at it. Not at real youth. Real childhood. No one can get at it. Is that true? Do you think I should give my coat a brush?” he asked. “You speak so softly. We are in a swampy landscape here, you must know. If it was summer, we’d already be finished. But what can kill you in summer, drag you down, it’s all frozen over now.” We reached the hay barn and sat down on the wood plank where he had squatted the day before. He said: “By nature, you might call me ideal.” As soon as he’d recovered, we got up, and walked back the way we’d come for a little stretch, but then turned off it, to get to the inn quicker. “Once we’re back at the inn, you should look for something for yourself. Anything. Whatever you like. I’d like to make you a present. Choose something in my room. You know, you don’t attack me. Everyone else attacks me.”

“What do people say about me?” he asked. “Do they say ‘that idiot’? What is it they say?” He wanted an answer. “I’m an irritant, that’s what it is. My head was always an irritant to them. Now, in my sickness, there are further traits emerging in me that were formerly hidden. That hadn’t got as far as my head. It’s true: sick as I am, it’s no longer possible for me to
suppress anything. Not a thing. You see, this is the way I am, it’s nothing bad. They laugh at me because I wear puttees. Also because my stick is an ornamental cane to them. And that’s just the beginning.” Then: “On the one hand, I should like not to be all alone; on the other, they all disgust me. Everything disgusts me. It forces its way into them, and into me, aversion and intolerance. No dealings. No. Should I sit down with someone? No. With the engineer? With the knacker? With the landlady? With the priest? With one of them? No. At one time, it might have been possible. Now I’m a long way from there. But of course I’ll give it a go. So as not to sink. Or perhaps because I want to sink.” He said he might have made some sort of scientist. “But I am deeply incapable, deeply deeply incapable.” The unusual qualities of many people were barely worth remarking on. “But I am nobody.”

For days now, there have been no other guests at the inn. Only the painter and I. Between meals, it’s as silent as the grave. “Our grave,” the painter suddenly said today. He raised his stick at something I couldn’t see, and repeated: “Our grave.” Then he cut round the inn, and vanished into the dark shadows of the trees. For the first time, for some reason, he wanted to be alone. That gave me the chance to go up to my room. At first I thought I might write a letter home where I would mention my mission, where I was, what I was doing with the painter. A few details established themselves in my brain. Then, no sooner had I written three or four sentences, I dropped the sheet of paper in the stove. I read my Henry James book, and drank a glass of beer I brought up from downstairs. “The doctor is the helper of mankind,” I thought, that pronouncement that always provoked me in
the most idiotic way. Helper of mankind, I thought. Helping and mankind, the distance between those two terms. I can’t imagine myself ever helping anyone. When I’m a doctor … a doctor? I and doctor? The whole thing feels to me as if I’d just woken out of a dream, and now I’m to go about in a white coat I’ve got on for some reason. The “helper of mankind” flitted through my brain, and gave me a headache, my first in a long while. I don’t understand anything.

With my head full of those thoughts, I wasn’t able to make any progress with my Henry James either. I closed the book and slipped it into my coat, put another big log on the stove, and left the inn, heading for the village. In less than a quarter of an hour, I was at the cemetery, which was where I thought I might find the knacker. I would have loved to talk to him, teased one of his stories out of him. But he wasn’t in the cemetery. A few local women were carrying paper wreaths into the chapel. There was a rattle in the bell tower, and at that same instant, a chunk of ice came off the church roof and fell at my feet. I stopped in alarm. One more step, and … I remembered how once, fifteen years ago or so, an enormous icicle flew down, brushing my sleeve, and the air pressure alone was enough to knock me over. Back then, I hadn’t been able to sleep for many nights because of the excitement, and I went on wetting my bed for weeks afterward. Disappointed not to have seen the knacker, I walked along by the children’s graves, this way and that. But before long, my walking struck me as pointless, and I couldn’t bear it anymore, and ran into the nearest pub on the village square. I sat down in a corner, from where I could watch the farmer’s lads playing cards in the other corner, drank a couple of glasses of
beer, and didn’t get up until I was fairly drunk. I stumbled into the ditch a couple of times, straightened myself out again, laughed into space, and didn’t get back to the inn until much later.

In the public bar, the engineer said the construction of the power plant was the largest such project ever to have been carried out. Even now experts were arriving from all over the world on a daily basis to have a look at the thing. “But can our state afford such a large project?” asked the painter. “Oh, yes,” said the engineer, “the state is rich. If only it would always put its money into such large and useful and universally admired projects. But unfortunately the state wastes most of its money!” Billions disappeared every year without a trace. It was known where the money had disappeared to, to ministerial villas and ministerial factories and into the nationalized enterprises, which were so badly run that it was completely pointless putting any money into them. All those businesses ran at big losses, which had to be made up from the public purse. “But most of it goes on representation,” said the engineer. And the painter said: “There’s no other country like ours, where the ministers have a choice of twenty official cars; if there were, they would all go down the drain.”—“Back where we came from, in other words,” said the knacker. “Yes,” said the painter, “we’re bankrupt.” “Bankrupt,” said the knacker.