Frost: A Novel (12 page)

The engineer, who had ordered us a liter of wine on his tab, then said: “The power plant will supply electricity to the whole of Europe. No layman could even begin to imagine a
construction like it. I only know the very broad outlines, and have detailed information about a few parts of it. Everyone has his own particular area for which he’s responsible. The real achievement belongs to those scientists who designed it. I am only responsible for the building of it, and the building of a small section. If you think that a cubic meter costs about as much as a village to build, and not a small village at that, then you can begin to imagine the scale of the investment. But really it defies the imagination.” The painter says: “But the landscape will be wrecked by it. The more such power plants are built, and I’m not arguing about the need for them, or that they’re not incredibly useful, they’re the best thing we could build here, I’m really not arguing about that, but the more such power plants are built, the less beautiful countryside will be left. Now, this valley is ugly anyway, and it can hardly be disfigured more than it is already, one ugliness more or less hardly matters, but in beautiful landscapes, and our country largely consists of beautiful landscapes, in such landscapes power plants can have a devastating effect. Half the country has already been wrecked by the building of power plants. Where there used to be flowery meadows and rich farmland and first-growth forests, there are only these concrete lumps now. The whole country will soon be paved over by power plants, and before long it will be impossible to find a spot where you won’t be bothered by power plants, or at the very least by telegraph poles.”—“Yes,” said the knacker, “that’s true.”—“The great rivers are being destroyed as well,” said the painter, “because people build dams at those points where they flow most beautifully, and through the most beautiful scenery, and break their flow with ugly power plants. Not that I’m an enemy of the new architecture, quite the contrary, but a power plant is always a thing of ugliness.
There are already thousands of them up and down our country.” The engineer says: “Why shouldn’t we use the energy that is ours to exploit? All the other countries are building all the power plants they can. Electricity is a precious commodity.” And moreover power plants were by no means as ugly as the painter claimed they were. Because they were built as simply as possible, they often fitted into the landscape as if they had always stood there. “In many places, reservoirs come into being that actually constitute an improvement on what was there before,” says the engineer. “Ugly villages and swamps and useless waste ground could all disappear underwater overnight.” The painter says: “But dams are continually being breached, and then the waters inundate the quiet fertile lowlands, and hundreds of people are ruined, I’m forever reading about such incidents.”—“Yes,” said the engineer, “you’re right there.”—“And the people don’t know what they’ve done to find themselves exposed to such a constant danger. Because there’s really nothing much that can be done about a dam breaking, is there, Engineer?”—“Yes, we’re pretty helpless if it comes to that.” But dams were only very rarely breached. And those occasions were generally from natural causes, outside human forethought. “There, you see!” said the painter, “you see!” The engineer says: “Dam bursts are so rare, and the resulting losses, in terms of human lives, I mean, are so small, that they don’t really impinge on the calculations …”—“Oh, they don’t impinge?” says the painter; “they don’t impinge?”—“No,” says the engineer, “they really don’t impinge. Not if you think of the colossal advantage of having the power plant there.”—“Oh, the colossal advantage of having the power plant! And you think a hundred thousand deaths are any different from a single death?”—“How do you mean?” asks the
engineer. “Ah,” says the painter, “now, you see: how do you mean?” And then the engineer says: “The danger of human fatalities exists everywhere. And in fact people are killed everywhere. A very few in power plants. Workmen, yes. But workmen die everywhere, you get deaths on any building site. If our country hadn’t built the power plants it did build, never mind under what circumstances, then it would be a poor country.” Whereas now, whatever the abuses and the corruption, it could still claim to be a prosperous country. “The more power plants are built, the more fortunate our country.” Everybody was agreed about that. Only the painter didn’t say anything, just: “Yes, power plants.”

“The engineer was in the Klamm valley,” said the painter; “if I’d known he was going to the Klamm valley, then I’d have gone with him. He could have given me a ride in his car as far as J. It’s ten years since I was last in the Klamm valley. You must know, the waterfall there is quite thunderous. Well, the engineer half froze to death in the Klamm. If he’d asked me, I could have told him what to put on, if you’re going to the Klamm!—‘The Klamm is an experience,’ I told him, and he said: ‘But what about the wild boar!’—‘The wild boar?’ I ask, ‘the wild boar? You didn’t believe that rigmarole about the wild boar, did you?’ ‘Rigmarole?’ he asks. ‘Yes, the rigmarole!’ The thing about the wild boar is a rigmarole. The knacker tells everyone going to the Klamm that there are wild boar there who will attack humans, you know! But the thing about the wild boar is an absolute rigmarole! ‘A rigmarole!’ I say, and the engineer says: ‘I’ve heard them!’—‘Heard what? The wild boar?’ I ask. ‘Yes, the wild boar.’—‘The wild boar? If you
heard wild boar in the Klamm valley,’ I said, ‘then you never heard a wild boar, because there aren’t any wild boar in the Klamm valley. None!’ I said definitively, and the engineer: ‘So you think the knacker was pulling my leg?’—‘Yes, the knacker pulled your leg,’ I say, ‘the knacker pulls the leg of everyone who goes into the Klamm valley.’—‘But they were wild boar!’ says the engineer, refusing to be convinced by me. ‘All right, then they were wild boar,’ I say. ‘Only a fool can fail to distinguish between wild boar and a fox or a deer. Those were foxes or deer.’—‘No, they were wild boar,’ said the engineer. And I turned and walked off. You know,” said the painter, “there haven’t been any wild boar in this part of the country for hundreds of years. Not up here in the mountains; down in the flatland, that’s another story, they wreak all kinds of devastation there, nibbling corpses, and barging open the doors of people’s houses, and surprising them in bed. But here there are no wild boar. ‘You should have put on your fur hat,’ I say to the engineer, ‘and you should have wrapped your feet in puttees.’ Yes, that’s what he should have done, he saw that too. But he believed the rigmarole about the wild boar.”

We walked past the pond. The painter said: “People have vanished here, and never been found; nothing more was seen or heard of them. I could give you several instances of people vanishing here. Most recently, the butcher’s girl vanished. Without a trace. The evening before, she was in her bed. In the morning she was gone. Once and for all. That such a thing should be possible,” said the painter, “it suggests there’s something to the supernatural, doesn’t it? Or don’t you think it’s supernatural if a person simply vanishes? Without a
trace? Leaving nothing behind but a wardrobe full of clothes, a couple of pairs of shoes, and a prayer book? And even after ten years nothing has been heard of them?”

I stay downstairs in the public bar, because the people create a bit of warmth. Up in my room it’s cold, the fire has gone out, and I don’t feel like trying to get it going again. I can’t sleep in a warm room. I’ve got a small cast-iron stove in my room. It quickly becomes red hot, but just as soon goes stone cold. And the room is like the stove. Down in the public bar, I join in their card games. I go and sit with them once I’m sure the painter won’t be back down. He wouldn’t like to see me playing with them. Or should I just tell him? Why don’t I tell him? I shouldn’t let him boss me around. But sometimes he stays sitting there himself, and asks the engineer something to do with the construction of the power plant, or the knacker about some detail in one of his war reminiscences. “Was that in Poltava?” he asks, to test out the knacker. And he says back: “No, it was in Odessa,” and if, as the painter recalls, he said, “in Odessa,” weeks before, at the same point in the same story, then he knows that the story is truthful. The painter likes to ask these trick questions. If the knacker had said: “Yes, in Poltava,” then that would have been proof that the story he told was not a truthful one. Or the painter says: “The girl remained faithful to that man to the end, didn’t she?”

Many times I have to fetch the beer-warmer from the kitchen for the painter. But then he leaves it in the glass for so long
that the beer becomes undrinkable, and then he says: “I can’t drink this!” and pushes it away. He orders one glass of beer after another, and leaves them untouched. If he steps away, the engineer drinks it off, or the knacker, or whoever else happens to be sitting nearby. Sometimes he takes his Pascal with him on walks, and suddenly pulls it out of his pocket, opens it up at a certain page somewhere, and says: “That’s a great thought!” pretends to read a section, looks at me, and returns the book to his pocket. “Blaise Pascal, born 1623, the greatest!” he says. It might be two o’clock before I get to bed. In the end, it’s still the engineer and the knacker sitting there, and the landlady and me. Now the cards are on the table, now they’re in our hands. The landlady keeps record of who wins. The wall clock ticks. Outside, the world shrivels up with cold. “Up until six months ago, I kept a dog,” says the landlady, looking out the window. And seeing nothing but fear. The light is dim, and my eyes hurt as one o’clock comes and goes. Up in my room, I suddenly feel terribly alone, without knowing why. It takes me hours to get warm.

“I’m standing in front of the tree,” I say, “but I don’t know what that is, a tree. What is it? And there’s a human being standing there, and I don’t know what that is either. I don’t know anything. Now it’s high up and now it’s cold and now it’s dark. Do you know?”—“Me?” says the knacker, “why me?”—“And you’re looking up at the blackness, and those are clouds, aren’t they? And then you walk into a building where it’s warm. And there are people sitting. And there are some in the cemetery too. Do you know what that is?”—“No, people,” he says. “Yes, people.” And suddenly it feels cold,
and I’m shivering, and I ought to hurry back, the painter’s waiting for me. I told him I would be back soon, he asked me to get him some shoelaces in the village. I went to the cobbler’s, and bought him the shoelaces. And then I went out, and stood in the village square. Well, so it goes, I said to myself. And then: “Shoelaces.” And then I go round to the cemetery to ask the knacker something. Once I’m up there, I can’t remember what it is I wanted to ask him. He is standing in exactly the place where in my memory—or even in my dream, if you like—I thought of him standing. He is wearing what I supposed he would be wearing. He climbs out of a grave, and I put the painter’s shoelaces in my pocket. “I wanted to ask you something, but I can’t remember what it was,” I say. “I’ve forgotten it.”—“Ask me something?” he says, and descends into the grave again. I can only see his head, and I take a step forward, and now I can see his back as well. “A grave,” I say. He says: “How do you mean, a grave?”—“It is a grave, isn’t it? A deep grave.”—“A grave, yes,” he says. “Why?”—“Do you know why? How deep a grave can be,” I say. People walk around on the planet for a while, which looks to them like the sort of place where you can walk around—who says that?—and then they fall into a grave like that. Who had the idea of letting people walk around on the planet, or something called a planet, only to put them in a grave, their grave, afterward? “That’s a very old tree,” I say to the knacker. And he: “Yes, it’s a very old tree.” And after a while I say the same thing about a person, without realizing I’m saying the same thing, I say: “He’s very old, isn’t he?”—“Yes,” says the knacker, “he’s very old!” And then: “What’s it like in the parson’s house? Cold?”—“Yes,” he says, “very cold,
very
cold.” And I say: “How are things in the city? A lot of
people, I expect?”—“Yes, a lot of people,” he says. “And what’s tomorrow’s weather going to be like? Can we hope for something pleasanter?”—“Hope?” he says. “Yes. We can hope.”—“And why does the grave have to be dug today, when the burial’s not till the day after tomorrow?”—“Why? The burial’s the day after tomorrow,” he says. “The afternoon of the day after tomorrow.”—“Yes, the afternoon of the day after tomorrow.”—“It must be cold, down there,” I say. And he says: “Cold. Yes, it must be cold, down there.” What do we know about it all. Was he going the same way as me, I asked the knacker. Yes, he is going the same way. I wonder what he has in his rucksack, I think. We take the shortcut to the village. I wish I had stout shoes! The knacker says: “In the war, there was no lack of criminality here. And even after the war, when I was back home, people were brained over a bicycle or a piece of bread. And imagine this: the French let the convicts out of the prisons, and they flooded the entire country; every little place saw killings over a blanket, or an old horse. Not to mention the acts of vengeance!” said the knacker. “Did the painter not tell you about any of that? During and after the war, he was in Weng with his sister. The farmers did not treat him at all well.” The painter had been forced to sleep in an attic of the inn for a while, “because the rooms were all full of soldiers.” They had arrested the landlord, and put him up against the wall to shoot him, “no one knows why. But at the very last moment they didn’t shoot him.” During the war years, the cellulose factory had “worked exclusively on producing munitions.” Attempts had been made to bomb it from the air, but the planes had crashed in the mountains, or had been forced to turn back because of poor visibility. As a returning veteran, he had been forced to lie low in hay barns
for weeks. “I spent many days sleeping in cornfields. The corn was high. I ate fresh baby beets and corn,” he said. “It was very quiet down in the valley.” Here and there, he had heard the sound of gunfire. No trains. Nothing. “The bridges had all been blown.” Chunks of rock lay across the tracks. “Sentries had been put out in front of people’s houses.” When they were finally withdrawn one day, he left his cornfield, and went into the village. He got himself some old pants and an old jacket, took off his uniform, and got into the pants and jacket. Then he went round to the mayor’s office, where they were pleased with every man jack. They were looking for someone to bury the dead. “I was engaged on the spot.”