Frost: A Novel (15 page)

He listened to me a long time today as I told him about home. About how I had often gone on trips to the mountains, the lake, the cities. Also that I would read to them all from the Bible, father, mother, siblings—that seemed to make him sad. That we had trees in our garden that we had planted ourselves, cupboards and wardrobes where we keep early treasures, candles and baby clothes, pinecones from a cold and happy winter. That we always wrote each other letters, and worried about each other. That we knew of houses that were never locked up. Also forests, beaches, sled hills, known only to us. That there were beds turned back for us in heated rooms, and books, and that we love music which brings us together when it’s dark outside. And how storms suddenly wreck things that have been conceived to last for eternity, and were loved by everyone. He listened to everything I had to say, without a single interruption, even up and down the many detours and byways I took, where there was
talk of security and being together and being alone, of lack of self-confidence, of trust, and rebellion and distinctions, of suddenly stopping and going back, of fear and reproach, of love and torment, of deception and self-evidence, where clouds rose up, and heavy snowfalls darkened town and country, where people continually renewed each other, where there was grief after days of exuberance and rivers dragged their courses, where you gradually forgot how to live and found again what had been lost, where silence alternated with excitement, stimulating modesty here and brutality there—things that didn’t resolve themselves, how people walked past each other, not recognizing themselves, fell into silence, and the sayings of sadness, where nights were uselessly waked through and a thousand important days were slept away. It all made him very sad, but he was quite without bitterness. “Fascinating,” he said after these morning hours in which I kept saying, well, that was about the way of it, to myself and to him, who was so taciturn, “It’s like listening to my own life story. I can see it all before me with my own eyes, and I know that’s how it was.” And after a while: “Of course we see everything under false pretenses.”

I attempted a description of my room at home. Forced myself, step by step, to see everything in my room, along the walls, back and forth, to notice the sounds that came in, barged in, at various particular times of day. Began with the door, with its deep keyhole, through which you came into a sort of cavern, back out a little, past the hinges to the corner where dust always settled, got damp, dried out, and finally formed a solid mass, further bound together by fly droppings. Then on, along the ceiling, drop down to the floor,
onto the carpet, take in the ornaments, Arabian window casements, potpourri, staircases, views onto the temple and the sea, immobilized by heat. Through the keyhole into the chest, half-dead with the smell of the summer clothes jammed into it, looking for a way through the dark and the soporific smell, out and onto the window seat over the garden. Then the picture of the beautiful city, lying there in autumn, in wild brown colors. The mountain scene, with the walkers emerging into a river valley. Along the gilded frame, from one carved heart to another. Grandfather’s picture, then grandmother’s. The letter from my brother, covering over a third of the hunting scene, showing a hunter playing a bagpipe, and calling several other figures to dance. The copper engraving of an old castle in the flatland. Then the table and bed and chair, the floorboards, the cracks in the plaster. And all the connections between everything. The copper engraving and the castle, the castle and the lake, the lake and the hills, the hills and the mountains, the mountains with the sea lying below, the sea and the people, and their clothes and the summer evening, the air over the river that has our boat bobbing on it, long past midnight. Or grandfather’s picture with a room in a brewery, with a suicide, with a fisherman dragging a pike out of the rushes. I said: “Each item takes you to all the others. It’s a proof of all of them.” But the painter didn’t reply. Suddenly I noticed that he hadn’t been listening to me, that what I had been thinking and trying to say hadn’t interested him at all, because he said: “It’s too bad that I am compelled to take my meals down in the public bar. That the landlady won’t bring them up to my room. Send a child up there. It’s a torment for me to sit in that public bar. But then I suppose I’m looking for things that will irritate me. The smell,” he said, “makes me ill. The smell of workmen
has always made me ill. And always attracted me. Yes, it’s true. If I come down sooner, the food isn’t ready, if I come later, there’s nothing left. As if they were all equipped with trunks and claws when they eat,” he said. “The inns in the valley make even more of a profit, those inns make an immense profit. Only undesirables make their way up the mountain. Those who are heavily indebted, and can’t show themselves in the valley anymore. For whatever reasons. They cook in vast cauldrons down there. And all of them with the very cheapest fats and oils. Not our landlady! Even though she too, as I’ve already intimated to you, uses dirt, and works with dogmeat and horsemeat. I’ve always hated human gatherings.”

“In the morning, I was just cleaning my boots—they don’t clean your boots properly here, you always have to go over them again with a rag yourself—I saw the landlady hitting her elder daughter. Suddenly I heard it. She must have struck her with a hard object on the head, because I saw her running downstairs, bleeding. She collapsed under the chestnut tree, holding her head in both hands. I expect she spent half the night among the railwaymen. In the snow I saw traces of blood when I went out later, because I couldn’t stand it in my room anymore. Scraps of words came up to my window. They were already on their way to the post office, but I caught everything. I jumped up and ran to the window. The whole scene was squalid. Presumably the girl spent the night with the son of the crossing-keeper. ‘Whore!’ I hear. ‘Whore!’ The landlady must have thought I was out, because otherwise she wouldn’t have lost control in such an abject way. The girl was contorted with pain under the chestnut
tree. She’s not even fourteen. You’ve probably seen him, the crossing-keeper’s son, a big young fellow. He works in the cellulose factory. He only ever visits the inn when the landlady’s away. I haven’t seen him for many days now. Back when the knacker was singing with the engineer, he was there: dark, and solidly built. I’m sure you must have seen him. At lunchtime, I heard the girl has moved out. She was in a train with her lover. It made a terrible impression on me, the girl’s helplessness I found especially alarming. The landlady lashed out with the poker. With the poker, if you must know. She lashed out at her like a butcher.”

Down on the building site, I remembered the time I used to go over the big bridges in blue workmen’s clothes. The air was fresh, and the noise wasn’t roused yet. Morning came down off the mountains into people’s houses, where they were saying their goodbyes for the day. Quickly they gulped down their coffee, and on the street chewed the bread that their wives had spread for them, or they didn’t eat anything at all, and started work on the building site on empty stomachs. The first shovelful took away your nausea. With my twenty years, I was stronger than the others, and I never really got tired. A big concrete mixer and a digger with the words “Zwettlerbau A.G.” loomed over us as we stood in the excavation. They were chilly days of autumn, but in a short time we were stripped down to our pants. And at noon we meandered over the road into the beer garden. It occurred to me that for a while I was perfectly happy with my life. To carry on in the same way seemed quite natural to me. In my family I had always heard about men who set out in construction and ended up in the gutter. They weren’t the worst. For
weeks I felt so happy in my work that I forgot all about my studies. But I passed my exams. As if in my sleep. I don’t know how I did it. I expect I was lucky. The rest of the world that wasn’t working on building sites struck me as crazy, and those people who weren’t standing in holes in the ground I looked at with sympathy. My evenings didn’t get so long, I was dog-tired, it felt sensible to collapse straight into bed, I didn’t even unpack my work things, I just left everything in my rucksack, and dropped into a deep sleep until half past four in the morning. The evenings came with the smell of the river drifting through the vegetation in the beer garden. There I would drink a beer with a couple of the guys, sometimes four or five beers, and we didn’t say much, but I liked what we did say. I was never able to speak to anyone else later as well as I did with my buddies from the building site. They didn’t say where they came from, and what they wanted to do with their lives. Probably they didn’t want to do anything particular with their lives. What should they have wanted to do with their lives? Did I want to do anything with my life? Probably the name of some young woman, a single mother, cropped up from time to time, or the name of a brother, and occasionally some town or village, where people wake up and go to sleep; I peered into kitchens and hallways, into garages and cesspools, and signalmen’s cabins.

And then I was a driver for an iron firm, and things got even more taciturn. And when we stood in our twos and threes on the big bridge over the big wide river, looking down into the water, then I wouldn’t think about countries and continents. The ships traveled down to the Black Sea, through the Iron Gate, through the various capital cities, and I was happy. But
I’d been spoiled, and I had my head full of something that only half convinced me, and I picked up my wages, and, come October, I went back to my school desk. I suppose I became unhappy again then, but in the long run even if I’d stayed on the building site, that might not have saved me from unhappiness. Who knows?

I too regularly felt drawn to the simple people, I told the painter today. Where all you see is the wheelbarrow going back and forth on a plank over a ditch with someone standing in it. Where all you see is clumps of earth being tossed up in the air. Who by? Well, you don’t know. Down there where they’re building the power plant, they stand around at nine o’clock and light their cigarettes and empty their bottles of beer and gesture with their fingers how many days till they’re due a holiday. But what will they do with it? Go away somewhere? When they’ve got the money to afford it! But where to? And isn’t it just too exhausting? They stay home, and just play cards a little later into the evening, because they don’t need to get up early, they go to the cinema, they write a letter that’s a year overdue to a brother, a sister, a mother. They balance across the rushing river, and those are the tricks they perform, life-and-death tricks, when they’re employed to slot in a section of a bridge. From six thirty in the morning to four thirty in the afternoon. Nine hours, because one is for eating and resting. Sometimes they shout across to each other, as if it was something essentially important, and not just a rope that needs tightening. The voices are used up. The crane swings across, now this side, now the other, and the mechanical digger at the end of its wires bites into the earth. Spits out
great chunks of earth between the men. The hydraulic drill might have driven them crazy twenty years ago, or at least one or other of them, but now no one is driven crazy by it. The trucks drive up from the railway station, sometimes they appear, sometimes they go again, and they go very close to the edge, and they need to be filled by the men. They wind the one rope ever tighter round their own necks. Most of them have never done anything else anyway but load and unload, standing in standing water in their gumboots and knocking in bridge piles. The fact that they’re used to it gives those people a pretext who never had to load and unload, never stood in standing water in gumboots, knocking in bridge piles; the pickaxes come whistling down on instructions given from the bank. You can climb around on the dirt and quiz the one or other of them without saying a word, without him saying a word either. If you watch, you have to be careful no one sees you, because otherwise you’ll be suspected of thinking about something you should have been thinking about all along. What is it these men slip into when they slip into their blue jackets, that, when the sun comes out, are hung up all over the place, on tree branches and on balanced shovel handles? Often the whole valley rings with their hammering and drilling. Then they detonate another big chunk out of the mountain into which they’re fitting the power plant, and the air pressure smacks against the cliff face.

Today they got a couple of people out of the Klamm valley on a sleigh. Two strangers, who wanted to spend the weekend high up in an Alpine hut. But they didn’t even get as far as the glacier when they took their fall. As if by a miracle, they
were almost unhurt and managed to stay warm all night under the branches of a broken pine. Even so, they were so weak come morning that only the elder of the two—they were both students—was able to crawl down to the valley for help. When the men, who apparently initially refused to go to the aid of the one lying up on the mountain with an injured leg, and for that reason was also unable to move, finally went up to help, they found the student unconscious, half in a stream. Only the fact that the rescue party reached him soon after he’d fallen into the stream saved his life. It was further miraculous that the students survived their initial fall relatively well; it was a ridge that had already claimed a lot of lives.

The engineer, who saw the students being taken down out of the Klamm valley, says the locals abused them to their faces, because they were forever having to deal with climbers, who, either out of ignorance or inadequate preparation and equipment, fall or lose their way, or get into some sort of scrapes. They should just leave them up there, they say. Why should their menfolk risk their own lives for the sake of “city showoffs”? What on earth were they doing, going climbing in all weathers, risking death by exposure, in a storm or rockslide? The city-dweller had no idea of the force of a storm suddenly breaking loose at altitude. The vehemence with which trees are uprooted, with which a gale smacks into a sheer face, causing the rock to tremble. Nothing of avalanches, or numbing frost. Nothing of the darkness that suddenly extinguishes anything that might offer sanctuary or support.