Frost: A Novel (16 page)

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“Every year there are a couple of hundred who lose their lives in the rocks somewhere,” said the engineer. “The Klamm is dangerous, unless you know the footholds.” Even today there were people lying around there with smashed limbs in the Klamm, who couldn’t be brought out, because it was too inaccessible. “Actually, it’s a mystery what brings all these thoughtless city-dwellers to the mountains.” The two students had been put up in an inn by the station. They were given warm beds and an earful of abuse. The engineer saw to it that they were made to pay for all the expenses resulting from their foolishness. “It seems they planned to kill themselves,” he said, “up in the hut.”

We know a thing or two about that in Schwarzach as well, the numerous tourist tragedies, from straightforward to complicated breaks, which develop into brain paralysis, to those cases where we get to the waterfall too late, or a wayside hut, where they simply lay them out, cover them with a canvas groundsheet or a piece of cardboard or some branches, and wait for the intern to issue a death certificate for them. Those are the city boys’ stunts, so they can impress their dubious friends for another year, and get their names in the paper, because they’ve been up a 2,500- or a 3,000-meter peak. What is it with climbing anyway? What’s the difference whether I’m three hundred meters up, or three thousand? It’s simply that the one is more dangerous than the other, the one isn’t a stunt, but the other is supposed to be. I’ve often seen young people snuffed out, just because darkness has
fallen all round them. And how do we benefit from standing around there clutching our rolls of bandage in hope, and the priest already on his way?

Or else we manage to get them into the hospital, and I’m sitting next to a lad or lass who doesn’t yet know that he or she will never walk again, will remain stiff as a board to the day of their death, and I hold their hand, and I say something in the ambulance that’s a flat-out lie. I might say: “You’ll be on the mend soon!” or: “It’ll take care of itself!” and I’ll only be struck by the horrendousness of what I’ve done at night, when I’m lying in bed. Then, in hundred- and thousandfold voices I hear their “No! No!” What it means to take the legs off a young man who’s a truck driver by profession. Or a newspaper delivery girl, or a student who was planning to go to India! They rip downhill on their skis and wrap themselves round a tree, that happens every day. Almost all the wards in the hospital are full of tourists who’ve met with accidents. You have to say they have only themselves to blame, they should never have gone up the mountains in the first place! But they are drawn up there, to the summits, up the slopes; whole school classes are found frozen, along with their teachers. If you ask them how they came by their frozen leg, which we’ve had to amputate, they say it was for a bet or showing off that prompted them to go on a climb; and that’s where it happened, most times nowhere near the peak. Once we had a boy in the hospital who survived for four days in a crevasse that already had three carcasses of mountain goats in it. It was only weeks after they brought him down that he got sick, and slowly lost his memory.

Thirteenth Day

“You only need to hear a certain name, and you start to make your excuses. Then someone is presented to you, and you’ve already closed the file on him. He can say what he likes, he’ll never get out of the oubliette we dropped him into, he’ll never get clear of it. Everything this person then does will look like the shameless self-promotion of an undesirable, of someone utterly unappetizing. That,” said the painter, “was how the engineer was for me, when he was introduced to me, I was immediately revolted by him, and I dropped him through the trapdoor, into the oubliette, as described. The first time I heard his name, I was almost sick. The idea of that name produced the most appalling impression of the person that went with the name. And when I met him face to face, I wasn’t disappointed. You’re never disappointed when you meet the person who goes with a name that you’ve chewed over and spat out.” If you met people before learning their names, the name, when you were told it, always fitted them. “Most people, all you need know of them is their name, you know.” The name contained everything you needed to know about them. It was mostly the names that prompted one to get to know someone. “The person who goes with a certain name never lets the name down. There are names that, when you hear them, give you a stronger feeling of nausea than the worst lack of appetite you can imagine. For instance, when a friend tells me the name of a friend of theirs, whom I haven’t
yet met. Have you not come across that phenomenon yourself? The name makes the man.”

I completely forget what I’m here for. That I have to make my observations. I think of it suddenly, when I’m in the larch wood possibly, when I notice something particularly striking about the painter, in the middle of the street, in the public bar, when he suddenly takes a great gulp from his glass of milk, like a healthy person, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t. That suddenly comes to mind, when I’m lost in trains of thought that took their starting point with the painter, when I’m far away from myself, separated by ranges of strange speculation. And I know that nothing but what I see will come to me. I intimated something of the sort to the assistant in the letter I wrote today. And that it’s so gloomy here, always gloomy, gloomy even on fair days. How a word I say sometimes pains me. A word that’s said to me. That can happen as well. I walk all alone through the village, and stick to the views of people, that’s what I do. And to the sky, which borders on nothing, and so doesn’t exist. In fact, I’m in hell, and have to keep quiet. The painter says it’s all incomprehensible because it’s human, and the world is inhuman, which makes everything comprehensible and terribly sad. He lets the words hang there. “Terribly sad” is what he says, and the way he says it, it must pierce the hearts of everyone. Beauty was a danger for itself, just as darkness was “independence of desire.” Or I walk over to the hay barn and imagine how he quells me with a mere look. And then I think of my task. Really, I ought to have a plan, or a table perhaps, where I can organize all the information I gather, add in the new data from above, and from below, so that whatever’s come in too
high can be reduced, and whatever’s too low can be added on to. But perhaps it’s all physical evidence that’s incapable of being ordered. Why is there no organization? In my observation of the painter, I mean to say. Am I in fact observing him? Am I not just looking at him? Am I observing him when I look at him? Looking at him when observing him? Then what? I’ll be pretty stumped when I next sit across the table from the assistant. He imagines I’ll come back to Schwarzach after a while, and spread out everything I’ve observed in front of him, and say: This is how it is! That’s the way he said it! That’s exactly how I made my observations! No possibility of error! His sadness is unlike any I imagined, but that’s how it is! Do you understand? No. I’m sure I can’t even string two or three words together coherently. Even though everything is perfectly clear. And how! And then there’s silence, nothing happens that would be pertinent. And how differently everything will present itself when I pick it out of what I’ve written. Completely differently. Because what I’ve written is wrong. Nothing written is right. Has any claim to rightness. Not even to precision, even though everything is set down conscientiously, with the view of knowing something about a distinct set of affairs. At best, less wrong. Still wrong, though. Of a different wrongness. Untrue.

I opened the door of his room, and saw him engrossed in his newspapers. That is, I saw—because he was sitting behind his bed, in front of the picture whose landscape I hadn’t yet discerned: a brown picture with large black stains that might be houses, but might equally be trees—I saw the newspaper, but behind the newspaper was him. Without putting the newspaper down when I stepped in—he didn’t look up at me—he
left me to sit down where I was. “You find me reading an interesting article about the imperial palace in Persia,” he said. “You know, those people must have quite unimaginable amounts of money. By the way, I’ve read a report on the meeting between the French and Russian foreign ministers. A very odd affair, that, indeed. Are you interested in politics at all?”—“Yes,” I said, a young person’s perfectly natural reply. “I’m really not interested at all in political wheelings and dealings, not anymore. But there was a time, not all that long ago either, when I was always hungry for news of political developments. Politics is the only interesting part of human history. It offers substance for anyone’s meditation. Evidently! Now, as you know, I’ve withdrawn, and follow things in a more casual manner. But the report on the foreign ministers’ conference, that’s something you have to read. Plus, if you feel like it, and I would urge you to, as you’re still young, and still have everything to learn, the article on the imperial palace in Persia. I take it you’re familiar with the history of the Peacock Throne?”—“Yes,” I said. “There are some passing references to it here.” Newspapers were the greatest wonders of the world, they knew everything, and only through them did the universe become animated for their readers, the ability to picture everything was only preserved by newspapers. “You still haven’t been to pick up the last few issues. Would you like to take them with you now?” It was all but dark in the room, and the air was barely breathable. I decided to go right away. “Of course, you have to know how to go about reading them,” said the painter. “You mustn’t just gobble them up, and you mustn’t take them too seriously either, but remember they are miraculous.” To this point, I still hadn’t glimpsed him. “The idea that you get information
about the whole world from a few little pieces of paper,” he said, “and are able to feel involved with everything, without taking a single step, even, if that’s your preference, from the vantage point of your bed! A miracle!” he said. “The dirt which people hold against newspapers is just the dirt of the people themselves, and not the dirt of the newspapers, you understand! The newspapers do well to hold up a mirror to people that shows them as they are—which is to say, revolting.” Sometimes, in effect everywhere and always, “the beauty and the greatness of human beings” could also be gleaned from the newspapers. “As I say, reading the newspapers is an art, the mastery of which is perhaps the most beautiful of all the arts, you know.” Then he folded the newspaper up on his knee, but I still couldn’t see him, because it was suddenly completely dark.

How he once spent four months painting a hand, he told me today. Then, at the end of four months, he fed the painting to the flames. “Not a bad picture. But the hand didn’t work. Later, I painted in a completely different style.” Unlike other painters who have to work in brightly lit studios, he could only work in darkened rooms. “It has to be dark, that’s the only way I can paint. In complete darkness. Not the least light should be allowed. But now I don’t paint anymore.” Before he began on a picture, he would tramp all over the city for days, from one café to the next, one neighborhood to the next, often riding for hours on streetcars and subways, on buses, from one terminus to the other, going on long marches in shirt and pants, mingling with workers and market stallholders, from time to time eating a meat sandwich
somewhere, then sitting in a café again, moving on, past long gray enclosures thrown around pieces of waste ground, through viaducts and playgrounds, to dairies and parks. “I often used to have a rest in a washroom somewhere,” he told me. “Changed my clothes. I changed three or four times a day, I always used to carry three changes of clothes in my briefcase with me, so that I could change whenever I felt like it.” He spent whole afternoons hanging around stations, watching people and trains. “Stations, and especially ugly old stations, have always been an experience for me, from childhood on.” Then he climbed into his elevator and rode up to his studio, straight into the darkness. While he was painting, only he could see his picture, because it was so dark. Before beginning, he disconnected the doorbell, locked up whatever could be locked up, stripped to his shirt. “The picture painted itself through my art,” he said. He didn’t go to bed for days, only loafed around on his two big sofas. Never knew if it was dark outside or not, lost all track of the date. Didn’t know if it was spring or summer or winter. When he thought his picture was done, he drew back the curtains, so abruptly that the light blinded him and he couldn’t see. “Only by and by could I see that it was no good,” he said. “That once again it was just a shot at something that had treated me like a dog, and it was nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing!” All these paintings he ended up shoving behind a wall where friends of his—“friends?”—would occasionally pull out one or other, to transport it to a dealer, or have it photographed or written up. “My paintings were always well reviewed, except by myself,” he said. “Basically there is no criticism, and the people who busy themselves with art are as uncritical as at any time in history. Maybe it was the lack of criticism
that irritated me, and that’s why I never became a good painter?”

“You know,” the painter said, “that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy … Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything … I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions … I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very greatest emetics … Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum? The infernality of unscrupulousness is something I always meet with in the thoughts of artists … But I don’t want any artists’ thoughts anymore, no more of those unnatural thoughts, I want nothing more to do with artists or with art, yes, not with art either, that greatest of all abortions … Do you understand: I want to get right away from that bad smell. Get away from that stink, I always say to myself, and secretly I always thought, get away from that corrosive, shredding, useless lie, get away from that shameless simony …” He said: “Artists are the identical twins of hypocrisy, the identical twins of low-mindedness, the identical twins of licensed exploitation, the greatest licensed exploitation of all time. Artists, as
they have shown themselves to me to be,” he said, “are all dull and grandiloquent, nothing but dull and grandiloquent, nothing …”