Frost: A Novel (17 page)

In the store I suddenly realized that school has started again. The whole of the gloomy store was full of schoolchildren, buying books and textbooks and pencils, and grown-ups were looking for pens and ink and drawing paper for their first-graders, and issuing threats and making jokes and laughing and throwing piles of loose change on the counter. The little girl in the black dress, the daughter of the proprietress, couldn’t manage to keep up with counting all the loose change, which the children had probably been hoarding for the past half a year or more. “And another pencil!”—“And another pen!”—“And another pad, just the same!”—“No, not a ruled one!”—“No, I want a red one, not a blue one!” I wanted to buy a pencil and barged forward, but in the end I didn’t care about waiting my turn. How the sweet and the repulsive odors of the children and the grown-ups mingled in this small, almost pitch-black space! Right at the back is the peephole through which you can see out to the snow. I took my pencil, and went outside. There I ran into the knacker, who was dragging a large cowhide behind him. The butcher had given it to him, he said, and he was taking it home and then he would get it tanned, and use it as a bedroom rug. “A cowhide makes a particularly warm bedroom rug,” he said. In the morning he had been down on the construction site; he had arranged a meeting with the engineer, who had given him a tour of the site. They had gone to the canteen together, and eaten a particularly good meal. “It’s much cheaper than the inn as well.” He wanted to ask me whether I thought the
painter was strange. “No,” I said, “he’s a man like any other.” I could be right. He thought the painter was crazy. Something was wrong with him, on this visit anyway. “It’s as though something happened to him in Vienna,” said the knacker. “Yes,” I said, “he’s unusual, but not particularly unusual.” He had seen the painter sitting in the church yesterday, “in the front pew,” shaking his head. The knacker hadn’t drawn attention to himself, so that he could go on observing the painter. The painter had taken a couple of quick paces to the altar, and raised his fist against the monstrance. “Then he walked out of the church, and went down to the pond.” The knacker said: “And the business in the ravine was crazy as well.” I let him move off with his cowhide, which left bloodstains on the snow, uneven bloodstains, and I went to the baker, who changed a hundredschilling note for me, with which I paid for the beer I’d drunk over the last few days. Outside, I ran into the painter, who was wearing his artist’s jacket. “I want to give myself a fright again today,” he said. “Give myself and the world a fright. When I wear this red jacket, I feel like the biggest twit of all time. And people believe I am the biggest twit of all time. Come along, let’s go and get some supper.”

In the evening, once the painter had gone upstairs, the knacker sang songs with the landlady. With an animal undertone, the knacker sang:

Through mouth and anus
the devil pulls his rope
the beast so pulled
can give up hope.

And he sang:

Morning, noon, and evening …
What says the night,
the gloomy gloomy night?

During supper, the painter had suddenly said: “Listen! Listen!” In the dreadful sausage-eating, beer-drinking din, he said: “Listen, the dogs.” I couldn’t hear them. But he wouldn’t give up, and without the others sitting at our table noticing, the engineer, the knacker, the landlady, the policeman were sitting there as well, the painter said: “Listen, the dogs! Listen to that barking.” And he got up and walked out, and went up to his room. When I followed him out into the entrance hall and stopped, I could hear through the half-iced-up open front door the long-drawn-out howling of dogs, and sometimes their barking. The endlessly drawn out howling, and the sound of barking biting into it. In front of me I heard the barking and howling, and behind me the laughing and vomiting and smacking of playing cards. Ahead of me the dogs, behind me the customers at the bar. I won’t be able to sleep tonight.

Fourteenth Day

He, the assistant, obviously thinks I can perfectly well carry out an assignment like observing the painter Strauch without taking any harm from it. “Harm! How could it harm you,
observing a suffering human being?” he said. So he understands that his brother is suffering. Not the
extent
of his suffering, which he is unaware of. Because the suffering of the painter exceeds the capacity of the assistant to imagine it. How deep are the painter’s sufferings? Is it possible to determine how deep someone’s sufferings are? And when they are at their deepest? The assistant sent me here thinking I would be able to keep off influences that might be bad for me. Yes, and of course that’s something one has to be able to do, to keep off the so-called bad influence of the people one is in contact with, forced to be in contact with, so that it doesn’t affect one. Deal with it, however difficult it might suddenly turn out to be. Keep your eyes open, you won’t ignore it, you won’t ignore the danger, but will meet it with the correct defense. In the company of the painter, I am of course continually exposed to bad influences. But I can see them, and I can distinguish the point where the bad influences begin, and where the bad influences are not good, because it is also possible for bad influences to be good. Presumably, this encounter will only take its full effect on me much later. Not now. Just as childhood influences are only now unfolding; the experiences you have at eight or nine suddenly shape the thirty-year-old. In the same way as a dye might gradually spread through a body of deep water—water which, furthermore, has always been a tad murky anyway. Is that right? The painter gives me many bearings. He is by no means hermetically sealed away. There are a lot of access points to him, but even so one often finds him where one hasn’t been looking, hasn’t suspected he might be. “I have a rigid conscience,” he says. What does he mean by that? Or when he says: “Reality is incapable of empathy,” saying it to himself, it would appear, with no connection to what he said before or after, I
don’t see what he means. His best ideas come to him while walking. In the fresh air. In the inn, or indoors in other places, he retires into himself, and you can sit with him for hours without getting a single word out of him. Now, silence and a gift for listening, even if no one is speaking, are both things I was born with. At home, sometimes no one would talk for days, at the most someone might ask for a plate or a pencil or a book. I no longer find it so difficult walking at the slow pace the painter likes, though I’m used to going quickly from one impression to the next, rather than stopping all the time, as he does, to sit down and rest. For me, the painter is a big problem I somehow have to solve. A task, in fact. And for him?

What sort of language is Strauch’s language? What can I make of his scraps of thought? Things that initially struck me as disjointed and incoherent, actually possess “truly immense connections”; the whole thing is in the nature of an enormous transfusion of words into the world, into humans, “a pitiless proceeding against stupidity,” as he would say, “an uninterrupted, regeneration-worthy backdrop of sound.”
How
get that down?
What
notes? Schematic or systematic to what point? His outbursts descend on me like rockfalls. Abruptly, things he says detach themselves from the explosive guffaw of ridicule which he reserves for himself “and the world.” Strauch’s language is the language of the heart muscle, a scandalous “cerebral pulse.” It is rhythmic self-abasement under the “subliminal creak” of his own rafters. His notions and subterfuges, fundamentally in accord with the barking of those dogs that he drew my attention to, with which he “scattered me to the air.” Can it still be described as
language? Yes, it is the false bottom of language, the heaven and hell of language, the mutiny of rivers, “the steaming word-nostrils of brains that are in a state of endless and shameless despair.” Sometimes he will speak a poem, and then tear it apart, reformulate it as a “power plant,” “a barracks for the raw philosophy of a wordless tribe,” as he says. “The world is a world of recruits, it needs to be brutalized, you need to teach it to shoot, and not to shoot.” He rips the words out of himself as from a swamp. This violent ripping out of words leaves him dripping with blood.

The war had left its grisly traces up and down the valley. “Even today you keep encountering skulls or entire skeletons, covered over by a thin layer of pine needles,” says the painter. In the forest over toward the Klamm valley and behind the lake, also in the larch wood, disbanded regiments had been starved to death. “And then they froze. A few were able to get away, but only a very few, the others were already too weak to reach the villages. And the soldiers didn’t think of murder,” murder being a preserve “of the dark elements out of the East.” The convicts from the nearby prison had also wrought considerable havoc, and a lot of missing men who had broken out and never returned were found dotted about under bushes and rocks. “Often, it was children out blackberrying who would suddenly scream, and drag their mothers over to some spot overgrown with snakeweed. There they’d find a human being, naked, the clothes ripped from his body once years back. Hunger turns people into animals.” At the end of the war, the forests had been full of war gear; tanks and armored cars and cannon and motorbikes and cars had been junked among the trees all over the place. “Some
exploded when they were touched. Often the tanks contained the bodies of their crews, huddled together with torn lungs. People who opened the hatches made some grisly discoveries,” he said. “By and by people dared to disassemble the war gear, and they also started burying the dead soldiers—on the spot, because they didn’t want them in their own graveyards, they were too alien for them. When they touched them, the bodies disintegrated, they had decomposed in the air. In the hollows, children found bazooka shells, which tore them apart. There were little scraps of children, you know, hanging off the trees. You could find men in their prime ground up under the wheels of field guns, in the ravine there was a group of grenadiers with their tongues cut out, and their penises stuffed in their mouths. And here and there, there might be shot-up uniforms in the trees, and stiff hands and feet poking out of the pond. It took years before the locals straightened out the forests and the countryside as a whole. At first they only went out to collect foodstuffs they found in the tanks, and various other useful objects, uniforms, as I say, which they adapted for themselves and then went around in for years; and only then to bury the dead, or what was left of them, the remains, as they say, and finally they turned out with rakes and shovels to wipe out the traces. But the traces of the war are not yet wiped out,” said the painter, “this war will never be forgotten. People will continue to encounter it wherever they go.”

“What do you think the painter Strauch said to me today?” With this question that wasn’t a question the landlady surprised me in my room, having knocked and entered to make the bed. So doing, she picked up the pillow, tossed it up in the
air, and caught it a couple of times. She shook out the featherbed at the open window. “What do you think?” she asked, having made the bed, and as she wiped down the washstand and filled the ewer with fresh water, and my glass on the bedside table. She drew everything out that she did, so as to be able to tell me finally what it was that the painter Strauch—“still in bed, not yet dressed, even though it was nine o’clock already!”—had said. “He said he would surprise me one day by lying dead in his bed.” She had laughed and supposed the painter was having a bit of fun with her. But then she had seen from his expression that he meant it. “You know, I can’t be doing with that in my establishment, a corpse,” she said. And then she left my room, but came back in right away and said: “I forgot to close your window.” She closed the window and then stopped in the doorway, as though looking to me for some sort of explanation. “Isn’t it funny to try and frighten someone like that?” she said. “The painter’s a bit odd this time, I find. What’s the matter with him? Do you know?” I didn’t know, I didn’t have any idea. The painter was worried about something, but I didn’t know what it was that was worrying him. “He’s a different man from what he used to be,” she said. “But I’d be sorry if he was ill or something,” she said. And then she finally left my room, I heard her shouting for one of her daughters down in the passageway. When I went down later to stretch my legs, just once round the inn, because I had the feeling I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all unless I got some fresh air, and suddenly feeling tired, I wanted to lie down for an hour, so as to be refreshed for when the painter came for me later, when I was downstairs I went into the kitchen under the pretext of having to get a glass of water, which was fresher from the kitchen well, and there she was standing there in just her skirt, and hearing me coming,
she hurriedly tucked her undershirt into it, and I said, while I drew a glass of water from the well, which is a draw-well of the sort you generally only find on the outside of farmhouses, and not inside a kitchen, I said: “Did he talk about suicide at all?”—“About suicide?” she said. “No, not about suicide. That would be still worse. He only said I’d find him dead in his bed one morning. Perhaps he has the feeling he might have a stroke. He always used to worry he might have a stroke.”—“He was worried that he might have a stroke?”—“He surely wouldn’t kill himself in my establishment? I think he was just having a bit of fun with me,” she said, and, feeling sure he wasn’t having fun at all, but merely stating something I got to hear from him quite regularly, I drank my glass of water, and set off outside.

On the way to the church he kept stopping and drawing my attention to the fact that he was an old man, and I shouldn’t wait for him. “I don’t mind. Quite the opposite.” After he’d said that four or five times, the last time in a sharp tone of command, I simply left him standing in the middle of the slope, by the big tree stump that marks the boundary between two fields, and ran up as quickly as I could. I enjoyed the feeling of suddenly being free. Like a dog that’s slipped his leash. Up at the top I stood in such a way that he couldn’t see me, but I had a good view of him laboriously making his way up. It seemed to me he rested more frequently than the day before, when we had taken the same walk, and he had asked me the following question: “What sort of person are you? I can’t make sense of you. Tell me what you think. What you’re doing meeting me all over the place, and accompanying
me! Going around with me! Have you at least enjoyed a bit of a break? It’s the tension that’s the mystery. You’re a mystery to me, even though you’re a very natural and uncomplicated type!”—Watching him now, I thought a little puff of wind would be enough to knock him over. When he stopped, he marked the ground with his stick, Indian signs, he told me, that are incomprehensible to me. Some of these signs remind me of animals, a cow for instance, a pig; others are shaped like temples, or the courses of rivers. Circles. Other geometrical forms. Even up where I was, I could hear him muttering to himself. Like an old general talking to himself, and then turning to the army that will always be there in his imagination. And he looked, too, like someone bending over a staff map, with everything on it down to the least detail depending on him. He was talking in foreign languages as well, Asian words and scraps were flying through the air. The whole scene, with him the focus of it, reminded me of a painting I saw years ago once in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; I can even remember the room it’s hanging in: a river landscape by Breughel the Elder, where people are trying to find distraction from death, in which they are successful, but only, as the picture seems to be saying, at the price of infinite torments in Hell. The black of the tree stump, which shaded into the black of the painter’s jacket, and the black of his pants and his stick, was finally picked up by the black of the mountain peaks. When he was no more than a few feet away from me, standing on one of the last steps going up to the church door, I was afraid of him. I imagined him coming up to me from behind, and clubbing me over the head with his stick. When I looked in his face, that idea left me. Even though nothing about his face ruled out
such a possibility. “If you like, we can go in the church,” he said. And immediately after: “No, you go by yourself. I’ll wait for you outside.” I went into the church and sat down in a pew with a good view of the altar. I picked up a prayer book that was lying on the pew next to me. Leafed through it. Found a psalm. Read the psalm: “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. Gloria Patri!” And then: “Me expectaverunt peccatores, ut perderent me: testimonia tua, Domine, intellexi: omnis consummationis vidi finem: latum mandatum tuum nimis. Beati immaculati in via: qui ambulant in lege Domini. Gloria Patri.” I read the whole thing through again. A second time. And a third. But it was unbearable to me, I could make no sense of it at all, and I had to get up and leave the church. As I crossed the soft carpet to the door, I saw angels’ faces of incredible ugliness, and the nearer I got to them, the more fearsome they grew. When I stepped outside, the painter had disappeared. He had in the meantime made his way round to the laying-out chapel, which was attached to the rear of the church. From there, standing in deep snow, he called out to me: “Stay where you are, otherwise you’ll have a fright!” I didn’t know what he thought would give me a fright. Then it occurred to me that the chapel was used for the laying out of corpses from time to time. “There’s a dead man in the chapel,” he said, and raised his head up past the windowsill, which caused his hat to slip back over his neck. When he returned, he said: “A painted corpse. They have the most gruesome way of painting corpses here.” He wondered what had prompted him to go to the chapel at all. “It’s not curiosity,” he said. We were late getting back to the inn; it was one o’clock.