Frost: A Novel (18 page)

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Strauch the painter is shorter than Strauch the surgeon. Strauch the painter is one of those cases where there’s nothing to be done with hammer and crowbar, with knife and saw and pincers and scalpel. So let the thoughts of modern science take their way, the inventiveness of many sleepless nights. Because this is a case of an error purchased and now almost entirely paid off by Death. Yes? A consequence of development which is no development, a consequence of matter. Of movement that is no movement. Something organic that isn’t organic. A point of departure that is no point of departure. Can’t be. Of an incurable illness. He continually scents danger. It’s clear that he continually feels himself under threat. Continually on the alert, in the same way as the world about him seems to him to be. So what is the organism? What is the contrast? Body and mind? Mind less body? Body without soul? What then? Under the surface? Above the surface? And on the surface? A shy destiny coming to an end, and what is it? But there are illnesses that are completely unrecognized. They have always existed, and always will exist. If one becomes curable overnight, another may become incurable overnight. One fewer is one more. Why? How? Is the causation any indication?

The painter said: “The priest is a gravely ill man. Yesterday, before coming back to the inn, I spoke to him. He asked me for money again. For the poorhouse. For the sacristy, you know. He is very well aware of my views on the church. He likes to walk in the snow for an hour. In summer, he sits by his pond, and catches nothing in two weeks. The church is
not overly generous with its employees. The church in the countryside is something like folk poetry. You see it on the trees and in the cellars and on the potato fields. Going around with children. Its laughter has a fiendish rhythm. It’s afraid of all ceremony, in particular it’s afraid of the bishop. You know, there’s something poetic about that. If you suddenly hear a man sobbing, then it’s the priest. Incidentally, he has an excellent library. Doesn’t know any sermons. He is so timid, a bird is enough to give him a fright. But if need be, he’ll go to visit a dying man at night, in the pitch dark, alone, with a lantern. Often to remote farmhouses, far up in the ice and rocks.”

“Enormous amounts of timber,” said the painter, “vast quantities of valuable wood go to waste up there. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of trees. The cellulose factory gobbles them up. By the time it reaches the valley, that’s all they’re good for. This whole landscape,” he said, “used to be simply a wild, wonderful biotope … Come,” he said, “I’ll show you a few types of tree that are particularly common here … Here is the spruce, picea excelsa, first and foremost, then the Scotch pine, the fir, the larch. The odd cembra pine. Come along, I’ll give you a few details, on broad-leaved trees, angiospermae, and conifers, the gymnospermae …”

At the outset it amounted to something, but even then it was already seeking to cause pain as soon as possible, the relationship between two young people who, short or long, but in any case suddenly, had come together, said the painter. “Before it turns into anything,” he said, “that’s when it’s
beautiful and precious.” Youth somehow “pulled off the stunt of fooling the world for a brief moment,” and for a few days and nights everything bore the appearance of happiness. I was thinking of S. and wanted to write her a letter at once, and just at that moment I also wanted not to write, and I tried to think of something other than her, but I didn’t manage, not till I was out of the village, not the whole way up the path, not in the ravine, and not in the inn; I said to myself: What was that anyway? Didn’t it finish long ago? What happened? And how and why was it suddenly over? At first not a day without her, then almost not a night without her, and then everything started to crumble the way it always crumbled, withdrew in two directions from two people, and was gone. And where did it go to? Often I woke up at night, in alarm. And followed a trail that suddenly ended somewhere in the forest, by a river, in a fire. I often, often asked myself what it is that creates the conditions that make two young people unhappy. I’m so young, and yes, it’s over! There was a coming and asking and establishing, and that’s how pitiless it was: the end. If I were to write again, she thinks, then it might start over. But it can’t start over, it mustn’t. “It’s a lie,” said the painter. I know what he meant: there’s a lie founded on another lie, and looking for refuge in a third: which is to say, bang in the middle of another person. I hadn’t thought of her in weeks. I went away from her as one might walk out of a shop, with the firm resolve never to go there again. OK. The painter said: “Then it’s like a couple of mountains that are separated by a rushing river.” Suddenly I noticed I had been singing, the whole stretch of the way to the cornfield. I was singing to mask over what I was thinking. But thoughts don’t leave when you ask them to, you can’t just usher them out.
On the contrary: it’s then that they really take root in you, and start to produce reproach and irritation all the way to infinity. If the afflicted one gets into this destructive process, he can become powerless whatever he does, wherever he goes. The painter said: “The most beautiful flowers are cut first; what help are clever gardeners then?” He pulled me further and further into gloomy thoughts that finally, mad as it seemed to me, as the noose tightened around me, prompted me to tear myself away from him. I ran off without a word to him, and then waited by the hay barn. I apologized. He was quite unfazed.

Between the larch wood and the hay barn, where they allegedly found the butcher’s big dog, “frozen, having fallen asleep under the boards,” the painter draws my attention to various trees, some in a group, others standing on their own. “Here, you see,” he said, “the spruce,
Picea excelsa
, the aristocratic sister to the spruce that is called the spruce fir, wrongly also silver fir. The fir …” He steps up to the fence and says: “Here, you see, the oak … This one is a durmast oak, this one a pedunculate oak … The oak has a growing season of two hundred years. The name is derived from the Old Indian word
igya
, which means, roughly, veneration. But you will also find ash and alder,” he said, “and even sycamore. And down there, you see, that yew that I told you about on the day of your arrival here. It’s a majestic holdout from primeval times …” As we walked along the larch wood—I had the feeling of walking in my own footsteps of the day before—he said: “This is a moment of demonic quiet. A phenomenon still too little investigated by science.” It really was
quiet, not a sound from the work down in the valley. Nothing. “The world still entertains a very primitive understanding of such quiet. All my life I’ve thought of it as an illness in an exhausted nature, as hideously ripped-open abysses of feeling. To nature, this quiet is horrible.”

Of course it’s not possible to have an insight into everything, but I think he is depressed by not receiving any mail. “Since no one knows where I am, no one can write to me either. But nor do I want anyone to write to me,” he said. “I don’t write any letters, so no one knows where I am. I don’t think I’ll ever write another letter.” In his condition, he’s not up to writing in any case. When he sits down to make some notes in some “logbooks of inventions” that he started many years ago—“at the instant when I begin to go into myself”—his headaches worsen to the degree that he is forced to stop, to abandon a thought halfway, to shut his notebook, and lie down. And he really doesn’t want to write to anyone either. For him, that’s all in the past, so far that it’s all unavailable, out of reach, “not one person, nothing.” He regularly thought of himself now as drifting under water, and then frozen somewhere into a world of irrelation. “If you can’t open your mouth, you can’t scream.” Time went by, or then again not: “Sometimes it’s as though it stood still.” How it will end, “seeing as it will end,” I’m not sure. The worst case might suddenly come about, I know that from experience. I don’t believe in miracles, at least not now. I can imagine him killing himself. But it might take a long time till he does. He might wait for spring, and then summer, and then next winter, and so on. But it can’t be a matter of decades. Not with him. Not even years, because
he is ill and will soon die anyway. There’s activity in his subconscious, even if everything’s been switched off on the surface. A great-uncle of his killed himself, by the way: he was a gamekeeper. Apparently because he was unable to take “any more human misery.” They found him in the woods. He had shot himself in the mouth. If you inquire, you will find sufficient cause in every individual. But, as the assistant says, his brother had “suicidal inclinations” from the outset. Suddenly he starts talking about his disease again, which is “completely asymptomatic.” At night he gets to the root of it, but then at the critical moment, it all recedes again. Only the pain was left, “a pain that is incapable of passing its apogee … At first,” said the painter, “I was told there was a treatment for my head, an approach, a method. But suddenly I looked behind the scenes of medicine: they know nothing, they can do nothing! I rejected all their methods. Doctors are just quacks, you know! Mechanics. It’s true, they can’t tell their patients immediately that they’re hopeless cases … that medicine is just a superficial calmative for body and psyche …” He said: “Another pillow to prop my head up at night? I’ve tried that, and I’ve tried no pillow at all. The pain comes when it pleases, and the illness suits itself, it’s completely ununderstood … you know, one would have to investigate the extremes of pain in all their gradations, trace the whole architecture of pain! Well, enough of my illness: illness gets people talking, whether common or refined … You want to know whether the other fellow is suffering as much as you are … you talk because you want sympathy. You hear about the catastrophic abuses in medicine: catastrophic coincidences, the feebleness of the so-called doctors, the many botched and bungled operations, incidents, and so on and so forth …”

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“One might go to the bakery, perhaps,” he said. “But did you know the baker has tuberculosis? All the people here run around in a highly infectious state. The baker’s daughter has tuberculosis too, it seems to have something to do with the runoff from the cellulose factory, with the steam that the locomotives have spewed out for decades, with the bad diet that the people eat. Almost all of them have cankered lung lobes, pneumothorax and pneumoperitoneum are endemic. They have tuberculosis of the lungs, the head, the arms and legs. All of them have tubercular abscesses somewhere on their bodies. The valley is notorious for tuberculosis. You will find every form of it here: skin tuberculosis, brain tuberculosis, intestinal tuberculosis. Many cases of meningitis, which is deadly within hours. The workmen have tuberculosis from the dirt they dig around in, the farmers have it from their dogs and the infected milk. The majority of the people have galloping consumption. Moreover,” he said, “the effect of the new drugs, of streptomycin for example, is nil. Did you know the knacker has tuberculosis? That the landlady has tuberculosis? That her daughters have been to sanatoria on three separate occasions? Tuberculosis is by no means on the way out. People claim it is curable. But that’s what the pharmaceutical industry says. In fact, tuberculosis is as incurable as it always was. Even people who have been inoculated against it come down with it. Often those who have it the worst are the ones who look so healthy that you wouldn’t suspect they were ill at all. Their rosy faces are utterly at variance with their ravaged lungs. You keep running into people who’ve had to endure a cautery or, at the very least, a transverse lesion. Most of them have had their lives ruined by failed reconstructive
surgery.” We didn’t go to the bakery. Straight home instead.

T
HE
D
OG
B
ARKING

“I could say it’s the living end,” said the painter, “but it’s the end of life, by turns low down and high up, low down, then all around, it smashes its head against the snow blanket, it crashes incessantly against the awful iron in the air, the iron in the air, if you must know, that’s where it gets shredded, and you have to breathe it in, breathe it in through your ears, till you go crazy, till the noise shreds you, till your earlobes smash brain and muzzle, muzzle and brain with the limitless naïveté of destructiveness. Listen to it, stop and listen to it: that yapping! It’s not possible to eradicate it, all you can do is push it back, push it back with your brain, push back the yap, the bark, the ghastly godawful yowling, you can press it down, but then it comes up worse, it will crush flesh, soul and flesh, it’s established itself like maggots in space, established itself everywhere, in the shattering fat of history, in the quarterstaves of the insoluble diluvia … It makes no sense,” said the painter, “to try and hide in the dog barking, it will find you out, and then even your fear will be chewed up … Yes, I’m frightened, I’m frightened, everywhere I hear: fear and fear, and I hear fear, and this ghostly trauma of fear will ruin me, drive me mad, not just my illness, no no, not just my illness, but the illness
and
this trauma of fear … Listen … how the barking organizes itself, how it makes space for itself, listen, it’s the cracking of canine whips, it’s canine hyperdexterity, canine hyperdespair, a hellish serfdom that is taking its revenge, taking its revenge on its grim devisers, on
me, on you, yes, you too, on all limitless apparitions, on all limitless, terrible, basically cut-off apparitions, on human organs, which are the organs of heaven and hell, on the infernal organs of the heights and the celestial organs of the depths, on the jailbird unhappiness of all tragedians … Listen, these tragedians, listen to them: that stubborn deafmute breed of snakes’ tongues, listen to them: the monstrously unappetizing republic of all-powerful idiocy, listen to them: this unsolicited shameless parliament of hypocrites … There are the dogs, there is their yap, there is death, death in all its wild profusion, death with all its frailty, death with its stink of quotidian crime, death, this last recourse of despair, the bacillus of monstrous unendingness, the death of history, the death of impoverishment, death, listen, the death that I don’t want, that no one wants, that no one wants anymore, there it is, death, the yap, listen, the unlawful drowning of reason, the refusal to give evidence of all supposition, the spastic smack of soft brain on concrete, on the concrete floor of human dementia … Listen to my views on the yap, listen … I want to try and plumb the thinking of the infernal tempest, the confusion of eras, Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic, the monstrous Tertiary and Quaternary, the monstrously meaningless rejection of the great floods licking up from the depths … Listen to me, I am going into the yap, I go in and I smash their fangs, I yell at it with the thunder of my unreasonableness, I scramble its processes, its mendacious propaganda … Listen, stop, listen, the sweating stupid slavering dogs’ tongues, listen to the dogs, listen to them, listen to them …” We were standing on the spot from which you can see down into the Klamm. “Wolves,” said the painter. “From here you can see straight down the throat of all wolf science.” He was exhausted. I
could hear the dogs. I could hear the barking and yapping. I was exhausted too. I was stunned by the painter’s outburst, my body felt crushed as though by a rockfall; “and then I found him crushed on the road, below me, at my feet,” the painter was saying. I immediately organized the painter’s outburst. I’m astonished, I need only to push the button on my listening machine, and the outburst passes over me. But I’m exhausted. I’m utterly exhausted. “Listen,” said the painter, “it’s the yapping of the end of the world. Quite manifestly it’s the end of the world in person, in this yapping. How sternly and implacably it’s proceeding in people’s faces, in people’s faces, in the face of thoughts, in the face of reason, against all ridicule.” He said: “I’m afraid. Come. Let’s go. Let’s go to the inn. I can’t stand to hear any more of that yapping.” Never had the dogs barked like this without interruption all day and all the previous night. “What else could this yapping portend,” said the painter, “as we know everything and understand everything, if not the actual end of the world.” He lengthened the words “end of the world” across his tongue like a priceless delicacy, and like a “sinful pleasure” he pulled the words “end of the world” across his tongue. Then we were silent. In the ravine, he said: “Infamy! Don’t you see what it says up there, high up in what we flatteringly term the mother of heaven: it says: Infamy!”