Frost: A Novel (24 page)

I saw the landlady preparing food in the kitchen, bacon and sausage and apples and coffee all piled up on the sideboard. In
between times she went to the stove and the public bar, and she kept going into the pantry, because she’d forgotten something that she could bring out and lay on the sideboard with the other things. There was a blue bag of lump sugar. I stood in the kitchen, because I was waiting for water, which she’d put on the stove to heat up especially for me. Then she disappeared into her bedroom for a little time, and when she came back she had a pair of her husband’s warm woolen socks, which she set down next to the food. “Your water will be hot soon,” she said. Then I watched her pack all the food things in a big cardboard box. “Did you see the knacker anywhere?” she asked. “No,” I said. “He said he’d come and take the things down to the post office for me.” She wrapped the cardboard box in a big sheet of brown paper, and tied it up with thick twine, perhaps some old washing line. “That has to go out today,” she said. “It’s urgent.” She had the makings of lunch in big saucepans on the stove. She stirred one, then another, with a big wooden spoon. She fed the fire with more wood. “If it goes to the post office now,” she said, “it’ll go on the mail sleigh.” Would the parcel cost a lot to send? “No,” I said, “it won’t be very much.” The postmistress had used to be a friend of hers, and had spent years eating in her pub. “But our husbands forced us apart,” she said. She had divorced the postman, and married a worker at the cellulose factory, five years ago now. “It was always going to go wrong,” she said. “I would never have married him!” Then the knacker came in, with his rucksack on his back. It was good that she had got the parcel packed and ready, because he was just on his way to the post office. “I can’t send him any more than I’ve got here,” she said. He seemed very surprised that it was such a large parcel. “I put his warm socks in there too.” She went into the pantry and came out with some
bacon, which she cut up and laid on a piece of bread. That was for the knacker to eat. He ate up the bread and bacon. To me she said: “I’m sure your water’s hot now.” I had forgotten all about the water. I took the jug off the stove, and went up to my room. I thought the landlord probably wrote and asked for some more food. And for some warm socks. I was sure there had been dissent between the landlady and the knacker before the making up of the parcel. The knacker had a lot to carry.

Eighteenth Day

“I could drill through my boots, you know that? I could. But I don’t want to. I’ve got the strength. But I’m not going to drill through my boots. It would be a pointless waste of strength.” We walk on. He says: “The whole world consists of pointless wastes of strength. I’m waiting for the end now, you know! Just as you’re waiting for your end. Just as everyone’s waiting for their end. Only they don’t realize they’re waiting and waiting for what I’ve always been waiting for, namely the end!” He reminds me of a church singer, who is suddenly called upon to
speak
loudly into the nave. “My end frees me! Me and my person. All the things that only exist in and through me!” His sentences echo back, as from the walls of a church. “That’s the extraordinary thing!” Then: “Vague, always vague! But I don’t intend ever to express myself with precision. I can imagine it must be difficult to make anything of these connections, omissions, sins of omission, accumulations,
obligations, verdicts … No, I don’t demand that! I no longer demand anything. Anything. Nothing from anyone! … A situation like the one in which I find myself is completely unimaginable. Of course, I don’t know anything either. That’s true. I’m a burden on you … I know your life can’t be easy for you either, but it’s a good deal easier than mine. To begin with,” he said, “you have all sorts of possibilities. You are able to enthuse about all sorts of things. The most banal things! You develop an array of gifts, of the sort that many people manage to develop, canny people, brutes, and then timid like wallflowers. You can do this and that and the other thing, and your head is stuffed full of all sorts of plans and future directions. All in all, you think you might want to do pretty much anything and have it in your power to do so. You think you’re in a circus, and because you’re so gifted and so popular, you can do anything in the circus that takes your fancy: any stunts, even the hardest, any tricks, even the meanest. You think you can walk on a tightrope, high over a drop, where the air is already thin … you think you can ride, put your head in the lion’s mouth, and take it out when the beast roars … acrobatics … stunts … you think you can do anything, and you also think, and you’re completely persuaded of that fact, that you can be the director as well … the circus director: fine, there are no limits, because you see none. It’s all unlimited, and that deadly subconscious feeling of being able to turn your hand to absolutely anything … till one day your first idea comes to you, and then a second, a third, and a fourth … one after another … finally hundreds and thousands, thousands of ideas: those are the painters, the newspapermen, the prison wardens and the prisoners, the policemen, the philosophers … heir, cow, tail, minister, director, you understand
 … till you end up not being convinced by anything … that’s what it is … Because you have your moments of this and that, and no character … how soon everything turns into nothing, unemployed, unskilled, mad, unemployable, manifesting the signs of idiocy … But all that’s just a point of view,” he said, “no deeper and no less deep than the crassest error.”

Existence was well used to torrents, but sometimes it tended to forget that, and was carried along: “But it’s always an existence,” says the painter. Years ago, he had been in Weng with his sister once, “in spite of herself. She hated the region. In wartime.” More and more, the valley became a sort of refuge for the pair of them. “Unlike then, I’m unprotected now.” His sister’s baby, “back then, behind the church wall,” she was pregnant by an apprentice well driller, had died in its infancy. “No one knows why it suddenly died.” That fact, and the fact that his sister had had no objection to having the baby—“to her it was a happy and unlooked-for chance to find herself, as it were, overnight, in a state of expectancy—she never got over it. After conceiving, she came to me with friendly traits she had never had previously. Suddenly my sister manifested a sort of previously repressed wildness. At mealtimes. When I met her for walks. In the dark sometimes. When she said ‘goodnight,’ you could see it. The precocious father of her baby became a jailbird. Involved in several rapes, in the end he was unable to avoid the scaffold. He was from Goldegg. At the time, he was just fifteen. But powerfully built, like all the young fellows here. Come over the mountain, and punch six bells out of all and sundry. It was a warm spring day. My sister was walking in the graveyard, as she often did. You could
hear the war from over the cliffs. The workhouse drew him in, the clogs of the prisoners at Garsten jail were like a marching band. I’ve got a photo of him. Over the years I managed to find out quite a bit about him, for instance that he fathered five children, who are all running around somewhere, living on farms. In workmen’s hostels. Who knows. Sometimes nature wants nothing but to test her strength on two people who don’t know what brought them together, why they belong together: there’s a sudden violence, favored by the climate in these parts, that switches off logic and emotion and thought for the duration. Often, it’s just an animal cunning that gets its way.”

His time as a substitute teacher came up again. “All my life, I’ve never hated anything as much as I hated teachers. Those teachers who always struck me as the embodiment of stupidity, the stupidity was drilled into their underpants. Also the generally dangerous ridiculousness, which further makes huge claims. For, as you must know, teachers make huge claims which take precedence over other claims. I so detested the teacher’s life, that I simply snubbed fellow humans whom I had known for some time but who had gone to become teachers. And there I was suddenly overnight becoming a substitute teacher. And on my own initiative! Just imagine my extremity! But I got out of that disgrace … A teacher is the mouthpiece of an entire generation. And you see: teachers make for calamities. Injustice and war. Of course, I was not a regular teacher, and I wasn’t on a regular pay scale either. Not a teacher in the strict sense. Only an occasional substitute teacher. So I wasn’t involved in that ghastliness.”
He had suddenly found himself a substitute, a sort of casual teacher, just as others, and he himself in past years, were casual laborers. He doesn’t see much of a distinction between casual teaching and casual labor. The principal difference being that the casual laborer is generally in the fresh air, whereas the casual teacher is always in stuffy classrooms. The casual teacher feeds the children with figures and signs, and the casual laborer feeds the cement mixer with buckets of water and sacks of cement. The casual teacher has to be careful he doesn’t fall off his little classroom platform, and the casual laborer that he doesn’t fall onto the pavement from the third or fourth story of a building. “The casual teacher is so pathetic that regular teachers look the other way when he walks past them. They stand around in the corridor with their hands behind their backs, and form up into a solid phalanx, so there’s no room for the casual teacher in their midst. If the casual teacher has a question, he has to go to the director, because the regular teachers won’t give him an answer. ‘I’m going away,’ the regular teachers tell their classes, ‘and a casual teacher is coming to fill in for me.’ They don’t say: ‘You’re getting a new teacher …’ And thereby they spoil everything for the casual teacher. For instance, casual teachers are not allowed to wear the white coat of regular teachers. At the most, substitute teachers are allowed to wear sleeve protectors. Of course I would never have worn a teacher’s coat in any case. Much less had recourse to sleeve protectors … Nor do substitute teachers qualify for a training supplement.” He had never known what to do with himself in the breaks, because the regular teachers all snubbed him. “The substitute teachers’ trade union wants to improve all the conditions that the substitute teachers are exposed to.
But the more it does, with its clumsy methods, the worse things are for substitute teachers. It’s a fact that the regular teachers’ union has much more influence.”

Today I wrote my fourth letter to the assistant, even though I haven’t had a reply from him to the first three. I drew a comparison between the painter Strauch and the surgeon Strauch. Inside and out, the two belonged to two quite opposed worldviews. They are two opposed worlds. Just as his brother and I are different. Different, not made of one and the same substance. The surgeon, who aims at a successful career. Who is either unfamiliar with despair, or else won’t have it anywhere near him. Only at a distance, where it can’t hurt him. Concerned, true, about the condition of his brother. But only out of his guilty conscience. He is not
quaking
.

An activity that fills his days and nights, to wit, surgery, which has also given him local celebrity, won’t let him think any more deeply, as humans can and sometimes desire to do, when they are basically unemployed, and therefore only concerned with themselves. In the operating theater, there is no thinking, only doing. After that, there is eating, and then sleeping, at the most there might be a little distraction in between times. Hardly any conversation. Hardly any variety. No moodiness. No melancholy. No troublesome memories. No women. The football pools. Down on the courts, a spot of tennis to counteract the unignorable signs of middle-age spread. No writing letters. No reading, with the exception of the specialist literature, as for instance the book
On the Etiology
of Smegma
, or
Cancer Research in America
. The envious, the imitator, and the admirer are zealously kept at bay. The subjects of conversation are cancer, lung disease, wasting sickness, cramps, embolism, sites of infection. Wine is drunk. There are whispered meetings with nursing sisters. Interns and surgical nurses are ordered around, suddenly in the middle of an operation, bodies are sewn up, rolled out, “they wash their hands of them.”

It so happens that a condition is fatal that was not thought to be fatal. It happens more frequently than one might imagine. Outside the hospital walls. No news leaks out that would have serious consequences. He, the assistant, knows how to talk to people: to the consultant, to such and such, to the patients. He is free with the
Du
form, but it doesn’t mean a great deal. He is said to have a steady hand. Even by his helpers during the operation. Defter with his scissors than with needle and thread. Bold. Decisive, where others dither around. If someone dies, the reasons for it don’t greatly interest him. A devotee of the chase, he has no interest in the twilight world of art. The things his brother used to do were always repugnant to him. The academic side of him has gone on developing. He hates aesthetics. Also dreams. He appears never to have suffered. One can observe an athletic arrogance in him as he strides out of the hospital. On Sundays he goes to church. He is careful not to believe any more than is prescribed. Communists approach him, because he has never mocked Communism. He has a reputation for “textbook operations,” of the sort that is useful to every doctor over time. The scuttlebutt is that therapy is no longer a labyrinth to him. During the operation he exerts a magnetic pull on the
instruments. The registrar has already designated him his successor. He is kind to me. Why? But then again, the way he deals with the scalpel seems highly artistic. Not just artful. He takes patients’ notes up to his room with him, the light is still on at two in the morning. He’s up at seven. You hear him. His footfalls in the corridor. Remarks have been attributed to him like: “Source the fantasy in the delusion …”—“Groundless screams” or “the word gentleness, which keeps recurring.” Not an enthusiast. Not a spoilsport, because not a player. A rock? For me, yes. Places where no one has yet been, where nothing has lived. Vistas that lie open. The surgeon, the competent one. The painter, his brother, the incompetent, I think.