Frost: A Novel, Page 2

  Weng lies in a hollow, buried among blocks of ice for millions of years. The roadsides favor promiscuity.

  Third Day

  “I was never a painter,” he said today; “at the most, I may have been a decorator.”

  There’s now a tension between us that is present on the surface and below. We were in the woods. Silently. Only the wet snow, pounds of it clinging to our boots, seemed to speak continually but incomprehensibly. Breaking our silence. Inaudible words present as thought, but not as speech. He always asks me to go first. He is afraid of me. He knows from stories, and from personal experience, that young people attack and plunder their victims from behind. The bland expression conceals the presence of tools of murder and brigandage. The soul, inasmuch as someone might feel like referring in such a way to this “transgressor of all laws,” because one happens to believe in it, steps out, but rationality, put together from suspicion, fear, and mistrust, makes an ambush impossible. Even though I tell him I don’t know my way around at all, he makes me go on ahead. From time to time he mutters an instruction like “left” or “right” (and clears away my sense that he might be drifting off on thoughts of his own). I carry them out impatiently, and, as it were, in the dark. What was curious was that there wasn’t the least light to help orient me. It felt like rowing along, in the mind as well, and balance is both effortless and impossible. What would I do if I were all on my own? A thought that suddenly presented itself. The painter walked along behind me, like some vast encumbrance on my nerves: as if he was continually studying the implications of my back. Then he got short of wind, and told me to stop. “I take this path every day,” he said, “I’ve been walking here for decades. I could walk it in my sleep.” I tried to discover more about the reason for his presence in Weng. “My sickness and any number of other reasons,” he said. I hadn’t expected any more detailed reply. I told him as well as I could, in brief points, the story of my life, with spots of light or sorrow, and how it had made me into what I am—without betraying to him what, at the moment, I really am—and with an openness that surprised me. But it interested him not at all. He is only interested in himself.

  “If you knew how old I am, in calendar terms, you’d get a shock,” he said. “You probably imagine I’m an old man, as young people are apt to. You’d be amazed.” His face seemed to darken into a deeper hopelessness. “Nature is bloody,” he said, “but bloodiest toward her own finest, most remarkable, and choicest gifts. She grinds them down without batting an eyelid.”

  • • •

  He doesn’t think much of his mother, and even less of his father, and his siblings had become as indifferent to him over time as he thinks he has always been to them. But the way he tells me, I can tell how much he loved his mother, his father, and his siblings. How attached he is to them! “Everything was always gloomy for me,” he says. I told him about a passage from my own childhood. Thereupon he said: “Childhood is always the same. Only to one person, it will seem ordinary, to a second benign, and to a third satanic.”

  In the inn, they treat him with appropriate respect, as it seems to me. But once his back is turned, they all make faces.

  “Their excesses have been noted. Their sexuality can be sniffed. One can feel what they think and what they want, these people, sense what forbidden things they are continually contriving. Their beds are under the window or in the doorway, or they don’t even bother with beds: they go from atrocity to atrocity … The men treat the women like pieces of tenderized meat, and vice versa, now one, now the other, depending on their respective imbecility. The primitive is everywhere. Some behave as if by prior arrangement, others seem to come to it naturally … their too-tight trousers and skirts seem to drive them wild. The evenings go on and on: it’s all too much. A few yards here or there, in or out, so as not to have to freeze … Their mouths are taciturn, the rest goes wild … day dawns, and you don’t know which way is up. Sex is what does for them all. Sex, the disease that kills by its nature. Sooner or later, it will kill off even the deepest intimacy … it brings about the conversion of one into the other, of good into evil, from here to there, from high to low. Godless, because ruination appears first … the moral becomes immoral (a model of universal decline). The forked tongue of nature, you might say. The way the workers go around here,” he said, “they live for sex, like most people, like all people … they live to the end of their days in a continual wild process against modesty and time and vice versa: ruination. Time sends them on their way to unchastity with a slap. Some are more accomplished at concealing it than others. With the canny ones, you only realize when they’re all done. But it’s for nothing. All of them live a sex life, and not a life.”

  How long was I proposing to stay in Weng, he asked. I needed to get back fairly soon, to prepare for exams in the spring, I said. “As you’re studying law,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll find it easy to get a job later. There are always jobs for lawyers. I had a nephew once who was a lawyer, only he lost his mind over stacks of files and had to quit his job in the civil service. He wound up in Steinhof. Do you know what that is?” I replied that I had heard of the institution “am Steinhof.” “Well, then you’ll know what became of my nephew,” he said.

  I had expected a difficult, but not a hopeless case. “Strength of character, leading to death,” a phrase from a book I’d read early on, occurred to me, and made me think about the painter: How is it that all his thoughts circle around suicide? Is it permissible for suicide to be a sort of secret pleasure to a man? What is suicide anyway? Self-extinction. Rightly or wrongly. By what right? Why not? I tried to focus my thoughts on the one point: is suicide permissible? I had no answer. None. Because people are no answer, and can’t be, nor is anything living, and not the dead either. By committing suicide, I am destroying something for which I am not to blame. Something entrusted to me, then? By whom? When? Did I realize it at the time? No. But an unignorable voice tells me that suicide is a sin. Sin? As easy as that? It’s something that will bring the whole edifice to collapse, says the voice. Edifice? What edifice? His watchword, whether asleep or awake: suicide! It will choke him. He is bricking up one window after another. Before long, he’ll have walled himself up. Then, once he can’t see out anymore, because he can’t breathe anymore, he’ll be persuasive: because he’ll be dead. I have the sense of standing in the shadow of a thought of his that is very close to me: the thought of his suicide.

  “A brain is like a state,” the painter said. “Suddenly anarchy breaks loose.” I was in his room, waiting for him to get his boots on. “The greater and lesser assailants among the ideas” would form coalitions, only for these coalitions to be equally suddenly revoked. And “being understood, and wanting to be understood, are a deception. Based on all the errors of gender.” Contraries reigned for a single, everlasting night over the day. “Colors, you know, colors are everything. Which means shadows are everything. Contraries are very highly colored.” In many ways, it was like clothes: you buy them and wear them a few times, and then you don’t wear them anymore, at best you sell them, give them away, let them molder away in a chest of drawers. You move them to the attic or basement. “In the evening, you may have a sense of what the morning will be like,” he said, “but the morning is always a surprise.” There was really no such thing as experience, not really. No continuity. Admittedly, there were ways of avoiding desperation. “These ways never existed for me.” At the moment, all the things on which life insisted were losing their value. “All endeavor is riding for a fall,” he said. Something was splendid, and the next thing was brutal, much more brutal than the first had been splendid. “The man who gets to the top of the tree is forced to realize there is no top and no tree. I was your age when I first grasped that nothing is worth the least effort. It both calmed me and unsettled me. Now it frightens me.” He referred to his condition as “expeditions into the jungle of solitude. It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big
sticks,” he said. He had never been short of privation, nor had he put himself beyond the reach of exploitation by others, nor could he. “I still put my trust in people even when I knew they were deceiving me, and intending to kill me.” Then he had kept himself to himself, “in the way that you might stick by a tree, which might be rotten, but at least it’s a tree,” and heart and understanding had been dismissed, pushed into the background.

  There are people in the village who have never left the valley. The bread delivery woman, for example, who started delivering bread when she was just four, and is still delivering bread now, today, at seventy. Or the milkman. Both of them have only ever seen the train from outside. And the sister of the bread delivery woman, and the sexton. For them, the Pongau is the equivalent of darkest Africa. The cobbler. They have their work; nothing else interests them. Or else they’re afraid to take a single step outside. “A friend told me about the inn,” I said. How did a lie like that pass my lips? It was terribly easy, as though there was nothing easier than lying. And more and more. “I like visiting places I’m unfamiliar with,” I said, “I didn’t think twice about coming.”—“The air here has a terrible composition,” said the painter. “Suddenly circumstances will start to constrain your freedom of movement.” Why was it I had chosen this abode, and not another; there were other inns and pensions to be found. “And some down in the valley too. But they’re probably only for transients, people stopping for a single night.” It had all been my friend’s idea, I lied. I had traveled here, with a couple of addresses. “And your journey was without incident?” he asked me. I couldn’t think of anything that had happened on my journey. “You know,” he said, “when I travel, there are always incidents, mishaps.” Getting back to the village and the inn, he said: “I expect you’ve brought something to read, or something you’re working on with you. What have you got?”—“A novel of Henry James’s,” I said. “Henry James,” he said. “I came without books,” he said, “quite deliberately. That is, I’ve brought a couple of little things. But really just my Pascal.” He didn’t look at me the whole time, his walk was remarkably stooped. “Because I’ve shut up shop,” he said. “The way you do when you’ve seen your last customer out.” Then: “Here, it’s possible to make many observations that translate into cold, into self-loathing. If you like that: wherever there are people, you can observe them. Especially what they don’t do, which is to say, what does them in.” There was nothing here “deserving of the least respect.” It was all so unfathomably ugly and expensive. “I’m glad you dislike our landlady,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.” And he said nothing more under that head. Not to have any pity, but follow one’s revulsion wherever it led, in many cases that was an ornament to reason. “She’s a monster,” he said. “You’ll get to meet a whole series of monsters here. Especially at the inn.” Did I have the ability to weigh up characters, a gift, “nothing to do with intelligence, which not many people have”? To imagine, say, a third character between two others, and so on … that was how he spent his time. “Not anymore. There is a chance,” he said, “that you might be intruded upon in the night. Then don’t be afraid: it will only be one of the innkeeper’s concubines who’s not familiar with the layout of the building. Or the knacker who seems to be night-blind. Broken bones and sprains of all types seem not to have prevented him from seeking out her bed at night.” The innkeeper favored everyone, except for himself, the painter. For instance, she would change the sheets every four or five days in all the rooms, except his. She never filled his glass properly, and if anyone asked her about him, she would come out with insolent lies. Only he had no proof, and so could not confront her. I said I didn’t believe the innkeeper would spread slanders about him. “She does, though,” he said; “she talks about me as if I were a dog. She says I wet my bed. When my back’s turned, she taps her head with her forefinger to indicate that I’m mad. She forgets there are such things as mirrors. Most people do.” She watered his milk. “And not just my milk either.” Quite apart from the fact that he suspected she had served him dogmeat and horsemeat for years. “She once told her children I was a cannibal. Since then her children have avoided me.” She had always read postcards addressed to him, and sometimes even steamed open his letters and absorbed their contents. “Time and again, she would know things I never told her.” Now he didn’t get any mail anymore. “No more.” He said: “Quite apart from the fact that I am made to pay for everything two or three times over, because she assumes I have money. They all do here. Even the priest suffers from that misapprehension, and is forever approaching me for donations. Do I look as though I had money? Do I look well off?”—“As far as country people are concerned,” I said, “every city person comes with money, and it’s their business to take it off him. Educated people especially.”—“Well, do I look educated, then?” he asked. “The landlady bills me for things I never had. And she comes to me begging for money for meals for an unemployed man. Of course, I don’t turn her away. But I ought to. Why don’t I turn her away? She cheats me in everything. Nor am I the only one. She cheats everyone. Even her children.” Cheating could be fuel for a lifetime. “Or a spur,” added the painter.

  “My first time in Weng, she was underage. I know she’s listening at the door. If I pull it open suddenly, I know I’ll see her face. But I don’t.” She was a slovenly washer-up. Her folded tea towels contained traces of beetles and cockroaches, and sometimes the beetles and cockroaches themselves. Even worms. On Friday nights she baked a huge cake, going back and forth between two men “she ruthlessly exploits. The knacker doesn’t know that one floor down, one of the guests is getting to suck on her tits in the same dishonest way.” She had recipes that went from mouth to mouth. “Dangerous and immoral as she is, she’s a good cook.” In her larder in the cellar and up in the attic, in among foodstuffs, sacks of flour and sugar, strings of onions, loaves of bread, piles of potatoes and apples, she kept evidence of her dissolution: men’s underpants, attacked by rodents and rot. “She keeps an interesting collection of her trophies lying around at the top of the house and in the cellar. She takes special satisfaction, at times when there aren’t too many men around, in looking through her collection and reviving her memories of their former contents. She keeps the keys to these rooms always about her person, has done for years, and no one but me has the least idea of what these keys are there to open doors to.”

  The painter Strauch spits out his sentences the way old people spray saliva in the air. I next saw him at suppertime. In the intervening hours I sat down in the public bar and watched them getting dinner ready. The painter came down rather too late for the landlady’s liking, after eight o’clock; by then it was only the regular seats that had drinkers in them. An awful reek of sweat and beer and dirty workclothes filled the room. The painter stood in the doorway, craning his neck to look for a place, and when he saw me, he came toward me, and sat down facing me. He told the landlady he didn’t want to eat whatever she’d cooked up that evening. She was to bring him a piece of spam and some fried potatoes. He didn’t want any soup. For several days past he had had no appetite to speak of, but today he was hungry. “I was cold, you see.” It wasn’t cold, quite the opposite really, but: “The Föhn, you know. Inside, I was freezing. That’s where it gets you, inside.”

  He doesn’t eat like a wild beast, not like the workmen, not from out of some primal condition. He takes every morsel as a scornful remark against himself. The spam on his plate was “a piece of some carcass.” He looked at me as he said it, but I didn’t show the revulsion he had hoped. I do a lot of work with dead bodies, and I’m not squeamish. The painter, of course, wasn’t to know that. “Everything people eat is pieces of dead bodies,” he said. I saw how disappointed he was. An infantile disappointment left his face in an expression of pained uncertainty. After that, he talked about the worth and worthlessness of people with me. “The animal quality,” he said, “that lurks inside people, and that we associate with raptors, waiting for a n
od to leap at you, and tear you to pieces, that’s the same thing as the animal we see when we cross a street, like hundreds of other people, you understand …” He chewed, and said: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious. Often, of all the things you mean to say, that’s all that’s left, the sense that you had it in mind to say something malicious.”

  Fourth Day

  “You just arrive in a place,” said the painter, “and then you leave it again, and yet everything, every single object you take in, is the sum of its prehistory. The older you become, the less you think about the connections you’ve already established. Table, cow, sky, stream, stone, tree, they’ve all been studied. Now they just get handled. Objects, the harmonic range of invention, completely unappreciated, no more truck with variation, deepening, gradation. You just try to work out the big connections. Suddenly you look into the macro-structure of the world, and you discover it: a vast ornament of space, nothing else. Humble backgrounds, vast replications—you see you were always lost. As you get older, thinking becomes a tormenting reference mechanism. No merit to it. I say ‘tree,’ and I see huge forests. I say ‘river,’ and I see every river. I say ‘house,’ and I see cities with their seas of roofs. I say ‘snow,’ and I see oceans of it. A thought sets off the whole thing. Where it takes art is to think small as well as big, to be present on every scale …”