Frost: A Novel (29 page)

“One keeps descending, among the low,” said the painter, “then lower and lower, far lower than them. What I say is true: the finer traits of humans have always been repugnant to me: I have had to brush them away, I never wanted to come in contact with them. Periodically, throughout my life, I have descended into the low, squalid world. I always felt I belonged there. And so I remained there. And the low world,
you know, isn’t low, and the squalid world not squalid, at any rate the low world is never as low as the other, nor the squalid as squalid. Hence too my preference for poverty, for rejection, you must know. Because when I was poor, I was also a man who seemed to have some value to myself, even if I walked in filth, and was filthy myself … But that’s just something I say to myself …” He said: “Imagine a tree that you expect to bear fruit once again, and that disappoints you by not bearing any more fruit.” Almost all lives had been disappointing in such a way. “Wherever you look, trees that no longer bear any fruit.” The human race was the unfruitful thing, “the only unfruitful thing in the whole world. It serves no purpose. It can’t be made into anything. It can’t be eaten. It isn’t a raw material for some process outside itself.” He was a pessimist, which was something ridiculous, something finally much worse. And beyond that, more ridiculous still. “The brain says one thing, and the rest of the body says something else, and what ends up happening is something that neither the brain nor the rest of the body is happy with.” From out of himself he had gone into the world, and been through the world back to himself. “It’s in myself, as I know, because it’s deeper than the world.” The knack of switching himself off was something he had often managed to achieve between opening his eyes and closing them again. “Too much respect at the beginning, and too much hatred and revulsion later on. First of all the drive to get to know certain cities, and then the drive to forget all those cities again. Men like rats, chopped up by street sweepers’ shovels. Too many negotiations with humans have done me in.” Unusual interests: “Investigations, the ideals of investigations, the ideals of friendships followed successively by being delivered of the ideals of investigation, being delivered of the investigations
themselves, of the ideals of friendship, and finally of the friendships themselves.” For years, it had all been nothing more than “eavesdropping on suffering.” In split seconds, eternities of disappointment. In his permanent condition of dupe, the human was relegated to being his own arena.

Earlier he had been able to catch charmed words like balls, the word “creation,” first off, then the word “chemistry,” then “instinct,” “painting,” and last of all “murder.” The ruin of mankind had been a child’s dream. And everything settled then. Father and mother exemplars of unhappy, irresponsible, no longer amendable actions on the part of instinct, emotion, the devil. “In winter, pain falls in the form of snow, did you know that?” Songbirds sing pain. “The weak man has no law that will protect him.”

The landlady was astonished at the numbers who turned out for the funeral of the farmer’s wife, who, as the fire was destroying her house, was crushed by a falling roof beam. From everywhere, from the remotest valleys, they came, relatives and acquaintances and the merely curious. The funeral procession had been so long that not all the mourners had got into the graveyard. A number had had to wait outside on the cemetery steps during the service, and in the square in front of the church. Never in her life had she seen so many flowers and wreaths. She had been most interested to see the widower, but had only caught sight of him once everything was over, and managed then to exchange a few words with him, having once been in service to him. “He’s much more dignified than he used to be,” she said. As there were so many
relatives around, she had to move off. But she was invited to the funeral meal, which was taking place in three inns at once, because one wouldn’t have had enough room for all the guests. The food had been better than for any corpse she could remember. The band, having just played a funeral march by the graveside, had struck up in a rather more cheerful vein outside in the square, which had been “heaving with people.” In the cemetery itself, the mourners had trampled on all the graves, they had pushed their way forward to the grave itself, so that they could peer down into it, but no one had been able to see anything worse than a plank. “The cemetery in S. is three times the size of the one in Weng,” she said. Of course a lot of people from Weng had been to the funeral as well, especially “money people.” Because she owned no black coat, only a gray one, she had been a bit embarrassed to begin with, but later she forgot all about it. “I was the only one in the place who wasn’t wearing a black coat.” They had loosed off rounds while the coffin was being lowered into the grave, just like at New Year’s. The vicar and the mayor had made speeches, but she hadn’t been able to hear a word. Her daughters had pushed their way in among the black-clad people through to the open grave, and mingled with the relatives of the dead woman, which earned her some furious looks, even before she left the cemetery. The revels went on till five in the morning, till everything had been eaten and drunk. But she had set off for home at eleven. “I was pretty drunk too,” she said. The knacker had taken her back in his sleigh. I heard them, how he unloaded her, and how she tried to detain him, but he left anyway. Last night she had gone down to the station for a bunch of immortelles which she left on the dead woman’s coffin, once there was no one around to see. What had been of most interest to her
was the food the various landlords had prepared, for the most part following
her
recipes. Their vicar had joined in the dancing, and been pretty free with suggestive remarks as well, she had been surprised to see a vicar, “a man of God,” carrying on in such a way.

“People need to taste the whip,” said Strauch, “the knout of the executioner.” He urged me to put on sturdier shoes, he found it unbearable to see me in such “luxury items” as the shoes I had on every day. But I have no sturdier shoes. I own just two pairs, a pair of boots for the winter, and a pair of ankle-high shoes for summer, which I left at home. “Things change here very quickly,” said the painter, “quite without notice. Suddenly it’s so cold, it can freeze your sinuses. A sudden blow, and you go from one thing to the opposite.” He didn’t think it would snow any time soon, but there would be an iron frost. He could tell by all sorts of things, by plants, by everything, that a frost was in the offing. “A terrible frost. You can see it in the trees and rocks. You can hear it, when you hear the animals.” And one day everything would freeze, “and be dead. The world as presently constituted. Even the air will go rigid, and the snowflakes in the air.” When he was walking out of an inn once, in the Tyrol, where he used to go at times, “into the clear country,” as he says, he suddenly jammed his stick into a pig that had frozen solid. He had wanted to drive the beast on, but the stick was caught fast in the pig, as if it had been made of snow. When he pulled out his stick, the pig made a squelching noise, which disgusted him. “The frost eats everything up,” said the painter, “trees, humans, animals, and whatever is in the trees and the humans and the animals. The blood stalls, and at great speed.
You can break apart a frozen human like a piece of stale bread.” He said: “Did you notice that country people never wear a coat, no matter how low the temperature? At least not here, in this region. In the flatland, yes, but not here. In the lower Alps, but not in the Alps proper. The men put up their collars, the women come down from the mountains in their folklore outfits. Even at twenty below zero.” The cold drew people together as much as the beasts in the sty, around a dish or a book. “Cold is the most sharp-witted state of nature,” said the painter. Schoolkids usually got no further than an outcrop of rock, and then they turned back, for fear of freezing to death. Or the schools were closed on account of the low temperatures. People died in midsentence. In the middle of a cry for help. The stars flashed like nails driven into the night sky. “Air composition that makes reason ring out like the tongue of a bell.”

Had I ever had a frozen limb or digit, he wanted to know. “There are many men who have been marked by frost.”—“No,” I said. “In the war, I should tell you, men had the feet freeze off their legs, and the ears off their heads. By thinking on a certain subject, a condition that may be thousands of years away, or at the very least a beautiful memory, it is possible to generate warmth in oneself, even heat, but only to a certain, finally unsuccessful, degree. Even those soldiers who burned with homesickness during the Russian winter campaigns were not enabled to survive by their homesickness.” He said: “When the days get that cold, I sit in my bed, and stare at the frost flowers on my window, that in a succession of miracles evoke landscapes from painting, from nature, from inner despair, only to crush them again, and to draw
from them such truths as, to my conviction, are dispersed in their hundreds of thousands and their millions in our lives, and portray more than an intimation of a world that lies alongside our familiar world, a universe we have failed to recognize.”

Then, in front of the trunk that looms out of the middle of the pond, he said: “We all live the lives of death masks. Everyone who is really alive has taken his off at one time or another, but as I say, people don’t live, it’s just, as I say, the life of death masks.” There were no real humans anymore, just death masks of real humans. And the whole thing was so grotesque precisely because it amounted to a vast “crippling by reason,” spreading from our brains to those of friends and neighbors. “A seeming life, no longer capable of real life. Cities that are long since dead, mountains too, long dead, livestock, poultry, even water and the creatures that used to live in the water. Reflections of our death masks. A death-mask ball,” he said. He became agitated when I told him I didn’t believe in his “death-mask ball.” “You young people don’t believe,” he said. “The whole world is nothing but a death-mask ball.” In accordance with its development, and the development of the cosmos. “The influence of the stars, the astral bodies is not open to doubt.” He said: “What I tell you is intellectuality pondering logically.” What is that? “Nothing you can touch, nothing you can think, nothing apparent, nothing real, as we have come to refine the idea, nothing we can ‘deal with,’ nothing for Pascal, nothing for Descartes. Nothing for humans. Nothing for swine. If monstrosity could breed in one man’s head, where would that get us,” he said. “The incomprehensible is our life. Nothing else.
That sometimes finds form in humans, just as swarms of birds take to the air and turn it black. The incomprehensible is the miraculous. The un-understood world is the world of wonders, the one you understand has no wonder in it.” Each step toward knowledge was a step away from wonder. “Science of course claims the opposite. But just as any science always claims the opposite of any other science.” And then things weren’t quite that simple. For: “Science lies, that’s its principle, it destroys, and makes megalomania possible, and the miraculous. What science wants is to stop being science, at a certain point it wants to select. That’s its endeavor. And that’s worthy of our support.” A man was never in the way of science at that point where it was seeking to emerge from itself, and go back to humans. He said: “Then, when science has achieved its end, the death masks will become human beings again.”

Pub gardens in summertime were often full of people who clearly “take themselves to be the center of the world. They draw attention to themselves immediately. Go up to a table in the deepest shade (or, in the present season, we would say: next to the open fireplace!) and that may have been reserved for them. What goes on in a brain that conceives itself to be the center of the world. Millions of lights going on and off in millions of centers! That’s the world. That’s all it is. The ordinary sits at a table with the extraordinary and drinks a pint of beer, or eats a plate of scrambled eggs. Plays chess or a game of cards. Each ordinary and extraordinary individual that makes up the world. But what is ordinary? What is extraordinary? In the summer heat (as in the winter cold), humans are less confined, because more helpless. They pull on ropes, and
pulling on the other end is the world: ‘my world.’ That’s where they think it is, or that’s where they think they are. And that’s how they come to think of themselves, sitting there with head erect, as being what they claim to be, the center of the world. ‘When I’m dead, the world will die’ is what they think.” He, the painter, thought of humans as “aboriginal outgrowths, bordering on the unfathomable, but only bordering on it.” His picture of pub gardens in summertime enabled one to follow the trails of humans in their greatest folly. “To identify their world. To identify the world. Tactics? Where vulgarity carries its head as high as royalty. Brutality wanders along like the epitome of gentleness, celebrated, ethical, inimitable. The thought of a glass of beer leads to the wildest overestimates and thoughts: the world is what I am! Begins where I begin. And ends where I end. Is as bad as me. As good. No better, because me. No question, me. Likes to drink. Likes to eat. Doesn’t know one percent, because I don’t know one percent either. Famous? Well, yes and no. Too much, that would mean knowing more than me, wouldn’t be good for it, because that would mean I was sick. Without appetite. That’s the world: confined to a head of cattle, confined to roast beef. A human will never go beyond where he thinks the world will go. His personal edge is also the edge of the world. Its defeat is his. In a pub garden in summertime, the world is confined to the hunger and thirst of the world. Of each individual in it. Each single individual. ‘A beer, please,’ means the world is asking for a beer. It downs it, and after a while, it feels thirsty again.”

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned. “Living
together as husband and wife, you know, that’s the same as unjustifiable torment till the end of the marriage. When the states of two individuals are pushed together into unbearableness like seams of rock. Then black ceases to be black, and a child is no longer a blessing. Everything turns into its obverse. You know, poverty looks quite different, wealth turns out to have been a deception, ahead of a further, catastrophic deception.” It soon turned into a stagnant pool, where the two partners stared emptily at one another. Each of them destroyed by figures and calculations. A head full of shame and waste, that was marriage, for man and woman alike. “They walk in through the church gates, and walk out through the brothel door. There are mirrors where you can see everything to the point of cruelty, to the deadly thumbs-down.” And it was all an immutably fixed underground process. Why? Waking dreams suddenly come out, suppositions turn into bitter truth. Blows, received in a dream, send you reeling. The frustrated fantasy dreams of travel, of returning to a solitude that wasn’t solitude at all. In the middle of the city, there’s a sudden gust of wind you thought had long passed. But you can no longer shake the tree to bring down the overripe fruits. No. A dog runs against your shin, and you wake up feeling embittered. There’s a bricklayer hunkered down on some scaffolding planks, there’s a railwayman standing looking at his watch because he’s tired, there’s someone walking along a roof carrying a sheet of glass for a window … Removal men with weight lifter belts are good for hefting tables and crates about, you think, and you feel like the saddest man on the planet. And the world is miles away from the spectacle that abandoned it, as ruthless as a bad mother, running after her lover. Strauch said: “The truth is like some crazy gardener, uprooting cabbages and letting
them lie. It’s a spree.” The man walks beside his wife to the edge of town where the factories are and the mines that feed him, with his child by the hand, he walks into an endless unhappiness. And it must often come to him, the glib saying that thousands of people are used like pieces of sacking, and then discarded. And he thinks of words such as “added” and “subtracted” and “oppressed” and “beaten.” And wherever his wife looks, she sees only addled faces. And the scabies on her daughter’s face. Whatever it is you might want is not on the menu. To walk together till it means falling together, till it means murdering each other together. “If at all, then take the child as well.” And he: All he proposed was the effort to get crushed. To the rail embankment. Just a few yards off. Oh, yes. But brutality always intervenes, everywhere. The thing that glistens softly over the rooftops, well, it might be warm air, but actually it’s the beginning of the end. And the creaking tree: malign, the blackness of its trunk. And still, everything takes its usual course. No one says anything. Which makes everything even worse. The child is put to bed, and then you dread everything ahead of you. The one lying beside the other in bed thinks everything that is so terribly evil could—an ill spark crosses the other’s face—be the truth. And even if it’s not, it still hurts.