Frost: A Novel (13 page)

“I’d like to take you along to the poorhouse once,” said the painter. “It might be a good thing for someone like you, without much experience—that is the case, isn’t it?—” he said, “to take a look at one of the most pitiful and oppressive institutions there are, a collection of infirm old people, incapable of doing anything beyond mumbling to themselves. I don’t
think it’ll shock you to such a degree that I would have to smack myself on the wrist and say: I really shouldn’t have done that, taken that fellow in there, made him acquainted with the hydrocephalic, with the alcoholic, with the swollen smoker’s leg, with the senility of geriatric Catholicism. The old just want to eat,” said the painter, “the old men are guests of the devil, the old women suck on the tits of heaven! And all without self-defense! That smell,” said the painter, “when you set foot in the poorhouse, you don’t know if it’s apples or the rotting breasts of old grocers’ wives. You want to hold your breath,” said the painter, “hold your breath to everything with the impertinence to lie ahead of you! But already your chest is full of rot. Suddenly you can’t even manage to exhale anymore, can’t exhale so much filth, so much age, the stink of so much unbelievable redundancy, that dull melancholy stink of ichor. Yes,” said the painter, “I’ll take you along there. I’ll show you the place. You’ll curtsey to the mother superior. You’ll tell her your little story, the little story of your life, and you’ll get one or two back! You’ll be torn apart! The old are the grave-robbers of the young. Old age is grave-robbery. Old age gets its bellyful of youth,” he said. “So I come into the poorhouse once,” said the painter, “and they bring me bread and milk, and they want me to drink schnapps as well, but I say I don’t want any schnapps, no no, no schnapps, I say, under no circumstances, and I refuse and resist, but they pour out a glass for me anyway, and I don’t drink it, and I say, no, I’m not drinking this, and the mother superior pours the schnapps back in the bottle, and I know she’s after money, the whole village is after my money, all of them, they all want a piece, they all take me for stupid, basically they all think I’m stupid, limitlessly stupid, because I’ve
been feeding them all, feeding them all for years, with advice, suggestions, tips, help, support, yes, even money, I’ve stuffed so much money into this rathole … so, I come into the poorhouse,” said the painter, “and I refuse their schnapps, and I listen to their begging, listen to them saying I should give them a subvention, ‘a very small subvention,’ which ‘the Lord’ (what Lord) will ‘give me credit for,’ and I listen to it all, and I look at the mother superior, and I hear her feet working the sewing machine treadle, she works the treadle while she pulls a ripped old man’s shirt under the needle at her breast, and then a jacket, and I look in her face, her wide, puffy face, her swollen hands, her square dirty fingernails, I look under her bonnet, her snow-white bonnet, I think: Ah, so this is evening in the poorhouse, which is always the same evening, for a hundred years, for five hundred years, the same evening as this one, sewing together and drinking together and eating together and praying together and lying together and sleeping together and stinking together; it’s all this one evening, I think, which no one is thinking of changing, and no one is thinking of, period, it’s the evening of loathsomeness and rejection by the world. If you must know,” said the painter, “I’m sitting there for an hour and I say I’m prepared to pay a supplement for an old man, a cooper, if you must know, in leather leggings and a loden coat, in a canvas shirt, and with a fur cap on his head, I say I’m prepared to purchase a Severin calendar from the mother superior, one of those loathsome productions of clerical idiocy, and then I notice there’s a man lying on the bench by the wall, completely motionless if you must know, with the Severin calendar on his chest; the man is lying behind the mother superior, and I’m thinking surely he’s dead, the man must be dead, and I give myself a nudge,
and I think, the man must be dead, so this is what a dead man looks like, old and dead, and I wonder how it is that I’ve not noticed this dead man lying there all along, with straight thin legs that look as though they’ve been stuffed into the craw of eternity. But there can’t be a dead man lying here! Not here! Not now! In the dark, I failed to notice the man the whole time I was here, also because the mother superior was claiming the whole of my attention with her nonsense about the Severin calendar. ‘Our Severin calendar,’ she kept saying the whole time, ‘our Severin calendar benefits the poor in the Congo, the poor in the Congo …’ I’ve been listening to her say that for fully an hour, I think to myself, and I want to jump up and go over to the dead man, but then I see the man start to move, suddenly the man on the bench is moving, and he pulls the Severin calendar up from his belly to his chin, so that he can read it. So, the man isn’t dead after all! But even so, I think to myself, he looks like a dead man, dead people don’t look any worse, in some sense this man is a dead man! I watch him move his arms, how he leafs through the calendar, avidly leafs through the calendar, but his body is completely motionless, and once again I think to myself, yes, he is dead! But then I hear a breath, the first ‘breath’ from this dead man. I feel alarmed, alarmed mostly at myself, because I hadn’t noticed the man all the time I was there. The mother superior hadn’t mentioned to me that there was a man in the room with her. In the darkness I wasn’t able to see him. Suddenly, after an hour, I saw the body, the head, perhaps the legs as well, because, I don’t know why, imperceptibly, for some reason, it got a little brighter, even to see the man by, perhaps because my eyes suddenly got used to the darkness (your eyes don’t work, for a long time, if you must know, your eyes
don’t work, then all at once your eyes start to work). Suddenly my eyes saw the man, my eyes saw this dead man. He was lying there like a piece of wood. And then this piece of wood started to breathe, it breathed and it started to flick through the calendar. Then I said to the mother superior: ‘There’s somebody lying there!’ But she didn’t react at all. She was reattaching a sleeve she had previously cut off. ‘There’s someone lying there!’ I said, a bit louder. Without looking at me, she replied: ‘Yes, a human being.’ It was terrible, the way she said it. I wanted to say, ‘He’s lying there just like a child!’ But instead I said: ‘He’s lying there just like a dog. What’s he doing here?’ Someone like that isn’t going to be able to listen, I thought, and so I could speak about him with the mother superior quite uninhibitedly. ‘He’s reading the Severin calendar,’ I said, ‘even though it’s dark, even though it’s almost pitch-dark.’ ‘Yes,’ said the mother superior, ‘he’s reading the Severin calendar.’ I had to laugh! I started laughing, I burst out laughing, most of all because I recalled that I had taken the man to be dead, taken him to be dead the whole time, and in fact I said: ‘I thought the man was dead.’ I had to get up in order to stop laughing. I had to walk up and down. ‘Dead!’ I exclaimed, ‘I thought he was dead!’ Then I was suddenly alarmed, you understand, by the face that was lying in the dark, lying as if above the surface of a dirty pond. ‘This man is reading in the dark,’ I said. The Mother Superior said: ‘He knows everything, he knows everything in the calendar. He’s learned it all off by heart,’ she said. She didn’t stir, and kept pushing the treadle of her sewing machine. ‘He gets frightened when he’s not here with me,’ she said, ‘then he shouts and turns the whole house upside down. If I let him stay here with me, everything’s quiet, and he’s quiet as well. It won’t be much longer before he finally moves off.’—‘Finally
moves off,’ she said. She wanted me to pay for a couple of yards of flannel shirting for the old man, but I said I needed to think about it, I’d consider it. I thought it was an impertinence on her part, trying to hang a couple of yards of flannel shirting on me as well. Then, sitting impassively at her machine, she described her childhood to me, if you must know. I always like to hear about that. Her father was crushed by a tractor, if you must know, her brother, a sportsman’s guide, put a bullet in his brain because he hated the world. Commonplace destinies. She’s a prolix, dropsical type,” said the painter. “But I haven’t told you the most important thing: there I was, sitting there, thinking I should say goodbye, when a dreadful noise made me jump to my feet. The old man had fallen off his bench—dead. The mother superior closed his eyes, and asked me to help her lift him back up on the bench. Shaking, I did so. I thought, now I’m breathing in the dead man’s air, and I went. All the way home, I thought: my lungs are full of dead man’s air. I hadn’t been mistaken, I’d been right all along, the man had been dead the whole time. Perhaps the movements I saw were just fantastic inventions on my part, he was dead all along, just dead the whole time the mother superior was repairing his jacket and his shirt, because they had been his jacket and his shirt that she had pulled this way and that under her needle, with an irritated expression on her face, with an expression of appalling irritation on her face. And he was dead long before I ever came along, I’m convinced of that.” The painter took a step back, and drew something in the snow with his stick. I soon saw that it was a sketch of the mother superior’s room in the workhouse. “There’s the bench where the dead man was lying, whom I failed to see for a whole hour, even though he was close enough to reach out and touch, here is the sewing
table, here is the mother superior, here’s her wardrobe, if you must know, there’s the bed of the mother superior, and there’s her chest; here, you see, is where I sat down; this is where I came in through the door, and greeted the mother superior, I went up to her, and she immediately started trying to interest me in a subvention, in a Severin calendar. I knew I would part with the subvention and purchase the calendar, but I drew the whole thing out. I thought I was alone in the room with her, the way I had always been alone in the room with her, who could ever have supposed there would be anyone else in the mother superior’s room anyway, but I had a strange feeling as well, a feeling I can’t describe. Then it got brighter, and all at once I saw the stiff contours of the old man. Also I had said ‘like a dog’ to the mother superior. She even repeated it after me. The idea that the man couldn’t hear anything made me burst out laughing. Here, you see,” said the painter, and he drew a circle between the bench and the sewing machine, “right here is where the dead man lay when we picked him up. The whole thing is quite extraordinary and not at all well described; but the only reason I’m telling you about this incident is because, however incompletely, it does give a picture of the mysterious lack of accountability in the world. On one of the next few days,” said the painter, “we’re going to the poorhouse. A young person must see what suffering is, what suffering and dying are, what it is to rot away.” We walked quickly home. The painter suddenly ran away from me, with an unexpected turn of speed for one of his years. “Wait for me!” I called after him. But he didn’t hear. He disappeared in one of the many dips in front of me.

People like the landlady didn’t understand values like respect and awe. She goes to church, but only because she doesn’t want to be rebuked. Because otherwise she would be destroyed, living among people who have got it into their heads that you have to go to church. Drowning among country people is a miserable way of drowning. They calmly watch their victim resisting, and the waves closing over their heads, as if it was the most natural thing in the world: letting an evil person, someone who doesn’t belong in their world, simply sink. Someone who didn’t take instruction from them, wasn’t persuaded by what they told him. Someone who struck them as odd from the outset, and therefore unworthy of sharing their lives with them: “The landlady is a stranger,” said the painter. She was always strange to them all, because her father came from a different region, a valley nearer the Tyrol. They describe someone like the landlady as vermin. The farmers do. And the farmers still rule here, even though their influence has been pushed back. Even though the proletariat has attained privileges that, three or four years ago, would have been unthinkable. The proletariat: all the people who, in the last three decades were washed into the valley, to service the cellulose factory, the railways, and now the power plant. “There are still the Corpus Christi processions,” said the painter, “and Ascension Day parades, but how much longer? Catholicism is on the wane. At least here. Communism is on the march. In a few years’ time there will
only be Communism. And then agriculture will be a dream. No longer leading anywhere.” He said: “But the landlady goes to church, because she still depends on the farmers. And she attends the Communist meetings, because she’s compelled to do that too.” But for her, the inn would surely have changed hands before now, because “her husband is a drunk who drinks more than he brings in, unless she slaps his wrist.” Always drunk, he lives the life of a “slimy bloated newt, from time to time lashing out.” He often lay in the garden with outspread arms, gaping mouth, and rolling eyes, as if he was dead, and merely swollen with schnapps and beer. Often he would call the cab to get a ride home instead of walking. He knows she holds everything together, that everything depends on her, and that it’s up to her whether she takes the thread he’s dangling from, and simply and brutally snips it, so he doesn’t send her away anymore. Rather, it’s she who can do as she pleases. If anything, it’s he who has to worry about being sent packing. But the property belongs to him, and that keeps her from putting her most radical plan into effect: to throw him out once and for all. Cannily, because he’s not stupid, he’s steadfastly refused to make over the property to her, as she’s often expressly called on him to do, he even refused to cede a part of the property consisting of the real estate, the hollow, and the inn, to her. So she’s probably always going to have him to deal with. “Often they dragged him over from the shady side,” said the painter, “where he was drinking on credit.” Every three weeks she went the rounds, to pay his tabs at all the places where he drank. She begged the landlords, her competitors in effect, to no longer serve him. But they always ignored her wishes. Any landlord has got to be pleased about slowly wiping out a rival. They even egged him on. And when he gets let out of prison,
it’ll carry on. Often, when she paid his bills, she would get to hear about other women who had eaten and drunk at his expense, and who “themselves had been rather generous”; but she was used to that, and of course she compensated. She is the daughter of a road worker, who, when he died, left just enough to cover his funeral expenses. Aged fourteen, she went to a dairy farm as a maid. She was always a good worker, and that was what got the landlord’s interest, and prompted him to bring her to the inn.