Frost: A Novel (15 page)

“In the morning, I was just cleaning my boots—they don’t clean your boots properly here, you always have to go over them again with a rag yourself—I saw the landlady hitting her elder daughter. Suddenly I heard it. She must have struck her with a hard object on the head, because I saw her running downstairs, bleeding. She collapsed under the chestnut tree, holding her head in both hands. I expect she spent half the night among the railwaymen. In the snow I saw traces of blood when I went out later, because I couldn’t stand it in my room anymore. Scraps of words came up to my window. They were already on their way to the post office, but I caught everything. I jumped up and ran to the window. The whole scene was squalid. Presumably the girl spent the night with the son of the crossing-keeper. ‘Whore!’ I hear. ‘Whore!’ The landlady must have thought I was out, because otherwise she wouldn’t have lost control in such an abject way. The girl was contorted with pain under the chestnut
tree. She’s not even fourteen. You’ve probably seen him, the crossing-keeper’s son, a big young fellow. He works in the cellulose factory. He only ever visits the inn when the landlady’s away. I haven’t seen him for many days now. Back when the knacker was singing with the engineer, he was there: dark, and solidly built. I’m sure you must have seen him. At lunchtime, I heard the girl has moved out. She was in a train with her lover. It made a terrible impression on me, the girl’s helplessness I found especially alarming. The landlady lashed out with the poker. With the poker, if you must know. She lashed out at her like a butcher.”

Down on the building site, I remembered the time I used to go over the big bridges in blue workmen’s clothes. The air was fresh, and the noise wasn’t roused yet. Morning came down off the mountains into people’s houses, where they were saying their goodbyes for the day. Quickly they gulped down their coffee, and on the street chewed the bread that their wives had spread for them, or they didn’t eat anything at all, and started work on the building site on empty stomachs. The first shovelful took away your nausea. With my twenty years, I was stronger than the others, and I never really got tired. A big concrete mixer and a digger with the words “Zwettlerbau A.G.” loomed over us as we stood in the excavation. They were chilly days of autumn, but in a short time we were stripped down to our pants. And at noon we meandered over the road into the beer garden. It occurred to me that for a while I was perfectly happy with my life. To carry on in the same way seemed quite natural to me. In my family I had always heard about men who set out in construction and ended up in the gutter. They weren’t the worst. For
weeks I felt so happy in my work that I forgot all about my studies. But I passed my exams. As if in my sleep. I don’t know how I did it. I expect I was lucky. The rest of the world that wasn’t working on building sites struck me as crazy, and those people who weren’t standing in holes in the ground I looked at with sympathy. My evenings didn’t get so long, I was dog-tired, it felt sensible to collapse straight into bed, I didn’t even unpack my work things, I just left everything in my rucksack, and dropped into a deep sleep until half past four in the morning. The evenings came with the smell of the river drifting through the vegetation in the beer garden. There I would drink a beer with a couple of the guys, sometimes four or five beers, and we didn’t say much, but I liked what we did say. I was never able to speak to anyone else later as well as I did with my buddies from the building site. They didn’t say where they came from, and what they wanted to do with their lives. Probably they didn’t want to do anything particular with their lives. What should they have wanted to do with their lives? Did I want to do anything with my life? Probably the name of some young woman, a single mother, cropped up from time to time, or the name of a brother, and occasionally some town or village, where people wake up and go to sleep; I peered into kitchens and hallways, into garages and cesspools, and signalmen’s cabins.

And then I was a driver for an iron firm, and things got even more taciturn. And when we stood in our twos and threes on the big bridge over the big wide river, looking down into the water, then I wouldn’t think about countries and continents. The ships traveled down to the Black Sea, through the Iron Gate, through the various capital cities, and I was happy. But
I’d been spoiled, and I had my head full of something that only half convinced me, and I picked up my wages, and, come October, I went back to my school desk. I suppose I became unhappy again then, but in the long run even if I’d stayed on the building site, that might not have saved me from unhappiness. Who knows?

I too regularly felt drawn to the simple people, I told the painter today. Where all you see is the wheelbarrow going back and forth on a plank over a ditch with someone standing in it. Where all you see is clumps of earth being tossed up in the air. Who by? Well, you don’t know. Down there where they’re building the power plant, they stand around at nine o’clock and light their cigarettes and empty their bottles of beer and gesture with their fingers how many days till they’re due a holiday. But what will they do with it? Go away somewhere? When they’ve got the money to afford it! But where to? And isn’t it just too exhausting? They stay home, and just play cards a little later into the evening, because they don’t need to get up early, they go to the cinema, they write a letter that’s a year overdue to a brother, a sister, a mother. They balance across the rushing river, and those are the tricks they perform, life-and-death tricks, when they’re employed to slot in a section of a bridge. From six thirty in the morning to four thirty in the afternoon. Nine hours, because one is for eating and resting. Sometimes they shout across to each other, as if it was something essentially important, and not just a rope that needs tightening. The voices are used up. The crane swings across, now this side, now the other, and the mechanical digger at the end of its wires bites into the earth. Spits out
great chunks of earth between the men. The hydraulic drill might have driven them crazy twenty years ago, or at least one or other of them, but now no one is driven crazy by it. The trucks drive up from the railway station, sometimes they appear, sometimes they go again, and they go very close to the edge, and they need to be filled by the men. They wind the one rope ever tighter round their own necks. Most of them have never done anything else anyway but load and unload, standing in standing water in their gumboots and knocking in bridge piles. The fact that they’re used to it gives those people a pretext who never had to load and unload, never stood in standing water in gumboots, knocking in bridge piles; the pickaxes come whistling down on instructions given from the bank. You can climb around on the dirt and quiz the one or other of them without saying a word, without him saying a word either. If you watch, you have to be careful no one sees you, because otherwise you’ll be suspected of thinking about something you should have been thinking about all along. What is it these men slip into when they slip into their blue jackets, that, when the sun comes out, are hung up all over the place, on tree branches and on balanced shovel handles? Often the whole valley rings with their hammering and drilling. Then they detonate another big chunk out of the mountain into which they’re fitting the power plant, and the air pressure smacks against the cliff face.

Today they got a couple of people out of the Klamm valley on a sleigh. Two strangers, who wanted to spend the weekend high up in an Alpine hut. But they didn’t even get as far as the glacier when they took their fall. As if by a miracle, they
were almost unhurt and managed to stay warm all night under the branches of a broken pine. Even so, they were so weak come morning that only the elder of the two—they were both students—was able to crawl down to the valley for help. When the men, who apparently initially refused to go to the aid of the one lying up on the mountain with an injured leg, and for that reason was also unable to move, finally went up to help, they found the student unconscious, half in a stream. Only the fact that the rescue party reached him soon after he’d fallen into the stream saved his life. It was further miraculous that the students survived their initial fall relatively well; it was a ridge that had already claimed a lot of lives.

The engineer, who saw the students being taken down out of the Klamm valley, says the locals abused them to their faces, because they were forever having to deal with climbers, who, either out of ignorance or inadequate preparation and equipment, fall or lose their way, or get into some sort of scrapes. They should just leave them up there, they say. Why should their menfolk risk their own lives for the sake of “city showoffs”? What on earth were they doing, going climbing in all weathers, risking death by exposure, in a storm or rockslide? The city-dweller had no idea of the force of a storm suddenly breaking loose at altitude. The vehemence with which trees are uprooted, with which a gale smacks into a sheer face, causing the rock to tremble. Nothing of avalanches, or numbing frost. Nothing of the darkness that suddenly extinguishes anything that might offer sanctuary or support.

•   •   •

“Every year there are a couple of hundred who lose their lives in the rocks somewhere,” said the engineer. “The Klamm is dangerous, unless you know the footholds.” Even today there were people lying around there with smashed limbs in the Klamm, who couldn’t be brought out, because it was too inaccessible. “Actually, it’s a mystery what brings all these thoughtless city-dwellers to the mountains.” The two students had been put up in an inn by the station. They were given warm beds and an earful of abuse. The engineer saw to it that they were made to pay for all the expenses resulting from their foolishness. “It seems they planned to kill themselves,” he said, “up in the hut.”

We know a thing or two about that in Schwarzach as well, the numerous tourist tragedies, from straightforward to complicated breaks, which develop into brain paralysis, to those cases where we get to the waterfall too late, or a wayside hut, where they simply lay them out, cover them with a canvas groundsheet or a piece of cardboard or some branches, and wait for the intern to issue a death certificate for them. Those are the city boys’ stunts, so they can impress their dubious friends for another year, and get their names in the paper, because they’ve been up a 2,500- or a 3,000-meter peak. What is it with climbing anyway? What’s the difference whether I’m three hundred meters up, or three thousand? It’s simply that the one is more dangerous than the other, the one isn’t a stunt, but the other is supposed to be. I’ve often seen young people snuffed out, just because darkness has
fallen all round them. And how do we benefit from standing around there clutching our rolls of bandage in hope, and the priest already on his way?

Or else we manage to get them into the hospital, and I’m sitting next to a lad or lass who doesn’t yet know that he or she will never walk again, will remain stiff as a board to the day of their death, and I hold their hand, and I say something in the ambulance that’s a flat-out lie. I might say: “You’ll be on the mend soon!” or: “It’ll take care of itself!” and I’ll only be struck by the horrendousness of what I’ve done at night, when I’m lying in bed. Then, in hundred- and thousandfold voices I hear their “No! No!” What it means to take the legs off a young man who’s a truck driver by profession. Or a newspaper delivery girl, or a student who was planning to go to India! They rip downhill on their skis and wrap themselves round a tree, that happens every day. Almost all the wards in the hospital are full of tourists who’ve met with accidents. You have to say they have only themselves to blame, they should never have gone up the mountains in the first place! But they are drawn up there, to the summits, up the slopes; whole school classes are found frozen, along with their teachers. If you ask them how they came by their frozen leg, which we’ve had to amputate, they say it was for a bet or showing off that prompted them to go on a climb; and that’s where it happened, most times nowhere near the peak. Once we had a boy in the hospital who survived for four days in a crevasse that already had three carcasses of mountain goats in it. It was only weeks after they brought him down that he got sick, and slowly lost his memory.

“You only need to hear a certain name, and you start to make your excuses. Then someone is presented to you, and you’ve already closed the file on him. He can say what he likes, he’ll never get out of the oubliette we dropped him into, he’ll never get clear of it. Everything this person then does will look like the shameless self-promotion of an undesirable, of someone utterly unappetizing. That,” said the painter, “was how the engineer was for me, when he was introduced to me, I was immediately revolted by him, and I dropped him through the trapdoor, into the oubliette, as described. The first time I heard his name, I was almost sick. The idea of that name produced the most appalling impression of the person that went with the name. And when I met him face to face, I wasn’t disappointed. You’re never disappointed when you meet the person who goes with a name that you’ve chewed over and spat out.” If you met people before learning their names, the name, when you were told it, always fitted them. “Most people, all you need know of them is their name, you know.” The name contained everything you needed to know about them. It was mostly the names that prompted one to get to know someone. “The person who goes with a certain name never lets the name down. There are names that, when you hear them, give you a stronger feeling of nausea than the worst lack of appetite you can imagine. For instance, when a friend tells me the name of a friend of theirs, whom I haven’t
yet met. Have you not come across that phenomenon yourself? The name makes the man.”

I completely forget what I’m here for. That I have to make my observations. I think of it suddenly, when I’m in the larch wood possibly, when I notice something particularly striking about the painter, in the middle of the street, in the public bar, when he suddenly takes a great gulp from his glass of milk, like a healthy person, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t. That suddenly comes to mind, when I’m lost in trains of thought that took their starting point with the painter, when I’m far away from myself, separated by ranges of strange speculation. And I know that nothing but what I see will come to me. I intimated something of the sort to the assistant in the letter I wrote today. And that it’s so gloomy here, always gloomy, gloomy even on fair days. How a word I say sometimes pains me. A word that’s said to me. That can happen as well. I walk all alone through the village, and stick to the views of people, that’s what I do. And to the sky, which borders on nothing, and so doesn’t exist. In fact, I’m in hell, and have to keep quiet. The painter says it’s all incomprehensible because it’s human, and the world is inhuman, which makes everything comprehensible and terribly sad. He lets the words hang there. “Terribly sad” is what he says, and the way he says it, it must pierce the hearts of everyone. Beauty was a danger for itself, just as darkness was “independence of desire.” Or I walk over to the hay barn and imagine how he quells me with a mere look. And then I think of my task. Really, I ought to have a plan, or a table perhaps, where I can organize all the information I gather, add in the new data from above, and from below, so that whatever’s come in too
high can be reduced, and whatever’s too low can be added on to. But perhaps it’s all physical evidence that’s incapable of being ordered. Why is there no organization? In my observation of the painter, I mean to say. Am I in fact observing him? Am I not just looking at him? Am I observing him when I look at him? Looking at him when observing him? Then what? I’ll be pretty stumped when I next sit across the table from the assistant. He imagines I’ll come back to Schwarzach after a while, and spread out everything I’ve observed in front of him, and say: This is how it is! That’s the way he said it! That’s exactly how I made my observations! No possibility of error! His sadness is unlike any I imagined, but that’s how it is! Do you understand? No. I’m sure I can’t even string two or three words together coherently. Even though everything is perfectly clear. And how! And then there’s silence, nothing happens that would be pertinent. And how differently everything will present itself when I pick it out of what I’ve written. Completely differently. Because what I’ve written is wrong. Nothing written is right. Has any claim to rightness. Not even to precision, even though everything is set down conscientiously, with the view of knowing something about a distinct set of affairs. At best, less wrong. Still wrong, though. Of a different wrongness. Untrue.