Frost: A Novel (19 page)

•   •   •

In the winter, it was naturally hardest to make any headway with building work, says the engineer. We are sitting down in the public bar, and the painter pretends the engineer’s words are of the greatest interest to him. He has a bad headache, but he doesn’t let on, drinks wine like the rest of us, and sometimes makes a move as though to check that his Pascal is still in his coat pocket.

“When we’re expecting a frost, we can’t do any concreting at all,” says the engineer. “But there are other things we can do: right now we’re sinking a bridge support. That’s not without its dangers.”

The painter says: “Isn’t it very cold over the river? It makes me cold to look at it, what can it be like to stand over it all day and give instructions.”—“It’s not cold,” says the engineer, “it’s just important to have a head for heights. If a man doesn’t, he’ll fall head first into the water before he knows where he is.”—“Is the water deep at that point?” says the painter. “Not right there,” says the engineer, “but the current is very powerful. Even if you happen to be a good swimmer, and physically strong as all our people are, you’ll have a job to get out, because it’ll just wash you away, and in a few seconds you’ll be at the old weir, and you’ll meet your death.”—“Ah, right,” says the painter, “there’s the old weir as well. Won’t the old weir be destroyed when the power plant is finished?” “Yes,” says the engineer, “then it’ll be redundant.”—“Of course,” says the painter. “How many people have you got working for you at present?” he says. “Two hundred,” answers the engineer, “but there are never that many at one
time, some will be off for the day, some others will be sick. On average it’s a hundred and eighty.”—“A hundred and eighty!” says the painter, “that’s a lot of men!”—“It’s important to know where to assign them. What the most suitable occupation for each individual is at any given moment. Of course that’s a continual headache. But that’s what I do at night. At night I think about how to arrange things for the next day.”—“Do you write your ideas down?” asks the painter. “No, I never write anything down,” says the engineer, “I keep it in my head. In the morning when I drive down to the site, I issue the instructions I think up overnight. Or sometimes I tell the people who are eating and drinking in the inn to pass them on. That saves me no end of running around on the site. Getting from one work group to the next can be time-consuming. Often the different groups are working a long way from one another. One group might be working on the bridge, another will be loading and unloading on the road, a couple of hundred yards away, and a third will be over by the waterfall.” The painter says: “And where do you eat lunch?”—“In the canteen. Everyone does, except one or two who have time off and go up the mountain to eat at the inn, where the food’s better.”—“But then the canteen’s probably cheaper than here?” says the painter. “Cheaper, but not so good.”—“And what happened at Christmastime, did everyone go home?”—“Only a very few went home. Most of them haven’t got a home. We celebrated Christmas in the canteen. Me as well.”—“And does the contractor pay a Christmas bonus?”—“Yes,” said the engineer. “A generous bonus?” It was fairly sizable, says the engineer, “building firms are not mean when it comes to Christmas money.” In fact, the workmen did fairly well for themselves. A temporary worker on the site could reckon to pick up his three
thousand schillings. “That’s more than a middle school teacher,” says the painter. “Of course, there’s no comparison between the work done by a laborer down there and a middle school teacher.”—“Of course not.” The knacker says: “And some do overtime, and they pick up four thousand and more.”—“True,” says the engineer, “but they’re working themselves into the ground.” It was no secret that they get lung disease, and often collapse and have to spend weeks in the hospital. “The contractor’s not happy to see too much overtime being worked. Because they know they’ll have to offer sick pay for weeks and months.” But for the amount of work they did down there, “they’re not overpaid.” Anyway, they needed the money, because they have to eat properly, and drink as well, so they don’t get depressed after work. “It’s the bachelors who do best for themselves. They’re usually young and strong, and can put a bit aside. After a couple of years, standing in the dirt, they often start their own business or something, the ones that know how.” He himself had once stood in the dirt like that. As a young fellow he had paid his way through college by temping on building sites, just as I had done, well, he had done it too, standing around in puddles and ditches, and worrying about getting through his eight cubic meters of earth per day, or risk getting fired. “I’ve done it all, and I know my way around, and the men know that, and that’s why we’re on such good terms.” There was no other engineer on the site that they got along with as well as with him. They had confidence in him, for instance when it came to representing them with the contractor. “As soon as the first warm days come along,” he says, “then we’ll start to make some headway.”—“I expect you’re pretty well paid yourself,” says the painter. “I’ve heard that construction engineers are among the best paid people in the country.”—“Yes,”
says the engineer, “true enough, but I could have gone to India and made more money. But then I didn’t go to India, though I can’t say I wasn’t tempted.”

Suddenly I thought of the bustle of the capital, where between twelve and half past one everyone who is anyone walks along the Graben or shows themselves on the Kärntner Strasse, as in a display window several hundred meters long, from the point of view of the businessman, from the point of view of the manager’s wife, from the point of view of the attorney’s wife, and from several hundred other points of view, as for instance the chartered accountant’s wife or the woman with the fruit stand, who’s come up from the Naschmarkt, to be there as well. And I think how I fit into the scene with my books and papers under my arm, how I pick up snatches of conversation, a greeting or a goodbye, or even just swearwords or complaints. There I am, suddenly in the fresh air, which seems to have come down into these streets from the outlying hills, and I don’t know what to do with myself this lunchtime. My friends are all gone, headed home, eating lunch with their girlfriends or their brothers or their aunts from the provinces, and I’m all alone. I ponder which is better, to take in the words of the self-important and the curious passersby, or to go and sit in a park, of which there are many in the capital, one more beautiful than the next, and finally I decide on the latter course, and I’ve already turned down the Albrechtsrampe to the green island, where day in, day out the birds sing and the children play tag. That’s where the secretaries sit eating their sandwiches, and the milk women have a break here, and the occasional doctor of
philosophy with no better option sits on some stone step or pedestal to dig into his salt beef, carefully wrapped this morning for him. It smells of jasmine and hard-boiled eggs, and there’s the periodic rustle of dried leaves being pushed by one of the innumerable attendants from one end of the park to the other. A look at my watch tells me I have two hours till the next lecture. I put my books down on the top step of the staircase that leads up to the rather pompous Greek Temple of the Muses, and before long I’m stretched out in the sun, which seems to be almost setting. Before long, October’s finished, and there are no more leaves on the trees and no more humans in the park. Before long, the first snowflakes will fall on my shoulders, and my sandals will be replaced by shoes. But even in winter the Kärntner Strasse is so thronged with people that it feels warm, even when it’s thirty below. And the Graben is lit up at Christmastime, and people bump into each other, and everyone feels glad to be alive. Sometimes you might shiver a little to be standing all alone in the midst of so many people, but then you think of your bed, and you don’t feel sad anymore.

Today as I was sitting in front of the window, I had the idea that I ought to do something about my future. At least the immediate future. About what would happen once my internship in Schwarzach is finished. How will I get ready for my exams? I don’t have the sense that I know enough to even attempt them. And here I’m not even able to do anything to prepare. There’s no time. Because I’m altogether under the painter’s thumb, I have to go where he goes, although that’s not really it: I can’t help going with him wherever he goes.
Even if he didn’t ask me to go with him, I’d still want to go. They are always the same walks. They aren’t really walks at all. Just tramping through the snow, the wind, the forest, the cold. Sometimes I’m on my own. After lunch, when he goes back to his room, to lie on his bed—“Don’t imagine I’m sleeping!”—when he suddenly sends me packing, like he did the day before yesterday. Then he looks at me and taps me with his stick and says: “Now go back to the inn. I want to be on my own.” Then I leave him, but even then I’m still with him, in my thoughts, which are forever circling around him.

I ought to write home, at the very least I ought to tell them where I am, so that, having heard nothing from me in two weeks—I bet they’ve asked in the hospital if they know anything—they know what’s going on. But they would think it was strange if I wrote and told them I was here to observe someone. Observe someone? They wouldn’t understand that, they can’t imagine what it is to observe someone, I’m not sure I know myself what it is. The assistant’s brother? Well, why? Because he’s very ill? Mortally ill? But they don’t even know the name of the illness? Something in the brain? Something in the head? Someone who’s not quite normal? And they expose you to him? On the assistant’s say-so? And with the agreement of the registrar? A recognized surgeon? A danger like that? Such a young person? Who doesn’t really know what he’s about himself? A painter, with confused ideas? Someone who’s perhaps utterly confused? Someone altogether abnormal? But that could have a terrible effect on our son and brother and nephew! Better, then, not to write.
After all, what are two weeks! I’ve often not been in touch for longer than two weeks. Sometimes not for months. They’re used to me turning up and disappearing again and not being in touch. And if they think I’m at the hospital, where they know I’m very well looked after, they won’t assume anything too strange merely if I don’t write to them. My future’s like a stream in a forest, of which there are many precise descriptions, but nothing more; the forest is endless and as dark as only a childish notion of a forest can be, on the edge of gloom, and about to turn into utter gloom. The future is a long way off. And yet it’s at the door. Go through the door? How? How to equip myself as I pass through the door, into the dark, or even down into the dark? I’ll go home, shut myself in my room, and study the skin and the liver and the pancreas and “hearing tests.” I will study coldly, implacably. The window will be closed, maybe it’ll already be snowing outside, I’ll have to turn everything else down, I won’t come down for meals, not even join the others for breakfast; they’ll call, I won’t answer. Then, one evening a walk through the forest and back, along the stream, past the mill, sit on the bench with a wide view over the countryside.

Then set off on my journey. Back to my room at the hostel, with no light and no sunshine. I’ll fix myself something to eat, look at my watch, lie down and not be able to sleep, I’ll pace up and down the street, and open my books again. And what about the internship? What will it bring me? How much longer will I be at Schwarzach? What if the assistant is dissatisfied with me? If he thinks, oh dear, I should have given someone else the task, not him? And will I get five hundred
schillings, as I do every year? Even if I’ve been gone quite a long time? Wonder whether the matron knows? Yes, of course, she’ll be reminded of the fact that I’m not there at every mealtime. Now I think of the ghostly atmosphere in the staff room. There’s a radio there that hasn’t worked for years. A clock that ticks, but tells the wrong time. Vases with flowers that are long since dried out. A gray oilcloth spread over the long table, tacked down. Paintings on the walls, scenes from village life, done by a rather fetid academic painter. Books from the nineteenth century, unopened for decades. There I see down one side of the table the registrar, the assistant, the assistant’s assistant, the bonesetter, the pediatric surgeon. And on my side of the table the other two interns, the Greek doctor, the new med students. They eat in silence, and sometimes they draw a complicated fracture of the ulna on the table, or the position of an embryo, and the sister who carries in the food then wipes everything off once they’re all gone. I walk down the long passages, get lost at the end, where all the doors are suddenly locked and you can’t remember which way you came, I bang on a door, and already I’m thinking I’ll have to spend the night there, in that room, surrounded by locked doors. I hear footfalls, and I bang on the door with my fists, and the door opens, and the sister says: “Why, doctor, what are you doing in here?” And the sound of that “doctor.” Sounds how? And then I try and compare a human being with another human being, both with the same illness, and reacting to it differently. One dies, the other survives as if nothing had been the matter. And both had the same illness. I read, it’s almost dark, but I read in my Koltz, a section which explains about diseases of the brain, but the disease the painter has, which is a disease of the brain—what else would it be?—doesn’t appear anywhere in
Koltz. And we’re talking about a very new book, by a leading authority, just imported from the States.

And then I go to the chapel, only a few yards, because the chapel is built onto the hospital, or is it the hospital is built onto the chapel, I don’t know, both of them are several generations old, they have the same thick walls, and both give off the same chill. And then I cross the bridge, and I sit in the café, and I pick up a newspaper. And later, in the middle of the night, I am woken up, because “for you, doctor, an interesting case,” there’s a new admission. “A fractured atlas, with paraplegia.” I pull on my white coat, and follow the nurse who woke me down along the long corridors to the operating room, where the assistant is standing ready, just one or two preparations, and he makes the first incision. “There’s almost no light,” he says, and the operation gets under way. And continues perhaps until morning, and there’s no time to go to the staff room for breakfast. A head needs to be raised a little, a leg wants to be reset, a camphor injection is required, and a blood transfusion. The sisters perform astonishing feats. Never get to bed before eleven, and are back from church already by five, having been heard singing there at half past four. Everywhere, the great white tulips of their bonnets, which manage to flower where everything is dark with despair, where everything else is bleak and bare and inimical. The relatives of the patients who died overnight are standing between the elevator and the bathroom, holding in their hands the last possessions of their brother or sister. About to be dispatched to the cemetery administration. And the smiles of the young nurses put all sadness to flight. What will my future bring? What awaits me? Tomorrow! The day
after! I don’t want to think about what might be. What will be. What’s the future anyway? I don’t want to think!