Frost: A Novel (20 page)

I quickly took a letter to the assistant to the post office. There was the postmistress, a relative of the knacker’s, with her back to me, writing something in a ledger. “The painter,” she said, taking my letter and stamping it, “the painter hasn’t been by in a long time.” Earlier, he’d used to get mountains of mail, the postman had had so much to carry for him. And now nothing. Not one letter in all the weeks the painter had been here this time. “He doesn’t look well,” she said. “Yes,” I said, “he’s ill.”—“Ill?” she said. What was wrong with him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”—“Something serious?”—“Yes,” I said, “something serious.”—“But why doesn’t he get any mail?” That was nothing to do with his being ill. She seemed to think if someone is ill, they will need letters, more than if they’re healthy. What else does a person need if he’s got his health, she seemed to think. I don’t know anything about his postal arrangements, I said. Of course, I couldn’t help being struck by the fact that he got no mail. But I didn’t want to continue the conversation with the postmistress, and I went out.

Outside the post office, I thought: It must be a terrible thing for his housekeeper, not to know how he is. Where he is. And then I hurried across the village square. I climbed up the steps to the cemetery. There was the knacker, up to his belly in the earth. I had just come from the post office, I said. It was so quiet today, why was that. “I’ve never known it this quiet,” I
said. “Yes,” said the knacker, “it is quiet. There’s no wind.”—“No,” I said. And then I thought of something: “The landlord … How did the manslaughter case come about? You know, that business at the pub,” I said. “The manslaughter case?” he said. “Yes, the manslaughter case. What sort of man was he?”—“What sort of man?”

He had sat in the inn for a couple of weeks, but got rowdy every night, and often called for more to drink at three in the morning. And once the landlord had refused. Then the workman had lashed out with his fists. And the landlord with a beer glass. “It happens,” said the knacker. “They usually get up afterward and sit together and have a drink and get to be friends. Didn’t happen on this occasion,” he said. “But at first, people thought it wasn’t a crime?”—“Yes,” said the knacker, “at first.”—“Then how did it come up?”—“Yes,” said the knacker, “how did it come up?”

He picked up his shovel again, and went back to work. I went over to the children’s graves and looked at the photographs on the tombs. Whey-faces, I thought. Puffy faces. Dead faces. Faces attacked by birds of prey. When I went back, I passed the knacker again, and he stopped digging. “Isn’t it strange,” I said, “that it’s so quiet today?”—“Yes,” he said, “it often gets so quiet, you can’t hear nothing but your own heart beating.” I went down to the rectory, and headed off to the larch wood, away from the village.

•   •   •

Nothing, not one thing, was mute. Everything continually expressed its pain. “The mountains, you see, are great witnesses to great pain,” said the painter. He walked toward the mountain: “People always say: the mountain reaches up into heaven. They never say: the mountain reaches down into hell. Why not?” He said: “Everything is hell. Heaven and earth, and earth and heaven, they’re all hell. Do you understand? Above and below are hell, here. But of course nothing reaches into anything else. Do you understand? There is no adjacency.” The newly arrived Föhn showed up details on the shady side that normally were not seen. “You see?” said the painter, “all those shadows? They’re mountain goats, look!” He drew me closer. “Look!” he said. But I didn’t see any. “That mountain always put me in mind of a gigantic catafalque. See!” It’s true, the mountain does have the outline of a gigantic catafalque. “In summer I sit here for hours, and study it all,” he said. “Insight? I don’t think so. I just look at everything. So that it doesn’t kill me.” He now went on ahead. “Death doesn’t want us to occupy ourselves with it,” he said. “Come along, you go first. And that’s why I continually occupy myself with death!” Was I not cold? Was I not shivering? I wasn’t shivering. “In the Föhn, nothing seems to make sense. Everything you say seems nonsense. Religions dupe us about the fact that everything is nonsense, you know. Christianity is nonsense. Christianity. Yes. Prayer is a false state of consciousness. One that turns everything into nothing. Prayer. Absolutely.” But the human animal liked to live in such a false state of consciousness, with misleading impressions, “that pressed his head down to the ground. Suddenly, one renounces all falsehood. Renounces unchastity, chastity, weakness, the opposite of weakness, renunciation itself. Then everything comes clear. There have been such dark
moments in my life that left me unable to speak finally, and that are killing off and will kill off what existed in me, and exists in me, and will never exist again.

“I often tried to come closer to the truth, to this understanding of truth, even if only through silence. Through nothing. I didn’t succeed. I never got beyond the attempts. There was always an ocean in the way, my inability to tie her heart, as people say, to mine. Just as I never succeed in coming into harmony with the truth, so nothing in my life succeeded, except my dying. I never wanted to die, and yet never tried to compel anything more rigorously. To make the world die in me, and myself die in the world, and everything to cease as though it had never been. Night is much darker yet than any notion of night, and day is just a gloomy and unbearable interval.” He wanted to go home. We walked up the ravine.

“The policeman is another one enjoying carnal relations with the landlady,” he said. “I have made some observations. They fit my theory. I get up and go to the window and see the policeman. I hear a conversation outside, which woke me. An exchange between the landlady and the policeman. At first I thought the policeman was on duty. That maybe the landlady got him to come for some reason. But then I could see from the state of his clothes that he had spent the night with the landlady. His uniform was partly unbuttoned. He walked back to the village with his rifle on his shoulder. I noticed once before a certain tension between the policeman and the landlady. I wasn’t mistaken. The disordered clothing and the policeman’s whole manner indicate that something transpired
between himself and the landlady that night. I’m a light sleeper, I wake up at the least sound. That’s why I see more than others do. It’s not pleasant. My suspicion is confirmed: the policeman stands in for the knacker, when the latter is away. It’s strange the people that come together. One would have thought they must be mutually repellent, but no, they attract one another. The policeman is very young. Younger than you.” When we stood outside the inn, he said: “I had thought of asking you up to my room, but I won’t now. Perhaps we could put it off till tomorrow.” He opened the door and with his stick pushed me into the public bar, where a lot of people were sitting. It was twelve already.

“The walls are hollow. Even soft rapping will make itself heard down into the foundations,” he said. Since there was a rushing stream a hundred yards further on, the inn was subject to a continuous, but therefore all the more dangerous shaking. “The plaster in my room is crumbling,” said the painter. “The stucco rose pattern is cracked from top to bottom, and way beyond. There are great patches of damp. If you lay your hand on them, you will feel cold. The cowbells in autumn are said to have a deleterious effect on the fabric. You hear the water barrels down in the kitchen with a noise like thunder. Not to mention the beer barrels when they are trundled inside. Of course the termite labors day and night. But I like all that. It doesn’t scare me. Quite the contrary. I have the feeling I am at home.”

For the painter, everything is terrible. “Every so often new tunnels through the walls are completed, and then there’s a
trickle of sawdust,” he says. “If there’s a break in the cold, then the window frames creak, and the floorboards, as if they were exhaling.” Down in the cellar there was a crack made by an earthquake once. Clocks and paintings had rattled against the walls. Lamps shattered, some floorboards had to be relaid. Carpenters and masons were kept busy for four or five days. Apparently, Weng was situated on the eastern extremity of a fault line that came up from the south to the northern foothills of the Alps. In the vicarage cellar there was a rock split in two that one could view. “For the earthquake, it was the work of a single second,” says the painter. The rock had split asunder, the vicarage itself had sustained no damage whatsoever. Since that time, various stories had circulated about the “earthquake rock” in the vicarage. “Every place has its miracles. Did you know I once found a pair of blackbirds in the attic, dried and pressed together? A pair of blackbirds. Fossilized. As if their song were still filling the air.” Summer was “warm and full of apprehension.” Winter “cold and strange.” An elderberry bush had suddenly pushed through the rear wall of the house. “A jolt in the night. As if a hand had suddenly moved everything by one handbreadth … I was here once, it was the end of October, when I had the sensation that the song of birds that had been there all spring and all summer had frozen in the air. And was waiting for deliverance. For the first warm days … Profound shadows” were often projected by the inn. Just as the whole depression in which the inn is situated is fertile ground for dowsers.

There are many reasons for the painter to be in Weng. A sudden gust of an ill wind was enough to set him down here. The inn has always disappointed him. As he says, “It disappoints
even the undemanding guest.” It was a nook “where an existence can knit itself together.” He often thought of it as resembling a cemetery like the one at San Michele in Venice, “where the dead are stacked in layers … Have you not noticed the way people live in cemeteries? That big cities are big cemeteries? That small towns are lesser cemeteries? Villages yet smaller ones? That a bed is a coffin? Clothes are graveclothes? That everything is a readying for death? The whole of existence is a trying out for laying out and burial.” The idea of situating the inn on this deadly spot, “where nothing has ever stood,” was inexplicable. The landlord’s father was effectively given the site in the hollow. He won it in a bet. No one remembers what the bet was about. Leftover railroad ties were used in the construction of the house. Old bricks, laboriously tapped clean by the builders themselves. “Cement they stole from the storehouses of the cellulose factory.” They had the inn ready in four years. Three days after it was finished, the builder died. “Isn’t it always the way that people die when the house is finished? Or perhaps a little before? But always on the summit, or just below?” The landlady had been unable to pay for the railroad ties in ten years. “But when the state’s your creditor, you take your time,” he said. “The walls are so thin, you can hear people’s thoughts through them.” Their bad consciences. Upstairs and down. “The landlady sometimes goes around and swills out the dirt with bucketloads of water. Also the traces of slaughtering days at Christmas and Easter … Fresh coat of paint every fifteen years … The wallpaper patterns go from room to room.” Electric light had been introduced shortly before the last war.

•   •   •

“Another reason I’m here is the abattoir smell that lingers over the village.” He went around in that smell with his pants belt pulled tight, as if to cut it off. “Sometimes my methods get to be too much for me.” There were a thousand references to the torment, the myriad awfulnesses, from the second you awoke in the morning. “The damp, infertile soil that the inn stands on … All imaginable diseases are continually germinating in this soil. It’s not possible to be so healthy that being here won’t cripple you inside and out.”

Among other things, he had occasionally worked as a substitute teacher, teaching at various elementary schools. “Conspiracies against myself.” Since, as was known, there was a monstrous shortage of teachers, he had always been able to find employment. It surprised him that he had never been called upon to take any sort of proficiency test, “not one.” The very first time he had put himself forward as a substitute, he had found himself hired. “I was hungry, I thought I would try and get something at a school I passed every day. They wanted to put me in a classroom right away, though they didn’t know the first thing about me. I said I hadn’t even written out an application. They didn’t want to let me go. Can you understand that? There were loads and loads of schools then, and no teachers. Far too few teachers. I handed in my application to the official in the local education department, who processed it immediately, in my presence. The official should have presented it to several other officials in the ministry, before it went to the highest authority for approval. In the event he took it up to his superior himself, who immediately gave it the nod. That same day I went back to the school, and was taken on. I was given a classroom in
the school basement, with electric lighting on all the time. I moved schools several times a year. In between times I didn’t work. For as long as possible. As long as I wasn’t compelled to have any dealings with the art world. Sooner go back to school than have dealings with the art world. Sometimes I needed support from my brother, who always had extraordinary ties with extraordinarily influential individuals. He was useful to me, even though I never approached him for help. Of course, I never told him about being a substitute teacher. But as you know, word gets out … It’s impossible to do anything without word getting out, without it becoming public knowledge. Public knowledge in particular in those circumstances where what you most fear is something becoming public knowledge …” In fact, he had no aptitude for dealing with children, he was incapable of teaching them anything. “But the school authorities never asked me about any of that. They took me without a single question. Asked me only whether I was happy with the money I would have earned, had I decided to stay. The children bossed me … The tragedy of it was that the children bossed me from the start. Even though they were frightened of me. Of course the relationship between teacher and pupils is far from ideal,” he said. “Children are monsters … Powerful and cruel, like monsters.” The only way he had been able to restrain them had been by showing them from the outset how unpredictable he could be. “I beat them too … But it hurt me. It hurt me so much, I was frightened of myself.” His way home after class had been “paved with fear.” In spite of which, it had been the best thing for him, being a substitute teacher. Rather than using his art to pay his way. “I always hated the art world.” Accusations against the world around him had always really been accusations against himself. “Everything is
your own fault. The things that make you suffer are your own fault. You can always make an end. If you don’t make an end, you suffer. Suffer horribly. Stop suffering, and make an end, why don’t you?” he said. During his lessons, “which might have been taught by anyone who could count up to fifty, and speak and write three correct sentences, for instance the sentence: ‘I leave home with my father, and come back alone,’ or: ‘My mother is kind to me,’ or: ‘The days are bright, but the nights are dark,’ I read my Pascal all the time. You know Pascal! Even then I read nothing but Pascal!” It was a remarkable thing that he had only ever taught in ancient, dilapidated, already half-shut-down schools. “Even the way I spoke should have warned those responsible against taking me on, against getting involved with me.” But one shouldn’t overestimate substitute teaching either. It was basically “a martyrdom which I suffered in patience, because everything else would have been much worse.” There had been frequent complaints from parents to the headmaster. “They complained about all kinds of things. And the heads had no option but to have me transferred. To request a transfer for me. Then I would be transferred.” After two years he might find himself back at a school which he was all too familiar with “from many fits of weakness.” “But basically they just used me as a stand-in for sick teachers.”