Frost: A Novel (22 page)

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He explains how memory shifts from unconfined joy to sorrow, and light turns into darkness, just as morning becomes noon, noon afternoon, and afternoon evening. How homecoming comes to feel like escape once did. How neglect and incapacity make for torment, bitterness, and despair. “What’s the danger?” he asks. Putting it to use? Putting what to use? A man watches a woman who only lately was delighted with herself, with him, now falling like a stone into the wretchedness of pregnancy. Her voice is suddenly tired, and her heart jaded, she just wants to be left alone. Strength of character starts to fade, there is nothing left. Antipathy hurts quite amazingly. Serenity becomes disfavor, then open hostility, then killing and letting live. The jolly climb to the peak ends up in the inn in the valley with aggravated assault. A happy, enchanting turn of phrase suddenly brings about a quarrel. It’s the machinery that thinks and that governs the man. Admiration turns into reproach, character swiftly and reflexively into lack of character. Dreams turn into the destruction of dreams, and poems turn into piles that are driven home. He knows how morale comes to grief, and primal happiness turns into a lie. How a mean instinct finds its way into a million receptor centers, and wipes them all out. “Who knows anything about the moment, but everything shrivels up in a moment, the extinction of everything is the work of a moment.” He explains the air to me which drowns one color, and allows another to climb into the unbearable. “With my grandparents,” he said, “where happiness came and went, and often stayed for hours, unobserved of course, there we could marvel at the way a filthy mood suddenly took control, which froze everything that made up this mood, and finally
ensured that it was forgotten: the walk in the woods, the sleigh ride over the frozen lake, the reading aloud, the clean pure water. A hand moved, and there was no contradiction.” Just as crimes and accidents were brought on by great happiness. “The result of thoughtlessness, which can be so beautiful, it can move mountains. Compared to a wind, which will suddenly expose a tree. With the sea’s rough justice. It’s baffling how everyone calls for a lasting happiness,” he said. “Since all anything has is resale value.” Ornaments that charmed entire Sundays would suddenly turn into grotesques, just as people turned into animals and vice versa, enough to put anyone to flight. Blue went black, and black to blue. Top turns to bottom. Just as a street turned into another street, no one quite could say where. “A man never knows the decisive moment.” Everything flowed like rivers which were condemned by nature to carry greater or lesser quantities of water.

During the blizzard, a fire broke loose in the neighboring village, which turned a large farmhouse to ashes. The site of the fire is five or six miles’ distance from Weng. A lot of people ran over there, even while the blizzard was still raging, fires exert an irresistible pull on people. They leave everything standing and have nothing but the inferno in their heads. When I met the painter in the entrance, he said: “Did you see the knacker charge in here? He says the fire was started by an electric spark. Did you see him giving his information? He plunged in the way a herald in Greek tragedy does. Typical of people,” he said, “both dementing and demented, just as they both govern and are governed. The knacker and the landlady, they’re both good examples of fires as they go through the
people. You see,” he said, “on the one side there’s the bearer of news, on the other the receiver of news, the astonished, the sensation-hungry. It takes the landlady to give any importance to what the knacker has to say. Then the landlady takes over the knacker’s role, and then others take her role, and his, and eventually an entire population is busy with the news …” The fire had cost the lives of hundreds of pigs. Men with cloths wrapped round their faces had tried to rescue the pigs who had broken loose, but then the pigs had run back into the flames, cows as well, ducks, all the poultry had gone up in flames. Everything burned or choked in the fire. The fire engines completely helpless, because all the wells are frozen, none of the streams carry any water … In the space of a few seconds, huge flames had sprung up, which were kept down by the clouds. There had been a flickering in the sky that they all had seen. Albeit, there had been nothing to see from the inn. You can’t see anything from here. You can’t see anything from the hollow. “A terrible fire! The Weng fire brigade have come out, didn’t you hear?” I didn’t hear anything. “No one in the inn heard anything. Nothing is heard in the inn, everything passes overhead. You have to imagine the dry wood, the hay, the straw barn was like a glowing cube of fire, as it finally broke apart. Hoses without water, fire chiefs standing by helplessly, their crews unrolling the hoses, and then no water … Where was it going to come from? Unimaginable, people are so helpless. A colossal scene as the roof frame comes crashing down! I saw such a thing once before, in a Bavarian village, when I was walking down the road, completely blinded by snow, trying not to suffocate in it, when all at once sparks were spinning round my head, more and more sparks, not just white flakes, but red also; I ran in the direction from where the red flakes seemed to be
blowing … Left of me, up on a hill, I saw a burning roof frame behind the wall of snow. The whole horizon was on fire. Perhaps I was thinking of rescuing someone or something, but the spectacle was ringing in my ears and warming the soles of my feet! As I soon saw, I was the first person to discover the fire. Great waves of heat washed up to me. I was still a hundred yards from the fire when I heard creaking and groaning and breaking and finally also screams, and then suddenly alarmed people were running around,
out
of the fire, or
into
the fire. Picture it to yourself: it was night, people were in their beds, they ran as they were, in their nightgowns and nightshirts in the snow, burning torches falling down in the snow, it hissed the way it does when you extinguish a burning candle in snow, you know, and then the roof tree came down! At first it seemed to buckle, and then it came down with a tremendous crash. And then there was the bellowing of the cattle that weren’t able to get away, because the doors were all pinned shut from the incredible pressure from above. The whole thing happened very fast, in under twenty minutes. The firemen braved the flames, pulled people out, but they were already half-dead, or fell down dead in the snow. It was pure chance that I saw it at all, it was because I was late getting home, from the house I was living in at the time I wouldn’t have been able to see anything, it was built in a hollow, like the inn. As it transpired, the owner of the house and his wife both died in the flames. And another three or four other people as well, who were working there. A couple of the servants were taken to the hospital with burns, and received treatment for months, and in one case, as I learned, for years. Their lives, of course, were ruined. When the knacker came dashing in, I immediately remembered that fire, I’ve never forgotten it. Then, as now, there were rumors
of arson. Now, as then, poor people set off for the site of the fire with their rucksacks, to try and pick up pieces of beef and pork and scraps of poultry. Emergency slaughters were carried out on the spot. You know, anyone’s allowed to help himself to a burned carcass. Whatever was there to be picked up, people picked up. There are people who are just waiting for a fire to break out, and then head off there immediately, sometimes in cars, to try and loot whatever they can. They turn up with slaughtering tools, with axes and knives, and they chop everything into pieces. A fire is an extraordinary spectacle! A grotesque spectacle!” At ten o’clock, I was still sitting in the public bar, because the knacker couldn’t stop talking about it, he kept starting over afresh, all the while missing tricks he could have picked up, because he had a king or an ace or whatever, and then the engineer came by, he had been at a dance somewhere, and he reported it was arson. There were people being questioned already. A group of police and court investigators was at work, and would be at work all night. A large insurance deal that had been concluded only the day before was almost certain proof that the owner had set fire to his own house.

It was arson. But it wasn’t the farmer, as everyone supposed, who set fire to the house, but one of his farmhands, who didn’t know the insurance was in place, and who wanted to damage his master. It is known why: there is talk of a “relationship”
between the farmer and the farmhand, of which the farmer’s wife, who also died in the blaze, was informed. And so the farmer stands to receive a large sum of money. Apparently, he wants to invest it in a factory in a Tyrolean valley, and not have anything more to do with agriculture. They found his wife at the back of the house, crushed by a falling beam. The assumption is that she ran back into the building to find her little boy, but the little boy was faster than she was, and got out of the room by himself; then, as she rushed back out of the house, having avoided the flames and smoke, the beam fell on her head. In the dark they clambered over her body several times without realizing it, they supposed she was in the building, under the wreckage, among the animals that were burned to charred ruins, blackish-brown lumps of matter, with horns or hooves protruding from it in some cases, looking as stiff and rigid as cast iron, and giving off a frightful smell, which I now seem to remember having smelled around the inn as well. Our policeman had to force people away, strangers come to loot, with his rifle butt, and even hit the odd one a blow over the head, when they refused to do as they were told. A doctor had arrived, but too late. They were able to save the tractor, on which the farmer had driven clear of the burning house. The landlady is going to the wife’s burial, she knows the family. “A large farm,” she said. As a girl, she had once been employed there, with her sister. “The whole of one summer.” Now they are looking everywhere for the farmhand who started the fire. The policeman duly went up to the inn early in the morning to ask questions. But no man who answered the description of the wanted man had ever shown his face in her inn, the landlady said. The arsonist comes from Carinthia, “where all bad lots come from,” as the landlady says, and had only been
working at the farm from late fall. The police think he may have gone home, but they want to keep an open mind. It was his day off, and he was wearing his Sunday best before leaving the house. Afterward, during the fire, the farmer had recalled that he had taken his little suitcase with him as well. Generally, such people, once they have perpetrated their crime, tend to turn up at friends’ or relatives’, and are found by the police. They would see where they found him, if they found him at all. But usually they find people like that in a matter of days, if not hours. Because they won’t have gone very far, they don’t have the means. Or the courage either. They will hide out in a hay barn or a wayside hut and will be found, half-starved or completely starved. If the farm had burned down just a day earlier, the farmer wouldn’t have stood to get a single cent for it. Whereas now he’ll receive an enormous sum. The fire-setter must have miscalculated by just one day. “You know,” the painter said, “the whole country, as you see, is full of criminals. Full of murderers and arsonists.”

“It’s oppressive,” said the painter, “really oppressive today. The smell of the fire is everywhere. Do you feel like going up and having a look? I don’t myself. If there were a sleigh, but there aren’t any sleighs. It’s too much trouble.” He had sat in the kitchen of the poorhouse and talked with the mother superior, and some of the kitchen women. “They make soup from potato peels,” he said. Gypsies had passed through the village, and been given a hot meal at the poorhouse. “They came with a horse and cart. Part of a larger group that stopped down at the station. From Croatia. The mother superior gave them all bread and a medal. The Gypsies are left over, left over from a world that’s sick of itself. They
wanted to sing, but the mother superior didn’t want any singing, and so they didn’t sing, and they packed the bread in their cart, and drove off …” He said: “And then I went through the village. But the weather, as the teacher likes to say, is stupid. The newborn are dying all over the place. Emergency slaughterings are undertaken every day. I’ve heard the butcher giving out orders nonstop. His wooden clogs against the aluminum tub of blood. The glistening of the calf’s intestines as he pulled them out. The warm, sweet smell of them! You know, they still brain them here, they refuse to shoot them, the way they do everywhere else. One man grabs hold of the ears and tail, the other clubs it down. I expect you’re familiar with the sound of an animal collapsing onto the cement floor of an abattoir. The mountains are suddenly so near, you think you’ll hit your brains against them. The whole village is littered with tufts of hair and scraps of hide. I tell them to tidy them away, and shovel snow over the puddles of blood, but who listens to me. In the countryside, the paths are always sodden with blood. I went into the butcher’s and told him he should get his apprentice to sweep the hair away from the entrance to the slaughterhouse, and cover over the bloodstains, and then I didn’t leave till the fellow had swept and covered it. The butcher said there was going to be a big lavish affair in the next village because of the farmer’s dead wife, they had come and placed orders with him. And that was why he had been doing some fresh killing. He needs to supply them tonight.” They had a sledload of meat to deliver to the community center in O.

We had reached the place where the Klamm suddenly opens out. It was a long way round, but Strauch was dead set on
going there. I had read him a sentence from my Henry James book, and he interpreted it in the most wonderful way, this incomprehensible, to me incomprehensible sentence, which kept me awake all night (I have to say, I was never in all my life afflicted with this restlessness, I had gone down from my room into the public bar, and then walked out of the house into the cold air, into the “graveyard chill,” I wandered into the ravine, I had thrown a jacket over my nightshirt, slipped into my trousers, and was walking “into the unconsciousness of things”; but I am unable to explain any of it, I can’t write anything down that happened, neither of that nor of anything else)—when the painter interpreted this Henry James sentence to me, and the Klamm lay in front of us, the snowed-in approach to the Klamm, he stopped suddenly and told me to stand two paces behind him. He didn’t turn to face me, even though he suddenly started talking to me. “You see,” he said, “this tree comes on and says the line I told it to say, an incomprehensible line of poetry, a line that will turn the world on its head, a so-called line against God, you understand me! This tree walks on from the left, the cloud comes on from the right, the cloud with its softer voice. I view myself as the creator of this afternoon drama, this tragedy! This comedy! Now listen, the music has come in right on cue. The music plays on the difference between my words and all others. Listen, the instruments are perfecting it, my tragedy, my comedy, the instruments, all the high-pitched and low-pitched instruments, music is the only mistress of the double killing-ground, the only mistress of the double pain, the only mistress of the double forbearance … Music, you hear me … language approaches music, but language hasn’t the strength to circumvent music, it has to directly approach music, language is nothing but weakness, the language
of nature as much as the
language of the darkness of nature
, as the language of the depth of leave-taking … You hear me: I was
in
this music, I
am
in this music, I am made of this language, I am contained in the quiet poetry of this afternoon … Do you see
my theater?
Do you see the theater of apprehension? The theater of God’s un-self-sufficiency? What God?” He turned to me and said: “God is a cosmic embarrassment! An immense embarrassment of the stars! But,” he said, and set his index finger against his mouth: “let’s not talk about that. I want the tree to finish its lines, I want the stream to finish its lines, I want the sky to finish its lines, and I want Hell to master the rationale of its fires, to the very end. I want these fires, you must know. I want these shadows, I want these shadows to kill … to kill each and every thing … I have compassion with this tragedy, with this comedy, I have
no
compassion with this tragedy, this comedy, this self-invented tragicomedy, with these self-invented shadows, with these torments of shadows, with these shadow torments, with this endless sadness …” He said: “Such a spectacle is a product of absurdity, of divine absurdity, such a spectacle, you see, you must know, is nothing but laughter … And now listen,” said the painter, “the world arises into the air from its own dark, just as air, just as the water in the air, the relation between the air and the other air … Yes,” said Strauch, “and now I’m going to clap my hands, quite simply clap my hands, I’m going to clap my hands and bang my head against the most sensitive point of the universe, and the whole thing was just a specter, just a specter of a ghost, you understand, just a ghostly specter.” We walked into the village. He said: “Sometimes exhaustion comes into my head like a self-dispersed theater, like something endlessly musical-demoniacal, and destroys me. It
destroys me on the way to inability to be myself, on the way to the smallest, most remorseful tranquillity in my memory, and my ravaged heart.” He said: “For me it might have been enough simply to say, tree, forest, rock, air, earth; but for you, and for the world around, that’s not enough … You suddenly find yourself manufacturing a trauma, a drama, a comedy, a worm’s cast of a comedy … And sometimes nature will wring one’s neck,
nature without simplicity
, and then you see: the endless complications of terrible nature. Then, finally, everything is incomprehensible, ever more incomprehensible! All I had wanted to say was: ‘Here comes the tree …’ Nothing more. ‘The air is learning its lines …’ Nothing more. Come on, let’s go, and let’s not be scared anymore.”