Frost: A Novel (25 page)

•   •   •

Today, I was to collect the painter from the vicarage, where he was paying a visit. “Just ring the bell and wait,” he instructed me, “I’ll come down right away.” He didn’t say I was to go into the vicarage. He visits the vicar from time to time “to discuss his black cat with him, because it’s not possible to talk to him on any other subject. But he has such excellent wine that I never refuse his invitations,” said the painter. Accordingly, I crossed the cemetery, and walked to the vicarage. In the cemetery, I read the names on the children’s graves: here and there, the parents had had their deceased children photographed, and had these photographs displayed on the tombstones. There were many instances, though, of graves with no names on them, without any reference to the child buried there. I was struck that the path that ran through the section of children’s graves to the big compost heap had no footsteps on it. No one had been to visit the children’s graves, certainly not for a long time. There were no candles of the kind that all the children’s graves had back home in L., usually burning. I rang the vicar’s bell, and waited. It wasn’t long before a window opened above me in the second floor, and I took a step back and saw the thin face of a young woman. The vicar’s cook, I thought. And then I heard the sound of footsteps coming down a flight of stairs. Just inside the door, the painter said goodbye to the vicar. He would certainly come again before long, and he thanked him for the refreshments. Then the door opened, and the painter emerged. He took me by the arm, and pushed me along the vicarage wall out into the open, where the ash trees stood. The vicar had told him of great upheavals that were in progress within the “vast Church apparatus,” and of the great impetus coming from the person of the new pope. “But of course,” said the painter, “whatever the Church does, it is
a completely illegitimate organization. Particularly as
church.”
Then he complained about an “agonizing headache, that had already set in when I reached the vicarage, they seem to come earlier and earlier, but without losing any of their ability to get worse and worse.” The vicar’s cook had a relationship with the chimney sweep, he said, but she was so loyal to the vicar, her brother, that he couldn’t get by without her. “The vicar is a farmer’s son from the Lungau,” said the painter, “and completely unable to cope on his own.” He admired his simplicity, and he was “absolutely a good person,” albeit, as already said, “incompetent in the most basic things. Not to mention such things as archiepiscopal visits, where he falls down utterly.” Well, the vicar knew his position with regard to the Church. And he didn’t make any attempt to work on the painter with anything that he was less than completely convinced by himself.

Suddenly we saw a group of power plant workers ahead of us, on their way to the inn. They walked in silence, and then greeted us, because they knew us, as we them. “You see,” said the painter, once they had passed, “those men are on the right road, they are good men.” He watched them go, passing under the juniper bushes, and then disappearing. “You see, there, on the opposite side, on the shady side, that’s where they’re going to dig the second underground reservoir,” he said. “It’s quite easy to discern the lines of the whole thing. The road which you see in front of you was built by the Energy Ministry, and it is immensely profitable to the farmers on that side, because it goes straight past their farms. They were only required to pay a minimal subsidy, those rich, well-off farmers. A laughable supplement, a sum half of
which was paid on their behalf anyway, by the Ministry of Agriculture. Before that, there was only a very narrow rutted cart track leading up to those farms from just behind the station. You see: this is the point where the river will be dammed and put to work, as you see, the power plant itself will have to be built partly in the river and partly into the mountain, on the other side. In the three and a half years that they’ve been working on it so far, eighteen men have lost their lives here, meeting their death either by crane, by water, by rockfalls, or under the wheels of trucks. If you take everything into account, it’s not even a terribly high price! You can see the difficulty of the whole undertaking: it’s not a propitious region for building in!” Getting a job down there was next door to kicking off. “In practice, everything is that much worse. The men remain tired out for the rest of their lives, and unfit for any higher task. But then, what might that be! I’m afraid this anthill is nothing but an earth-mover, on the vastest scale, for a project priced in billions.”

“You have to wonder whether you should really see them as human at all,” he said, “those people who come limping along at five to twelve, limp into a hut, or into a canteen, or an inn. The workers have their particular smell, and the building site has its particular smell, and the cellulose factory; each smell is woven in with the others. And in the cellulose factory, as you know, the work practices have remained unchanged for decades. The work premises have remained unchanged too. High windows which it’s impossible to see out of, because the dirt on them is inches thick. Mind you, with that machine noise going on, you wouldn’t want to look out anyway, where would you look out to? Into blackness.
Into cold blackness. First, the power plant people tried to recruit workers from the cellulose factory for their project. They set up a recruiting office, and offered signing-on bonuses. But very few went over, because they didn’t need to be told that the power plant would be finished one day, in a year, or two, or three, but the cellulose factory will just go on forever. At least, as far as anyone can see. The cellulose factory is an incredibly certain proposition for everyone. In the end, the power plant will end up as a huge source of labor for the cellulose factory. Almost all the workers there are Communists. Communism falls on fertile ground here. Here, up in the Alps, where you wouldn’t think it at all likely. Everything down there is Communist. It’s an area that might have been made specially for Communist infiltration. Communism, as you might not know, is at least the intermediate future for people all over the world. Communism will rule everything, even the remotest valley in the world. Even the most obscure corner of the last winding of a brain opposed to it. Communism is something that thrives on dirt and stench and harsh contrasts. Well, if Communism comes, all that can take a running jump! And behind it Moscow stands and supervises, the way it stands and supervises everywhere.” He said: “And yet, this was originally an ancient Christian valley. But, tell me if you can, where does Catholicism, where does Christianity have its roots nowadays? Where?” We were standing in the middle of the village square.

“Were you ever happy? And did you know then what happiness was? And in a situation you never thought you’d leave?” He said: “I don’t want an answer to my question.”

•   •   •

After we ran into the knacker, who was in conversation with the cobbler in a doorway, we walked to the vicarage, and from there, through the garden of the poorhouse, back to the village square. “Do you hear it at night when I open my window?” he said. “I often get up and open my window. Walk back and forth, back and forth. But it doesn’t settle me at all. I think I’m going to suffocate: but when the cold air streams into my room, my head feels even worse. I think the cold air will get me going again, like winding a watch. But that’s an illusion. The effort and the deviousness I need to get myself going seem to be getting more and more demanding. It is like with a watch, yes. Even if that’s a very simple comparison, but then I’m in favor of using only very simple comparisons in speech, like handholds, to give support … You’re probably a stranger to insomnia. At any rate, I haven’t heard you complain of insomnia. Everything torments me now. I’m like a man tormented by a river he can look at without being able to jump into it. Disgusting points in relation to people and the human past. I see nothing I like.” And then, when we’re in the larch wood again: “Is everyone waiting? Is everyone waiting as I am waiting for something that will alter, shred, conclude everything? To continue it on a completely different level, or way down?” Then we run into the postman coming out of the inn, and he greets us by touching his hand to his cap. Silently. When he’s at a sufficient distance, the painter says: “He’s another one with those dog movements that most of them have here, those dog-paw gestures. He hates his wife. Hates his children. Drinks. Shirks. Man is an ideal hell to his fellow men. And everything gives him phenomenal
grounds to be the way he is.” We pass the hay barn. And then quickly into the inn.

In the night it approaches him like a whole mountain range to torment him. Only began to recede as it got light. Long-extinguished memories were reawakened in him: war, hunger, hatred. The attempt to wrestle sorrow into reason was futile. The futility of creating anything, a picture, a thought, entered the world of his cells as it grew dark, and fled into its hiding places with the returning light. “The day has different pains. I have a brother who’s a doctor,” he says, “you know, but that’s not enough. Anywhere there’s a doctor, there’s a lot of damage.” He mentioned his headache again. In very early childhood he had had a headache, once only, very suddenly “terrible pain behind my frontal bone,” on the edge of a forest. Then not again, not for decades, not till
the onset of this illness
. But “many in our family were destroyed by these headaches, I know that. That dam-bursting and incessant nonsense that crushes words in its path,” he said. “Pain can be an obligation.” And: “Even against my will it can reach its objective. It keeps reaching it.” One had to adopt the pain “like the mirage of a bridge you don’t know where it leads.” Then he started to talk again about the sleigh ride we had gone on the day before. Down to the station. Should he ride in front or in back, his hesitation delayed our departure by fifteen minutes. That sleigh ride reminded me of episodes from distant childhood: winter landscapes. I remembered the form and the color and the breadth and depth of sleigh traces, and the sensations I felt while looking at them. I adeptly put all the windings of the road behind us. “Not so quickly!” I heard
from him a couple of times, he drilled his head into my back, and clasped both arms around me. At the bottom, in front of the station, he was sweating. We went into various shops, bought things, talked to the people behind the counters. Then I went to the apothecary’s for him. He was waiting for me at the station with a thick pile of newspapers in his arms. The mayor picked us up on his horse-drawn sleigh and gave us a lift to Weng.

At the station he was overcome by a great impatience, a sudden disgust, as it seemed to me. “These people who don’t know what to do with themselves,” he said. Stations were “centers of far-reaching lunacy. There you can study brutalism.” Asked about the seven or eight newspapers he had in his arms, he said: “I am principally interested in new ideas. Less what makes the world hold its breath—that’ll be forgotten by the morning. But new ideas,
what will come tomorrow
, the future.” The way he stood all alone in the station hall in front of the ticket counter, he looked like someone for whom nothing is more than a child’s brief game, which will end in death. No. He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

The engineer says that starting tomorrow they will have to work through the night to finish in time. Almost all had volunteered for the night shift. For an hour at night you got three times as much as an hour in the daytime, and today they put up floodlighting to light the site at night. The works management clearly expected the local people who lived along the river to complain about the extra noise. But “their
complaints will be rejected, that’s already been agreed with the mayor.” Of course the crane makes much more noise at night than by day. All sound is louder at night. Now, when they’re knocking in the props for the extra bridge, it will be particularly loud. But if they don’t work at night, the whole thing will take an extra year. And that would be one in the eye for the management, and cause vast losses for the companies involved in the construction. What was quite astounding was that the union had no objection to the proposed night work. The engineer reckons the only reason it was keeping quiet was that it had some stake in one or other of the companies. And so it said nothing about working on Sundays and holidays, let alone on Saturdays and afternoons. “From now on we’ll be working through,” said the engineer. “I haven’t been able to sleep for a long time anyway. I might get to lie down a while, nothing more.” There were continual disputes between the different departments within the project. There was disagreement as to which firms should pick up contracts. There too, everything was political. Often components of inferior quality were ordered because the firm supplying them was more acceptable to the board than another firm whose goods were of higher quality. It was another drawback, the engineer said, that no temporary housing had been thrown together for the wives and children of the workers. “The upshot is that they have to travel forty or fifty miles by train in the evening, and the same coming back in the morning.” That sapped the energy of the workforce. Individuals who weren’t living on-site were noticeably weaker. And they were more expensive too, because the management paid for their rail tickets. Nor were such men suited for night work. Or for work on Sundays and holidays. “But if they have their families on-site, then they’ll agree to work at night and on
weekends.” He, the engineer, would improvise several more temporary accommodations for wives and children in the course of the day. It was worth it, even now. It would also cut down on the amount of association that went on between married men and local girls and women, and less friction. Because it often happens that married men here on their own would drop into the station buffet “just for a glass of beer,” that turned into four or five, and at the end of which it no longer occurred to them to go home, but instead they picked up some railwayman’s girl, and disappeared with her behind a hay shed, or into a quiet room in an inn somewhere. And then they don’t go home till they’ve had enough, which might be three or four nights. And then the wives turn up and complain to the management, which is completely in the dark about everything. “Now, if you set up accommodation for the families, all that could be avoided,” said the engineer. “At least, the trouble could be reduced to a minimum.” One couldn’t hope to eliminate it altogether, anywhere conditions were primitive, there would always be drunkenness and excess. “Anywhere you have a lot of workers, you’ll get a lot of pregnancies,” says the engineer. They’ll make a baby with any girl or woman that strikes them as suitable for the purpose. “What do you think’s on their minds, once the shift’s over?” The knacker grins, and with one gulp empties his half glass of beer. “I’ve witnessed scenes, I tell you, scenes in my own office,” says the engineer, “that no one would believe.” The wives too had a completely false sense of their husbands, but a man was really not cut out for marriage. A woman, yes, but not a man. The night shift went from six in the evening till five in the morning. There were meal breaks at nine p.m. and at two a.m. But he, the engineer, would have to be on his feet day and night, at least some of the time. “I have good
foremen and overseers and good masons and concreters,” he says, “but still you always have to be on the lookout.” He wasn’t petty or mean. When one of the workmen’s wives had come to term recently, he had picked her up in his own car and driven her to the hospital. “Little kindnesses like that win you sympathy,” he says. The knacker asks how deep into the riverbed they had to drill. “Twenty meters,” says the engineer. And had they completed the relaying of the rail tracks. “Yes,” says the engineer. They had had to blast twenty thousand cubic meters of rock out of the mountain to relay the tracks. “That wasn’t in the original blueprints,” he says. “That alone added a couple of million to the costs.” In such a way, construction projects, whatever their scale, always ended up costing you more. “Generally, with building projects, you should double your estimate,” says the engineer. “It’s easy to get in too deep. Believe your figures, and you get burned.” A lot of projects were standing around half-built, and falling down. “To be certain of completing a project, a private contractor should have at least double the budget in the bank. Only the state can build as and when it pleases, and be certain of completing it, because only the state has the funds, and the ability to raise more.”