Frost: A Novel (30 page)

I have to say, there was a real to-ing and fro-ing today.

We came out of the larch wood, making for the village and beyond into the deep forest. I was leading the way. The
painter followed me, all the time I had the sense he’s about to lay into me, he’ll attack me from behind. I don’t know what prompted me to think that way, but I was unable to lose the fear that was oozing out of me. From time to time I picked up a word he was saying, it was completely incomprehensible to me, I couldn’t answer him when he asked me something, because really he was only asking himself. He growled at me: “Kindly stop when I ask you a question!” I stopped. “Come here!” he commanded. Suddenly I realized (it was in his tone, and I felt only I was in a position to realize this) the resemblance to his brother, the assistant. He said: “The air is the only true conscience, do you understand me?” I replied: “I don’t understand you.”—“The air, I say, is the only true science!” he repeated. I still didn’t understand, but nodded anyway. He said: “The gesture of the air, the great aerial gesture, you understand. The nightmarish sweat of fear, that’s the air.” I told him that was a great thought. In my opinion it was even poetry, to me what he had just said was the distillation of all memory, of all possibility. “Poetry is nothing!” he said. “Poetry as you understand it is nothing. Poetry as the world understands it, as the poetry hound understands it, is nothing. No, this poetry is nothing! The poetry that I have in mind is something else. If you meant
that
poetry, then you’d be right. Then I’d have to embrace you!” I said: “What is your poetry?”—“My poetry isn’t
my
poetry. But if you mean
my
poetry, then I’ll have to admit I’m unable to offer you a description of it. You see, my poetry,
which is the only poetry
, and therefore also
the only truth
, just as much as
the only truth
that I find in the air, which I feel in the air, which is the air,
this poetry of mine
is always generated at the center of its own thought, which is all its own. This poetry is momentary, is instantaneous. And therefore it isn’t. It is
my
poetry.”—“Yes,”
I said, “it is your poetry.” I had understood nothing of what he had said. “Let’s go on,” he said, “it’s cold. The cold is eating into the center of my brain. If only you knew how far the cold had already advanced into my brain. The insatiable cold, the cold that insists on its bloody nourishment of cells, that insists on my brain, on everything that could make anything, could
become
anything. You see,” he said, “the brain, the skull and the brain within it, are an incredible irresponsibility, a dilettantism, a lethal dilettantism, that’s what I want to say. One’s forces are attacked, the cold bites into my forces, into my human forces, into the lofty muscle power of reason. It’s this ancient tourism of cold, billions of years old, this exploitative and pernicious tourism, that penetrates my brain, the entry of frost … There is,” he said, “no longer the category of ‘secret,’ it doesn’t exist, everything is just
frigor mortis
. I see the cold, I can write it down, I can dictate it, it’s killing me …” In the village, he popped into the abattoir. He said: “Cold is one of the great A-truths, the greatest of all the A-truths, and therefore it is all truths rolled into one. Truth is always a process of extermination, you must understand. Truth leads downhill, points downhill, truth is always an abyss. Untruth is a climbing, an up, untruth is no death, as truth is death, untruth is no abyss, but untruth is not A-truth, you understand: the great infirmities do not approach us from outside, the great infirmities have been within us, surprisingly, for millions of years …” He says, staring through the open abattoir doors: “There it is clearly in front of you, broken open, sliced apart. And there’s the scream as well, of course! If you listen, you’ll catch the scream as well. You will still hear the scream, even though the facility for the production of the scream is dead, is severed, chopped up, ripped open. The vocal cords have been rendered, but the scream is
still there! It’s a grotesque realization that the vocal cords have been smashed, chopped up, sliced apart, and the scream is
still there
. That the scream is always there. Even if all the vocal cords have been chopped up and sliced apart, are dead, all the vocal cords in the world, all the vocal cords of all the worlds, all the imaginations, all the vocal cords of every creature, the scream is always there, is always
still
there, the scream cannot be chopped up, cannot be cut through, the scream is the only eternal thing, the only infinite thing, the only ineradicable thing, the only constant thing … The lesson of humanity and inhumanity and human opinions, and of the great human silence, the lesson of the great memory protocol of the great being, should all be tackled through the abattoir! Schoolchildren should not be brought to heated classrooms, they should be made to attend abattoirs; it is only from abattoirs that I expect understanding of the world and of the world’s bloody life. Our teachers should do their work in abattoirs. Not read from books, but swing hammers, wield saws, and apply knives … Reading should be taught from the coiled intestines, and not from useless lines in books … The word ‘nectar’ should be traded in forthwith for the word ‘blood’ … You see,” said the painter, “the abattoir is the only essentially philosophical venue. The abattoir is
the
classroom and
the
lecture hall. The only wisdom is abattoir wisdom! A-truth, truth, untruth, all added up come to the vast abattoir immatriculation, which I would like to make compulsory for humans, for new humans, and those tempted to become humans. Knowledge in the world is not abattoir knowledge, and it lacks thoroughness. The abattoir makes possible a radical philosophy of thoroughness.” We had gone into the slaughterhouse. “Let’s go,” said the painter, “in me the smell of blood turns into
the extraordinary
, the smell of blood is
the
only parity
. Let’s go, otherwise I should have to uproot the possibility of new intellectual disciplines from my own thinking materiality, and I don’t have the strength for that.” He took large steps, and said: “The beast bleeds for the human, and knows it. Meanwhile the human doesn’t bleed for the beast, and doesn’t know it. The human is the incomplete beast, the beast could be fully human. Do you understand what I mean: the one is disproportionate to the other, the one is massively dark to the other. Neither is for the other. Neither excludes the other.”

“I find the inn insufferable, you must know,” he said. “But I have an instinctive yen to expose myself to it, to expose myself to everything that is directed against me. Where there is putrescence, I find I cannot breathe deeply enough. I always want to breathe in the odor of humanity, you understand.” He had always been at pains to strike up a relationship with the world around him, “which is a deeply contemptible undertaking, of course.” To stay close to the things he hated had been his endeavor from the start, “to wander around like a dog among human legs, perfectly meaningless, surrendering to my sense impressions.” Then, like a dog, they had always kicked him. “It’s true,” he said. “Always drowning in the midst of people, but never going down. Wherever there are people, the necessary sweating out of lust!” He had always told himself: “I keep steering clear of murder, homicide,
suicide. It drives me crazy.” The sound of the workers eating their soup was for him “a dull, distant ringing of bells, portending nothing.” Each time he set foot in the inn, he felt disgust. But then he raised his head, “far beyond himself,” so as to beach himself “like an ocean-going vessel onto the desert of humanity. Like a sportsman, I show off my injuries,” he said. “I settle down between walls of meat that warm me. Then the unbearable turns into something physically soothing for me.” He thinks he is successful in passing himself as being like everyone else, but he is not successful. He thinks he is unobtrusive, but that makes him all the more an alien in their midst. “Do you see the big chunks of bread floating in your soup? I am reminded of the end of the world. A grand vision, you know, is founded on a very small observation.”

“You are molested wherever you go,” said the painter. “It’s as if everyone had conspired to bother you. An instinct that rages through them all like a wildfire. Against you. You wake up, and you feel molested. In fact:
the
hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast! When you go out on the street, you are subject to the gravest possible molestations. You are unable to shield yourself. You lay about yourself, but it’s no use. The blows you dole out are returned a hundredfold. What are streets, anyway? Wendings of molestation, up and down. Squares? Bundled together molestations. And all that inside you, you know, not at some distance from you! And all for some insane purpose! And you’re not able to cling on anywhere for assistance. The whole of life, put together from
cries for help, an interminable thought, interfered with by happy humans, workmen, simple housewives with shopping baskets, you know! The begetting of children goes to your head! Women’s desire to conceive? The molestations are so grave, you do nothing but hold your hands over your head. There is no protection for the human. Questions only aggravate the situation. In an emergency, questions might save you from punishment, but only for a time. Honest, open faces turn out to be traps, spring landscapes turn out to harbor plagues. You have already inhaled too much poison to hope to be able to escape. There is no help, you know, there are no untried means, not ‘art,’ not ‘obsession,’ nothing. Insomnia might be a mitigating factor, except that it produces the same consequences as dull-wittedness. You see: I simply have the thought that I was such and such, and that burdens me. Seeing the inn burdens me. Seeing myself. Seeing you. Because that means playing a part, and that burdens me. But kicks are not merely inventions of a shared external world. No. And darkness is often a flowering ceremonial, processions of morbid beauty flit across it, a dizzying arrogance … I suffer at the hands of the above-average, you must know. From the objections of nature, from rights that are anathema to me. I always draw the short straw.”

“And then this alternation between absolute sluggishness and the disappearance of my process into an unplumbed, bottomless region only available to the insane … And yet, I have to say I have never complained, never complained … even the most intractable situation I have successfully negotiated by obstinate refusal. Sometimes I have even succeeded in returning from such straits into health. Now I no longer
believe in such a solution: it would simply kill me from behind my back. The inn is dark, and the humans go around in their terrible fevers, sunken, mysterious, unable to die, you know, while things outside are even darker. While everyone in the inn is asleep, the pressing hostility outside increases. I am of the view that there are no extraterrestrial influences involved. It’s an appalling thing to me to know that I may be infecting you with my illness, and just as appalling to feel how necessary you are to me … and since I am, as you know, a master of restraint, and have always been able to confine myself to the tiniest limits … now do me the favor and tell me what you think of me, I mean, tell me the truth and don’t leave me in this ridiculous torment … You can go your ways, I don’t want to claim ownership of you, I don’t want you to be irritated with me … The pain, you know, the pain in my head drags my earlobes down to my knees.”

“The tragedy” was not always tragic, wasn’t always perceived as tragic, “even though it always is a tragedy … The world isn’t moved by tragedy.
Nothing is tragic.”
The ridiculous was “more omnipotent than anything else.” Within the category of the ridiculous, you might find “tragedies like mine shafts, when you didn’t have a light.” There was despair in the ridiculous. “It is,” said Strauch, “as if the terrible thing
were true.”
He dropped his stick, and I stooped to pick it up for him. “Everything always strikes us differently on every occasion. Frost for instance,” said the painter, “in one man it’s chilblains, in another it’s a little town in summer … And finally, as we know, frost may also signify the
end of a world empire.”
It strikes him as practical to wear puttees, and he says: “Why did people ever stop wearing puttees? You can’t
buy puttees anywhere nowadays. And ordering them made costs a lot of time and money and nerves.” Every new acquisition was such a problem for him that he ended up not acquiring it after all.

“It’s a monstrous thing that tragedies always contain monstrous tragedies within them.” He says: “What is a state of panic? Is a state of panic when something is approaching that you know very well or that you
don’t know at all
, and are afraid of for that reason?” The word “monstrous” sounds quite hollow the way he uses it. Sometimes he uses the word “morbid” as he comes after me. “Isn’t monstrous misery the same thing as monstrous happiness? The monstrous vulnerability of connections in the brain …?” Man was “in his fact,” and: “There are only bailiffs and those who are afraid of bailiffs and who would like nothing better than to become bailiffs …” and: “The sky would get goose bumps if it knew something we didn’t. Eerie? That’s the many-dimensional darkness in the evening between the cliff faces.” When he stops, and laughter spills out of him, then everything is indeed eerie. When, as he does today, he jabs his stick into my back, and says: “Now walk down into the hollow! Walk!” And I suddenly see the lights of the inn ahead of me, no more than a dozen paces away.

Tomorrow is the funeral of the woodcutter who was run over by his own sleigh. The landlady got a death announcement from his family. Here, fatalities are announced on
parte
slips, which are pinned up on doors. Where the deceased are local people, you often see these
parte
notices on every door,
as now, when the
parte
notice of the farmer’s wife and the crushed woodcutter appear on every front door. They are big cards, edged in black. On them, it says when the deceased was born and the day he died. Whose child he was, and who his next of kin are. Where he is buried, and where a mass is being read for him. His line of work is also given. All the relatives are given with full names. The woodcutter has been laid out for days already in his parents’ house on the shadow side. The landlady got herself ready bright and early, and went down the ravine across to the shadow side, to pay her respects to the parents of the dead man. He was engaged, and in another three weeks, he and his fiancée were to have married. It was all prepared. But not the funeral, which needs to be arranged hastily and very differently. His bride was spending night and day kneeling at the bedside of her fiancé. Just praying, wouldn’t eat anything. The landlady had spoken to the boy’s parents. “A young man in the pink of health,” she says. The dead boy’s parents had asked her to stay for lunch, but she had to be back at ten, to start cooking. A lot of blood had flowed out of the corners of his mouth, she says. “It was thick and brown.” The loss wouldn’t have been so grievous, “if he hadn’t been the only son, now lying dead in his room, under the shroud that his mother sewed and decorated for her own use at some future date.”—“When an only child dies, then it’s as though the parents are dead as well,” the boy’s mother is supposed to have said. The young deceased was said to have been cheerful “and better educated” than most of his age. Had even read books that no one else had read, and the bride was prettier than all the other girls. His father had forbidden him to drive up to the clearing again, but he wouldn’t be put off. Now the father was blaming himself. “I should have forbidden it flat” were his words. The
woodcutter lived to be twenty-two. Each time someone dies who’s younger than yourself, it’s a frightening thing. Why? They wondered whether to bury him in a black or a white coffin, in the end they settled on a black. All at once. They still lay his place at table for him, where he would have eaten if he’d got back alive. The landlady said: “I don’t suppose there’ll be as many people at his funeral as there were for the farmer’s wife’s funeral.”