Frost: A Novel (31 page)

There were a lot of people at the burial of the young woodcutter. The landlady had got a good spot, and stood and wept in front of the open grave for the duration of the ceremony. “I like a good cry,” she says, “when I’m at a funeral.” The woodcutter’s coffin was shouldered by four of his erstwhile school friends. The preacher said something about “a short but God-pleasing life.” His fiancée stood between his parents, all three of them veiled. Everyone filed past the open grave, swung the holy water sprinkler, only the painter and I remained at a suitable distance by the wall. Before the relations could approach us, we left the cemetery by the front steps, and stood to one side of the village square. The band was playing a march, and the feeling was that of all country funerals that don’t pass off in silence. Even while the burial was in progress, we could hear through the open windows and doors of the restaurant the clinking of pots and pans for the funeral feast. Barrels were tapped. The ham steamed as
the rind was pulled off it. I thought how back home in L. funerals pass off in exactly the same way. Maybe things are even a bit more pretentious, because they have more money there. And then I remembered the way it was when some poor devil died. Someone from the poorhouse, or down on the building site, or in one of the railwaymen’s cottages. Someone who “doesn’t belong”? I’ve seen one, and even if I hadn’t, I could have imagined it easily enough. Then, with a minimum of fuss, and with no printing of any
parte
, because there’s no money for any
parte
, a pine coffin is stained, and the dead man is pulled out of bed, and nailed into the pine coffin. There’s no thought given to possibly laying him out. Where would they lay him out? In the poorhouse? In the railwayman’s cottage? In the power plant canteen, even? In the main office of the cellulose factory? No, he’s hurriedly nailed into his coffin, even before the preacher’s informed, if indeed he is informed at any time, because often enough they don’t think of the preacher, and why should they? and the knacker digs a hole, probably it’s two meters twenty deep, because those are the stipulations, and at seven in the morning, the coffin is lugged to the hole by the knacker and the sexton, and no one is in attendance except maybe a few people who happen to be up and about, and then it’s lowered into the hole, and covered up right away. A workman has to reckon he wouldn’t get so much as a dog attending his burial. Unless it’s a case of a regular industrial accident, then part of the crew would attend, and the engineer would say a few words; but if he dies on his own time, outside of office and factory hours, no one will bother about him. And if he’s married, then his wife will stay home, because it’s too cold for her, or the kids are sick. And why should anyone come out for a burial at all? “A big burial,” said the painter on the way home. “Strange, I
was the man with whom the woodcutter had his final conversation. No one knows that.”

I shivered.

During the burial, I remembered the man the knacker met at the crossroads, probably where the road from the larch wood branches off down to the river. I imagined the man as in something of the same predicament as the landlord. Probably he too has been locked up several times already. Neglected from childhood, perhaps an orphan, abused by older children, beaten by his teachers, exploited by the tradesmen he was apprenticed to, and finally made a monkey of by landlords. The nature of his relationship to the landlady is not certain. No doubt, she knows him pretty well; the way she responded to everything the knacker told her about him, she must have “loved” him at some time. Didn’t the knacker mention some “act of vengeance” that will prove ruinous to the suddenly reappeared man? He had only loaned him the money because he talked fairly convincingly about a job he had started. A job in a railway foundry, thirty kilometers upstream. The knacker remarked on his poor clothing. From something he said, I was able to deduce that the man is unmarried. He must have had a hundred jobs in the course of his life. Bedridden for years from a bullet wound incurred during the war. “So he’s hanging around here again!” the landlady said, and: “He’s the one who turned him to the bad!” Those are serious allegations. While the cemetery was heaving with people, pressing us, the painter and myself, back against the wall, I saw a man who “knocks on all doors,
and isn’t admitted anywhere,” till he’s completely plastered, when they scrape him off the roadway like a mole. I could ask the painter whether in addition to the landlord and the landlady and the knacker there isn’t a fourth party involved somehow. Then the painter might say that he’s the principal figure in the whole drama, where these four people are tangled up for better or worse. No, I don’t want to get him onto that. And maybe the painter doesn’t know anything about anyone who’s “to blame for the whole thing,” and “should take care never to show his face around here again.” The painter pushed me toward the exit, and with his stick propelled me down into the village square. “I’ve just been thinking about a line in Pascal,” he said: “It’s the line, ‘our nature is motion, complete stasis is death.’ ” He said: “When I come out of that sentence, I’m completely disoriented.” When the funeral people came down from the cemetery, the painter wanted to stay in the village square. He felt like hearing “one or two pieces of music” that were announced by the band. It’s very cold today, and we had to keep stamping our feet on the ground to keep them from freezing. “Actually, it’s a nice custom to leave the dead behind to the sounds of music. To shake them off with a funeral feast.” The band played, and the sounds of firecrackers rent the air.

Then I remember about the knacker and the dog’s body in his rucksack. My behavior that night was more than peculiar. For days I tried to account for it to myself. I had been in a state of extreme agitation that I now find difficult to imagine. Everything has gone, and all I know is that it was once a certain way, and I am left with a feeling of revulsion for the food
served in the inn. The following morning, I really could smell dogskin in the air. Because I knew the landlady was on her way to the cemetery, I went into the kitchen and the pantry, which unusually was not locked, but I didn’t find anything. Everything was neat and tidy, which in itself was unusual. She will have stashed the meat and the hide in the cellar, I thought. And the cellar was locked. As the painter says, she always carries the key to the cellar on her person. The thought of what things she might keep lying around in her cellar filled me with fresh revulsion. But then the painter called for me, and, keeping a couple of steps in front of him, I set off in the direction of the village, in the direction of the cemetery. Lots of farming people. Once again, I had occasion to observe that the men did not wear coats, just suits or jackets and pants made out of various puke-colored materials. A fully occupied sleigh overtook us. I thought about the game the landlady was playing with the knacker, and the knacker with the landlady. I said to the painter: “How old do you think the knacker is?” I couldn’t imagine him being any particular age. “He’s a man in his prime,” said the painter. “In his prime, then,” I repeated, and simultaneously asked myself what that meant: “in his prime.” When is your prime? “Is he forty?” I asked. “He might be forty,” said the painter. “Why are you so interested in the knacker?” It had just occurred to me to ask him what age the knacker might be, I didn’t especially know why. “Something suddenly occurs to you,” I said. “Curious that I was the last person to speak to the woodcutter,” said the painter. “He was an ordinary-looking man. And so many people are going to his burial. His boots were shining, because the lamp was directly above him. It had been dark for many hours.”

•   •   •

While the burial was in progress, I several times thought of the noise that the dog’s body had made as it landed on the bedroom floor.

On the way home, he got going on the state and the government and neutrality, provoked by an idiotic remark of mine. The state was the state as conceived by Plato, or it was no state at all. “There is no state. The state is impossible. There has never been a state.” As far as our own state was concerned, then, aside from the fact that it wasn’t a state (“no longer a state!”), it was something as ridiculous as a “squeaking little rhesus monkey in a big zoo,” in which, naturally enough, only the well-fed and beautiful specimens of lions and tigers and leopards attracted any interest: it was their roaring. Only roaring counted, squeaking was ridiculous! It was “only the great roaring” that counted! The squeaking would be roared down! The great roaring will roar down the ridiculous squeaking! Our head of state was a “co-op manager,” our chancellor “a market-day brothel attendant.” The people had the choice of butchers, apprentice electricians, dully blown-up waistcoat wearers, between grave-robbers and grave-robbers’ assistants. Democracy, “our democracy,” was the biggest swindle. Our country sat heavily in Europe’s gut, completely indigestible, like an “ill-advisedly swallowed clubfoot.” Even “our dance is dead, our song and dance is dead! All repro! All frippery. The whole thing scandalously destructive frippery. The nation is really a national disgrace! You know, this squeaking, which, faced with the roar, the big roar, should just shut up! Nothing but squeaking! Ridiculous,
high-pitched, dangerous squeaking! Folly and megalomania are now partners, squeaking partners, you know, hand in hand dancing their way down into the abyss, perfectly common or garden-variety squeaking partners, delusions born of feebleness, delusions born of repugnant squeaking!”

“Everything is barbarous kitsch. Yes,” said the painter, “the state itself is cretinous, and the people are pitiful. Our state is ludicrous. On top of everything, the pretense of musicality. Petit bourgeois sordidness … it’s too revolting: a layer of scum on top, and the general, galloping dullness of the population … we are at a stage of absolute degradation. Our state,” he said, “is a hotel of ambivalence, the bordello of Europe, enjoying an excellent reputation, especially overseas.”

The extent of his misfortune, he said, had suddenly revealed itself to him, “on a day whose date I could tell you now, and also the persons with whom I had contact on that day; city-dwellers, metropolitans, all of them with strong roots in whatever it was they did, in a factory, or a profitable art gallery, or in the backwash of some invention they made, and that earned them large sums of money, or people who were just happy, and didn’t especially know why, and didn’t care either, it didn’t occur to them to wonder why, people with whom I stood in eventually abrasive and stultifying and repugnant relationships, that by and by degenerated; I would spend whole nights at the homes of these people, they showed me mountains of photographs, emptied brains full of dirty jokes at my feet, and I had to laugh, and I did laugh,
and I drank and laughed and slept, often on their floors, and then I once more had to invoke the name of art, and I was so pitiful that it seemed to draw them to me, this pitifulness that showed itself in me drew them to me, they took me here and there with them, and they wanted to weld me to their lives, till the moment happened, on that day when I saw I would have to stop, not turn back, because there is no turning back, but I stopped, I quite simply stopped, and far away from those people and their habits and their possessions and their opinions, far away from their world, which didn’t fit with my world, I began to go forward by myself on a different plane, from one hour to the next, when I clearly saw I didn’t belong anywhere, not in the place I had just fled, for good, and not where I came from, and not where, without exactly knowing why, I wanted to get to, in the direction of which I was moving, like an escaped convict I ran off, I zigzagged away so as not to fall into the hands of my pursuers …” It had been his misfortune not to belong anywhere, “no longer to have anything at all.”

“You know,” he said, “when you’re suddenly walking through the streets, from one meaningless thing to the next, through streets all of which are black, and the people are black, and they float as quickly and darkly and clumsily as yourself past you … You are standing in a square, and everything is black, suddenly everything inside you and outside you is black, no matter where you look at it from, black and stirred smooth, and you don’t know what stirred it, and everything is broken … You still recognize an object here and there, but everything is broken and smashed and ripped; for the first time you prop yourself on a stick, which you’ve
only ever used as a weapon before against humans or dogs, but now you prop yourself on it, and you seem to be floating in a sea of lead, and here and there you make out some new, further blackness … people don’t know, is it the coming of spring, or is it the end … the great letters on the department stores coming toward you, having joined forces against you in a great rabble, a great rabble of a revolution, they ruin everything in you, where nature and creature turn to you for help, you try to make your way, in a yet more desperate condition … You see humans and you call out to them, with no shame you alarm these humans in this atmosphere, which is continually being teased by the cardinal points … and you have buttoned up your jacket, and everything in you is tense, and your head is afraid of bumping into things … all those handbags and sticks, those hundreds of thousands of handbags and sticks … you think you have come down a very long way in the world, just as those others have come up, and in your disgust you don’t know what to do … those crowds of people unleashed by precisely advancing clock hands … You seek refuge on a park bench, but it is already full of people cleverer than you are, they occupied all the benches from early morning on, and are reading enormous books, and eating extensive paper-bag lunches … the whole pathos of government employees hits you, the whole meanness of state pensions … and you wedge your head between your knees, and try not to sink … and you hear the world writhing in your own headaches, in grotesque cramps, in the terrible violence of the air … In your room you are menaced by shards of memory, they are birds, unbelievable black birds, endowed with incredible force … This incredible state of emergency, this synthesis of rejection by the world and alienation from the world, in which you suddenly find yourself,
without any bearings, this condition that lands you in every conceivable human procedure … The police and the vegetable truck, they’re all coming for you, as though to destroy you … the voice of the people … even as a child I could feel that devastating procedure in my brain … this people that darkens the passages of my ears … and accompanying all these impressions, you must know, each time I touch the ground with my stick, I knock a hole in my skull, everything is like being condemned to ceaseless torment by a metronome on Föhn days …” He often uses the word “suicide” now. In every sentence. With his great thumb that, when he stretches it, contains every ounce of his strength, he crushes himself, his surroundings, just as one might crush a beetle on a table or cabinet.