Frost: A Novel (4 page)

“My family, my parents, everyone, the whole world I might have tried to cling to, and to which in fact I repeatedly tried to cling, early on dissolved into darkness; overnight it just went black, withdrew from my vision, or else I’d taken myself away from it, into that dark. I’m not quite sure. At any rate, I was left on my own a lot, maybe I was always on my own. Being alone has preoccupied me, ever since I can remember. The idea of solitude too. Being shut up within myself. The
way I was, I couldn’t imagine being alone all the time. I couldn’t get my head around that, I couldn’t get it into my head, and I couldn’t find a way of expressing it either.” He said: “I kept going back to that point. I stood there helplessly. Stood there disconnectedly. Woke up there. Not where I should have woken up, to suit my nature. My childhood and youth were brutally alone, just as my old age is brutally alone. As if nature had a right to keep pushing me away, back into myself, away from everything else, toward everything else, but always up against the limit. You understand what I’m saying: one’s ears are full of self-reproach. And if you think what you’re hearing is song, some wild or domesticated music, then you’re deceived: it’s still nothing but being alone. That’s the way it is with the birds in the forest, with seawater, lapping around your knees. I never knew what to do for myself, and now I know it still less. That’s a little surprising, isn’t it? I think people only pretend not to be alone, because they’re always alone. If you watch them in their societies, aren’t they proof of the fact: the gatherings, the meetings, the religions, aren’t they all endless solitude? You see, they are always the same thoughts. Unnatural, perhaps. Too much continuity. Dilettante, possibly. If a little self-reliance is brought to solitude,” he said, “that makes it bearable, but I never had the least bit of self-reliance. I didn’t know how to go about anything. I couldn’t cope with influences, surroundings, self. With what it was I was full of. You see. Right!” He said: “People who make a new person are taking an extraordinary responsibility upon themselves. All unrealizable. Hopeless. It’s a great crime to create a person, when you know he’ll be unhappy, certainly if there’s any unhappiness about. The unhappiness that exists momentarily is the whole
of unhappiness. To produce solitude just because you don’t want to be alone anymore yourself is a crime.” He said: “The drive of nature is criminal, and to appeal to it is a pretext, just as everything people do is a pretext.”

He turned to face the village which lay before us: “It’s not a good cast of human being here,” he said. “The people are relatively short. The infants are given ‘brandy rags’ to suck, to keep them from screaming. A lot of miscarriages. Anencephaly is endemic. People don’t have favorite children, they just have a lot of them. In the summer they suffer heatstroke, because their frail tissue can’t stand up to the often fierce sun. In winter, as I say, they freeze to death on their way to school. Alcohol has displaced milk. They all have high squeaky voices. Most of them are crippled in one form or another. All of them are conceived in drunkenness. For the most part criminal characters. A high percentage of the younger people are in and out of prison. Assault and battery, and underage or unnatural sex are standard offenses. Child abuse, killings, are Sunday afternoon stuff … The animals are better off: after all, what people would really like is a pig, not a kid. The schools have very low standards, and the teachers are cunning and despised the way they are everywhere. Often suffer from ulcers. Tuberculosis suspends them in a milky melancholy, from which they never emerge. Gradually the farmers’ sons are integrated into the urban workforce. I have yet to see a good-looking individual in this region. And yet nothing is known of the people here, or of what they think: at the most you might brush against their occupations, existences, torments, their rapid increase. Just brush against it.”

•   •   •

As a child, he had been raised by his grandparents, and been allowed to run wild. In the wintertime, kept closely. Then he had often had to sit still for days on end, and learn combinations of words. By the time he started going to school, he knew more than the teacher did. The classroom in his country school in a quiet hamlet in Lower Austria “is unchanged to this day.” On a whim, he had gone back on a visit. The same smell, he said, that had always bothered him as a child, a mixture of tar, bathrooms, corn, and apples. Now he had breathed in the smell as if it were a spring morning. He often forced himself to put together the smell somewhere, quite suddenly. He almost always succeeded. As a master every now and then will come up with a masterpiece. His whole childhood had been put together from smells; the sum of these smells had made up his childhood. It hadn’t been inert, it was in continual flux. Also there were word games and ball games; fear of vermin, wild animals, gloomy lanes, raging torrents, hunger, and the future. In his childhood he had come across vermin, hunger, wild animals, and raging torrents. Also the future, and loathing. The war made it possible for him to see what people who are unacquainted with war have no knowledge of. City and country by turns, because his grandfather was restless, just as restless as he was himself. His grandmother clever, dignified, unapproachable to low-minded people. His grandfather acquainted him with landscapes, conversations, darkness. “My grandparents were masterful people,” he said. Their loss was the deepest loss he had experienced. His parents hadn’t bothered about him much; they were much more interested in his brother, a year older, and of whom they expected everything that they didn’t
expect of him: a settled future, just any sort of future. His brother had always received more love and more pocket money. Where he disappointed them, his brother never disappointed them. His connection to his sister was far too frail to endure. Later on, they took it up again over the ocean, wrote each other letters from Europe to Mexico, from Mexico to Europe, tried to parlay their mutual liking into a sort of love or dependency, in which they were possibly successful. “She writes me two or three times a year, as I do her,” he said. Within him and his solitude many thoughts were engendered, which became gradually darker. Once his grandparents died, he was in “a blackness that I will never come out of.”

And then his father died, and a year later, his mother. While his brother made his way, climbed up his career ladder rung by rung, to the surgeon he is now, he lost himself in the world in his head. First one way out, then the next were blocked off. Before long he was standing there, confronting ruin. There was little visible evidence of the fact: he always put on good clothes to go out in the street. But at home, in the privacy of his room, he slumped into the lowest frame of mind, into sleeplessness, into ponderings about science and art, into poverty. The more his poverty deepened, the more he shut himself away. His “artistic endeavors” didn’t impress him. He could see all too clearly that the work he produced, often effortfully, was nothing for anyone to remark on, much less celebrate. What he did struck him as ordinary. Everything was crumbling. And yet occasional tricks of fate, “pure accidents,” little hits of friendliness, kept him going. Where from? “Little excursions sometimes happened like a puff
of spring air,” whirling him along to a little town up the Danube, a forest village, yes, even across the border to Hungary, which he had never been able to see enough of, that “melancholy
puszta.”
But childhood was worst on that day when he no longer had his grandparents behind his parents. He was so lonely, he often sat on the steps in someone else’s house and thought he was going to die of misery. For days he went around, spoke to people on the street, who thought he was mad, unmannerly, disgusting. And in the countryside, it was just the same: he often wouldn’t see the fields and meadows for days, because of the tears in the eyes. He would be sent here and there, and be paid for. Or they didn’t pay, and then his being away, his being there, was even worse. He looked for friends, but never found any. It even happened that he thought he suddenly had a friend, but then it would turn out to have been a mistake, from which he hurriedly had to retreat. Into further confusion, apathy, uncertainty. The disruptiveness and blandishments of sex further complicated the situation, how to deal with forbidden sights, illnesses that he had to cope with alone, perturbed him. How different it was for his siblings, who were allowed to stay at home with their parents, and “live life to the full.” Since everything was so confused, he ruined his prospects at school, with the result that one day there was nothing left but to accept a desk job in an office, from which he was only able to rescue himself by a terrible scene, and then on to art school. He won scholarships, and took his final exams, as required. “But nothing came of it,” he said. His early manhood was still worse. He might have had a little more contact with somewhat like-minded contemporaries, but “it was pretty mindless.” His early years had been hard for him. In many ways they reminded me of my own youth. I was sad as well, but never
as bitter as he was, and at such an early age. And yet, childhood and youth were the only things in him “he found hard to say goodbye to.”

Today he admitted he had burned all his paintings. “I had to get rid of those things that were a perpetual reminder of my worthlessness.” They had been like ulcers, opening every day and silencing him. “I did it quickly. One day I realized I’d never make it as a painter. But then, the way everyone does, I refused to believe it, and protracted the agony for years. And then, the day before I was due to leave, it struck me forcibly.”

“There was a time I would have thought it impossible for me to give in to myself so blindly,” says the painter. He stops, draws breath, and says: “I could be in a good mood, after all. Why am I not in a good mood? I’m not bored, I’m not scared. I’m in no pain. I feel no irritation. As if I was someone else, just now. And there it is again: I’m hurt and irritated. Yes, it’s my own doing. See: all my life … I’ve never been merry! Never joyful! Never what people call happy. Because the compulsion to the unusual, the eccentric, the odd, the unique, and the unattainable, this compulsion has wrecked everything for me, and in the creative field as well. It tore everything up, as if it were a piece of paper! My fear is rational, orderly, itemized, there’s nothing low about it. I’m continually testing myself, yes, that’s what it is! I keep chasing my own tail! You can imagine what it’s like, when you open yourself like a book, and find misprints everywhere, one after another, misprints on every page! And in spite of those hundreds
and thousands of misprints, the whole thing is
masterly!
It’s a whole series of masterpieces! … The pain rises from below or comes down from above, and it becomes human pain. I keep banging into the walls that surround me on every side. I’m a cement man! But I’ve often had to hold on to myself behind my laughter!”

“Do you know what I can hear now? I can hear charges being brought against the big ideas, a great court has been convoked to hear the case, I can hear them slowly beginning to arraign all the big ideas. More and more big ideas are arrested and thrown into prison. The big ideas are sentenced to terrible punishments, I know that for certain! I can hear it! Big ideas are picked up at border checkpoints! Many flee, but they are apprehended and punished, and thrown into jail! Life, I say, lifetime imprisonment is the least punishment to which the big ideas are sentenced! The big ideas have no one to defend them! Not even a wretched public defender! I hear the state’s attorneys laying into the big ideas! I hear the police hitting the big ideas over the head with their nightsticks. The police were always battering the big ideas over the head! They’ve locked up the big ideas! Not one big idea will be left at large! Listen up! Look! All the big ideas have basically got it in the neck! Listen!” The painter tells me to go on ahead, and I go on ahead, and he drives me into the hollow with his stick.

By chance, I ran into the painter in front of the larch wood, and not down on the path where we had agreed to meet, and where I supposed him to be when I was no more than twenty
or thirty paces from the larch wood, when he leaped out from behind a tree brandishing his stick, as though to cut me off. I had been singing all the way from the village, tunes I didn’t know I had in me, one after the other, and he said: “I didn’t know you could sing! Why do you only sing when you’re alone? You never sang once when we were together. It’s an odd voice you have, but by no means unpleasant.” I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say. He took me by the elbow, and led me, breathing heavily, into the larch wood “Sing some more, why don’t you. You don’t have to be embarrassed, you’ve got a fine voice.” But I didn’t sing anymore. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have produced a single note. He had decided to wait for me by the larch wood “because it’s sure to be very cold on the path.” We walked fairly quickly. However, he seemed to be quite tired already, and kept stopping. “The imagination is an expression of disorder,” he said; “it has to be. In an ordered world, there would be no such thing as imagination, order wouldn’t tolerate such a thing, imagination is completely alien to it. All the way here, I was asking myself what imagination is. I’m sure imagination is an illness. An illness that you don’t catch, merely because you’ve always had it. An illness that is responsible for everything, and particularly everything ridiculous and malignant. Do you understand the imagination? What is imagination? I asked myself, and at the same time I asked myself whether it’s possible to understand the imagination at all. The truth is you can’t.” He dragged his stick along a thick bough, and got us covered with snow. I had to brush it off him. “Someone who doesn’t know anything, is such a thing possible?” he asked. “A man who never knew anything?”

•   •   •

By the time we got down to the station it was five o’clock. There were more people standing around than usual, and the painter wanted to barge through them, to the station buffet. He put out his hand, and they melted away from his stick. I followed him at a couple of paces. In the buffet, he sat down in the corner, from which you have a view of the platform and can see the trains pulling in and leaving. Then it was too cold for him there—“a hideous draft!”—and we moved next to the stove. We each drank a couple of glasses of slivovitz, and picked out things to read from the newsstand. Weighed down with newspapers—once he’s read them, I take them up to my room, to read them cover to cover—we decided to be back at the inn by seven, if at all possible. Outside the inn, while I was brushing the snow off my boots, he said: “Imagination spells a man’s death … I had a dream last night, I can’t remember the setting, but it was in some very familiar landscape; I can’t remember which one. An odd dream, not one of the desperate dreams I usually have. The landscape of my dream kept changing, from white to green to gray to black, probably each time in the space of seconds. Nothing had the color we would have expected it to have. For instance, the sky was green, the snow was black, the trees were blue … the meadows were as white as snow … It reminded me of certain contemporary paintings, even though the painters aren’t as radical, the painters are by no means as radical as my dream … it was really one of my most radical dreams. And so drastic, the landscape … the trees lofty, growing into endlessness, the pastures hard, the grass so hard that when the wind blew, it created a loud music, a music that seemed to be assembled from all sorts of different periods and styles. Suddenly, I was sitting in this landscape, in a meadow. The odd thing was that the people were the same colors as the landscape.
I was the color of the meadow, then that of the sky, then the color of a tree, and finally I was the color of the mountains. And I was always all of the colors. My laughter caused a great commotion in the landscape, I don’t know why. This pretty irregular landscape, you know, it was as animated as any I’ve ever seen. A landscape of people. Because the people took on the colors of the landscape as I did myself, the only way of recognizing them was by their voices, and it was only by my voice that they knew me. Such differentiated voices, you know, incredibly differentiated voices! Suddenly something horrible happened: my head swelled up, to such a degree that the landscape grew darker, and the people broke out in wailing, such terrible wailing as I have never heard. Wailing that was somehow commensurate with the landscape. I can’t say why. Since my head was suddenly so big and heavy, it started rolling down from the hill where I had been standing, down across the white pastures, the black snow—all the seasons here seemed to be simultaneous!—and crushed many of the blue trees and the people. I could hear that. Suddenly I noticed that everything in my wake was dead. Withered, crushed, dead. My big head lay in a dead wasteland. In darkness. It lay in that darkness until I awoke. How is it that my dream took such a horrible turn?” he asked me. The painter took his Pascal out of his left jacket pocket, and stowed it in his right. “It’s uncanny,” he said.