Frost: A Novel (2 page)

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So far I haven’t seen anyone but the landlady, even though I heard a lot of noise in the inn in the interval. At lunchtime, when I stayed in my room, I asked the landlady about the painter, and she said he was in the forest. “He’s almost always in the forest,” she said. He wouldn’t be back before supper. Was I acquainted with the painter? she asked. “No,” I said. Silently standing in the doorway, she seemed to pose an urgent question, as woman to man. I was startled, and—without a word, though not without an edge of nausea—refused her offer.

Weng is the most dismal place I have ever seen. Far more dismal than in the assistant doctor’s description. Doctor Strauch had spoken about it in the sort of veiled terms one might use to describe a dangerous path to a friend who has to go there. The assistant stuck to intimations. He tied me more and more tightly to the task with invisible ropes, creating an unbearable tension between him and me, while I felt the arguments he remorselessly advanced against me like nails being driven into my brain. He did at least manage not to irritate me. Confined himself rigidly to points I had to observe. I really was frightened by this landscape, in particular this one spot, which is populated by small, fully grown people whom one can certainly call cretins. No taller than five feet on average, begotten in drunkenness, they pass in and out through cracks in the walls and corridors. They seem typical of this valley.

Weng is at a considerable elevation, but still stuck at the bottom of a gorge. It’s impossible to get out up the cliff walls.
The only way out is by train. It’s so ugly that it’s characterful; far prettier landscapes have no character. Everyone there has tipsy children’s voices, scraped away to a high C, which they drill into you as you pass by. Jab into you. Jab from the shadows, I have to say, because in truth I have only seen shadows of people so far, human shadows, in poverty and in a dank tremor of frenzy. And those voices, jabbing at me out of the shadows, first of all confused me, and then drove me faster on my way. But these realizations were nonetheless sober ones; they didn’t depress me. Actually all I felt was annoyance, because it was all so incredibly inhospitable. On top of everything, I had to lug my cardboard suitcase, with its contents jumbling together. The way up to Weng from the train station, where the industrial park is and where the big power plant is being built, can only be covered on foot. Five kilometers, which can’t be shortened in any way, least of all in this season. Barking, howling dogs everywhere. I could imagine people being driven mad in the long run, if they were compelled to experience uninterruptedly the sort of thing I had to experience on the way up to Weng, and in Weng itself, if they weren’t distracted by their work or by pleasure or other appropriate activities, as for instance whores, or church, or drinking, or all three at once. What brings a man like the painter Strauch to such a place, and to such a place at such a time, that it must be like a repeated slap in the face?

My assignment is highly confidential, and I think it was deliberately entrusted to me suddenly, from one day to the next. The assistant must have spent some time nursing the idea of charging me with the observation of his brother. And why
me? Why not one of the others, interns like myself? Because I often came to him with difficult questions, and the others didn’t? He specifically told me on no account to arouse the least suspicion in the painter Strauch that there had been any communication between himself, the surgeon Strauch his brother, and myself. That’s why I am also to say, if asked, that I am studying law, so as to divert attention from medicine. The assistant paid for my travel and board. He gave me a sum of money that seemed ample to him to cover everything. He demands precise observation of his brother, nothing more. Description of his behavior, of the course of his typical day; information about his opinions, intentions, expressions, judgments. A report on his walk. On his way of gesticulating, flying off the handle, “keeping people at bay.” On the way he handled his walking stick. “Watch the way my brother holds his stick, I want a precise description of it.”

It’s twenty years since the surgeon last saw the painter. Twelve years since their last letters. The painter describes the relationship as hostile. “Even so, as a doctor, I will make an effort,” said the assistant. For which he needed my help. My observations would be extremely useful to him, more than anything he had yet undertaken. “My brother,” he told me, “is unmarried, as I am. He lives, as they say, in his head. But he’s terminally confused. Haunted by vice, shame, awe, reproach, examples—my brother is a walker, a man in fear. And a misanthrope.”

This assignment is a private initiative on the part of the assistant, but I am to view it as part of my apprenticeship in
Schwarzach. It’s the first time that observation has presented itself to me as work.

I had intended to take with me Koltz on diseases of the brain, divided into “hyper-activity” and “lesions” of the brain, but in the end I didn’t. Instead I took along a book of Henry James’s, which I had started in Schwarzach.

At four o’clock I left the inn. In the sudden massive quiet I was seized by a feeling of unease. My sensation—of having put on the room like a straitjacket, and now needing to take it off—made me charge down the stairs. I went into the public bar. When, after several shouts, no one came, I went outside. I stumbled over a chunk of ice, picked myself up, and found an objective: a tree stump some twenty yards away. There I stopped. Now I could see lots of similar stumps sticking out of the snow, as if shredded by shelling, dozens and dozens of them. It occurred to me that, sitting on my bed for a couple of hours, I had been asleep. My arrival and the new setting had taken it out of me. Must be the Föhn, I thought. Then I saw a man emerging from the piece of forest a hundred yards ahead of me: undoubtedly it was the painter Strauch. All I could see of him was a torso; his legs were concealed in deep snowdrifts. I was struck by his big black hat. Reluctantly, as it appeared to me, the painter made his way from one stump to the next. Propped himself on his stick, and then pushed off with it, as if he were drover, stick, and animal bound for the slaughterhouse, all at the same time. But such an impression faded immediately, and I was left with the question of how to
get to him as quickly and correctly as I could. What should I say to him? I thought. Do I go up to him and ask him a question, in other words, do I follow the traditional method of asking about the time or the place? Yes? No? For a while I vacillated. I decided I would cut him off.

“I’m looking for the inn,” I said. And that was it. He scrutinized me, because my sudden appearance was more alarming than inspiring of confidence—and took me with him. He was a long-term resident at the inn, he said. Anyone coming to stay in Weng had to be either an eccentric or mistaken. Anyone looking for a holiday. “In
that
inn?” It wasn’t possible to be so callow as to fail to see immediately that that was absurd. “In this area?” Such a thing could only occur to a fool. “Or a prospective suicide.” He asked me who I was, what I was studying, because surely I was “still studying” something or other, and I answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “Law.” That was enough for him. “You go on ahead. I’m an old man,” he said. The way he looked frightened me for long moments, forcing me back into myself, the way I saw him the first time, so helpless.

“If you walk the way I’m pointing with my stick, you’ll come to a valley where you can walk back and forth for hours, without the least anxiety,” he said. “You don’t have to be afraid of being found out. Nothing can happen to you: everything has died. No minerals, no crops, nothing. You’ll find traces of this or that period, stones, vestiges of masonry, indications, no one knows what of. A certain arcane relation to
the sun. Birches. A ruined church. Traces of wild animals. Four or five days. Solitude, quiet,” he said. “Nature without any human interference. The odd waterfall. It’s like walking centuries before human settlement.”

Evening falls very abruptly here, as if with a clap of thunder. As if a great iron curtain suddenly cut the world in half. Anyway, night falls between one step and the next. The sour colors are drab. Everything is drab. No transition, no twilight. The Föhn wind sees to it that the temperature doesn’t drop. An atmosphere that causes the heart to tighten, if not to stop altogether. The hospitals know all about this air current: ostensibly healthy patients, full to the brim with medical science to the point that there is hope for them, suddenly sink into unconsciousness, and cannot be reanimated by any human agency, however skillful or ingenious. A climate that engenders embolisms. Bizarre cloud formations, somewhere far away. Dogs chasing pointlessly through lanes and farmyards, sometimes attacking people. Rivers stinking of corruption all along their length. Mountains like ridged brains, overly palpable by day, blackly invisible at night. Strangers suddenly getting into conversations at crossroads, asking questions, giving answers they never asked to hear. As if just then, everything was possible: the ugly approaches the beautiful, and vice versa, the ruthless and the weak. The striking quarter hours drip down on cemeteries and rooftops. Death takes a deft hand in life. Children fall into sudden fits of weakness. Don’t shout or yell, but walk under a train. In inns and stations near the waterfalls, relationships are formed that barely last a moment, friendships are struck up that
never come to life; the other, the you, is tormented to the point of murderousness, and then strangled in pettiness and meanness.

Weng lies in a hollow, buried among blocks of ice for millions of years. The roadsides favor promiscuity.

Third Day

“I was never a painter,” he said today; “at the most, I may have been a decorator.”

There’s now a tension between us that is present on the surface and below. We were in the woods. Silently. Only the wet snow, pounds of it clinging to our boots, seemed to speak continually but incomprehensibly. Breaking our silence. Inaudible words present as thought, but not as speech. He always asks me to go first. He is afraid of me. He knows from stories, and from personal experience, that young people attack and plunder their victims from behind. The bland expression conceals the presence of tools of murder and brigandage. The soul, inasmuch as someone might feel like referring in such a way to this “transgressor of all laws,” because one happens to believe in it, steps out, but rationality, put together from suspicion, fear, and mistrust, makes an
ambush impossible. Even though I tell him I don’t know my way around at all, he makes me go on ahead. From time to time he mutters an instruction like “left” or “right” (and clears away my sense that he might be drifting off on thoughts of his own). I carry them out impatiently, and, as it were, in the dark. What was curious was that there wasn’t the least light to help orient me. It felt like rowing along, in the mind as well, and balance is both effortless and impossible. What would I do if I were all on my own? A thought that suddenly presented itself. The painter walked along behind me, like some vast encumbrance on my nerves: as if he was continually studying the implications of my back. Then he got short of wind, and told me to stop. “I take this path every day,” he said, “I’ve been walking here for decades. I could walk it in my sleep.” I tried to discover more about the reason for his presence in Weng. “My sickness and any number of other reasons,” he said. I hadn’t expected any more detailed reply. I told him as well as I could, in brief points, the story of my life, with spots of light or sorrow, and how it had made me into what I am—without betraying to him what, at the moment, I
really
am—and with an openness that surprised me. But it interested him not at all. He is only interested in himself.

“If you knew how old I am, in calendar terms, you’d get a shock,” he said. “You probably imagine I’m an old man, as young people are apt to. You’d be amazed.” His face seemed to darken into a deeper hopelessness. “Nature is bloody,” he said, “but bloodiest toward her own finest, most remarkable, and choicest gifts. She grinds them down without batting an eyelid.”

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He doesn’t think much of his mother, and even less of his father, and his siblings had become as indifferent to him over time as he thinks he has always been to them. But the way he tells me, I can tell how much he loved his mother, his father, and his siblings. How attached he is to them! “Everything was always gloomy for me,” he says. I told him about a passage from my own childhood. Thereupon he said: “Childhood is always the same. Only to one person, it will seem ordinary, to a second benign, and to a third satanic.”

In the inn, they treat him with appropriate respect, as it seems to me. But once his back is turned, they all make faces.

“Their excesses have been noted. Their sexuality can be sniffed. One can feel what they think and what they want, these people, sense what forbidden things they are continually contriving. Their beds are under the window or in the doorway, or they don’t even bother with beds: they go from atrocity to atrocity … The men treat the women like pieces of tenderized meat, and vice versa, now one, now the other, depending on their respective imbecility. The primitive is everywhere. Some behave as if by prior arrangement, others seem to come to it naturally … their too-tight trousers and skirts seem to drive them wild. The evenings go on and on: it’s all too much. A few yards here or there, in or out, so as not to have to freeze … Their mouths are taciturn, the rest goes wild … day dawns, and you don’t know which way is up. Sex is what does for them all. Sex, the disease that kills by
its nature. Sooner or later, it will kill off even the deepest intimacy … it brings about the conversion of one into the other, of good into evil, from here to there, from high to low. Godless, because ruination appears first … the moral becomes immoral (a model of universal decline). The forked tongue of nature, you might say. The way the workers go around here,” he said, “they live for sex, like most people, like all people … they live to the end of their days in a continual wild process against modesty and time and vice versa: ruination. Time sends them on their way to unchastity with a slap. Some are more accomplished at concealing it than others. With the canny ones, you only realize when they’re all done. But it’s for nothing. All of them live a sex life, and not a life.”