Frost: A Novel (14 page)

The painter Strauch is one of those who turn everything to liquid. Whatever they touch dissolves. Character, solidity, stability. “No one can see me, because no one can see anything,” he has said, and: “The principles that put millennia on the skids.” Or again: “Any activity is predicated on another, any meaning, any style. Wisdom on nonsense, and vice versa and simultaneously.” Breakfast is “way too ceremonial” for him, “it feels absurd to pick up a spoon. Meaningless. A sugar cube is an assault against me. Bread. Milk. A catastrophe. The day begins with insidious sweetness.” He hunkers down on his chair, which is far too low for him. But even there he towers over me. He looks down at me, his eye piercing. “To allow ingratitude to develop within one,” he says, “only to take note of a thing once one is certain what a terrible thing it is. Facts pile up, terrible facts too, and before too long you’re just the miserable little wretch trying to push the table back, which gets you a clip around the ears from above.” So great was reason that it too was “condemned to fail.” “Those two notions of mine, trotting along side by side like a couple of dogs, barking at everything.” Wanton destruction, to make contemplation a little easier. He whispers, and listens to the
walls shaking. “There is an obligation toward the depth of one’s own inner abyss,” he says. He pulls himself together, and it takes the brutality of simply getting up to bring him back to himself and out of himself. To some expression, like “It’s so utterly ghastly here!” He is dominated by himself, as by a lifelong injustice. By his destructive apparatus.

“There is little else but corruption,” he says, “but it’s impossible to eradicate. Opposition, a general opposition, a sign of youth, is growing weaker. The forces are shrinking. Everything is concentrated on getting through its allotted time … That’s got nothing to do with intelligence. In general, people on a lower level find it easier to deal with their surroundings. By and by it comes to your attention: the world around you, nothing but corruption, colossal misrule. On the whole the fools who can’t see that are small in number. One’s fellow humans? No more than a list of professions. What time is it? Half past four. Getting some air before going to bed is another sacred error. A smart observation: ‘the round fat face of the landlady, which has bounced off the engineer.’ Ah, the engineer,” he says. “You know, frost disfigures all men. Frost and women are the death of men. In the morning he sits over his blueprints, and doesn’t go mad. They’re all sitting around now. All these men sitting around will have to be paid: this sudden cold snap will cost hundreds of thousands! And no improvement in sight! If you ask me, I rather like cold, sharp winter days.”

The way he compares the inn with an Alpine village in Carinthia, and with a ballet dancer who has had just one
appearance in the opera and whom he describes as “a natural talent, but very dangerous,” is very illuminating. Or a vegetable trader who once gave him a smack because he thought he was stealing his tomatoes, with Napoleon III. It seems to me that even as he’s speaking about the woodcutter he watched dying, he’s already thinking about the tragedy of the four hundred mountain people who were abruptly killed in catastrophic storms. And then always himself. A sudden blast of wind forced him to the wall, and put him in mind of a celebrated acrobat. “He performed four somersaults between the backs of two galloping horses.” When he says “London,” he envisions the outer suburbs of Budapest. Sections of the lower Danube he attaches quite effortlessly to the upper Rhine. He swaps one delta for another. “In fact, that’s my sense of color,” he says. Certain mixtures of aromas play a part here. I can readily imagine him as a thirty-year-old, crossing the swollen plazas, and despising the dead, megalomaniac capital of the country. Anything provincial and dilettante as much as the “truly great” and the untouchable. His self-contempt is not based on ignorance; after all he was a city-dweller. Miles ahead of him he sees a lost thought return to him after years away. “Murder has a taste of honey,” he often thought. While his mouth talks about the ways of making paper, his hands are burrowing in his jacket pockets. He sees images faster than his body can catch them. “Every street debouches in my brain,” he says. He has turned a vast system of beginnings and significations into an edifice of thought where he tries to order the extraordinary chaos of history. “For decades, I’ve suffered from the most extreme attention, do you have any idea what that means?” If he talks about a tragedy, he shows no signs of the tragedy in his expression. When was it? “I’ve invented a notation of my
fears,” he says. Of the three who go to make him up, he doesn’t know which one he is here or there, when and where. “Being on the lookout doesn’t imply ill intentions, you know.” Everything was morbidly affected by the horrible, and “harmlessness has taken on all the tasks of destruction, do you see?”

He had been walking in the defile. At first he had found it difficult—“it took all my shattered strength”—to make his way up through the deep snowdrifts. “Branches leaped at my face like wild animals, you know!” But then he had moved almost at a jog, as before his illness. “I couldn’t stop. My head took control over me, if you must know!” Darkness had brought him to the defile. “I could have walked on, to the hay barn and further. But no, I had to walk up the defile. The defile that starts exactly where I saw the churchgoers emerge the day before yesterday. They were people such as I have yet to meet, from the shady side, as it seems to me, people from an era that ended millennia ago, great people, striding as if they walked past everything. Past a world that struck them as petty and spoiled. Past a later man, of whom they must have been warned. They reminded me of deer, so gigantic, so kingly, in the way they loomed up ahead of me. I ran into the defile, because I thought that would change my ideas,” said the painter. “With the help of the defile, I thought it would be possible to get some other ideas. I wanted to change the direction of everything, everything that had been as sad all day as episodes from my childhood, inaccessible, because you can never get out of them.” But he had been disappointed. A sudden snowfall surprised him in the middle of the defile. Then he sat down on a tree stump, “a quite rotten little
stump, just big enough for me,” to wait for it to stop snowing. “But how can you wait for it to stop snowing? And why?” Immediately persuaded of the stupidity of waiting for it to stop snowing, he had leaped up, and crawled back down the entire defile. “On all fours, like a wild beast that lives in the dark, in the gloom.” He had managed to get out of the defile in pretty quick time. “Even as a child, I used to be frightened of defiles,” he said. “While I was sitting on the tree stump, I had the feeling I was going to sleep, drifting off, you know.” With that feeling, he had been very happy. It mastered him, and he supported it, so that it got stronger. “Pleasure,” he said. “The way you can just fall asleep after a great exertion, the way great cities seem to shrink back as you dash through, or the claws of caged lions and tigers.” The way someone settles to sleep, all animal, he too had settled. And then he had suddenly become aware of the foolishness of waiting for it to stop snowing. And he had jumped up and away, first in quick bounds, then ever more slowly, barging through snow with his chest. “It would have been my grave,” he said.

He thought he had left his jacket behind in the public bar, and went back down to look for it. I saw him come down, but for some reason I couldn’t ask him what he was doing downstairs, having already once said goodnight. I could have asked him: “Do you need anything? Are you looking for something? What are you looking for?” But he was already at the foot of the stairs. “My jacket must be hanging in the public bar,” he said. I went into the public bar, and looked for the jacket, but couldn’t find it. I asked the landlady and some of the customers, but no one had seen his jacket. The painter stood in the doorway, observing me. I had the feeling he was
directing me to look for the jacket here and there; pushing me down to the floor, pulling me up to the great beam between the stove and the wall, from where you have a good view of the whole bar area. I didn’t see his jacket anywhere. The public bar was packed. A few other people helped me look. I saw a lot of new faces. The entire construction crew for the power plant seemed to be there: thousands of them! I felt I was drifting through a sea of fog. Individuals looked at me out of some rotting vegetation, it seemed to me. Like a jungle. I looked along the walls, but didn’t find any jacket. I wanted to be thorough, and looked on the floor again. The jacket might have fallen down, after all. The landlady stooped as well. “No, there’s no jacket here,” she said. I checked among the many workmen’s clothes hanging up on the walls. But no painter’s jacket. When I got back to the corridor, where I thought I’d find the painter, he had disappeared. Did he go up to his room? I wondered. But: he wouldn’t be able to get up as quickly as that. “Herr Strauch!” I called. No answer. Then I noticed that the front door was half-open. The painter was sitting on the bench outside. “I’m ignoring the cold,” he said, and disappeared further into his jacket, which it seemed he was suddenly wearing. “Where I found my jacket?” He had hung it on the front door when he returned from his walk, and forgotten about it. “Were you looking for my jacket the whole time?” he asked. You absentmindedly hung or left something somewhere, forgot all about it, and got into a terrible state as a result. “I think about what will be once everything goes black,” he said. “When there are no more colors, only black.” Then he pointed out a lot of stars to me, up there in the night sky, more stars than he’d seen in a long while.

In the morning he surprised me with the news that the swelling on his foot had gone. “There’s no sign of it,” he said, “it’s retreated, no doubt only to pop up somewhere else. You’ll see.” As he was standing in my doorway, I asked him inside. “If you don’t mind an old man fouling your room,” he said. He crossed my room to the window, and looked out. “You’ve got the same view as I have: darkness! Doesn’t it depress you? All these days? People like you spend years, decades, on the brink of depression. Then suddenly you fall in. Head first.” He sat down on my bed. “Lawyers make nothing but confusion,” he said. “A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he’s a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he’s always right.” He felt through his pockets again. “Jurisprudence creates criminality, that’s a fact. Without jurisprudence, there would be no crime. Did you know that? Unlikely as it may sound, that’s the truth of the matter.” He set his stick against my jacket, which I’d laid over the chair back, speared it as with a fork. “Youth is an ornament,” he said, “and ever more an ornament, and is always in any case refreshing.” He left my jacket alone. “Youth has no ideals; nor any masochistic notions, which will come later. Then, admittedly, with lethal effect.” He was still able to imagine what it was like, being young. “One imagines it’ll be better later on,” he said. “When everything isn’t ebullience, isn’t confusion,
isn’t cerebral. When everything is as distinct as the shadows inside you, with their hard, silent edges.” There were many mistakes he had only made because he was young. “Youth is a mistake.” The mistake of age, on the other hand, was seeing the mistakes of youth. “It can happen that a young fellow can cease to be young in the midst of his youth,” he said, and then: “Do you believe in Jesus?” which, he said, was much like asking: “Do you think tomorrow will be even colder than today?” He was going, he said, to take a walk down to the station. “First along the shady side. Then to the newspapers. Then the café. Let me think: couldn’t we visit the parsonage? Or the poorhouse? No, no, not that. But anyway, you’re coming. Aren’t you?”

He listened to me a long time today as I told him about home. About how I had often gone on trips to the mountains, the lake, the cities. Also that I would read to them all from the Bible, father, mother, siblings—that seemed to make him sad. That we had trees in our garden that we had planted ourselves, cupboards and wardrobes where we keep early treasures, candles and baby clothes, pinecones from a cold and happy winter. That we always wrote each other letters, and worried about each other. That we knew of houses that were never locked up. Also forests, beaches, sled hills, known only to us. That there were beds turned back for us in heated rooms, and books, and that we love music which brings us together when it’s dark outside. And how storms suddenly wreck things that have been conceived to last for eternity, and were loved by everyone. He listened to everything I had to say, without a single interruption, even up and down the many detours and byways I took, where there was
talk of security and being together and being alone, of lack of self-confidence, of trust, and rebellion and distinctions, of suddenly stopping and going back, of fear and reproach, of love and torment, of deception and self-evidence, where clouds rose up, and heavy snowfalls darkened town and country, where people continually renewed each other, where there was grief after days of exuberance and rivers dragged their courses, where you gradually forgot how to live and found again what had been lost, where silence alternated with excitement, stimulating modesty here and brutality there—things that didn’t resolve themselves, how people walked past each other, not recognizing themselves, fell into silence, and the sayings of sadness, where nights were uselessly waked through and a thousand important days were slept away. It all made him very sad, but he was quite without bitterness. “Fascinating,” he said after these morning hours in which I kept saying, well, that was about the way of it, to myself and to him, who was so taciturn, “It’s like listening to my own life story. I can see it all before me with my own eyes, and I know that’s how it was.” And after a while: “Of course we see everything under false pretenses.”

I attempted a description of my room at home. Forced myself, step by step, to see everything in my room, along the walls, back and forth, to notice the sounds that came in, barged in, at various particular times of day. Began with the door, with its deep keyhole, through which you came into a sort of cavern, back out a little, past the hinges to the corner where dust always settled, got damp, dried out, and finally formed a solid mass, further bound together by fly droppings. Then on, along the ceiling, drop down to the floor,
onto the carpet, take in the ornaments, Arabian window casements, potpourri, staircases, views onto the temple and the sea, immobilized by heat. Through the keyhole into the chest, half-dead with the smell of the summer clothes jammed into it, looking for a way through the dark and the soporific smell, out and onto the window seat over the garden. Then the picture of the beautiful city, lying there in autumn, in wild brown colors. The mountain scene, with the walkers emerging into a river valley. Along the gilded frame, from one carved heart to another. Grandfather’s picture, then grandmother’s. The letter from my brother, covering over a third of the hunting scene, showing a hunter playing a bagpipe, and calling several other figures to dance. The copper engraving of an old castle in the flatland. Then the table and bed and chair, the floorboards, the cracks in the plaster. And all the connections between everything. The copper engraving and the castle, the castle and the lake, the lake and the hills, the hills and the mountains, the mountains with the sea lying below, the sea and the people, and their clothes and the summer evening, the air over the river that has our boat bobbing on it, long past midnight. Or grandfather’s picture with a room in a brewery, with a suicide, with a fisherman dragging a pike out of the rushes. I said: “Each item takes you to all the others. It’s a proof of all of them.” But the painter didn’t reply. Suddenly I noticed that he hadn’t been listening to me, that what I had been thinking and trying to say hadn’t interested him at all, because he said: “It’s too bad that I am compelled to take my meals down in the public bar. That the landlady won’t bring them up to my room. Send a child up there. It’s a torment for me to sit in that public bar. But then I suppose I’m looking for things that will irritate me. The smell,” he said, “makes me ill. The smell of workmen
has always made me ill. And always attracted me. Yes, it’s true. If I come down sooner, the food isn’t ready, if I come later, there’s nothing left. As if they were all equipped with trunks and claws when they eat,” he said. “The inns in the valley make even more of a profit, those inns make an immense profit. Only undesirables make their way up the mountain. Those who are heavily indebted, and can’t show themselves in the valley anymore. For whatever reasons. They cook in vast cauldrons down there. And all of them with the very cheapest fats and oils. Not our landlady! Even though she too, as I’ve already intimated to you, uses dirt, and works with dogmeat and horsemeat. I’ve always hated human gatherings.”