Frost: A Novel

by Thomas Bernhard

  I stay downstairs in the public bar, because the people create a bit of warmth. Up in my room it’s cold, the fire has gone out, and I don’t feel like trying to get it going again. I can’t sleep in a warm room. I’ve got a small cast-iron stove in my room. It quickly becomes red hot, but just as soon goes stone cold. And the room is like the stove. Down in the public bar, I join in their card games. I go and sit with them once I’m sure the painter won’t be back down. He wouldn’t like to see me playing with them. Or should I just tell him? Why don’t I tell him? I shouldn’t let him boss me around. But sometimes he stays sitting there himself, and asks the engineer something to do with the construction of the power plant, or the knacker about some detail in one of his war reminiscences. “Was that in Poltava?” he asks, to test out the knacker. And he says back: “No, it was in Odessa,” and if, as the painter recalls, he said, “in Odessa,” weeks before, at the same point in the same story, then he knows that the story is truthful. The painter likes to ask these trick questions. If the knacker had said: “Yes, in Poltava,” then that would have been proof that the story he told was not a truthful one. Or the painter says: “The girl remained faithful to that man to the end, didn’t she?”

  Many times I have to fetch the beer-warmer from the kitchen for the painter. But then he leaves it in the glass for so long that the beer becomes undrinkable, and then he says: “I can’t drink this!” and pushes it away. He orders one glass of beer after another, and leaves them untouched. If he steps away, the engineer drinks it off, or the knacker, or whoever else happens to be sitting nearby. Sometimes he takes his Pascal with him on walks, and suddenly pulls it out of his pocket, opens it up at a certain page somewhere, and says: “That’s a great thought!” pretends to read a section, looks at me, and returns the book to his pocket. “Blaise Pascal, born 1623, the greatest!” he says. It might be two o’clock before I get to bed. In the end, it’s still the engineer and the knacker sitting there, and the landlady and me. Now the cards are on the table, now they’re in our hands. The landlady keeps record of who wins. The wall clock ticks. Outside, the world shrivels up with cold. “Up until six months ago, I kept a dog,” says the landlady, looking out the window. And seeing nothing but fear. The light is dim, and my eyes hurt as one o’clock comes and goes. Up in my room, I suddenly feel terribly alone, without knowing why. It takes me hours to get warm.

  “I’m standing in front of the tree,” I say, “but I don’t know what that is, a tree. What is it? And there’s a human being standing there, and I don’t know what that is either. I don’t know anything. Now it’s high up and now it’s cold and now it’s dark. Do you know?”—“Me?” says the knacker, “why me?”—“And you’re looking up at the blackness, and those are clouds, aren’t they? And then you walk into a building where it’s warm. And there are people sitting. And there are some in the cemetery too. Do you know what that is?”—“No, people,” he says. “Yes, people.” And suddenly it feels cold, and I’m shivering, and I ought to hurry back, the painter’s waiting for me. I told him I would be back soon, he asked me to get him some shoelaces in the village. I went to the cobbler’s, and bought him the shoelaces. And then I went out, and stood in the village square. Well, so it goes, I said to myself. And then: “Shoelaces.” And then I go round to the cemetery to ask the knacker something. Once I’m up there, I can’t remember what it is I wanted to ask him. He is standing in exactly the place where in my memory—or even in my dream, if you like—I thought of him standing. He is wearing what I supposed he would be wearing. He climbs out of a grave, and I put the painter’s shoelaces in my pocket. “I wanted to ask you something, but I can’t remember what it was,” I say. “I’ve forgotten it.”—“Ask me something?” he says, and descends into the grave again. I can only see his head, and I take a step forward, and now I can see his back as well. “A grave,” I say. He says: “How do you mean, a grave?”—“It is a grave, isn’t it? A deep grave.”—“A grave, yes,” he says. “Why?”—“Do you know why? How deep a grave can be,” I say. People walk around on the planet for a while, which looks to them like the sort of place where you can walk around—who says that?—and then they fall into a grave like that. Who had the idea of letting people walk around on the planet, or something called a planet, only to put them in a grave, their grave, afterward? “That’s a very old tree,” I say to the knacker. And he: “Yes, it’s a very old tree.” And after a while I say the same thing about a person, without realizing I’m saying the same thing, I say: “He’s very old, isn’t he?”—“Yes,” says the knacker, “he’s very old!” And then: “What’s it like in the parson’s house? Cold?”—“Yes,” he says, “very cold, very cold.” And I say: “How are things in the city? A lot of people, I expect?”—“Yes, a lot of people,” he says. “And what’s tomorrow’s weather going to be like? Can we hope for something pleasanter?”—“Hope?” he says. “Yes. We can hope.”—“And why does the grave have to be dug today, when the burial’s not till the day after tomorrow?”—“Why? The burial’s the day after tomorrow,” he says. “The afternoon of the day after tomorrow.”—“Yes, the afternoon of the day after tomorrow.”—“It must be cold, down there,” I say. And he says: “Cold. Yes, it must be cold, down there.” What do we know about it all. Was he going the same way as me, I asked the knacker. Yes, he is going the same way. I wonder what he has in his rucksack, I think. We take the shortcut to the village. I wish I had stout shoes! The knacker says: “In the war, there was no lack of criminality here. And even after the war, when I was back home, people were brained over a bicycle or a piece of bread. And imagine this: the French let the convicts out of the prisons, and they flooded the entire country; every little place saw killings over a blanket, or an old horse. Not to mention the acts of vengeance!” said the knacker. “Did the painter not tell you about any of that? During and after the war, he was in Weng with his sister. The farmers did not treat him at all well.” The painter had been forced to sleep in an attic of the inn for a while, “because the rooms were all full of soldiers.” They had arrested the landlord, and put him up against the wall to shoot him, “no one knows why. But at the very last moment they didn’t shoot him.” During the war years, the cellulose factory had “worked exclusively on producing munitions.” Attempts had been made to bomb it from the air, but the planes had crashed in the mountains, or had been forced to turn back because of poor visibility. As a returning veteran, he had been forced to lie low in hay barns for weeks. “I spent many days sleeping in cornfields. The corn was high. I ate fresh baby beets and corn,” he said. “It was very quiet down in the valley.” Here and there, he had heard the sound of gunfire. No trains. Nothing. “The bridges had all been blown.” Chunks of rock lay across the tracks. “Sentries had been put out in front of people’s houses.” When they were finally withdrawn one day, he left his cornfield, and went into the village. He got himself some old pants and an old jacket, took off his uniform, and got into the pants and jacket. Then he went round to the mayor’s office, where they were pleased with every man jack. They were looking for someone to bury the dead. “I was engaged on the spot.”

  He became knacker a week later, when they stumbled across two hundred shot horses in the larch wood, which for several days had been spreading a nauseating smell that they hadn’t been able to trace, because the wind must have come from the opposite direction, otherwise they surely wouldn’t have been able to tolerate the stench. “I had to work day and night. To separate the shot soldiers from the shot horses. The horses we simply burned. A great big bonfire,” said the knacker. “The soldiers we buried in big pits. Some hundred or so young men who had come from somewhere or other on those horses. We don’t know where from, and we don’t know who shot them either. People seem to think it was French machine guns … that’s what they think.” When I said goodbye to him in the village square, he said: “All full of cadaver smells!” And I went to the post office.

  Tenth Day

  For the first time, I had a dream
about Strauch; following this dream, or perhaps even during it, it occurred to me that I hadn’t dreamed for some time, certainly, I can’t recall a single dream I had recently, though that must be a mistake, one of those “mistakes that distract us from death,” because there is no such thing as “people who don’t dream,” our nights are dreams, nothing but dreams, which we are unable to see, though we are aware of them, even if this awareness takes place without consciousness. Be that as it may, I dreamed about Strauch for the first time. I was in a clinic in a city, a building put together from all the clinics I had ever visited and worked in, and I had the rank of doctor, I was, as I was being told on every side as I walked through this big clinic, a “highly regarded doctor,” even a “renowned doctor,” a “specialist,” as they told me on every side, I heard the word “specialist” from all round, from every direction, everything was buzzing and hissing the word “specialist” at me, sometimes also “medical specialist”; my progress was a tormenting fording or crossing of this concept, I ran, but I couldn’t run, after all, I thought, a specialist doesn’t run, I didn’t have to control myself, but I was controlled: I walked through enormous wards, where crowds of patients had been waiting for me, and were bowing to me, their heads curiously low to the ground, so that I was unable to see their faces, I saw only their long, bony, fleshy, fatty backs, I saw those backs and the feet of these people, oddly I was able to give them all their names, and some of them I called out, and it was a torment when those I called emerged from the mass of the patients and told me their medical histories, really only by a variety of hideous facial expressions; behind me I had a line of doctors, among them the assistant, also several faces of specialists who had marked my exams, and who would mark my future exams, all were behind me in a horribly stiff gaggle of doctors, as if “condemned to medical anonymity,” they were all responding to me, to everything I appeared to be expressing; I said: “Of course there are certain constellations which prohibit life!” (I remember that sentence particularly clearly); to that sentence they responded as follows: they simply denied that those patients who seemed to demur against my sentence possessed the faculty of thought, they shouted them down; those patients who refused to be shouted down were removed by them, made invisible, made invisible for me; the doctors burst out in a gale of laughter at that. I said: “Life forbids individual lives!” whereupon they threatened the patients with grave punishments should they offer a response to my second sentence; the doctors themselves laughed even harder; when their laughter became unbearable, I fled into another room, this one was a white-tiled, abattoir-like room, completely empty, where the doctors let me go all alone. I could sense, however, that they were standing by the door, which had closed behind me. All at once, I saw an operating table in the middle of the room, which at first had been empty; suddenly I saw Strauch strapped onto the operating table. Suddenly I had a collection of instruments floating in front of me ready for use. Strauch lay immobile and strapped to the operating table, which was moving in a semicircular rotation. The ghastly thing was that the operating table continued to move; each time I approached it, it moved, and I saw that I wouldn’t be able to work at this operating table. “No!” I screamed. The doctors, standing outside, burst into further laughter. They chanted: “Operate! Operate!” and they laughed. In the midst of their laughter, I kept hearing the assistant say: “Make an incision! What are you waiting for! Make an incision! You have to make an incision! Begin! Don’t you see you have to make an incision? You owe everything to my brother!” And then I began to operate; I don’t remember what sort of operation it was, I was performing a whole series of operations: a spleen-kidneys-lung-heart-head operation; and all on the continuously and irregularly gyrating operating table. Suddenly I saw that the body, on which I had thought to perform certain precise operations, had been completely slashed to ribbons. The body was no longer recognizable as a body. It was like a piece of meat, which I had radically, impeccably, and completely insanely cut up, and was now as impeccably and crazily stitching together again. All through these operations, which followed the very strictest methodology, I was regaled by the laughter of the medical retinue, which was waiting outside, apparently following everything I was doing in the operating theater, annotating every single cut with a puking gurgling laughing display of technical superiority. Finally they thought the operation had been brought to a successful conclusion, whereas I myself was of the view I had merely “ripped and cut open and completely wrongly stitched back together.” They surged into the theater and yelled that I had performed a great feat, the greatest-ever feat in medical operational terms, they cheered and finally they lifted me shoulder-high, they all wanted to shake my hand, or kiss my hand, they had broken out into the most appalling cheering; held aloft, I looked down from close to the ceiling of the operating theater on a heap of mutilated flesh that, under the application of electric current, seemed to move, to twitch, a heap of minced meat that spastically discharged blood, incessantly discharged blood, vast quantities of blood, slowly inundating everything in blood, everything, the doctors, everything; also the cries of the assistant, those awful sentences, drowning in the vast flows of his brother’s blood: “Don’t worry, the operation has been a success! This is your brother, I’m your brother! Don’t worry, the operation has been a success! …” When I awoke, I had to open the window and put my head outside. I had the feeling I was going to suffocate. But outside, there was the moon, and the stars looked like sheet anchors. The doctors in my dream, some of whom were familiar to me, but then it turned out I didn’t really know them at all, had children’s voices. You have to picture these doctors to yourself, men of all ages between nineteen and seventy, often with big bellies and round swollen doctors’ heads, all yelling and laughing like three- or four-year-olds, or like thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kids!

  IN THE POORHOUSE

  “I’d like to take you along to the poorhouse once,” said the painter. “It might be a good thing for someone like you, without much experience—that is the case, isn’t it?—” he said, “to take a look at one of the most pitiful and oppressive institutions there are, a collection of infirm old people, incapable of doing anything beyond mumbling to themselves. I don’t think it’ll shock you to such a degree that I would have to smack myself on the wrist and say: I really shouldn’t have done that, taken that fellow in there, made him acquainted with the hydrocephalic, with the alcoholic, with the swollen smoker’s leg, with the senility of geriatric Catholicism. The old just want to eat,” said the painter, “the old men are guests of the devil, the old women suck on the tits of heaven! And all without self-defense! That smell,” said the painter, “when you set foot in the poorhouse, you don’t know if it’s apples or the rotting breasts of old grocers’ wives. You want to hold your breath,” said the painter, “hold your breath to everything with the impertinence to lie ahead of you! But already your chest is full of rot. Suddenly you can’t even manage to exhale anymore, can’t exhale so much filth, so much age, the stink of so much unbelievable redundancy, that dull melancholy stink of ichor. Yes,” said the painter, “I’ll take you along there. I’ll show you the place. You’ll curtsey to the mother superior. You’ll tell her your little story, the little story of your life, and you’ll get one or two back! You’ll be torn apart! The old are the grave-robbers of the young. Old age is grave-robbery. Old age gets its bellyful of youth,” he said. “So I come into the poorhouse once,” said the painter, “and they bring me bread and milk, and they want me to drink schnapps as well, but I say I don’t want any schnapps, no no, no schnapps, I say, under no circumstances, and I refuse and resist, but they pour out a glass for me anyway, and I don’t drink it, and I say, no, I’m not drinking this, and the mother superior pours the schnapps back in the bottle, and I know she’s after money, the whole village is after my money, all of them, they all want a piece, they all take me for stupid, basically they all think I’m stupid, limitlessly stupid, because I’ve been feeding them all, feeding them
all for years, with advice, suggestions, tips, help, support, yes, even money, I’ve stuffed so much money into this rathole … so, I come into the poorhouse,” said the painter, “and I refuse their schnapps, and I listen to their begging, listen to them saying I should give them a subvention, ‘a very small subvention,’ which ‘the Lord’ (what Lord) will ‘give me credit for,’ and I listen to it all, and I look at the mother superior, and I hear her feet working the sewing machine treadle, she works the treadle while she pulls a ripped old man’s shirt under the needle at her breast, and then a jacket, and I look in her face, her wide, puffy face, her swollen hands, her square dirty fingernails, I look under her bonnet, her snow-white bonnet, I think: Ah, so this is evening in the poorhouse, which is always the same evening, for a hundred years, for five hundred years, the same evening as this one, sewing together and drinking together and eating together and praying together and lying together and sleeping together and stinking together; it’s all this one evening, I think, which no one is thinking of changing, and no one is thinking of, period, it’s the evening of loathsomeness and rejection by the world. If you must know,” said the painter, “I’m sitting there for an hour and I say I’m prepared to pay a supplement for an old man, a cooper, if you must know, in leather leggings and a loden coat, in a canvas shirt, and with a fur cap on his head, I say I’m prepared to purchase a Severin calendar from the mother superior, one of those loathsome productions of clerical idiocy, and then I notice there’s a man lying on the bench by the wall, completely motionless if you must know, with the Severin calendar on his chest; the man is lying behind the mother superior, and I’m thinking surely he’s dead, the man must be dead, and I give myself a nudge, and I think, the man must be dead, so this is what a dead man looks like, old and dead, and I wonder how it is that I’ve not noticed this dead man lying there all along, with straight thin legs that look as though they’ve been stuffed into the craw of eternity. But there can’t be a dead man lying here! Not here! Not now! In the dark, I failed to notice the man the whole time I was here, also because the mother superior was claiming the whole of my attention with her nonsense about the Severin calendar. ‘Our Severin calendar,’ she kept saying the whole time, ‘our Severin calendar benefits the poor in the Congo, the poor in the Congo …’ I’ve been listening to her say that for fully an hour, I think to myself, and I want to jump up and go over to the dead man, but then I see the man start to move, suddenly the man on the bench is moving, and he pulls the Severin calendar up from his belly to his chin, so that he can read it. So, the man isn’t dead after all! But even so, I think to myself, he looks like a dead man, dead people don’t look any worse, in some sense this man is a dead man! I watch him move his arms, how he leafs through the calendar, avidly leafs through the calendar, but his body is completely motionless, and once again I think to myself, yes, he is dead! But then I hear a breath, the first ‘breath’ from this dead man. I feel alarmed, alarmed mostly at myself, because I hadn’t noticed the man all the time I was there. The mother superior hadn’t mentioned to me that there was a man in the room with her. In the darkness I wasn’t able to see him. Suddenly, after an hour, I saw the body, the head, perhaps the legs as well, because, I don’t know why, imperceptibly, for some reason, it got a little brighter, even to see the man by, perhaps because my eyes suddenly got used to the darkness (your eyes don’t work, for a long time, if you must know, your eyes don’t work, then all at once your eyes start to work). Suddenly my eyes saw the man, my eyes saw this dead man. He was lying there like a piece of wood. And then this piece of wood started to breathe, it breathed and it started to flick through the calendar. Then I said to the mother superior: ‘There’s somebody lying there!’ But she didn’t react at all. She was reattaching a sleeve she had previously cut off. ‘There’s someone lying there!’ I said, a bit louder. Without looking at me, she replied: ‘Yes, a human being.’ It was terrible, the way she said it. I wanted to say, ‘He’s lying there just like a child!’ But instead I said: ‘He’s lying there just like a dog. What’s he doing here?’ Someone like that isn’t going to be able to listen, I thought, and so I could speak about him with the mother superior quite uninhibitedly. ‘He’s reading the Severin calendar,’ I said, ‘even though it’s dark, even though it’s almost pitch-dark.’ ‘Yes,’ said the mother superior, ‘he’s reading the Severin calendar.’ I had to laugh! I started laughing, I burst out laughing, most of all because I recalled that I had taken the man to be dead, taken him to be dead the whole time, and in fact I said: ‘I thought the man was dead.’ I had to get up in order to stop laughing. I had to walk up and down. ‘Dead!’ I exclaimed, ‘I thought he was dead!’ Then I was suddenly alarmed, you understand, by the face that was lying in the dark, lying as if above the surface of a dirty pond. ‘This man is reading in the dark,’ I said. The Mother Superior said: ‘He knows everything, he knows everything in the calendar. He’s learned it all off by heart,’ she said. She didn’t stir, and kept pushing the treadle of her sewing machine. ‘He gets frightened when he’s not here with me,’ she said, ‘then he shouts and turns the whole house upside down. If I let him stay here with me, everything’s quiet, and he’s quiet as well. It won’t be much longer before he finally moves off.’—‘Finally moves off,’ she said. She wanted me to pay for a couple of yards of flannel shirting for the old man, but I said I needed to think about it, I’d consider it. I thought it was an impertinence on her part, trying to hang a couple of yards of flannel shirting on me as well. Then, sitting impassively at her machine, she described her childhood to me, if you must know. I always like to hear about that. Her father was crushed by a tractor, if you must know, her brother, a sportsman’s guide, put a bullet in his brain because he hated the world. Commonplace destinies. She’s a prolix, dropsical type,” said the painter. “But I haven’t told you the most important thing: there I was, sitting there, thinking I should say goodbye, when a dreadful noise made me jump to my feet. The old man had fallen off his bench—dead. The mother superior closed his eyes, and asked me to help her lift him back up on the bench. Shaking, I did so. I thought, now I’m breathing in the dead man’s air, and I went. All the way home, I thought: my lungs are full of dead man’s air. I hadn’t been mistaken, I’d been right all along, the man had been dead the whole time. Perhaps the movements I saw were just fantastic inventions on my part, he was dead all along, just dead the whole time the mother superior was repairing his jacket and his shirt, because they had been his jacket and his shirt that she had pulled this way and that under her needle, with an irritated expression on her face, with an expression of appalling irritation on her face. And he was dead long before I ever came along, I’m convinced of that.” The painter took a step back, and drew something in the snow with his stick. I soon saw that it was a sketch of the mother superior’s room in the workhouse. “There’s the bench where the dead man was lying, whom I failed to see for a whole hour, even though he was close enough to reach out and touch, here is the sewing table, here is the mother superior, here’s her wardrobe, if you must know, there’s the bed of the mother superior, and there’s her chest; here, you see, is where I sat down; this is where I came in through the door, and greeted the mother superior, I went up to her, and she immediately started trying to interest me in a subvention, in a Severin calendar. I knew I would part with the subvention and purchase the calendar, but I drew the whole thing out. I thought I was alone in the room with her, the way I had always been alone in the room with her, who could ever have supposed there would be anyone else in the mother superior’s room anyway, but I had a strange feeling as well, a feeling I can’t describe. Then it got brighter, and all at once I saw the stiff contours of the old man. Also I had said ‘like a dog’ to the mother superior. She even repeated it after me. The idea that the man couldn’t hear anything made me burst out laughing. Here, you see,” said the painter, and he drew a circle between the bench and the sewing machine, “right here is where the dead man lay when we picked him up. The whole
thing is quite extraordinary and not at all well described; but the only reason I’m telling you about this incident is because, however incompletely, it does give a picture of the mysterious lack of accountability in the world. On one of the next few days,” said the painter, “we’re going to the poorhouse. A young person must see what suffering is, what suffering and dying are, what it is to rot away.” We walked quickly home. The painter suddenly ran away from me, with an unexpected turn of speed for one of his years. “Wait for me!” I called after him. But he didn’t hear. He disappeared in one of the many dips in front of me.