Frost: A Novel

by Thomas Bernhard

  “It’s oppressive,” said the painter, “really oppressive today. The smell of the fire is everywhere. Do you feel like going up and having a look? I don’t myself. If there were a sleigh, but there aren’t any sleighs. It’s too much trouble.” He had sat in the kitchen of the poorhouse and talked with the mother superior, and some of the kitchen women. “They make soup from potato peels,” he said. Gypsies had passed through the village, and been given a hot meal at the poorhouse. “They came with a horse and cart. Part of a larger group that stopped down at the station. From Croatia. The mother superior gave them all bread and a medal. The Gypsies are left over, left over from a world that’s sick of itself. They wanted to sing, but the mother superior didn’t want any singing, and so they didn’t sing, and they packed the bread in their cart, and drove off …” He said: “And then I went through the village. But the weather, as the teacher likes to say, is stupid. The newborn are dying all over the place. Emergency slaughterings are undertaken every day. I’ve heard the butcher giving out orders nonstop. His wooden clogs against the aluminum tub of blood. The glistening of the calf’s intestines as he pulled them out. The warm, sweet smell of them! You know, they still brain them here, they refuse to shoot them, the way they do everywhere else. One man grabs hold of the ears and tail, the other clubs it down. I expect you’re familiar with the sound of an animal collapsing onto the cement floor of an abattoir. The mountains are suddenly so near, you think you’ll hit your brains against them. The whole village is littered with tufts of hair and scraps of hide. I tell them to tidy them away, and shovel snow over the puddles of blood, but who listens to me. In the countryside, the paths are always sodden with blood. I went into the butcher’s and told him he should get his apprentice to sweep the hair away from the entrance to the slaughterhouse, and cover over the bloodstains, and then I didn’t leave till the fellow had swept and covered it. The butcher said there was going to be a big lavish affair in the next village because of the farmer’s dead wife, they had come and placed orders with him. And that was why he had been doing some fresh killing. He needs to supply them tonight.” They had a sledload of meat to deliver to the community center in O.

  We had reached the place where the Klamm suddenly opens out. It was a long way round, but Strauch was dead set on going there. I had read him a sentence from my Henry James book, and he interpreted it in the most wonderful way, this incomprehensible, to me incomprehensible sentence, which kept me awake all night (I have to say, I was never in all my life afflicted with this restlessness, I had gone down from my room into the public bar, and then walked out of the house into the cold air, into the “graveyard chill,” I wandered into the ravine, I had thrown a jacket over my nightshirt, slipped into my trousers, and was walking “into the unconsciousness of things”; but I am unable to explain any of it, I can’t write anything down that happened, neither of that nor of anything else)—when the painter interpreted this Henry James sentence to me, and the Klamm lay in front of us, the snowed-in approach to the Klamm, he stopped suddenly and told me to stand two paces behind him. He didn’t turn to face me, even though he suddenly started talking to me. “You see,” he said, “this tree comes on and says the line I told it to say, an incomprehensible line of poetry, a line that will turn the world on its head, a so-called line against God, you understand me! This tree walks on from the left, the cloud comes on from the right, the cloud with its softer voice. I view myself as the creator of this afternoon drama, this tragedy! This comedy! Now listen, the music has come in right on cue. The music plays on the difference between my words and all others. Listen, the instruments are perfecting it, my tragedy, my comedy, the instruments, all the high-pitched and low-pitched instruments, music is the only mistress of the double killing-ground, the only mistress of the double pain, the only mistress of the double forbearance … Music, you hear me … language approaches music, but language hasn’t the strength to circumvent music, it has to directly approach music, language is nothing but weakness, the language of nature as much as the language of the darkness of nature, as the language of the depth of leave-taking … You hear me: I was in this music, I am in this music, I am made of this language, I am contained in the quiet poetry of this afternoon … Do you see my theater? Do you see the theater of apprehension? The theater of God’s un-self-sufficiency? What God?” He turned to me and said: “God is a cosmic embarrassment! An immense embarrassment of the stars! But,” he said, and set his index finger against his mouth: “let’s not talk about that. I want the tree to finish its lines, I want the stream to finish its lines, I want the sky to finish its lines, and I want Hell to master the rationale of its fires, to the very end. I want these fires, you must know. I want these shadows, I want these shadows to kill … to kill each and every thing … I have compassion with this tragedy, with this comedy, I have no compassion with this tragedy, this comedy, this self-invented tragicomedy, with these self-invented shadows, with these torments of shadows, with these shadow torments, with this endless sadness …” He said: “Such a spectacle is a product of absurdity, of divine absurdity, such a spectacle, you see, you must know, is nothing but laughter … And now listen,” said the painter, “the world arises into the air from its own dark, just as air, just as the water in the air, the relation between the air and the other air … Yes,” said Strauch, “and now I’m going to clap my hands, quite simply clap my hands, I’m going to clap my hands and bang my head against the most sensitive point of the universe, and the whole thing was just a specter, just a specter of a ghost, you understand, just a ghostly specter.” We walked into the village. He said: “Sometimes exhaustion comes into my head like a self-dispersed theater, like something endlessly musical-demoniacal, and destroys me. It destroys me on the way to inability to be myself, on the way to the smallest, most remorseful tranquillity in my memory, and my ravaged heart.” He said: “For me it might have been enough simply to say, tree, forest, rock, air, earth; but for you, and for the world around, that’s not enough … You suddenly find yourself manufacturing a trauma, a drama, a comedy, a worm’s cast of a comedy … And sometimes nature will wring one’s neck, nature without simplicity, and then you see: the endless complications of terrible nature. Then, finally, everything is incomprehensible, ever more incomprehensible! All I had wanted to say was: ‘Here comes the tree …’ Nothing more. ‘The air is learning its lines …’ Nothing more. Come on, let’s go, and let’s not be scared anymore.”

  “The depredations of the forest are spoiling the balance of nature,” he said, as we were standing by the edge of the larch wood, there where you can plummet down vertically into the river, opposite the “sarcophagus.” “If these human assaults continue in their present exploitative fashion for another hundred years or so, then wherever we look in the world, we will only see these ghastly scenes of dying forests.” He said: “Each time I look at it, this landscape looks uglier to me. It’s ugly and menacing and full of wicked memory particles, a landscape that can really dismember a man. With its glooms and its savage herds and its accumulated devastation where the workers are being put upon. Unexceptionally malignant ravines, cracks, stains, disheveled shrubs, split trunks. All hostile. And regardless. On top of everything else, infested with the stink of cellulose. The birds fly up completely helplessly in summer, not knowing where they’re going, and then there’s the darkness of the actual rock face: you’d think you were suffocating. Nowhere is the cold so great, nowhere is the heat so unbearable. This thinking that it’s all death, you know, this gloom, the monstrously generic nature of it all … without question, death is the limitless, the most successful moment is death … All future hope is in death.” Then: “What is the mass that misunderstands death? What are the crowds that foolishly antagonize it? The crowd is always there, and moves into itself, into its restricted districts …” He went into the larch wood, and told me to go on ahead of him. “I have often seen policemen gallop up on tall horses, and rain blows down on the masses: it’s a recurring image: the way t
hey lash out at unprotected heads with clubs and rifle butts. The way the crowd closes ranks, shows first horror, then fight. How, only lately dominated by the police, they now dominate the police, who are still raining blows on them, you understand … The crowd is a phenomenon, the phenomenon of the man in the crowd has always fascinated me. The crowd exerts a morbid pressure on the individual to want to join it, to have to join it, you know … Disgust at being a part of it, disgust at not being a part of it. Now it’s the one form of disgust, now it’s the other … But people are always the crowd, always the mass. Every individual is the crowd and the mass, even the one who’s pinned between tall cliffs, who’ll never get out from between them, who’ll always remain high up and out of it … But this mass man, this crowd man, you know … It’s extraordinary to be part of a crowd! To know that that’s what you are: part of a crowd!” He said: “Shouldn’t we go to the curling arena? The people here have three passions: curling and whoring and playing cards. Did you understand the point of the game yesterday? You were freezing. You should have worn a thicker scarf. Don’t you have a proper woolen scarf?” He stomped over to a pile of brushwood, and motioned to me to follow him. “Look!” he said, and he lifted up the brushwood. There lay four or five deer, pressed together, frozen, with glazed eyes. “You’ll find refuges like this all over the place, they are always death traps when it’s as cold as it is this year,” said the painter. And I remembered the time when spring came, and I dragged together lots of deer carcasses with my brother in the great forests, and buried them. Often they were half eaten by foxes, and only their heads and skeletons were left.

  Today there was a letter from the landlord. Probably his letter was to confirm the receipt of the money that the landlady, on the insistence of her lover, the knacker, had sent him, I thought. Then I went around a long time with this letter, and kept wondering what would happen if I opened it and read it. But that would be a crime. So I didn’t do it. The landlord’s handwriting made me think about him and his life a lot. I felt that everything that went on in this person is doomed to be unhappy. And I can imagine him getting driven ever deeper into his sadness and his hopelessness, like a boat with an unconscious man in it, being pushed by the current ever nearer to the brink … At first I was unable to account for the way the knacker supported the landlord, by almost forcing the landlady to send the money he asked for, and how he keeps on supporting the landlord, even though the landlady is his mistress … Now I probably know why, though I’m not able to express it. I keep hearing how nicely the prisoners are doing in prison, but they can’t be doing so nicely that they don’t find it a terrible affliction, wherever they are and whatever they’re there for and under whatever the circumstances are, to be locked up … That handwriting shows you the whole misery of that condition, you can see it right away … I kept looking at the handwriting, and went round and round the hay barn. I wonder whether the landlord has another request now? I thought. What will he have to write to her about? He surely can’t know what she thinks about him, and how she opposes him, acts against his interests, quite apart from her unfaithfulness, which he knows about. And about the knacker too. It’s a terrible situation. In my agitation I go to the cemetery, to look for the grave of the workman whom the landlord killed. I walk up and down, and then I’m standing in front of a snowy mound, with a cross stuck in the earth. But no name. Nothing. That’s surely it, I think. I stand there and I feel like crying. In fact, I did cry. And then I quickly went into the chapel, but it was so cold in there, and so stupidly quiet, that I could get no peace, and I went out into the cemetery again. Roofs all round. Houses, with smoke pouring out of them. I felt utterly miserable. Then I ran into the knacker, coming over with his cramp-irons and shovel from the rectory, walking through the graves toward me. He must have seen me. What was I doing there; it wasn’t usual to find a person in the cemetery at this time. I wasn’t doing anything, I said. Nothing at all. I was bothered. I couldn’t ask him whether that mound was where the workman was lying. “No,” I said, “I’m not doing anything.” I must have struck him as very disturbed. I was disturbed. Then with the letter in my hand, I ran to the inn, and gave it to the landlady.

  I saw the landlady preparing food in the kitchen, bacon and sausage and apples and coffee all piled up on the sideboard. In between times she went to the stove and the public bar, and she kept going into the pantry, because she’d forgotten something that she could bring out and lay on the sideboard with the other things. There was a blue bag of lump sugar. I stood in the kitchen, because I was waiting for water, which she’d put on the stove to heat up especially for me. Then she disappeared into her bedroom for a little time, and when she came back she had a pair of her husband’s warm woolen socks, which she set down next to the food. “Your water will be hot soon,” she said. Then I watched her pack all the food things in a big cardboard box. “Did you see the knacker anywhere?” she asked. “No,” I said. “He said he’d come and take the things down to the post office for me.” She wrapped the cardboard box in a big sheet of brown paper, and tied it up with thick twine, perhaps some old washing line. “That has to go out today,” she said. “It’s urgent.” She had the makings of lunch in big saucepans on the stove. She stirred one, then another, with a big wooden spoon. She fed the fire with more wood. “If it goes to the post office now,” she said, “it’ll go on the mail sleigh.” Would the parcel cost a lot to send? “No,” I said, “it won’t be very much.” The postmistress had used to be a friend of hers, and had spent years eating in her pub. “But our husbands forced us apart,” she said. She had divorced the postman, and married a worker at the cellulose factory, five years ago now. “It was always going to go wrong,” she said. “I would never have married him!” Then the knacker came in, with his rucksack on his back. It was good that she had got the parcel packed and ready, because he was just on his way to the post office. “I can’t send him any more than I’ve got here,” she said. He seemed very surprised that it was such a large parcel. “I put his warm socks in there too.” She went into the pantry and came out with some bacon, which she cut up and laid on a piece of bread. That was for the knacker to eat. He ate up the bread and bacon. To me she said: “I’m sure your water’s hot now.” I had forgotten all about the water. I took the jug off the stove, and went up to my room. I thought the landlord probably wrote and asked for some more food. And for some warm socks. I was sure there had been dissent between the landlady and the knacker before the making up of the parcel. The knacker had a lot to carry.

  Eighteenth Day

  “I could drill through my boots, you know that? I could. But I don’t want to. I’ve got the strength. But I’m not going to drill through my boots. It would be a pointless waste of strength.” We walk on. He says: “The whole world consists of pointless wastes of strength. I’m waiting for the end now, you know! Just as you’re waiting for your end. Just as everyone’s waiting for their end. Only they don’t realize they’re waiting and waiting for what I’ve always been waiting for, namely the end!” He reminds me of a church singer, who is suddenly called upon to speak loudly into the nave. “My end frees me! Me and my person. All the things that only exist in and through me!” His sentences echo back, as from the walls of a church. “That’s the extraordinary thing!” Then: “Vague, always vague! But I don’t intend ever to express myself with precision. I can imagine it must be difficult to make anything of these connections, omissions, sins of omission, accumulations, obligations, verdicts … No, I don’t demand that! I no longer demand anything. Anything. Nothing from anyone! … A situation like the one in which I find myself is completely unimaginable. Of course, I don’t know anything either. That’s true. I’m a burden on you … I know your life can’t be easy for you either, but it’s a good deal easier than mine. To begin with,” he said, “you have all sorts of possibilities. You are able to enthuse about all sorts of things. The most banal things! You develop an array of gifts, of the sort that many people manage to develop, canny people,
brutes, and then timid like wallflowers. You can do this and that and the other thing, and your head is stuffed full of all sorts of plans and future directions. All in all, you think you might want to do pretty much anything and have it in your power to do so. You think you’re in a circus, and because you’re so gifted and so popular, you can do anything in the circus that takes your fancy: any stunts, even the hardest, any tricks, even the meanest. You think you can walk on a tightrope, high over a drop, where the air is already thin … you think you can ride, put your head in the lion’s mouth, and take it out when the beast roars … acrobatics … stunts … you think you can do anything, and you also think, and you’re completely persuaded of that fact, that you can be the director as well … the circus director: fine, there are no limits, because you see none. It’s all unlimited, and that deadly subconscious feeling of being able to turn your hand to absolutely anything … till one day your first idea comes to you, and then a second, a third, and a fourth … one after another … finally hundreds and thousands, thousands of ideas: those are the painters, the newspapermen, the prison wardens and the prisoners, the policemen, the philosophers … heir, cow, tail, minister, director, you understand … till you end up not being convinced by anything … that’s what it is … Because you have your moments of this and that, and no character … how soon everything turns into nothing, unemployed, unskilled, mad, unemployable, manifesting the signs of idiocy … But all that’s just a point of view,” he said, “no deeper and no less deep than the crassest error.”