Existence was well used to torrents, but sometimes it tended to forget that, and was carried along: “But it’s always an existence,” says the painter. Years ago, he had been in Weng with his sister once, “in spite of herself. She hated the region. In wartime.” More and more, the valley became a sort of refuge for the pair of them. “Unlike then, I’m unprotected now.” His sister’s baby, “back then, behind the church wall,” she was pregnant by an apprentice well driller, had died in its infancy. “No one knows why it suddenly died.” That fact, and the fact that his sister had had no objection to having the baby—“to her it was a happy and unlooked-for chance to find herself, as it were, overnight, in a state of expectancy—she never got over it. After conceiving, she came to me with friendly traits she had never had previously. Suddenly my sister manifested a sort of previously repressed wildness. At mealtimes. When I met her for walks. In the dark sometimes. When she said ‘goodnight,’ you could see it. The precocious father of her baby became a jailbird. Involved in several rapes, in the end he was unable to avoid the scaffold. He was from Goldegg. At the time, he was just fifteen. But powerfully built, like all the young fellows here. Come over the mountain, and punch six bells out of all and sundry. It was a warm spring day. My sister was walking in the graveyard, as she often did. You could hear the war from over the cliffs. The workhouse drew him in, the clogs of the prisoners at Garsten jail were like a marching band. I’ve got a photo of him. Over the years I managed to find out quite a bit about him, for instance that he fathered five children, who are all running around somewhere, living on farms. In workmen’s hostels. Who knows. Sometimes nature wants nothing but to test her strength on two people who don’t know what brought them together, why they belong together: there’s a sudden violence, favored by the climate in these parts, that switches off logic and emotion and thought for the duration. Often, it’s just an animal cunning that gets its way.”
His time as a substitute teacher came up again. “All my life, I’ve never hated anything as much as I hated teachers. Those teachers who always struck me as the embodiment of stupidity, the stupidity was drilled into their underpants. Also the generally dangerous ridiculousness, which further makes huge claims. For, as you must know, teachers make huge claims which take precedence over other claims. I so detested the teacher’s life, that I simply snubbed fellow humans whom I had known for some time but who had gone to become teachers. And there I was suddenly overnight becoming a substitute teacher. And on my own initiative! Just imagine my extremity! But I got out of that disgrace … A teacher is the mouthpiece of an entire generation. And you see: teachers make for calamities. Injustice and war. Of course, I was not a regular teacher, and I wasn’t on a regular pay scale either. Not a teacher in the strict sense. Only an occasional substitute teacher. So I wasn’t involved in that ghastliness.” He had suddenly found himself a substitute, a sort of casual teacher, just as others, and he himself in past years, were casual laborers. He doesn’t see much of a distinction between casual teaching and casual labor. The principal difference being that the casual laborer is generally in the fresh air, whereas the casual teacher is always in stuffy classrooms. The casual teacher feeds the children with figures and signs, and the casual laborer feeds the cement mixer with buckets of water and sacks of cement. The casual teacher has to be careful he doesn’t fall off his little classroom platform, and the casual laborer that he doesn’t fall onto the pavement from the third or fourth story of a building. “The casual teacher is so pathetic that regular teachers look the other way when he walks past them. They stand around in the corridor with their hands behind their backs, and form up into a solid phalanx, so there’s no room for the casual teacher in their midst. If the casual teacher has a question, he has to go to the director, because the regular teachers won’t give him an answer. ‘I’m going away,’ the regular teachers tell their classes, ‘and a casual teacher is coming to fill in for me.’ They don’t say: ‘You’re getting a new teacher …’ And thereby they spoil everything for the casual teacher. For instance, casual teachers are not allowed to wear the white coat of regular teachers. At the most, substitute teachers are allowed to wear sleeve protectors. Of course I would never have worn a teacher’s coat in any case. Much less had recourse to sleeve protectors … Nor do substitute teachers qualify for a training supplement.” He had never known what to do with himself in the breaks, because the regular teachers all snubbed him. “The substitute teachers’ trade union wants to improve all the conditions that the substitute teachers are exposed to. But the more it does, with its clumsy methods, the worse things are for substitute teachers. It’s a fact that the regular teachers’ union has much more influence.”
Today I wrote my fourth letter to the assistant, even though I haven’t had a reply from him to the first three. I drew a comparison between the painter Strauch and the surgeon Strauch. Inside and out, the two belonged to two quite opposed worldviews. They are two opposed worlds. Just as his brother and I are different. Different, not made of one and the same substance. The surgeon, who aims at a successful career. Who is either unfamiliar with despair, or else won’t have it anywhere near him. Only at a distance, where it can’t hurt him. Concerned, true, about the condition of his brother. But only out of his guilty conscience. He is not quaking.
An activity that fills his days and nights, to wit, surgery, which has also given him local celebrity, won’t let him think any more deeply, as humans can and sometimes desire to do, when they are basically unemployed, and therefore only concerned with themselves. In the operating theater, there is no thinking, only doing. After that, there is eating, and then sleeping, at the most there might be a little distraction in between times. Hardly any conversation. Hardly any variety. No moodiness. No melancholy. No troublesome memories. No women. The football pools. Down on the courts, a spot of tennis to counteract the unignorable signs of middle-age spread. No writing letters. No reading, with the exception of the specialist literature, as for instance the book On the Etiology of Smegma, or Cancer Research in America. The envious, the imitator, and the admirer are zealously kept at bay. The subjects of conversation are cancer, lung disease, wasting sickness, cramps, embolism, sites of infection. Wine is drunk. There are whispered meetings with nursing sisters. Interns and surgical nurses are ordered around, suddenly in the middle of an operation, bodies are sewn up, rolled out, “they wash their hands of them.”
It so happens that a condition is fatal that was not thought to be fatal. It happens more frequently than one might imagine. Outside the hospital walls. No news leaks out that would have serious consequences. He, the assistant, knows how to talk to people: to the consultant, to such and such, to the patients. He is free with the Du form, but it doesn’t mean a great deal. He is said to have a steady hand. Even by his helpers during the operation. Defter with his scissors than with needle and thread. Bold. Decisive, where others dither around. If someone dies, the reasons for it don’t greatly interest him. A devotee of the chase, he has no interest in the twilight world of art. The things his brother used to do were always repugnant to him. The academic side of him has gone on developing. He hates aesthetics. Also dreams. He appears never to have suffered. One can observe an athletic arrogance in him as he strides out of the hospital. On Sundays he goes to church. He is careful not to believe any more than is prescribed. Communists approach him, because he has never mocked Communism. He has a reputation for “textbook operations,” of the sort that is useful to every doctor over time. The scuttlebutt is that therapy is no longer a labyrinth to him. During the operation he exerts a magnetic pull on the instruments. The registrar has already designated him his successor. He is kind to me. Why? But then again, the way he deals with the scalpel seems highly artistic. Not just artful. He takes patients’ notes up to his room with him, the light is still on at two in the morning. He’s up at seven. You hear him. His footfalls in the corridor. Remarks have been attributed to him like: “Source the fantasy in the delusion …”—“Groundle
ss screams” or “the word gentleness, which keeps recurring.” Not an enthusiast. Not a spoilsport, because not a player. A rock? For me, yes. Places where no one has yet been, where nothing has lived. Vistas that lie open. The surgeon, the competent one. The painter, his brother, the incompetent, I think.
When he took off his hat, I saw he had a wound on his head. He had lost his bearings at night, and hit a beam. “I crawled along the floor, not knowing where I was going. Then I tried to get up, and smashed my head against a beam.” I couldn’t have the least idea of what the night he had spent had been like. The fear of being “completely mad” had sent him plunging out of his room, “between three and four a.m., in blank despair.” Half-dressed, he had first gone downstairs, into the kitchen, then the public bar, where he had looked for something to drink. “But she keeps everything under lock and key.” Because beer bottles and juice often went missing, the landlady had taken to locking up her supplies. Guests at the inn had even tapped the barrel, and let half the beer run out. “I didn’t manage to find anything. Not in the kitchen, and not in the public bar,” he said. Then he had thought of the cellar, but on the way he had remembered that she always locked the cellar too. “As you know, she always keeps the key to the cellar on her person.” Then he had gone back, and abruptly lost his orientation. “I didn’t dare turn on a light. If I turn on a light, I’ll wake everyone up. I didn’t turn on a light.… I expect I crawled around in circles.” The wound to his head had happened very suddenly. Suddenly he felt warm blood on his hand, and smeared his clothes with it. “On the floor as well … In the morning, I was the first one downstairs, at five o’clock, and wiped away the bloodstains I left behind. Even the doors were smeared. And the walls too.” How he’d got back up to his room he couldn’t remember. “I fell into bed when I was upstairs. So I was lucky I woke up before five o’clock, so that I could straighten everything out. Just imagine if the landlady had found my bloodstains everywhere! … I originally went upstairs to wash. Since I’d lain down in my bed in my clothes—I was simply too weak to get undressed—I got the bed all bloody as well. But that’s not unusual. I dabbed the wound with cold water, which felt good. Then I put my feet in the basin too. The pains relented. The burning got less.” That night, he had had the feeling the whole time that he had to hide “from something terrible.” He had gone over to the window and opened the curtains and looked out. “It was as if I were in an aquarium where the water had frozen. Everything in the aquarium was frozen. The trees. The bushes. Everything. Coated in whitish ice that was so clear, you could see the rocks beneath. At the least movement, for instance if I breathed, tens of thousands of cracks would form in the massive ice block that the world had turned into.” He had been stunned by the sight. “I had to turn away, it was so fascinating … I went back to the wash basin, and dipped my towel in the water, and tied it round my head. When I returned to the window, the scene had changed. No ice. No rigidity. Suddenly everything was living and moving. And that was even stranger.” Then he sat down on his bed and, to distract himself from what he had seen, he tried to think of something in the past—“something jolly. A good moment, a single beautiful moment. But I could find none. If only I could have been able to watch a single amusing figure go by, in my memory! But no, there wasn’t the least thing to distract me. I was only able to muster a few shallow breaths,” he said.
By morning, the wound to his head had healed. I looked at it when he sat down to breakfast. It was healing, as if on a healthy person. Closing, as if drawn together with an invisible thread. He had reflected about himself all night, and come to various, “albeit unsatisfactory,” conclusions. There were so many ways in which one might look at oneself. From the surface. From the deep interior, “from way underneath.” From a thousand acute or obtuse angles. What one saw was so wretched. And simultaneously frightening. “A man writhing like a worm in all the mirrors he’s forced to look into.” The head wound, from which he had now almost recovered, had compelled him to reflect on human diseases. The human diseases of the body and the human diseases of the other thing. “What constitutes a disease in the first place?” he asked himself. “Do they even begin? Are they not perhaps there from the beginning? Where do they come from, if they weren’t always there? At what point can one say that they are perceptible? When are they imperceptible? When, where? In the place where they suddenly break out? What does ‘from the beginning’ mean? When would that be?” He had walked across the cornfield a ways. “I had the feeling my wound was electrically charged,” he said. “I was thinking about the connections between pains. All the way, I was working on that one thought. But I suddenly didn’t feel like it anymore, perhaps because such horrible insights were coming to me, quite against my will. And getting stronger all the time. Suddenly wiped me out. Once again, I saw how pointless it is to pursue a strain of thought utterly, in the belief that one wouldn’t perish in it, as in a tunnel. Not suffocate in it.”
“As if doors were opening all over the place,” he said. “People and the likenesses of people, my whole defeat approaches me from all directions. I am continually repelling intrusions. Scraps of memories from the time I pursued my experiments, which were eclipsed by the comparable but more thrustful experiments of others. I thought quite a bit about my painting today. I attended exhibitions. I leafed through catalogs in my memory. Friends came to call. Sat with me for an hour or more. The studio suddenly appeared. The ghostly conversations. Suddenly all that nonsense—particularly attractive to women, who crouched on my chairs. Young men in tight trousers sprawled in the dark. Oldsters who wanted to buy into respectability in the form of art. The world is straightforward. I saw my windows blocked up with the rottenness of people who didn’t know why they were there, what they were about. Idealistic vaporings flattened themselves against my windows, while the cigarette smoke twisted upward. Those evenings still disgusted me years later. Those mornings. Those nights that lay between the evenings and the mornings like static orgies of philosophizing. Flesh against flesh. If I intervened, everything flew apart as if putrid, scattered like dust. I mustn’t give offense. Young people came to inveigh against the old. Old people came to inveigh against the young. Everything came to me like a whirlwind that left behind only despair. I suddenly saw the detail of a landscape I painted the summer before last: a green establishing itself against blue. The forcefulness of it. Everything struck me like feral horses, after decades of domestication. And then a hand that wouldn’t do what it was told. Didn’t want to live, even though, finally, it had to live. Everything very spiritistic, you understand. The smell of coffee and the winy sentimentality that came with the private views. Incapable of anything more. Exhausted, even with sleep. ‘A masterpiece!’ they exclaimed, and that was it for a second or two. But only for a second or two, you understand: a river landscape, devastation, a city of martyrs. One celebrity betrayed the next, to eyes that saw more clearly than was good for them. Ghostly too, because the unattainable was so effortlessly reduced. Disparaged heroics, you understand. Snobbery just barely adjusted to mendacity. The most unprepossessing prepared to pass judgments only a king should pass. I had assembled a whole generation of usurpers about me in the form of those three or four or five or six people, who like me in their quest for scale had plunged into the poverty of their emotions. Rome was bandied about as if it were a mug of beer. The idea of fame was connected to the feebleness of the world around, the size of other shrubs bred behind high garden walls, so that they had to see what grew there and how to destroy it: to be capable of anything in the starred world. And then suddenly the people disappeared, art disappeared out of me, out of the studio, the studio itself disappeared, everything disappeared, and left me calmly striding out, if only for a few moments at a time, when I can take fifteen or twenty paces by myself. Without disgust.”
Nineteenth Day
“The qualities of youth and the qualities of age are the same qualities,” said the painter, “but the effect they produce is entirely different. Yo
u see: the qualities of youth are not objected to in the young, but the qualities of old age are objected to in the old. A young man may tell lies without someone wringing his neck, but an old man who tells lies will have his neck wrung. A young person will not be condemned for all eternity, but an old person will be. A young person with a squint can appear droll, an old person with a squint is repulsive. In the case of the young person, they say, there is the hope that he may one day be cured of his squinting. In the case of the old person who squints, there is no hope of his ever being cured of his squinting. No, no possibility. A young person with a deformed foot excites our sympathy, not our disgust, but an old person with a deformed foot only excites our disgust. A young person with sticking-out ears may make us laugh, an old person with sticking-out ears embarrasses us, and we think: how ugly this person is, who has had these ugly sticking-out ears all his life. A young person in a wheelchair moves us. An old person in a wheelchair plunges us into despair. A young person without teeth can strike us as more or less interesting. An old person without teeth makes us ill, makes us feel like vomiting. Youth,” he says, “has it all over age, and it can do what it pleases. Its stupidity doesn’t repel us, its shamelessness is bearable. Old age meanwhile cannot afford to be stupid, without risking its neck, and the shamelessness of old age is, as we know, the most loathsome thing there is. With the young person, they say: Oh, he’ll grow out of it! With the old person, they say: He’s too old to ever change! Whereas in fact the qualities of youth and the qualities of old age are the same qualities.”
Frost: A Novel Page 20
