Frost: A Novel

by Thomas Bernhard

  At the inn, the painter showed me the headscarf he had found at the site of the crime. We had just come in the door. In the darkness that obtained there even at midday, he fished something bloodied out of his coat pocket and showed it to me. I held it up in the light that fell through the narrow glass panel in the front door, and saw the headscarf. “That’s terrifying testimony, isn’t it,” said the painter; “it’s all too easy to imagine the victims might have been human. And it wouldn’t even be too grisly, because one wouldn’t be able to laugh, not be able to burst out laughing. And when I saw the grisly chopped-up animals, I had to burst out laughing, I burst out into extraordinary laughter. Do you know what that means? It means horror demands laughter!” We went into the public bar, and from there to the kitchen, where we took off our jackets and coats, and above all our boots. And then we took off our trousers, and finally, called upon to do so by the landlady, and because the painter seemed to have no objection, our underpants as well. The landlady should sew a patch over the missing material in his sleeve, and make it good, said the painter. As we both stood facing the wall, while the landlady went up to our rooms, to find us some clean dry underpants and socks and pants, the warm air from the stove at our backs brought us back to life. “She (the landlady) is taking advantage of this incident to quickly light a fire in my room,” said the painter, “because as I said to you before she won’t have kept the room warm. We startled her by getting back so early. She just tricked me,” he said. “How could I be so stupid as to follow her instructions to get undressed in the kitchen, and make an ass of myself in front of her. I do feel an ass standing face to the wall, half-naked. Don’t you feel like an ass too, with your face to the wall like that, it’s a moronic and undignified state to be in, a couple of grimacing individuals facing a firing squad. We are being executed here!” the painter called out. He now had his coat wrapped round his legs and belly, and said: “Please to keep the incident with the cows to yourself, just as I’ll keep it to myself. To make such witness precipitately public, and in such an unpleasantly disagreeable case as this, can only lead to the nausea of a trial by public opinion. I prefer to avoid that. I would ask you not to waste a word on it. Not to anyone. Not the least suggestion of it.” Then he said: “This is now the period of murder conspiracies, the farms are wiped out by the snow and cretinism. The gangs unscrew the padlocks on the barns, and gag the livestock. The air is slashed by the whistling of their sticks.”

  Once changed, he hunkered in the hallway and read to me from his Pascal. It was always “about the whole tragedy,” he said, I didn’t understand what he meant by that. Always about “a single coarse act.” He said: “Factor in lethality.” And: “Death renders everything infamous.” He was continually leaving, only to get out at some city of thought, interrupting his journey; he had a destination “that would permit of no arrival, that discourages any arrival.” I went up to my room and said to myself, but aloud, so that it bounced off the walls and its echo struck me: “I can’t stand any more of this!” I lay down. I leafed through my Henry James, without giving the writer a thought. Got up. Walked to and fro. Lay down again. I detested the shamelessness of a sentence I had come across in the middle of my book somewhere. I threw the book to the floor. Everything stinks, I thought. Suddenly everything was just stench, even the merest notion, the merest, most distant notion was stench. Then I went downstairs, and sat down at the extra table. Everyone was eating with great appetite, even the painter showed such an appetite that I was disgusted by it. I could eat nothing at all, and even let my soup go cold. When the painter had gone up to his room, I stood in the kitchen and joined in the discussion that must have been in progress for some time between the landlady and the knacker. It was to do with rich people, and hunting parties. They came three or four times a year and chased with hounds, and there were a lot of wild shots into the bushes, and you often found natty buckles and belts and ear protectors and single gaiters in the woods and on the gravel. Sometimes the nobility (the painter said “the gentry”) suddenly took over this “dirtiest corner of the world.” What were the rich? they asked themselves. They didn’t know either. It got to the point that they would automatically have to hate wealth, so as not to find themselves excluded by it. Then I remember a sentence the painter came up with yesterday: “Poverty can stare up at wealth, and that’s as near as it gets.” The knacker was often taken on by the hunting parties. Various venerable old families would assemble “in a spirit of megalomania, to shoot holes in nature.” Last night, the painter described hunting as “divine sense with trivial human markings.” I said to the knacker: “Have you been hunting in the Klamm valley at all?” The Klamm was a particularly sought-after hunting terrain, said the knacker, it still had a reputation for wolf barks from the olden days. I remembered happy hunting expeditions myself. As a child I had often gone along on hunts, high and low. “The hunt is the only institution between the world powers, man and beast, beast and man, man and man, beast and beast, not to involve sadism,” my father had once said. To avoid the painter, I tried to slip into my room as quietly as possible. But he heard me, and summoned me to him in his room with his call: “Come along!” which was a strict command. I stood in utter darkness. “Feel these walls,” said the painter, “having to freeze between walls like these is an act of catastrophic lunacy. Now sit down!” He pushed me down onto one of his chairs. “Everything is actually without words,” he says, “it is as wordless as it is loathsome, as conscientious as it is condemned by sense.” He wanted to have my company. I could feel it. Everything he said was like forcing me into his coat, and buttoning me into it for all time. But in that state of torment he said: “Leave! Leave! I want you to leave!” And he forced me out the door. “It’s a mistake to count on people. It’s a grave mistake to count on anyone at all. I have always made this mistake. I have always made this most glaring of mistakes, I have always counted on people!” he said. I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I ran downstairs and out of the house. Once I was out in the fresh air, I soon recovered myself. I had the feeling the painter, this man, Strauch, had me in his power again. “All right,” I said, and I went to the cemetery. And: “All right,” and I went back. All the way I saw nothing and thought nothing, except that the painter had me in his power. Forced me into his pictures, into the world of his fantasy. Me, his feeble observer. I felt imprisoned. But even that fantasy, I thought, is a fantasy of the painter’s. I am no longer myself. No, no, I thought, I am no longer myself. It drove me wild, this violence was a sudden induration against which I kept banging my head. But isn’t that metaphor, that sensation in my brain, isn’t everything I think and see and speak and revile—isn’t it all Strauch’s? In the afternoon, I tried to sleep, and couldn’t. I saw myself helpless and entrapped in sentences and perspectives of Strauch’s, in his “morbidities” and “absurdisms.” I continually heard myself blurt out the man’s phrases. Not until dusk, when our walk was almost finished that we had gone on together, was I able to push myself off from him. As from some fatal shore. I don’t know, is it all nonsense? Is what I’m writing now nonsense, because I’m writing far into the night, in the “boundless ignorance of darkness.”

  Of course they had all heard about the poachers and the slaughtering by now, and the knacker had to set off up to the stream, and stuff the remains of the cows into sacks, and carry them off. He had gone up there with the mayor’s horse-drawn sleigh, I could have gone with him, but in the end I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t have seen much because it had started snowing again. He had broken the horns off the skulls, and brought the tails along. He described everything differently than Strauch, but what he said was confirmation of what they both had said about the episode.

  The people were pretty agitated, there had been quite a spate of cows being stolen, and slaughtered by some flowing water or other. “I should say there were three cows and a calf,” said the painter down in the public bar. The knacker looked at him, and asked him how he knew. No one knew that, apart
from him, the knacker. “It was a hunch,” said the painter, “just a hunch.” And he said to the knacker: “Well, didn’t you find six horns, three tails, and four heads at the place?” “Yes,” said the knacker, that was right, but he hadn’t told anyone about it, or given out any figures. “You must have without realizing it,” said the painter. The knacker was mystified.

  There was talk about the cattle thieves until far into the night. The painter told me the whole story again, but now that I was hearing it for the second time, I found it repulsive, thoroughly repulsive. I just simply felt disgusted, I had the feeling the painter was reveling in the story, in this, to him, for whatever appalling and unfathomable reason, so extraordinarily congenial story. The landlady put the tails in the pot right away, and at lunchtime everyone was eating the soup from them without any show of disgust. I wasn’t disgusted either, and I ate the soup. He had thrown the many fresh bones to the dogs, said the knacker. They laughed about the soup, “for which we have those thieves to thank!” they said. They almost couldn’t eat for laughing. But they did, they ate it all up. All of them, they ate it all up. The painter ate in silence. He looked as though he were sitting on a big secret. And of course he knew more about the whole episode than any of the others. But he remained true to his resolve. He didn’t tell anyone that he had heard the thieves, perhaps even seen them make their escape into the forest. “A black scurrying of bodies and a bestial lugging of sacks of meat across to the other side,” he had said. He is not wholly sure whether his impression is the product of fact, and not imagination. “But it’s not just imagination,” he said. The talk was of other instances of poaching in recent times. No trace of the “poaching scum” had ever been found. Not the least trace. “We won’t make any headway with this latest case, either,” they said. “No,” the painter had said. “The snow will cover over all footprints. The thieves are counting on the snow. The snow will cover their crime.” The engineer, who had now also come to the table, said he had noticed something at lunchtime that might lead to the apprehension of the culprits. “Traces,” he said. Then, two hours later, the traces had disappeared. Even at lunchtime, there had been “not the minutest lead.”

  Twenty-sixth Day

  “I lay in my room all night, on the floor, if you must know. Another man might have called out, or knocked for help. If only the cold hadn’t been so intense, coming through the floorboards,” said the painter, “there was an intense cold coming through the floorboards. I freeze, because my head takes away all the heat from my body. It doesn’t even have to be cold, I’m still freezing. I can pile on any number of blankets, I’ll still freeze. And then my head started to swell up like a balloon: everything transpired in a sort of half-waking state: my huge head was breathing in and out, and almost crushing my chest. My thighs were so cold that when I touched them, I thought they must be dead; and my legs and feet, which I normally keep moving, to get some warmth into them, you know … I couldn’t do it this time, and there was no way of getting myself warm … Can I hang on till morning? I wondered, and closed my eyes. But even closing my eyes was a painful intervention into my being. As for opening them again! I open my eyes more slowly than anyone I know, and I close them in the same way. My eyes, my mouth, my ears, are all terribly sensitive; because they are all so big, they cause me great pain. My collarbone and shins are covered by the merest layer of skin. The nerves have nothing to sustain or protect them. The hours pass more and more slowly, I find it increasingly difficult to get through a night. I can’t read my Pascal anymore either. Not one word. Nothing. Before long, I won’t be able to think of anything to make my nights bearable. There are no pressure points in my body, not to mention my head, that aren’t extraordinarily sensitive to pain. It doesn’t matter what I do, my constant headaches will be joined by the pains I suffer when I move my foot anywhere, when I put my hand on something somewhere: it makes no difference what I touch it with and how, it will hurt, and I will be in pain. And then there’s the additional factor that incipient thoughts bat around the inside of my skull; each time, I think my head will break apart when I move from one subject to another. There is a continual imaginative assault, which is driving me half crazy. You must remember, no one has such self-restraint. Every object I see hurts me. Every color I am forced to take in. Every memory that surfaces, everything, everything. There isn’t anything I can look at till the end, because I would either be wiped out or driven crazy, in the way that everything strikes me as being so crazy already, that I’m like a cursed animal, do you understand! I’ve already crossed the line …”

  “I have the feeling,” the painter said, “that my head is my body, and vice versa. Certain faint rowing motions with my legs, you understand, in the night … as if my head were filled with poison gas, as if I would feel the greatest relief if someone were to stab me in the head … then it would transpire that my head is made of some solid matter after all, it would split open … I am so afraid of encountering some hard object, some pointed object, it’s ridiculous … as if I had a giant tumor over my left eye. The yawning holes of my nostrils are the muzzle of a prehistoric beast. I have the feeling: my nose is made up of an infinite number of little sucker nozzles. In every one of these nozzles I, my explorer character, is able to descend … the lungs, you know, no longer work by instinct, I am continually afraid they might tear. Whereas the lungs are the only organic part of me that doesn’t hurt. Which in turn frightens me, you see: what if one wing no longer stands the pressure, then there’s a chain reaction … such knowledge of the inner makeup of my body … I feel and empathize with every one of my internal organs … each organ is a firmly defined notion, a well-rounded pain … And the extraordinary … Liver, pancreas, kidney, those three torments, you understand … and then the torment of my head, which I have already described to you. Head torment and body torment, reciprocal, you understand, unyielding, you understand also: and then the whole subterranean empire of torments, the torments of the mind, and the free-floating torment of the soul … I could divide my head into millions of constituent parts and study its laws: that work of extermination! The brightly colored territory of my pains: no horizon, you know, no perception, no relief from unconsciousness …” He says: “I cling to people who have certain specific intentions, it’s a mental torture.”