Frost: A Novel (7 page)

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Once it was already dark, I paced back and forth at the station, as far as the single-story barracks with the sign “Railwaymen’s Hostel.” There I saw men without their shirts, bending down over dirty basins, rubbing themselves dry with gray towels, then looking at their reflections in the mirror, shaving, sitting down on their bunk beds in their underpants and eating their dinners. Black railwaymen’s caps hanging on the walls, and from hooks on the doors coats, jackets, and shoulder bags with papers spilling out of them. Knives flashed through big hunks of bread, and beer bottles stood there, reflected in the mirrors over the basins.

I took a few strides back and forth, purely so as not to attract notice, but wherever there was a light I looked up. What if it was you in there, standing in front of a mirror, and chatting to others, and they didn’t realize that it was you, because you were like them? What if you had changed in such a way that brought you nearer to them? If I wasn’t me, I would be like them; that’s where those thoughts tended. I walked along between a couple of freight trains, to the end of the station area, and then back, counting the wheels, and imagined being crushed between a couple of bumpers and squeezing into a paragraph at the bottom of the next to last page of the newspaper, the place where they itemize fatalities of slight but morbid interest. And then the men again, some already in their army-style bunks. The windows have double glazing, everything is sealed shut. So they don’t freeze. There’s an alarm clock which will go off with an infernal rattle at four in the morning. Then they’ll crawl out of bed and slip their
pants on, because it’s colder than it’s supposed to be, and they should already be in the train, looking to see that all the barriers are down. And then there are the first schoolkids in the front carriage, sleepy and frightened, because they’re not sure that what awaits them at school isn’t going to be terrible after all.

I walked down to the station alone, it just takes me fifteen or twenty minutes at a rapid clip, I promised the painter I’d pick up a newspaper for him, but the kiosk was already shut. Also, it was a day on which not too many trains passed—in the time I was down there, there wasn’t a single one, apart from the freight trains thundering through. Facing the railwaymen’s hostel is a sheer cliff face, there are pines and firs, shrubbery, but you can’t see much of it in the dark. The river was raging, and filled everything with its roar. From the houses built on its banks, I could hear laughter, and then the sounds of an argument, but it didn’t develop, but became more and more subdued, and finally stopped altogether. The lights went out in the odd bedroom, until there was only a single one left illuminated, where I saw an elderly man sitting, raising his tattooed arm to turn off the light. By now I was shivering, and I walked as fast as I could, over the bridge and up to the inn.

“Every stone here has a human story to tell me,” says the painter. “You understand, I’ve fallen prey to this place. Everything, every smell, is chained to a crime of some sort, an abuse, the war, some piece of infamy or other … Even if it’s all buried under the snow just now,” he says. “Hundreds and
thousands of ulcers, continually swelling up. Voices incessantly screaming. You’re lucky to be as young and inexperienced as you are. The war was finished by the time you were ready to think. You know nothing about the war. You know nothing, period. And these people, all of them on the lowest level, often the lowest level of character, these people are all prize witnesses to the great crimes that were perpetrated. Further, there’s the fact that your regard has to break when it comes up against the cliff walls. This valley is death to any tenderness of feeling.” Then he says: “You know, I’m an irritant, I was always an irritant. I irritate you, the way I’ve always irritated people. It hurts you. I know, you’re often asphyxiated by my remarks … Here, I have the sense of the dissolution of all life, of all fixity, the smell of the dissolution of all imaginings and laws … And here, you see, conversations with people, with the butcher, with the priest, with the policeman, with the teacher, with these woolly hatted people … with this prototypical milk-drinker who mangles things before he says them, with that dreadful melancholic … All these people have their complexes. It might be a matter of bedwetting in childhood, or the patterns of the wallpaper in their nurseries, the rooms where they open their eyes for the first time. All those intimidated heads,” he says, “upcountry and down. The teacher reminds me of my time as a substitute teacher, it’s enough to make me feel ill. Emotional chill, yes, with the passing of the years one’s conclusions become more drastic, the curlicues are omitted in favor of a more rustic expression, in favor of forthrightness … And all wartime experiences, you know, everything these people have to talk about is to do with the war …”

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Everything was “appalled.” “Life retreats, and death emerges like a mountain, dark and sheer and unscalable.” He could even have attained great celebrity, great fame, but that hadn’t finally interested him. “I had enough talent to have become world famous,” he says. “People often hang a modest talent on a big drum, and become famous. Subtlety! It’s all the drum, all the big drum! I stayed aloof, I saw what the drum was, the big drum, and I was never popular. And since it’s come up between us: the war is an inexpungible inheritance. The war is properly the third sex. Do you understand!” He wanted to get down to the station again as soon as possible, to his newspapers. “Those smells,” he says, “the smells of unworthy humanity, you know, the smell of rot, of tramp, and the smell of the so-called wide world, the smell of leaving and being left, of arrival and the despair of having to leave. The human famishment of wanderlust has always tempted me.”

I walked with the policeman a ways. He immediately involved me in a conversation. He was going on duty and no end in sight, no change whatsoever. A promotion would lift him up in the pay scale, but the work would remain the same. Initially, he had wanted to go to college. His parents sent him to Hauptschule, then a couple of years of Gymnasium, from which they withdrew him, because his father thought he might make a fool of himself. “He hated the fact that I went to Gymnasium,” he says. An apprenticeship with a carpenter followed on the heels of Latin, the lathe after Greek exercises. That was his tragedy. And from then on things went downhill. From the moment he walked out of the Gymnasium, knowing: I’m never going to see inside there again. And
so, by the same token: I’m never going to be able to better myself. It had all been so perspectiveless, a gray, endlessly bleak day full of suicidal thoughts, high up on the hill that rises out of the middle of the city, from which he had wanted to throw himself down. But then there was the meeting with the carpenter. The very next day he slipped into his work overalls, and for four years he didn’t take them off. If it had previously been the Latin vocabulary that made his eyes swim, if it had been Livy, Horace, and Ovid, well, now it was the wood shavings, the sawdust, the presentation piece. But he went on to take the journeyman’s test, and stayed another year. Then, on the basis of an ad in the paper, he chucked carpentry, “just to get out of it all,” and entered the police service. He swiftly found himself in uniform, and woke up in a vast dormitory with thirty-two others, all embarked on the same course as himself. Then, after the exams, he reported for duty in the mountains. First posting was Golling. Next came Weng. A year ago, he took over from a man of forty who died of septicemia. “He scratched himself with a fawn’s bone.” Studying medicine, that would have been the thing for him. Becoming a doctor. That hit me unexpectedly and hard. I felt myself blushing. “Studying medicine,” I said. “Yes, studying medicine,” the policeman.

On his shoulder he carries a carbine, very new in its pale, creaking leather holster. What was it like, being a policeman? “It’s always the same,” he said. “Everything’s always the same,” I said. “No, no,” he said. He had thought: Policeman, that would be a job with a lot of variety, with a lot of arresting and locking up and detective work. “Which it is, but it’s always the same.” But it was healthy, I said. “Oh, sure, it’s
healthy.” And surely varied as well, if I think of the fights on the building site, and in the pubs. The manslaughter perpetrated by the landlord sprang to mind too, but I didn’t mention that. “I want to go to the city,” he said. “Oh, the city,” I said. The city afforded different possibilities. There were crimes there that people in the country didn’t know existed. There were major crimes in the country, but the bigger ones, the interesting ones, the ones “involving the criminal imagination,” they only happened in the city. “And the rural constabulary, where I am, isn’t the same as the police,” he said, “and so I have to stay in the country.”—“Yes,” I said.

Today, when I came back from the larch wood, the postman handed me the mail for the landlady. Three letters, one of them from her husband. When I saw the handwriting on the envelope, I thought at once of the landlord, and I wasn’t mistaken. When the landlady had taken the letters, she said: “Ah, one from him!” and she put all three letters—the other two were bills, something official—in her apron. At lunch, I concluded from a conversation between her and the knacker, who was helping her pour beer, that it really was a letter from her husband. He wanted her to send him some money, so that he could buy food, because the food in prison was very bad. The newspapers had recently been full of stories claiming how prisoners were living the life of Riley: from that time forth, new measures had been put in place. She should send the money to a certain individual working in the prison service, who would then act for him. I was sitting right next to the bar, and heard every word.

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The knacker said the landlady should immediately follow the wishes of her husband, and he named a sum too, probably the one that the landlord himself had suggested in his letter, but the landlady said she wasn’t about to send him anything. And what was the knacker doing anyway, telling her what to do? It was up to her, whether she was going to send him any money or not. The knacker said it was a natural thing to do. Besides, people would get to hear about it one way or another, when the landlord came out, and tongues would wag about the landlady not sending her husband any money, even though it was all “his money” anyway, all the property was in his name. It wasn’t right to desert her husband in such a situation. After resisting the reproaches of her lover, the knacker, for a long time, on wider-ranging issues as well, she finally gave in after all, but named a sum that fell far short of the landlord’s wishes. She said her husband had driven her “to the brink of despair” with his wildness and ill-discipline, the way he had failed to look after her and her daughter. And now he expected her to send him money, in prison? Other inmates weren’t sent money. Weren’t prisons there to starve and punish you anyway? You were sent there to reflect on what you’d done, over bread and water and hard labor. “But he’ll never change,” she said. The only reason she had married him was because she was already carrying his child. She hadn’t even known there was an inn. “Only for the sake of the child,” she said. The knacker was agitated. Each time she came back with empty beer glasses, he took it up again. She had always depended on him, and also the landlord had occasionally shown “a good side.” Not least it had been on her account, “because that was the way she wanted it,” that the landlord had been arrested and tried in the first place, and then got his prison sentence. Because nobody had been in
any doubt that it had been an accidental death that had befallen the customer who had been clubbed by the landlord. She herself had pointed out to the police that the wound to the customer’s head—he was a construction worker at the power plant—hadn’t been caused by any fall, but had been inflicted by the beer mug with which her husband had struck the man. Since the landlord had acted in self-defense, as became clear during the course of the trial, he was sentenced to only two years. “But he wouldn’t have been locked up at all,” said the knacker, “he would be running around the same as ever.” The landlady said back: “I can’t believe it’s you telling me that. When it was for your sake that I brought charges against him.” The knacker didn’t say anything. “Because I wanted him out of the way,” she said, “because we wanted him out of the way.” The knacker reckoned the landlady had been precipitate in bringing charges. The people in the village, all of them, were against the landlady, because they knew darned well that it was she who had gone to the police station to bring charges. The dead man had been in the ground for weeks already at that point. No one was talking about it anymore. Till, on her word, they got him out of the ground, and examined him thoroughly, and then started that “whole big case” against the landlord. If it hadn’t been clearly proven that he had acted in self-defense—and how often it happened in court cases that the truth is unable to establish itself, yes, is somehow deflected!—the landlord would certainly have been put away for life. Did she feel no compunction? the knacker asked the landlady. She didn’t owe him any reply, she said. She didn’t need to defend herself. Everything had been right and proper. “It was all by the book,” she said. And now, as the person responsible for his mishap, as had been shown, she didn’t even want to grant him his wish for a
few schillings, so that he could buy himself better food, or maybe just a little more of it? “All right,” she said, “I’ll send him some money.” The knacker demanded that she do so right away, he wanted to send it off himself. She said her purse was in the till. Before her eyes, the knacker pulled out a couple of bills, put them in an envelope, and wrote out the address.

In the great commotion, everything full of smoke and kitchen reek, the pair of them hadn’t noticed me. At a favorable moment, I stood up and went to join the painter, who was sitting by the window. “What’s the landlord like?” I asked. Without stopping to reflect, the painter said: “He’s bound to be a poor devil. That accidental killing business has ruined him. The landlady is the sole person responsible for his misfortune. When he gets out of prison and comes back to the inn, something terrible will happen. And of course the landlady is terrified of that.” Yes, she is terrified of it.