Frost: A Novel

by Thomas Bernhard

  On the way home, he got going on the state and the government and neutrality, provoked by an idiotic remark of mine. The state was the state as conceived by Plato, or it was no state at all. “There is no state. The state is impossible. There has never been a state.” As far as our own state was concerned, then, aside from the fact that it wasn’t a state (“no longer a state!”), it was something as ridiculous as a “squeaking little rhesus monkey in a big zoo,” in which, naturally enough, only the well-fed and beautiful specimens of lions and tigers and leopards attracted any interest: it was their roaring. Only roaring counted, squeaking was ridiculous! It was “only the great roaring” that counted! The squeaking would be roared down! The great roaring will roar down the ridiculous squeaking! Our head of state was a “co-op manager,” our chancellor “a market-day brothel attendant.” The people had the choice of butchers, apprentice electricians, dully blown-up waistcoat wearers, between grave-robbers and grave-robbers’ assistants. Democracy, “our democracy,” was the biggest swindle. Our country sat heavily in Europe’s gut, completely indigestible, like an “ill-advisedly swallowed clubfoot.” Even “our dance is dead, our song and dance is dead! All repro! All frippery. The whole thing scandalously destructive frippery. The nation is really a national disgrace! You know, this squeaking, which, faced with the roar, the big roar, should just shut up! Nothing but squeaking! Ridiculous, high-pitched, dangerous squeaking! Folly and megalomania are now partners, squeaking partners, you know, hand in hand dancing their way down into the abyss, perfectly common or garden-variety squeaking partners, delusions born of feebleness, delusions born of repugnant squeaking!”

  “Everything is barbarous kitsch. Yes,” said the painter, “the state itself is cretinous, and the people are pitiful. Our state is ludicrous. On top of everything, the pretense of musicality. Petit bourgeois sordidness … it’s too revolting: a layer of scum on top, and the general, galloping dullness of the population … we are at a stage of absolute degradation. Our state,” he said, “is a hotel of ambivalence, the bordello of Europe, enjoying an excellent reputation, especially overseas.”

  The extent of his misfortune, he said, had suddenly revealed itself to him, “on a day whose date I could tell you now, and also the persons with whom I had contact on that day; city-dwellers, metropolitans, all of them with strong roots in whatever it was they did, in a factory, or a profitable art gallery, or in the backwash of some invention they made, and that earned them large sums of money, or people who were just happy, and didn’t especially know why, and didn’t care either, it didn’t occur to them to wonder why, people with whom I stood in eventually abrasive and stultifying and repugnant relationships, that by and by degenerated; I would spend whole nights at the homes of these people, they showed me mountains of photographs, emptied brains full of dirty jokes at my feet, and I had to laugh, and I did laugh, and I drank and laughed and slept, often on their floors, and then I once more had to invoke the name of art, and I was so pitiful that it seemed to draw them to me, this pitifulness that showed itself in me drew them to me, they took me here and there with them, and they wanted to weld me to their lives, till the moment happened, on that day when I saw I would have to stop, not turn back, because there is no turning back, but I stopped, I quite simply stopped, and far away from those people and their habits and their possessions and their opinions, far away from their world, which didn’t fit with my world, I began to go forward by myself on a different plane, from one hour to the next, when I clearly saw I didn’t belong anywhere, not in the place I had just fled, for good, and not where I came from, and not where, without exactly knowing why, I wanted to get to, in the direction of which I was moving, like an escaped convict I ran off, I zigzagged away so as not to fall into the hands of my pursuers …” It had been his misfortune not to belong anywhere, “no longer to have anything at all.”

  “You know,” he said, “when you’re suddenly walking through the streets, from one meaningless thing to the next, through streets all of which are black, and the people are black, and they float as quickly and darkly and clumsily as yourself past you … You are standing in a square, and everything is black, suddenly everything inside you and outside you is black, no matter where you look at it from, black and stirred smooth, and you don’t know what stirred it, and everything is broken … You still recognize an object here and there, but everything is broken and smashed and ripped; for the first time you prop yourself on a stick, which you’ve only ever used as a weapon before against humans or dogs, but now you prop yourself on it, and you seem to be floating in a sea of lead, and here and there you make out some new, further blackness … people don’t know, is it the coming of spring, or is it the end … the great letters on the department stores coming toward you, having joined forces against you in a great rabble, a great rabble of a revolution, they ruin everything in you, where nature and creature turn to you for help, you try to make your way, in a yet more desperate condition … You see humans and you call out to them, with no shame you alarm these humans in this atmosphere, which is continually being teased by the cardinal points … and you have buttoned up your jacket, and everything in you is tense, and your head is afraid of bumping into things … all those handbags and sticks, those hundreds of thousands of handbags and sticks … you think you have come down a very long way in the world, just as those others have come up, and in your disgust you don’t know what to do … those crowds of people unleashed by precisely advancing clock hands … You seek refuge on a park bench, but it is already full of people cleverer than you are, they occupied all the benches from early morning on, and are reading enormous books, and eating extensive paper-bag lunches … the whole pathos of government employees hits you, the whole meanness of state pensions … and you wedge your head between your knees, and try not to sink … and you hear the world writhing in your own headaches, in grotesque cramps, in the terrible violence of the air … In your room you are menaced by shards of memory, they are birds, unbelievable black birds, endowed with incredible force … This incredible state of emergency, this synthesis of rejection by the world and alienation from the world, in which you suddenly find yourself, without any bearings, this condition that lands you in every conceivable human procedure … The police and the vegetable truck, they’re all coming for you, as though to destroy you … the voice of the people … even as a child I could feel that devastating procedure in my brain … this people that darkens the passages of my ears … and accompanying all these impressions, you must know, each time I touch the ground with my stick, I knock a hole in my skull, everything is like being condemned to ceaseless torment by a metronome on Föhn days …” He often uses the word “suicide” now. In every sentence. With his great thumb that, when he stretches it, contains every ounce of his strength, he crushes himself, his surroundings, just as one might crush a beetle on a table or cabinet.

  “I have no use for myself anymore,” he says. “I’m just ordinary. As ordinary as the rest of the world. Gagging on ordinariness.” On the rug under his feet, which “has always been pulled away. My awakening, like my going to sleep, ordinary. Even my dreams are ordinary. And I of all people, thought I had a claim to more-than-ordinary dreams. The nightmares I have are the nightmares of my childhood. Gruesome, when an old man has to dream them again. It’s no pleasure. Advanced astonishment, nothing more, and always alone. On my left there is you, and in my right, my stick. The two things that keep me together. I trust you’re not angry with me? My original concept, I don’t know what it is anymore, maybe you know … And then the disqualification of the rest of the world … the impossibility of coping with talent … The whole person just black propaganda against himself. Is that right …? I try to understand myself, you know, and I know that things are getting worse: it was always that way. Attrition of the muscles in the brain. And everything I see a reflection of myself, sometimes broken by a powerful stream of alien thought.” I think it must be easier to stitch up a leaky intestine than to make these observ
ations. I could read the whole thing back, but I would only give myself a fright. The way he says: “Everything is black.” Everything as though determined for no one but himself, and as if he assumed the others were all wearing earplugs. Even the way he wipes his shoes with the rag he always carries in his pocket, the way he tries to prove everything with his Pascal, though he knows there’s nothing to prove. “Nothing is jocund,” he says. And then the smell of frying meat greets us in the public bar.

  It was possible to drift on a raft with other people for years and years, pressed together, body against body, in a tiny space, without coming to know those people any better. “The darkness around one must be equal at moments to the darkness later on, that turns to stone inside us, at the end. Petrifies our blood, like the veins in marble.” Quiet filled rooms with its curse, and day and night, at all times, there were hordes of “casualties of quiet.” Strauch says he wouldn’t be surprised to learn one day that he had really been someone else altogether. “To learn,” he says, “that a faulty adjustment toward me on the part of nature kept me from ever gaining admission to myself. Possible, no?” He got on to a certain happy time of his youth, and then right away buried it again: “The little creeks that refresh us, are they not produced by storms?” Before going to sleep, humans stared at the foam-tipped waves, “futilely, mindlessly, not yet in dream.

  “Youth is its own message. What happens afterward is without significance; a mode of fabrication, nothing more.” But to complain about it was pathetic. And pathos constituted age. Age was pathetic. “At any rate, age isn’t merit, much less triumph.” You could find yourself waking in a setting that was made up of all your previous settings, “more and more settings.”

  Over recent weeks, he had called on many government offices, to see what information was kept on him there. “There were many things I wanted to have corrected,” he said, “but they turned me away, even threw me out,” he said. In such a way one was thrown out by thunderstorms, and wound up in the sea, pointless and purposeless.

  I recalled how I had come by my internship in Schwarzach. Honsig had drawn my attention to it. In the dissecting room. How there was a hospital, not too small, not too large, with all kinds of possibilities. There was a registrar, and an intern, and other doctors, and nursing sisters. Situated at a major railway junction, and at the intersection of several highways. Many accident victims, widely famed for lung operations. A hospital that was continually bursting at the seams, summer and winter alike. The surrounding country offered sports facilities: skating, skiing. Good people, both from the medical and the personal point of view. Free board, and a quiet room. The place was bland and claustrophobic like all mountain towns. It was near the source of a river that suddenly turned north, where it’s a little less bleak.

  I think of Schwarzach, and what there is there. Houses, almshouses, a church. And the hospital. A couple of barber’s shops in competition with each other. A waterfall cuts the place in half. You see a lot of pregnant women, as you do in Weng. Not so many workers, because there is no industry. But just as many railwaymen. Postal workers. At any given moment, Railway Wrestling Competition, Railway Shooting Competition, Railway Ski-Jumping Competition, Railway Swimming Competition. St. Nicholas’s Day: a bunch of apprentice lumberjacks, butcher’s boys, and milkers put in an array of gruesome masks, with horns and braids, twisted ears and noses, gap teeth and split tongues, and set upon the bystanders, knocking over old people, beating up children, and, because it’s a centennial festival, are not brought to court for it. Heavy thunderstorms and ensuing landslides continually alter the face of the town. The same bleakness in the houses as there is in houses everywhere. Men standing around, sitting around, in black jackets buttoned up to their Adam’s apple, watching the waterfall, cursing their womenfolk. In the small hours, the “wild” workmen. Deafening noises, that make you shut your windows … Visiting theater groups as well. The air is damp, and the children have rickets, they’re all weak in the pleura and the bronchia. For no reason anyone understands, the water supply is the cause of a lot of illness in the place. The milk, though, is rich and fresh, because it comes straight down from the mountain farms up above.

  Twenty-fifth Day

  THE ANIMAL RUSTLING SCUM

  “… and so I made the most extraordinary discovery,” said the painter, “one of those discoveries that hit you like a bolt from the blue. You must imagine, my exhaustion of today had already reached its apogee, I was continually threatening to keel over, I was hanging on in the knowledge that I would otherwise drown, I made a pitifully helpless impression, I even screamed, and tore up my sleeves. Look!” he said, and he showed me his sleeve, and I could see, yes, the sleeve was ripped, there was even a big piece of sleeve missing; he was walking quickly now, and he was saying he thought the landlady would sew a patch of some other material over the missing piece—“one of those crap materials they go around in here in the country,” he said—and he suddenly grabbed hold of me, and knocked me into the ditch, which I hadn’t even seen, the snow was deep, I was up to my knees in snow, it was a water drainage ditch, as I noticed right away, into which, with my superior strength and weight, I had also pulled the painter. “The icy water has established itself inside my boots,” said the painter, once we had both pulled ourselves out of the “groin prison,” and: “Imagine a man remains motionless in such a position, he’d freeze to death in seconds, from the feet up, there’s a ruthlessness and thoroughness in this inimical cold that’s terrifying and indescribable.” But he didn’t want to let himself be diverted from his extraordinary discovery by this minor incident, I for my part tried to distract him too (we had spoilt our walk by now, had to head back before, as the painter said, “the cold brought out a new illness in us,” back to the inn, where they would surely have lit a fire by now, and the painter had said: “There are circumstances in which the landlady tries to dupe me, and she hasn’t started heating yet, she dupes me by only lighting my stove just before my return, which is flagrantly in breach of the agreement I made with her, and is explicitly directed against me. By only lighting the fire at a time when she expects me back, my room doesn’t get warm, my room doesn’t ever get warm, it should be heated all the time, all the rooms in the inn are cold, cold, cold rooms, you understand, these appallingly inimical rooms”), but he pulled me close to him again. “I mentioned my extraordinary discovery,” he said. “I suddenly saw, as I was emerging from the ravine, that the stream, you see, was red. I thought: a phenomenon, a natural phenomenon! But immediately I understood: blood! And I thought: That’s blood, by God, that’s blood! I couldn’t trust my eyes, but the entire stream was full of blood! Now, I felt like running back upstream, I wanted to and I felt like it, I was even duty-bound to run upstream, because what I saw was without question the product of a crime, as I very clearly saw, a human crime, ‘a wonderfully hurried rhythm of blood’ inscribed itself before my eyes, I wanted to run back upstream, but you know that’s not possible, I found myself in a tormenting position: to know with perfect clarity, and to see, yes, also to see, that a crime was in progress, who could say how far upstream, perhaps no more than a hundred paces (it could be no great distance to this crime), the quantity of blood was quite extraordinary (it was a first-class spectacle), the blood-red stream running through the white snow blanket, and all scratched by the black branches, by these wild black branches … All this just a momentary impression, the work of seconds. I wanted to call out. I didn’t call out. My attempt to make my way upstream was doomed to failure, I was up against such a huge impossibility that I was condemned to failure, I expect you’re familiar with the sensation: you want to take a certain path, and you’re unable to take a single step along the way, the brain gives its signal, the brain is like a whip against the body, but the body is an extraordinary instance of insubordination … But I did have one idea: I ran back into the ravine, and crawled, crawled, I say, crawled on my belly toward the stream, perhaps a hundred yards upstream of the place where I made the d
iscovery, I looked back where I had crawled, and I saw: an animal! I saw: a monster! I saw a humiliation of fins! I was too crushed to be able to get up and make my way to the stream through the undergrowth. But, in order to encompass what I just related to you, I felt an extraordinary access of strength. The idea that there was a crime in progress here, or rather, further up, where that terrible garish blood sprang from, gave me such superhuman strength I no longer believed was possible. Well,” said the painter, “all at once I heard a sound, a sound not from nature, a click as of a jackknife shutting, the sound of a blade, a rasp, a screech. I pressed myself down in the snow and tried to get some warmth into my shoulders by means of that particular turning of my head that I once described to you. All purely instinctively. Suddenly only my sense of hearing was functioning. I heard a scraping and the sound of gravel on railway ballast. The snapping-off of gigantic snakey leaves. Finally I heard the river being waded across three or four times. I immediately thought: men, men poaching fish, I thought, and crawled out of my hiding place. I was glad to be given the certainty that my discovery corresponded to fact, that my sense of color hadn’t deceived me, that this mountain stream was not just a blood-red stream in my brain, not just some deranged precipitation within my thought processes, that what I saw in this section of stream was not caused by some mirage or unlucky human chance, but was in fact fact, like lightning suddenly trumped by thunder. What I now saw, having crawled as far as the bank of the stream, was so horribly ridiculous: the heads and tails and midsections of cows. The warmth and softness of freshly slaughtered meat was still in the air, the opposition between chilly void on the one hand and warm void on the other; the emetic of fear on the white canvas of snow, an unrepeatable scene: the chewed and shattered and sliced anatomy of dehumanization by Heaven and Hell. As I say, only a scene, and behind it, on the other bank as though out of range, the miscreants, fled and fleeing.”—“The cow slaughterers,” I said. “We are talking about common livestock thieves, men and women, presumably from one of the neighboring villages. In among the scraps of meat, the stains of blood, the bone and cartilage and bowel, were signs of footsteps made by men and women. There was a headscarf lying there, I pocketed it as evidence,” said the painter. I was shivering and soaked to the hips as we walked in the direction of the inn, which we were neither of us able to see, because suddenly the fog had swathed everything, “down to the most rudimentary contours of the world.” The painter said: “I want to call the scene ‘slaughter,’ in the moment I beheld it, everything seemed to soak into the picture. I could clearly see the butchers’ fleeing footprints. One could see also the tracks of the livestock they had stolen. One could see the darkness of the planets, and the low proletarianism of murder. I saw the word ‘innocent’ on the ground, in the snow, this low code, you must know, and the word ‘meanness’ clearly in the sky. One thing was strange: even as the severed limbs and organs were still twitching, my interest instantly transferred itself to the process of rigor mortis, which here was being enacted in a million variations. I stooped and pressed my hand into the blood and mixed it with snow. I threw red snowballs! I threw red snowballs! Picture the scene. At first I prudently forbore to open any of the great eyes that were lying around, all of them strangely closed, I avoided the spectacle of those large, docile cow’s eyes. I forbore till the moment when I was no longer equal to the temptation to give myself over to the sympathy that any thing animal has with the human, and I opened one of the cow’s eyes, one of those gigantic, stalled, chilled, bloodless orbs. The thieves,” said the painter, “had proceeded by a scrupulous plan. Everything took place in a spot that hardly anyone but me has ever seen, one of the most inaccessible of spots, perhaps the most inaccessible spot there is. I still have not reported on what I took in. Of course I ought to go to the policeman and inform him. Probably word of the incident has already got out. Because, as I saw later, the ravine was full of blood too. The policeman walks through the ravine. The churchgoers walk through the ravine. They all must have seen the blood. At a certain place, the blood seemed to branch off, the traces of blood, in the direction of the scene of the crime. The thieves must have been equipped with all possible slaughterman’s tools. I myself heard the sound of a knife snapping shut, there was the beating of a hammer, of a mallet, the scrape of a saw, which suddenly broke off. They had heard me, they must have. They packed up the meat. They plunged into the stream. They waded across, once on the other side, they were in the relative security of the woods. There wasn’t the least thing I could have done about it. In my condition, a person in my condition is unable to do anything. Such a person can only flee, can only take flight, shrink back from the blood and the sounds of criminality. Baffling, the way the scene of the crime not only attracted me, attracted me with its natural horror, but was able to attract me. As I already said, I crawled up to it on all fours, like a beast. You understand: I was helpless against this setting, against this scene. The smell of slaughter, still warm, as under a bell jar,” said the painter. “And then this silence in which, had I not rubbed my face with snow, I might quite easily have suffocated. It was a question of three or four cows, I thought, there had to be three or four cows at issue, I thought, and I found three tails, three tails. And yet there must have been four cows, I thought. It was inexplicable to me, and I continued to think in terms of four cows. A small calf’s head lay in the bushes, already under water, bleeding dry. So there were three cows and a calf, three tails in other words.”