Frost: A Novel

by Thomas Bernhard

  Well, if one were able to establish overnight what our organs are. But perhaps you already have laid out in your mind in orderly fashion things that to me seem hopelessly entangled: perhaps an operation? Our science knows it, but doesn’t act on it, in accordance with the “terrible principle” of “here as there, illusion!”

  If only I could lay my hands on your brother’s “scrapbooks”! Did you know of the existence of these “scrapbooks” in which for many years, decades even, he has written down everything that preoccupies him?

  I am only able to note down a few headings, and even that strikes me as contemptible and mad.

  We played a game together today: to see which of us can reduce the other to tears! (This game, as I now know, was one you often played with your brother.) Your brother lost.

  SIXTH LETTER

  Dear Assistant Strauch,

  Suicide comes from the womb, as you once determined: its realization begins to occur at the moment of the suicide’s birth. Everything your brother has lived through to date has been a “passion of suicide.” A pursuit to the death of everything that was particular about this particular human being.

  • • •

  Against such a background of “deafening generality” he now speaks incessantly of the “craft of suicide,” the action that will bring him to completion after a lifetime of suffering and preparation. It’s not possible to oppose the boldness of the idea that each individual suicide is the maturation of thousands of years of preparation. Your brother (who has now almost entirely stopped sleeping!) refers to motherhood as suicidehood; truly, the womb is the tomb. The breeding of a human being (thinking most rigorously of himself) is the decision of the father (first and foremost) and of the mother (as well) to sponsor the suicide of their offspring, the child, the sudden premonition “of having created a new suicide.”

  Twenty-seventh Day

  “A devilish fear, you know, has always kept me away from suicide. Then there were thoughts arising out of the dark, the whole communing with self, very pronounced in my case. The conviction of my nature, the monstrous condition of spiritual development … Yes, I was always able to repel suicide, those innumerable cases of limitless disappointment, excess, criminality, heredity, these inhuman difficulties … You must know, like all humans, I have communed almost exclusively with myself in this difficult world, where there are practically no laws … no way of contemplating … I was too little interested, you know, always a man of resolve, of contradiction, of fear …”

  The material about Strauch (in my memory) is monstrous. What is written down is the best I can do. I am probably just about able to draw up a report. But it’s not possible to describe the condition of a human being in the same way as one can describe the state of an animal. My assignment advances my education. I’m certain it won’t benefit the painter Strauch. Why? The assistant will question me. I will be able to say things to him, and I can demonstrate the painter’s walk to him. I am now able to say what drew Strauch to Weng. Why he left Vienna. Why he burned his paintings. Why he hates so much. Why he runs into the woods. Stopped sleeping. Why! I am able to say what he says and how he says it and why it makes waves of insanity and revulsion. I am able to say what he feels when he sees the landlady, and when he sees the knacker with his rucksack. Why he is indifferent to so much and what, I know what is going on within him, who this painter Strauch is, this persecuted, ostensibly useless person, who on paper may have a brother and a sister and others besides, but in reality has always been alone, much more miserably alone than one will be able to imagine even after reading my report, alone in the way that a fly is alone in an apartment in a city in winter, being chased by the occupant and his cohorts, and finally is splattered against a wall, if these people feel hounded and maddened and under attack from this fly, so that they band together in their dwelling, and silently decide to kill it off, that vile, monstrous creature, as they call it in their aggression, that poisons their air and their evening—not knowing what a fly is, and what goes on in one, much less a fly in a city apartment in winter. I have observed the painter Strauch, I have lain in wait for him, I have lied to him, because that is what my assignment called upon me to do, I have driven him crazy with my questions, much crazier than he was before, and I struck him on the head with my silences, on his head that he fears so much. I bothered him with my youth. With my plans. With my fears. With my incapacity. With my moodiness. I talk about death without knowing what death is, what life is, what any of it is … everything I do I do in ignorance, and I compound his ruin with my own. Ruin? And finally today I even tried to list the various modes of death for his benefit, which completely cast a cloud over him. “Suicide is in my nature, you must know,” he says. Swipes the air with his stick just as a monster that’s no longer a monster might swipe at the air where there is no heaven, and not even any hell. The air he swipes at is just air and nothing else, and, as I see, it’s not even one of the elements.

  “One day you get home, and you know that from now on you have to pay for everything, and from that moment on you’re old and dead. One day, everything is finished, though life itself might go on for a while. You’re dead, and beauty and whatever happiness is and wealth, everything has withdrawn from you, forever.” The painter is talking to himself, not to me. In the village square, which we’ve unexpectedly reached, because we walked in a circle, and were lost in thought, he said: “Ghastly, that dog barking! I have always hated it. Always been afraid of being bitten by a dog, and dying of rabies. Even on my way to school I ran the gauntlet of barking dogs! I felt cramps in my heart, you know. The dogs leap up at you, and knock you down with a violent swipe of the paw. The dog owners sic their beasts on people who have done nothing to them or their dogs. And then you have a terrible bite wound! The way that energized flesh jumps at you, it could easily kill you! Dogs …” said the painter, “butchers’ dogs, wolfhounds! Barking and yapping wherever you go! How I hate dogs! My sister, you must know, had a bite taken out of her thigh by a dog in a pub once. The landlord never even apologized! If at least he’d been upset! … A beast takes a piece out of you, and all your efforts are in vain! They can rip the pockets off your coat! Attack deaf old men from behind, who, a matter of days later, die of a heart attack. When I arrive here, the dogs go for me, and I need to raise my stick at them once or twice to persuade them to leave me alone. Without my stick, I most probably wouldn’t be alive!” After we had passed through the cemetery: “Peasant funerals are a ritual. The dead man is washed and wrapped in a shroud and laid out and unwrapped again and dressed in his Sunday best.” At his feet, they recite prayers that have been in existence for hundreds of years. The brothers and sisters take turns praying, and then the parents, the grandparents, the children, the children’s children. Or other relatives pray. They sing hymns with medieval words none of them understand. Or Latin. Pictures of the departed are hung throughout the house. His remaining possessions are put in order, and labeled with the name of the one who is to have them. They pray to him to intercede for them in heaven, as that is where they think he has gone. They ask him questions, and receive his replies. They sprinkle holy water over him, “and invoke his name, as if he were one of the saints.”

  It all went through my head: the showmen, the eccentric tramp, the movable theater, the dog’s body, the burials, the behavior of the landlady, her husband away in prison, guarded like a dog, slaving away for tripe and gruel, never to get used to wooden clogs and burlap but who might yet find some relief in his straw sack and handcuffs. The cold went through my head, and drove me half crazy. It was a crazy morning, blown apart by brass-band music. Beer and salt pork and Sunday suits stunned me with their peculiar human reek. The previous night went through my head. I thought how far away everything is. It can’t be really, but it is and that’s how it is and it doesn’t really matter. Today was the coldest day so far, and I wrote to the hospital for my winter coat, otherwise I would freeze. And the copy of Koltz, because I’m not thinking of leaving
any time soon. I can’t leave now. Always the same walks, they tighten round you like a noose, and discipline your thinking. There’s a letter to my brother half written on the table, and the Henry James, which I’ve almost finished. It must be even colder outside. From one hour to the next it’s dark as well as cold. When I hear the painter wheezing up the stairs to his room, I feel sick. I should think about him seriously. Because I have to write my report. I’m not sure how old he is. His walk, what does it mean? The way he stands up and sits down? What he says and the way he says it! And me? How do I feel about him now? First and foremost, I’m a liar. Yesterday he looked at me sharply: “Law is what you said, isn’t it?” And I: “Yes, that’s right. Law.” And then silence. It was pitch-black in the valley, and the air could hardly be kept out. Then it started to snow. We could hear shooting from the forest, from the shadow side. But it couldn’t have been a deer I heard as I made my way back to the inn alone. “The world is constricting in my heart,” he said. Is it that? If I write down such coarse things, it’s heartless of me. I have to. It’s only because I have to that I can. Are they conversations that I have with the painter? Hardly. Clues? Something morbid about all of it, as his brother said, “and still a terrifying distance.” Who’s to blame? But now I know pretty much the major phases of his life. Doesn’t help me. There’s always a lot of snowfall between him and me. I was thinking about the way he sat on his bed, looking at himself. His dreams. His illness, which is also “in opposition” to him. It was horrible hearing him talk to the railwayman yesterday. How he kept conceding that the railwayman was right about everything, even though he didn’t understand anything, not the first thing. How he always concedes now. Everything he says is concession. In fact, he’s powerless all the time.

  Every age was always miles from the world which it always abused. Occasionally he found himself under attack from conditions in the remote past, a smell that had to do with afternoon coffee at his grandmother’s or the hens clucking on one of his grandfather’s farms. Or again the smell of a bakery in the city, where ladies ate cake. “The moments of the three-year-old haunt the thirty-year-old.” Now he sees them under conditions of a different terror. The trees of an avenue cool him down, they have to do with his homework in the second year of elementary school. Church visits, from a different period of childhood, along with having to get up and go to bed at fixed times and solving math problems. The magic of incense and Gloria and wooden Madonnas that the priest commissioned from the carpenter next door. The time of learning to walk, and learning to contradict. The time of devout evening prayers. “If someone in the pub says a certain word,” said the painter, “it makes me what I was twenty years ago.” And then: “You’re not always the person you are.” Retreats, fundamental experiences, forgotten and renewed where they broke off: a forest, a church, a schoolyard. City and countryside alternated according to the whims of his parents and grandparents, his walking and thinking remained subject to the whims of politics: all of it a checkered retrospect. “All of it softened,” he says. “I could eat in such a way that was repulsive, even where repulsiveness was at home, and I could develop manners that would have impressed princesses.” He had played the highest and the lowest parts. “I have always been a genius at transforming myself.” He mastered, like no other, “the art of not drawing attention to oneself. A formal walk and formal meals, as much as eating off newspaper.” And it had never been just a game either: “I was the person through and through who had to eat off newspaper, and also the one who eats formally, but mostly I was the one who has to eat off newspaper …” His childhood, spent in institutions: schools and hospitals. Career conversations that were the despair of parents and grandparents. Occasionally also of the guardians to whom he was given for foster care. Funds dried up at the precise moment when he needed money, “more urgently than ever!” Took a job, a succession of jobs. “I always did the dirtiest work.” Attempts to slip in here or there, study, generally study. All failed. Lying in bed for weeks on end. Slinking along walls, too hungry to be able to make a decision. Brother and sister withdrawn to their “secret world.” The deaths of grandparents, of parents. Retreat. The factory switches off all thought.

  “I often get up in the middle of the night,” said the painter. “As you know, I don’t sleep. Picture my head to yourself. Once I’ve worked my way out of bed, I begin to palp my arms and legs, I slowly begin to move, which is very difficult, because I can’t find my balance right away. With this head, you know, as soon as I get up, I experience difficulties with my balance: I have to be careful not to get up too quickly. I stand there stark naked. I listen, there seems to be nothing moving outside, nothing inside, as though everything had perished. There are probably birds sitting on the branches, the blackbirds of winter, but they’re not moving. If you go over to the window and look out, if you have enough time, you can see the birds sitting there: fat bellies, incapable of singing. I don’t know what sort of birds they are, but they’re always the same kind. I try to walk up and down my room once or twice, without hurting my head too much with the strain of walking. Do you have any idea what it means to be someone who feels indescribable pain when walking and breathing at the same time? I sit down carefully at my table, and start making notes, notes about everything that preoccupies me. But I don’t get very far, after every three or four words, I have to stop … of course, it’s an alarming thing, trying to commit something to paper … but then there’s this idea that’s just come to you, and you feel convinced it’s a good idea, and it goes. The nights are my martyrdom, you know, I abbreviate them by contemplating my body: I sit in front of the mirror, and look at myself. It’s not always possible to choke back highly pertinent questions. And so I experience quite lengthy periods of mere looking. It’s the only satisfaction I have; it lessens the pain; my head remains without uproar, without increase in heat and agitation. I get through the night, the terrible despair, you know, that appears in the walls when I scratch them with my fingers. You see,” said the painter, “my nails are all broken off. The pain from my head is so inconceivable that I can’t begin to describe it.”

  On my return to Schwarzach, I read in the Demokratisches Volksblatt: “The unemployed man G. Strauch from V. has not been seen in Weng or environs since last Thursday. In view of the heavy snowfalls currently being experienced there, the search for the missing person, in which members of the police also took part, has had to be called off.”

  That evening, I ended my internship, and traveled back to the capital, to resume my studies.