Frost: A Novel Read Free

stop. “I take this path every day,” he said, “I’ve been walking here for decades. I could walk it in my sleep.” I tried to discover more about the reason for his presence in Weng. “My sickness and any number of other reasons,” he said. I hadn’t expected any more detailed reply. I told him as well as I could, in brief points, the story of my life, with spots of light or sorrow, and how it had made me into what I am—without betraying to him what, at the moment, I
really
am—and with an openness that surprised me. But it interested him not at all. He is only interested in himself.
    “If you knew how old I am, in calendar terms, you’d get a shock,” he said. “You probably imagine I’m an old man, as young people are apt to. You’d be amazed.” His face seemed to darken into a deeper hopelessness. “Nature is bloody,” he said, “but bloodiest toward her own finest, most remarkable, and choicest gifts. She grinds them down without batting an eyelid.”
    •   •   •
    He doesn’t think much of his mother, and even less of his father, and his siblings had become as indifferent to him over time as he thinks he has always been to them. But the way he tells me, I can tell how much he loved his mother, his father, and his siblings. How attached he is to them! “Everything was always gloomy for me,” he says. I told him about a passage from my own childhood. Thereupon he said: “Childhood is always the same. Only to one person, it will seem ordinary, to a second benign, and to a third satanic.”
    In the inn, they treat him with appropriate respect, as it seems to me. But once his back is turned, they all make faces.
    “Their excesses have been noted. Their sexuality can be sniffed. One can feel what they think and what they want, these people, sense what forbidden things they are continually contriving. Their beds are under the window or in the doorway, or they don’t even bother with beds: they go from atrocity to atrocity … The men treat the women like pieces of tenderized meat, and vice versa, now one, now the other, depending on their respective imbecility. The primitive is everywhere. Some behave as if by prior arrangement, others seem to come to it naturally … their too-tight trousers and skirts seem to drive them wild. The evenings go on and on: it’s all too much. A few yards here or there, in or out, so as not to have to freeze … Their mouths are taciturn, the rest goes wild … day dawns, and you don’t know which way is up. Sex is what does for them all. Sex, the disease that kills byits nature. Sooner or later, it will kill off even the deepest intimacy … it brings about the conversion of one into the other, of good into evil, from here to there, from high to low. Godless, because ruination appears first … the moral becomes immoral (a model of universal decline). The forked tongue of nature, you might say. The way the workers go around here,” he said, “they live for sex, like most people, like all people … they live to the end of their days in a continual wild process against modesty and time and vice versa: ruination. Time sends them on their way to unchastity with a slap. Some are more accomplished at concealing it than others. With the canny ones, you only realize when they’re all done. But it’s for nothing. All of them live a sex life, and not a life.”
    How long was I proposing to stay in Weng, he asked. I needed to get back fairly soon, to prepare for exams in the spring, I said. “As you’re studying law,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll find it easy to get a job later. There are always jobs for lawyers. I had a nephew once who was a lawyer, only he lost his mind over stacks of files and had to quit his job in the civil service. He wound up in Steinhof. Do you know what that is?” I replied that I had heard of the institution “am Steinhof.” “Well, then you’ll know what became of my nephew,” he said.
    I had expected a