Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard

there were times I would get up at three o’clock and leave the inn, and go on long walks. If I saw her coming, I hid. There’s no shortage of places to hide hereabouts. When she got back, her husband often wouldn’t even be at home. That suited her, because then she got to sleep in. They must have spent years not asking one another what they get up to, where they’ve been when they come back in the mornings. The children knew everything.” The painter said: “In order to land her husband in prison, she even traveled to S., to the public prosecutor. Because the landlord was this close to getting off scot-free.” The same night her husband was taken away by the police, she received the knacker. “He was already waiting by the tree,” said the painter. “But there were also times when he was nowhere to be seen. Then there would be an icy silence in the inn.” Apparently, she would send her daughters down to the village to get him. If they didn’tcome back with him, they would be beaten by their mother. “Punched and kicked,” said the painter. Apart from that, the landlady was “a creature that doesn’t mind the odd blow, skulks in a corner, and then comes out as if nothing had happened.”
    For the last few years, the painter hadn’t had anyone except his housekeeper. She was sufficient for his so-called “physical requirements,” which others “exploited shamelessly,” but which became increasingly unimportant to him. “She doesn’t know the least thing about it,” he said. She was a woman with the necessary intelligence for a housekeeper, dressed carefully, and took herself off the moment it was required, without anything needing to be said. Unlike most of the other housekeepers he knew, she had only ever seen him as her employer. Two days a week. He felt that to be difficult for her. She was lonely. Didn’t know what to do with the rest of her time. He paid her over and above, and occasionally bought her tickets for some entertainment or other, for which she repaid him with especial care over his laundry, ironing, and keenness in the kitchen. She came from the country, and housekeepers who came from the country were always to be preferred. He hadn’t had her long, two or three years maybe, because before that he hadn’t been able to afford a housekeeper. At present, she was with her parents in T. The very first day after he’d given her her notice, she had driven to them. “A girl of forty-five,” he said. She had mastered the art of admitting visitors and escorting them out, like a highly competent mathematician. “But I hardly ever received visitors!” he said. It took her no more than two or three days to work out what his taste was, “the way I wantedthings to be.” He gave her a free hand. “She brought order to the worst of my chaos,” he said. “In artistic questions, she was ‘well-versed,’ knew her way about. Because she didn’t know the first thing about art: I always got my best criticism from her.” She was “equally good at polishing shoes and at the silent drawing of curtains, at smoking cigars and at puncturing the megalomania of artists … When she was with me, I understood what the rich were about. I suddenly understood wealth and mobility.” She told him what didn’t suit her more trenchantly, effectively, and agreeably than anyone had ever managed to say anything to him. “She wanted to put out flowers all over the place, wherever there was room, but I forbade it.”—“I don’t want hygiene to crowd everything else out!” he explained. And she got it. She opened the door for him, and closed it after him. Dusted books and walls in a way that didn’t cause him to protest. Posted his letters. Went shopping for him. Did all official business for him. Brought him news he would never have discovered for himself. “She made me hot and cold compresses and said thousands of times over that I was away, even when I was in my room, in bed.” He said: “Wealth