Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Page A

is as good as poverty when it comes to producing clarity.” One morning, after he knew he had a fatal illness, he locked everything up, and last of all locked out his housekeeper. “She wept,” he said. “Now I won’t go back there. It would be like going back to a dump. I can’t go back, even if I wanted to: I’m finished.” He said: “It’s true, I didn’t have anyone at the end except for my housekeeper. As far as everyone else is concerned I might already be dead.”
    The children had lice, the grown-ups had gonorrhea, or the syphilis that finally overwhelmed their nervous systems.“People here don’t go to the doctor,” said the painter. “It’s hard to persuade them that a doctor is as essential to them as a dog. They work on instinct,” he said, “they don’t like the idea of interventions. Of course.” Tree boughs often broke off in storms, and came down and killed passersby. “Because no one is protected. Never. Nowhere.” Death surprised you in your sleep, in the field, in the meadow. Between a “lower” and a “higher” conversation, people dropped dead. “Revert to their original condition.” They usually sought out a place “to die in,” where they wouldn’t be found so quickly. “Outside the borders of the commune.” Animals also went far away, far from their kind, when they have the feeling they’re dying. “Here the humans are like animals … Fragments of an alien life” often fell dead at his feet. It alarmed him. In a clearing, on a bridge, deep in a forest, “where darkness pulls the rope tight.” He would often stop and turn round with a sense of a voice calling him from behind—a sensation I’ve had as well—but not seeing anything. He explores the undergrowth and the water and the rocks and the living creatures in the water, “which can be as cruel as its deeps.” He had various methods of going through the woods: with his hands behind his back, with his hands in his jacket pockets. With his hands braced protectively across his head. He often ran on ahead to catch himself up, then hung back and chased after himself again. Talked to trees “as to members of an extraterrestrial academy, like children who are suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of being alone in a destructive chaos.” His powers of invention extend as far as “astonishing verbal constructions verging on the profound,” which he finds in the forests and fields, in the meadows and the deep snow. Or in the hollow path where he sits: “master of contemptu mundi” is one such, “uncivil engineer” another. That craze began one summer.Once, he drowned a determinist in a hole he’d drilled in the ice crust of a pond. “Something reigns over us that, in my view, has nothing to do with us”—that often brought him up short. One might laugh about it. But it was so dangerous that “it was possible to die in it.” He always rebelled against anything superior, until “there was nothing left there” for him. “Any rebellion has to get somewhere,” he said. His rebellions no longer got anywhere. From time to time he saw people in whom he sees: amazing assets, inexhaustible assets, he never had such assets himself! He said: “It takes you hours to adjust to the palpitations that suddenly start going in you like drumbeats at such a sight. Nothing can stand up to it in the long run.” The people here had no assets, and if they did, then they didn’t have the strength to use them, on the contrary, “they fritter them away.” There, “where human potential is negated.” Where ugliness offered itself everywhere like “the sexual imperative.” The whole region was “sodden with disease.” In this valley corruption spoke “sign language so that the deaf could hear it”: things that elsewhere took care to remain hidden till shortly before their objective, here showed no such fastidiousness: “people wear their tuberculosis on their sleeves. They wear it on the outside, shamelessly, so that