Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Page B

the glacier wind can whirl them away like a pile of dead leaves.”
    “There are schoolchildren,” said the painter, “who have a three-hour journey to school. Often enough, before leaving home—at four a.m.—they do the housework, twelve-year-olds feed and milk the cows, because no one else is able to do it, because the mother is dead or ill in bed, and the brother is even younger, and the father is in jail because he owesmoney at the pub. With nothing but a hunk of rye bread, they haul themselves down the mountain through the cold. There is nothing, but nothing progressive here. Storms blow up out of nothing, screams are unavailing; who would hear you. A lot of country schools have been built in mountain passes, but still children are put through the torment of a long walk to school, if they are to escape analphabetism. They have been found in twos and threes in ravines, in petrified formations, past help. The children you meet here are precocious. Cunning, bandy-legged, with a tendency to hydrocephalus. The girls pallid and scrawny and tormented by septic ear-piercings. The boys straw-blond, with shovel hands, flat low foreheads.”
    Leaping up and running away and sitting down again, that was really the sum total of his childhood. Rooms full of the air of dead people. Beds that, turned back, reek of death. The odd highfalutin word in the corridor, the word “never” for example, or the word “school,” the words “death” and “funeral.” For years these words had pursued and irritated him, got him “into terrible states.” Then again, they sometimes seemed like self-raising music: the word “funeral” spreading way past the cemetery, and then past all other cemeteries as well, out into infinity, or the notion that human beings have of infinity. “My notion of infinity is the same as the one I had when I was three years old. Less than that. It begins where your eyes end. Where everything ends. And it never begins.” Childhood had come to him “like a person coming into a house with old tales that are grimmer than you can think, than you can feel, than you can bear: and that, because you are always hearing them, you have never heard.Ever.” For him, childhood had begun on the left side of the road and led straight uphill. “From that point on, I was always thinking of falling. I wanted to be able to fall, and I undertook several attempts in that direction … but it’s wrong to make such attempts. It’s thoroughly mistaken.” Aunts towed him into morgues on the end of their long ugly arms, lifted him up over brass rails, so that he could gaze down into the coffins. They gave him the flowers for the departed to hold in his hands, and he had to keep smelling them, and listening to them say: “What a man he was! How lovely she is! See how elegantly dressed the dead man is! Look! Look!” They immersed him “ruthlessly in a sea of corruption.” In railway trains he can hear himself say, “Straight ahead.” In the long nights he loved the crack of light from his grandparents’ bedroom, where they are still talking or reading. Delighted himself in their shared sleep. “The way sheep sleep together” was his sense. The way their breathing knits them together. Mornings break over a cornfield. Over a lake. Over the river. Over the forest. From the top of a hill. Bird-song on the fresh breeze. Evenings deepening in rushes and silence, into which he intones his earnest prayers. The whinnying of horses plucks apart tufts of darkness. Drunks, carters, bats all terrify him. Three fellow pupils dead on the street. A capsized boat that a drowning man failed to reach. Cries for help. Enormous wheels of cheese with enough force to crush him. Hidden in a brewery cellar, he is afraid. In between gravestones a game is played where figures are tossed from one to the other. Skulls glimmer feebly in the sun. Doors open and shut. Vicarages are the scene of meals. Kitchens of cooking. Abattoirs of slaughtering.