Frost: A Novel Read Online Free

“Quite apart from the fact that I am made to pay for everything two or three times over, because she assumes I have money. They all do here. Even the priest suffers from that misapprehension, and is forever approaching me for donations. Do I look as though I had money? Do I look well off?”—“As far as country people are concerned,” I said, “every city person comes with money, and it’s their business to take it off him. Educated people especially.”—“Well, do I look educated, then?” he asked. “The landlady bills me for things I never had. And she comes to me begging for money for meals for an unemployed man. Of course, I don’t turn her away. But I ought to. Why don’t I turn her away? She cheats me in everything. Nor am I the only one. She cheats everyone. Even her children.” Cheating could be fuel for a lifetime. “Or a spur,” added the painter.
    “My first time in Weng, she was underage. I know she’s listening at the door. If I pull it open suddenly, I know I’ll see her face. But I don’t.” She was a slovenly washer-up. Her folded tea towels contained traces of beetles and cockroaches, and sometimes the beetles and cockroaches themselves. Even worms. On Friday nights she baked a huge cake, going back and forth between two men “she ruthlessly exploits. The knacker doesn’t know that one floor down, one of the guests is getting to suck on her tits in the same dishonest way.” She had recipes that went from mouth to mouth. “Dangerous and immoral as she is, she’s a good cook.” In her larder in the cellar and up in the attic, in among foodstuffs, sacks of flour and sugar, strings of onions, loaves of bread, piles of potatoes and apples, she kept evidence of her dissolution: men’s underpants, attacked by rodents and rot. “Shekeeps an interesting collection of her trophies lying around at the top of the house and in the cellar. She takes special satisfaction, at times when there aren’t too many men around, in looking through her collection and reviving her memories of their former contents. She keeps the keys to these rooms always about her person, has done for years, and no one but me has the least idea of what these keys are there to open doors to.”
    The painter Strauch spits out his sentences the way old people spray saliva in the air. I next saw him at suppertime. In the intervening hours I sat down in the public bar and watched them getting dinner ready. The painter came down rather too late for the landlady’s liking, after eight o’clock; by then it was only the regular seats that had drinkers in them. An awful reek of sweat and beer and dirty workclothes filled the room. The painter stood in the doorway, craning his neck to look for a place, and when he saw me, he came toward me, and sat down facing me. He told the landlady he didn’t want to eat whatever she’d cooked up that evening. She was to bring him a piece of spam and some fried potatoes. He didn’t want any soup. For several days past he had had no appetite to speak of, but today he was hungry. “I was cold, you see.” It wasn’t cold, quite the opposite really, but: “The Föhn, you know. Inside, I was freezing. That’s where it gets you, inside.”
    He doesn’t eat like a wild beast, not like the workmen, not from out of some primal condition. He takes every morsel as a scornful remark against himself. The spam on his plate was “a piece of some carcass.” He looked at me as he said it, but Ididn’t show the revulsion he had hoped. I do a lot of work with dead bodies, and I’m not squeamish. The painter, of course, wasn’t to know that. “Everything people eat is pieces of dead bodies,” he said. I saw how disappointed he was. An infantile disappointment left his face in an expression of pained uncertainty. After that, he talked about the worth and worthlessness of people with me. “The animal quality,” he said, “that lurks inside people, and that we associate with raptors, waiting for