Frost: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

a nod to leap at you, and tear you to pieces, that’s the same thing as the animal we see when we cross a street, like hundreds of other people, you understand …” He chewed, and said: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious. Often, of all the things you mean to say, that’s all that’s left, the sense that you had it in mind to say something malicious.”

Fourth Day
    “You just arrive in a place,” said the painter, “and then you leave it again, and yet everything, every single object you take in, is the sum of its prehistory. The older you become, the less you think about the connections you’ve already established. Table, cow, sky, stream, stone, tree, they’ve all been studied. Now they just get handled. Objects, the harmonic range of invention, completely unappreciated, no more truck with variation, deepening, gradation. You just try to work out the big connections. Suddenly you look into the macro-structure of the world, and you discover it: a vastornament of space, nothing else. Humble backgrounds, vast replications—you see you were always lost. As you get older, thinking becomes a tormenting reference mechanism. No merit to it. I say ‘tree,’ and I see huge forests. I say ‘river,’ and I see every river. I say ‘house,’ and I see cities with their seas of roofs. I say ‘snow,’ and I see oceans of it. A thought sets off the whole thing. Where it takes art is to think small as well as big, to be present on every scale …”
    It was insecurity that drove people to extraordinary feats. People who were really not good for anything were suddenly capable of everything. Heroes had emerged from insecurity. From fear, dread, despair. “Quite apart from the creations of art.” It wasn’t security that held sway, it was idiocy and inadequacy—and ordinary idiocy and inadequacy, at that. He makes these remarks during lunch. He sends back the beef, even though he ordered it; he wants salt pork instead. The landlady takes the beef and goes. We have a table to ourselves. The rest of the dining room is full. You’d think there wasn’t room for one more person. Chairs are brought out of the kitchen, the big bench is pulled out from under the window and extended by another couple of yards. And then there are still people hunkered on the floor, on boards put up across barrelheads. Friday, I think. Then, when there really isn’t any more space, some come up to our table. The knacker and the engineer first, then workmen come and beset the painter. The landlady, bringing him his salt pork, watches spitefully as they almost crush the painter. She makes another face at him behind his back, at him and at me as well, because she’s worked out that I’m on his side. Thatmakes me suspicious to her. She sees me as another one of the same sort. Since she detests him, she must detest me too.
    The knacker is a tall dark man; the engineer is a head shorter, brown-haired, talkative, very different from the knacker. “The work’s dragging on,” says the engineer. The work on the bridge, that is, a part of the construction of the power plant which is going on further down the valley. It was the worst time for concreting, but it had to be now. “Even overtime doesn’t help much,” he says. He is, as he says, “draconian.” Well on top of his crews. Talks like them. Drinks like them. Doesn’t stand on ceremony with them, as they wouldn’t with him. He calls their names out in the dining room. Every name gets an instruction for the day ahead. It seems the engineer has everything in his head: figures, deliveries, transports, structures, not quite secured sites, everything. He chain-smokes, and his belly hits against the table when he laughs. The knacker is taciturn. The engineer seems to bring enormous strength to bear against enormity. The workmen respect him. He doesn’t try to pull the wool over their eyes. “The rails need to be mounted,” he says, and everyone