Free Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Page B

couldn’t get under the bridge.” About how it’s getting harder and harder to drive up the mountain, especially with the snow not being properly cleared. “But there’s no one to clear it,” they say. They put away as much as they can, then they get to their feet, wipe their mouths with their sleeves, and go out, climb into their truck, and drive off. Then there’s nothing she can see but the brawny arm of one of the draymen, sticking out the open window. “They have it easy,” she says as she walks into the public room.
    The landlady was an instance of someone not putting herself out because she doesn’t want to make anything of herself beyond the ordinary, unless it were something over time horribly repulsive, which doesn’t require any exertion, just a general letting-oneself-go. She sometimes appeared to him, the painter, at the foot of his bed, in spirit, the way an image appears, emerging from the subconscious, half dream, half reality, something you don’t like and that leaves you no peace: when he can’t sleep; when he hears noise “from down in the public bar”; on the path, often; in the forest, then with particular roughness against the landlady and himself. The imagehad become a secret enemy of his, like other images of people who one day crossed his path and have long since forgotten him, and the moment they belonged to him. By nature, she was as lonely as thousands of others just like herself. Probably with just the same gifts for this or that as those others too. But thousands craned their necks to stare at him, when she craned her neck, as awkwardly and deceitfully as she did, with her timidity and her envy at odds. “Endowed with qualities that might lead to extraordinary heights,” but stifled at every turn, she lived for her physicality, for a game of hide-and-seek that she played with herself in the dark, held together by corpulence and a few simple phrases, no more than three or four.
    The landlady knew what her game was. And at the same time she didn’t know. “The obverse of every side appears … Strong-willed, but not strong, because mean.” He said it as if throwing the thing he said it about in the trash. Somewhere far away. “Her knowledge is based on self-deception so primitive that it cannot be called intellectual. No different than with a dog or cat. Only more pampered. More dependent.” Then he gives a brief description of once having caught the knacker getting some substantial sum of money out of the landlady. “Back of the house. First in the lavatory, then outside under the tree.” Four or five hundred schillings: “Big denomination notes. I don’t believe thousands, so they must have been hundreds. Which he hurriedly stashed away in his pants pockets when I appeared.” The landlady said, supposedly: “You don’t have to give that back to me. My husband doesn’t know.” When was her husband coming out of prison? the knacker then asked. “If it was up to me, he wouldn’t becoming out at all. I don’t want him anyway” was her comment. For nights the two of them had been together. “No passion in it,” said the painter, “purely out of shamelessness.” She, not he, was the driving force, pushing everything into repetitions of the same collapse. “Obtuse and blind, as women of her type always are.” She had been impatient to have her husband put away. Already when she was seventeen, a year after the wedding, she had had enough of her husband. Cheated him from that time forth. She always owned up to everything, if there was anything to own up to; she didn’t bother to keep secrets. “It was always her greatest weapon, the fact that she didn’t keep secrets. And she was never short of a little variety,” said the painter. “She just went around the corner. Straight into criminality,” said the painter. “In the mornings she would come up the mountain, at daybreak, not at all tired, in fact quite the opposite, refreshed. I often saw her, because