Free Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard

no one else had applied. Since he had never learned or been trained to do anything else, it was just right for him. He didn’t want to start being a woodcutter after the war, and he didn’t want to work in the cellulose factory either; he was too old for the railway, the post office turned him down, and there were no other possibilities. He has quite a bit of time to himself, and is almost always in thefresh air. Once every other week he takes a trip into the city, he’s the only one of all of them who occasionally sees a little bit of the world. He digs graves, and shovels them over. He removes decomposed wreaths, and occasionally he earns a bit on the side by selling the cemetery compost to one of the farmers. In the course of his digging, he often comes across items of jewelry, which it is claimed he takes into the city to sell. Summer and winter he’s dressed the same, in a leather jacket and leather pants, which are tied round the ankles. During funerals, he has to stand against the church wall and wait for the ceremony to be concluded. As soon as the last people have left, he gets to work, quickly fills in the grave, which, once it’s settled, he tidies up: he pours black earth onto it, and cuts pieces of turf which he assembles into a neat hill. For that he often gets whole rucksacks full of meat and butter and sausage and weeks’ supplies of free eggs, which he sells to the landlady, or rather, she deducts them from what he pays on the last of the month.
    Often he goes scrabbling around the cemetery for hours, lugging turf, the water-weight, and a whole set of narrow boards which he uses to measure. He makes no secret of the fact that he’s often up to his knees in water, because he has to dig graves to a prescribed depth of two meters twenty. They don’t believe him until they see for themselves. The clay soil, containing a lot of gravel, can no longer do anything to spoil his mood. At nine o’clock, he hunkers down and drinks a bottle of beer. When he walks out of the cemetery at five, having locked up the morgue at a quarter of, he has a tune on his lips. Everyone likes to hear his stories, even the ones he makes up as he goes along. You can see how one thing leadsto another with him, the way he always comes up with something unexpected.
    “As knacker and gravedigger one is an important figure, a man they can’t treat like an ordinary Joe,” he says. Often he has a dog that was run over by a train in his rucksack, but he might just as well pull out some completely out-of-the-way item he found in an attic somewhere, like the pair of carved wooden angels he set up in the middle of the table yesterday, to drink a toast to.
    The landlady was standing in the kitchen when I went to get some hot water. She was peeling potatoes, and her two daughters were stirring the contents of saucepans on the stove, or running to the woodshed for wood and putting it on the fire, or taking out clothes and brushing them clean. The landlady wanted to loan me a winter overcoat belonging to her husband. “You must be freezing,” she said, “what you’ve got isn’t more than a raincoat. The cold will cut right through that.” I told her I always wore a woolen vest, and I didn’t feel the cold. “That’s what you say,” said the landlady. “I don’t feel the cold,” I said. “Well, if you keep going around with the painter the whole time,” she said. “Yes, if I keep going around with him the whole time,” I said. She sent her daughters down to the cellar. “How long are you planning to stay?” I didn’t know. Usually, all her rooms were taken, “just not this year. Visitors don’t like to come when there’s so much noise. The people working on the power plant make too much noise.” But she didn’t make that much from her long-stay visitors. “You know, you can’t ask for that much from them … And then you have to have something to offer your customers in return … it has to be tasty, and generous