Free Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Page A

portions as well … But the workmen, they bring in money all right.” Why didn’t I sit down. She pushed a chair under me. If the inn were anywhere else, she said, “but here, right where they’re excavating!”
    Her potato-peeling took me back to my grandparents’ house, the doors that were always left open a crack, the smell, the cats that snuck around, the milk that sometimes bubbled over, the ticking clocks. She said: “It’s not easy being a student either.” It was something someone had said to her once, she didn’t mean anything by it. She had once been to the capital, and bought herself a few clothes. “I tell you, I was relieved to be heading home.” And then: “But I wouldn’t mind being in the city, not in the capital, but the city.” She has the legs of a washerwoman. Fat and dropsical and veined. The public bar cost twice as much to heat as it did last year. “Meat has tripled in price,” she said. And then she said something that utterly distracted me, put me in mind of a lake, a forest, a house in the flatland. Winter business was just the same as summer business. She was thinking of getting the building done up, getting all the rooms painted, replacing a lot of things that had gone out of fashion, “for instance getting in a new lot of wardrobes,” she said, “and new tables for the bar and new curtains and a new staircase, and the windows ought to be much bigger, I’d get the openings made as big as possible, to get some light into the place.” Then she poured hot water into a jug for me. She said: “But my husband doesn’t want any of that. When he gets out, that’s the end of everything anyway, you know. When he gets out …”The way she said it. The way she said it, I couldn’t get it out of my head: “When he gets out …”
    When the beer deliverymen come, the landlady stands in the doorway and sizes them up. I’m sure I’ll manage to get one or other of them into bed with me, is what she may have been thinking to herself. The deliveries happen at three in the afternoon, but already by late morning, she’s pretty excited, bustling about here and there, she tidies up the silverware drawer and mixes up forks and spoons, which makes for a little irritation at lunchtime. She sends her girls outside to see if the draymen aren’t coming. But they were always on time, and never got there before three. “Go and see if the draymen are coming!” she orders them. She opens the kitchen window so that she can stick her head out, but she can’t see anything, because of the way the little hill blocks the view of the road down which the draymen will come. She has known that from the very first day, but still she keeps looking out. If you ask her what she’s so excited about, she replies: “What do you mean? I’m not excited!” And she opens the main door at eleven, and loops the handle to a hook on the wall. “We need fresh air!” she says. “It’s stifling in here. The whole place reeks!” When the draymen draw up, she charges out and tells them how many crates and barrels she wants. They weren’t to make too much noise, she says, she had some sick and restless guests staying at the inn. She watches the draymen unload barrels and crates, and carry and roll them in. They wear large, thick, shiny leather aprons from throat to way below the knee, green caps on their heads, and keep the top buttons of their work tunics open even in winter. She asks for the first barrel to be lifted onto the bar and has the hose fittedto it, and the first three, four, eight, nine glasses, sprouting on the bar like mushrooms, all of them full of froth, she empties into a jug for the draymen, and sets out bread and butter and sausage on the table for them. She sits down with them, and asks them questions: “What’s going on down there?” she asks.
    They tell her what they know, an accident, a baptism, a fistfight at a Communist meeting, a case of infanticide, a raft on the river, “so big it