Frost: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

apples. Now he had breathed in the smell as if it were a spring morning. He often forced himself to put together the smell somewhere, quite suddenly. He almost always succeeded. As a master every now and then will come up with a masterpiece. His whole childhood had been put together from smells; the sum of these smells had made up his childhood. It hadn’t been inert, it was in continual flux. Also there were word games and ball games; fear of vermin, wild animals, gloomy lanes, raging torrents, hunger, and the future. In his childhood he had come across vermin, hunger, wild animals, and raging torrents. Also the future, and loathing. The war made it possible for him to see what people who are unacquainted with war have no knowledge of. City and country by turns, because his grandfather was restless, just as restless as he was himself. His grandmother clever, dignified, unapproachable to low-minded people. His grandfather acquainted him with landscapes, conversations, darkness. “My grandparents were masterful people,” he said. Their loss was the deepest loss he had experienced. His parents hadn’t bothered about him much; they were much more interested in his brother, a year older, and of whom they expected everything that they didn’texpect of him: a settled future, just any sort of future. His brother had always received more love and more pocket money. Where he disappointed them, his brother never disappointed them. His connection to his sister was far too frail to endure. Later on, they took it up again over the ocean, wrote each other letters from Europe to Mexico, from Mexico to Europe, tried to parlay their mutual liking into a sort of love or dependency, in which they were possibly successful. “She writes me two or three times a year, as I do her,” he said. Within him and his solitude many thoughts were engendered, which became gradually darker. Once his grandparents died, he was in “a blackness that I will never come out of.”
    And then his father died, and a year later, his mother. While his brother made his way, climbed up his career ladder rung by rung, to the surgeon he is now, he lost himself in the world in his head. First one way out, then the next were blocked off. Before long he was standing there, confronting ruin. There was little visible evidence of the fact: he always put on good clothes to go out in the street. But at home, in the privacy of his room, he slumped into the lowest frame of mind, into sleeplessness, into ponderings about science and art, into poverty. The more his poverty deepened, the more he shut himself away. His “artistic endeavors” didn’t impress him. He could see all too clearly that the work he produced, often effortfully, was nothing for anyone to remark on, much less celebrate. What he did struck him as ordinary. Everything was crumbling. And yet occasional tricks of fate, “pure accidents,” little hits of friendliness, kept him going. Where from? “Little excursions sometimes happened like a puffof spring air,” whirling him along to a little town up the Danube, a forest village, yes, even across the border to Hungary, which he had never been able to see enough of, that “melancholy
puszta.”
But childhood was worst on that day when he no longer had his grandparents behind his parents. He was so lonely, he often sat on the steps in someone else’s house and thought he was going to die of misery. For days he went around, spoke to people on the street, who thought he was mad, unmannerly, disgusting. And in the countryside, it was just the same: he often wouldn’t see the fields and meadows for days, because of the tears in the eyes. He would be sent here and there, and be paid for. Or they didn’t pay, and then his being away, his being there, was even worse. He looked for friends, but never found any. It even happened that he thought he suddenly had a friend, but then it would turn out to have been a mistake, from which he hurriedly had to retreat. Into