Frost: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard

Author:Thomas Bernhard [Bernhard, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77348-7
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2010-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

Then set off on my journey. Back to my room at the hostel, with no light and no sunshine. I’ll fix myself something to eat, look at my watch, lie down and not be able to sleep, I’ll pace up and down the street, and open my books again. And what about the internship? What will it bring me? How much longer will I be at Schwarzach? What if the assistant is dissatisfied with me? If he thinks, oh dear, I should have given someone else the task, not him? And will I get five hundred schillings, as I do every year? Even if I’ve been gone quite a long time? Wonder whether the matron knows? Yes, of course, she’ll be reminded of the fact that I’m not there at every mealtime. Now I think of the ghostly atmosphere in the staff room. There’s a radio there that hasn’t worked for years. A clock that ticks, but tells the wrong time. Vases with flowers that are long since dried out. A gray oilcloth spread over the long table, tacked down. Paintings on the walls, scenes from village life, done by a rather fetid academic painter. Books from the nineteenth century, unopened for decades. There I see down one side of the table the registrar, the assistant, the assistant’s assistant, the bonesetter, the pediatric surgeon. And on my side of the table the other two interns, the Greek doctor, the new med students. They eat in silence, and sometimes they draw a complicated fracture of the ulna on the table, or the position of an embryo, and the sister who carries in the food then wipes everything off once they’re all gone. I walk down the long passages, get lost at the end, where all the doors are suddenly locked and you can’t remember which way you came, I bang on a door, and already I’m thinking I’ll have to spend the night there, in that room, surrounded by locked doors. I hear footfalls, and I bang on the door with my fists, and the door opens, and the sister says: “Why, doctor, what are you doing in here?” And the sound of that “doctor.” Sounds how? And then I try and compare a human being with another human being, both with the same illness, and reacting to it differently. One dies, the other survives as if nothing had been the matter. And both had the same illness. I read, it’s almost dark, but I read in my Koltz, a section which explains about diseases of the brain, but the disease the painter has, which is a disease of the brain—what else would it be?—doesn’t appear anywhere in Koltz. And we’re talking about a very new book, by a leading authority, just imported from the States.

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