Read Frost: A Novel for Free Online

ahead, and he drives me into the hollow with his stick.
    By chance, I ran into the painter in front of the larch wood, and not down on the path where we had agreed to meet, and where I supposed him to be when I was no more than twentyor thirty paces from the larch wood, when he leaped out from behind a tree brandishing his stick, as though to cut me off. I had been singing all the way from the village, tunes I didn’t know I had in me, one after the other, and he said: “I didn’t know you could sing! Why do you only sing when you’re alone? You never sang once when we were together. It’s an odd voice you have, but by no means unpleasant.” I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say. He took me by the elbow, and led me, breathing heavily, into the larch wood “Sing some more, why don’t you. You don’t have to be embarrassed, you’ve got a fine voice.” But I didn’t sing anymore. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have produced a single note. He had decided to wait for me by the larch wood “because it’s sure to be very cold on the path.” We walked fairly quickly. However, he seemed to be quite tired already, and kept stopping. “The imagination is an expression of disorder,” he said; “it has to be. In an ordered world, there would be no such thing as imagination, order wouldn’t tolerate such a thing, imagination is completely alien to it. All the way here, I was asking myself what imagination is. I’m sure imagination is an illness. An illness that you don’t catch, merely because you’ve always had it. An illness that is responsible for everything, and particularly everything ridiculous and malignant. Do you understand the imagination? What is imagination? I asked myself, and at the same time I asked myself whether it’s possible to understand the imagination at all. The truth is you can’t.” He dragged his stick along a thick bough, and got us covered with snow. I had to brush it off him. “Someone who doesn’t know anything, is such a thing possible?” he asked. “A man who never knew anything?”
    •   •   •
    By the time we got down to the station it was five o’clock. There were more people standing around than usual, and the painter wanted to barge through them, to the station buffet. He put out his hand, and they melted away from his stick. I followed him at a couple of paces. In the buffet, he sat down in the corner, from which you have a view of the platform and can see the trains pulling in and leaving. Then it was too cold for him there—“a hideous draft!”—and we moved next to the stove. We each drank a couple of glasses of slivovitz, and picked out things to read from the newsstand. Weighed down with newspapers—once he’s read them, I take them up to my room, to read them cover to cover—we decided to be back at the inn by seven, if at all possible. Outside the inn, while I was brushing the snow off my boots, he said: “Imagination spells a man’s death … I had a dream last night, I can’t remember the setting, but it was in some very familiar landscape; I can’t remember which one. An odd dream, not one of the desperate dreams I usually have. The landscape of my dream kept changing, from white to green to gray to black, probably each time in the space of seconds. Nothing had the color we would have expected it to have. For instance, the sky was green, the snow was black, the trees were blue … the meadows were as white as snow … It reminded me of certain contemporary paintings, even though the painters aren’t as radical, the painters are by no means as radical as my dream … it was really one of my most radical dreams. And so drastic, the landscape … the trees lofty, growing into endlessness, the pastures hard, the grass so hard that when the wind blew, it created a loud music, a music that seemed to be assembled from all sorts of different periods and styles. Suddenly, I was sitting in this landscape, in a meadow. The odd