Thomas Bernhard
THE LIME WORKS
Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 and grew up in Austria. He studied music at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1957 he began a second career as a playwright, poet, and novelist. The winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany, he has become one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation. He published nine novels, an autobiography, one volume of poetry, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of plays. Thomas Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.
ALSO BY THOMAS BERNHARD
Concrete
Correction
Frost
Extinction
Gargoyles
Gathering Evidence
The Loser
My Prizes
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Woodcutters
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 2010
Translation copyright © 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Germany as Das Kalkwerk by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, in 1970. Copyright © 1970 by Thomas Bernhard. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1973.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for The Lime Works is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83353-2
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
First Page
But instead of thinking about my book and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps until I feel about to go mad.
… when Konrad bought the lime works, about five and a half years ago, the first thing he moved in was a piano he set up in his room on the first floor, according to the gossip at the Laska tavern, not because of any artistic leanings, says Wieser, the manager of the Mussner estate, but for relaxation, to ease the nervous strain caused by decades of unremitting brain work, says Fro, the man in charge of the Trattner estate, agreeing that Konrad’s piano playing had nothing to do with art, which Konrad hates, but was just improvisation, as Wieser says, for an hour first thing early in the morning and another late at night, every day, spent at the keyboard, with the metronome ticking away, the windows open …
… next, Konrad bought a lot of guns, partly from fear but also because he had a passion for firearms, second-hand rifles mostly but in prime working order, from the estate of Forestry Commissioner Ulrich who died last year, well-known makes like the Mannlicher etc., which Konrad, an extremely shy man (Wieser), full of apprehension that tended to grow into panic ever since the landowners Mussner and Trattner were mysteriously murdered not so long ago, felt he needed to protect the lime works against burglars and in general against what he called outsiders …
… Konrad’s wife, whose maiden name was Zryd, a woman almost totally crippled by decades of taking the wrong medications, and who had consequently spent half her lifetime hunched over in her custom-built French invalid chair, but who is now, as Wieser puts it, out of her misery, was taught by Konrad how to use a Mannlicher carbine, a weapon the otherwise defenseless woman kept out of sight but always within reach, with the safety off, behind her chair, and it was with this gun that Konrad killed her on the night of December 24–25, with two shots in the back of the head (Fro); two shots in the temple (Wieser); abruptly (Fro) putting an end to their marital hell (Wieser). Konrad had always been quick to fire at anything within range of the house, they say at Laska’s, and as everyone knows he did shoot the woodcutter and game keeper Koller who was passing by on his way home from work one evening about four and a half years ago; quite soon after Konrad had moved in, carrying his knapsack and a hoe, and catching it in the left shoulder because Konrad mistook him for a burglar; for which shooting Konrad was in due course sentenced to nine and a half months at hard labor. The incident brought to light about fifteen previous convictions of Konrad’s, mostly for libel and aggravated assault, they say at Laska’s. Konrad served his time in the Wels district prison, where he is being held again right now …
… apart from the exceptional few who found his eccentric though quite inconspicuous personality interesting, people began little by little to cut him dead; even those who wanted his money preferred to have nothing to do with him. When I myself ran into him a few times on the road to Lambach, or Kirchham, and a couple of times walking through the high timber forest, he’d nail me every time by starting to talk without let-up on some topic of a medical or political or scientific kind, or a mixture of all three; more about that later …
… at Lanner’s the word is that Konrad killed his wife with two shots; at the Stiegler place, with a single shot; at The Inglenook, with three; and at Laska’s with several shots. Obviously nobody really knows except, presumably, the police experts, how many times Konrad pulled that trigger …
… but the trial, set for the 15th, should cast some light—even if only in the legal sense, as Wieser says—on the mystery of this shooting, a mystery that only gets darker as time goes on …
… despite what most people thought even as recently as last January—that Konrad gave himself up right after the alleged bloody deed—it is now known that he did nothing of the kind. At Laska’s, where I managed yesterday to sell no less than three new life insurance policies, they are saying that it took the police two whole days to find him at long last in the frozen manure pit behind the lime works. The story is that the police were called by the so-called handyman, Hoeller, because of the strange prolonged silence in the house, and when they broke in they found the murdered woman slumped in her chair but no trace of her husband, whom the evidence promptly led them to identify as the killer. They combed the whole building from top to bottom several times, then they searched the annex where Hoeller lives, and all the other structures on the grounds, the nearby woods, everything, without success. Not until the next day, when it occurred to Reserve Officer Moritz to lift up the rotting planks covering the manure pit, was Konrad discovered, cowering half-frozen underneath; he was arrested and taken without the least resistance on his part, exhausted as he understandably was, straight to the room at the lime works where the murder had occurred and where at this point an old straw mattress dragged down from the attic was doing duty for the corpse in the chair. Even though the police let Konrad change before starting to grill him, they kept rushing him in their anxiety to get him to Wels as quickly as possible, I am told. Only after Konrad showed them some full bottles of liquor he had in the room and encouraged them to drink it all, did they suddenly relax and begin to take their time. The drinks were just what they needed after all the bother of looking for Konrad, and those men reputedly emptied the four or five or maybe even six bottles of schnapps in the patrol wagon, though to gain the necessary time they chose a detour of about sixty or seventy miles, crossing the Krems River right after they passed Sicking, so that it took them two and a half hours from Sicking to Wels, a dista
nce that ordinarily takes less than half an hour—two and a half hours! And when they finally got there, Konrad actually came tumbling out of the wagon head first; with his handcuffs on he could not hold on to anything and maybe one of the officers pushed him a little, and him without any shoes on, all he had on his feet was a pair of felt socks, they say, because the police were in too big a hurry to give him a chance to put on a pair of clean shoes; as for the shoes he had on when they dragged him from the manure pit, they were so bloated with liquid manure that once he’d dragged them off his feet he couldn’t possibly have gotten into them again, and they wouldn’t give him time to get a fresh pair from his own room; it was, Wieser said, inhuman. And Fro says that Konrad should never have been taken on that ride in the freezing cold without something to cover his head, Konrad being of an age when the slightest chill can have the most devastating effect; why, a draft to the back of the head has been known to cause death! but, on the other hand, considering the monstrous crime he committed, and more particularly that he survived two days and even the grueling night-time cold in that manure pit without coming to serious harm, it would be absurd to make a fuss over such trivia as the missing shoes, when he was at least back in dry, relatively warm clothing. They do say that Konrad asked for his long leather pants that he said were the best protection he had against catching cold, but Reservist Moritz who went to Konrad’s room for his things paid no attention and reappeared with an ordinary pair of dark gray loden pants, also a loden jacket, which he tossed on the floor at Konrad’s feet along with some underwear, a shirt, the aforementioned felt socks, and a handkerchief, ordering him to dress and be quick about it. Officer Halbeis who meanwhile was using his rifle butt to keep Konrad pinned in the corner near the desk, Fro says, as if the totally defenseless and wholly apathetic prisoner was likely to offer any resistance, is reported to have said “murderer” repeatedly to Konrad, whereupon the county magistrate, who, on entering the room, heard Halbeis using the word murderer is said to have pointed out that it was not for the police to call Konrad a murderer at this stage of the proceedings. Nevertheless the police disregarded what Wieser calls the magistrate’s highly proper instructions and continued to call Konrad a murderer in the presence of the magistrate who, it seems, did not notice that the policemen went on calling Konrad a murderer despite his explicit warning. Reservist Moritz, incidentally, is said to have acted quite against regulations when he pulled the Konrad woman’s body upright in the chair where it lay slumped forward, with her head all ripped to pieces from the shot or shots from that carbine; he did it, supposedly, after Police Inspector Neuner had briefly left the room in order, Wieser guessed, to find out some detail from Hoeller, the man who knew the lime works better than anyone else and who happened to be in the downstairs vestibule just then; it must have been right after the body was discovered, and the reason Moritz straightened it out was that he was afraid its own shifting weight would send it suddenly slipping from the chair onto the wooden floor. But the magistrate, referring to this in passing, called Moritz a bungling amateur, Fro says. Editor Lanik of the local paper, one of the rottenest characters around, is said to have been refused admittance to the lime works altogether. Wieser also mentions the shattered wrist on the corpse, proof that she had her hands up in front of her face when the shot fell. Fro keeps using the word unrecognizable, over and over again he says streaming with blood …
… at Laska’s they say that Konrad had tried at first to drag the corpse out to the upstairs vestibule, which has a window overlooking the water; like every man who has just killed someone, Konrad thought, says Wieser, that he could get rid of the victim, and the first thing that naturally occurred to him was to drag the body to that window and then, after weighting it with some good-sized object of iron or stone, as Fro thinks, simply drop it out the window where there happened to be, right under the sill, two marble blocks intended as door posts but left unused by Hoerhager, Konrad’s cousin and the former owner of the lime works, who had decided to use tuffstone instead; Fro feels sure that those two marble blocks will play a part in the course of the trial. Anyway Konrad soon realized that he could not drag the body to the window overlooking the water, because he simply did not have the strength, besides which it may have dawned on him that it would not make sense to throw the body into the water that way, because even a medium-bright flatfoot would soon have seen through so clumsy a way to dispose of the victim, as Wieser says; malefactors always began by thinking up the craziest ways to cover their tracks, and what could have been crazier in this case than to toss the Konrad woman out the window. So when Konrad had dragged her about midway he gave up the idea, possibly he decided at that point not to get rid of the body at all is Fro’s guess, but in any case he dragged it right back, the blood pouring from it harder all the time, dragged it all the way back to her room and somehow he mustered the strength to prop her up in her chair again, as the police reconstructed what happened; they say Konrad admitted that his dead wife kept slipping through his arms to the wooden floor as he tried to get her back into the chair, it took him over an hour to get the heavy, lifeless woman’s body that kept slipping down on him back into that chair. When he finally made it he was so exhausted that he broke down beside the chair …
… immediately after the murder, he is alleged to have told them, he began to run around inside the lime works as if he had gone completely crazy, he ran around from top to bottom and back again, and it was when he finally stopped to lean on the window seat overlooking the water in the upstairs vestibule, that it occurred to him to throw the dead woman out that window into the water. In fact there were blood tracks throughout the lime works that show exactly where and how Konrad ran all over the place, his statements, easy enough to check, were true, and Fro believes that Konrad had no reason not to tell the truth, actually it was characteristic of Konrad to be a fanatic about telling the truth, and still is. At The Inglenook they were saying that Konrad shot the woman in cold blood from behind, made sure she was dead, and then instantly went to give himself up. At Laska’s the word was that the woman’s head was shattered by a bullet fired into her left temple. When they’re discussing which temple it was, some keep saying it was the left temple and others that it was the right temple. At Lanner’s there were some who said that Konrad had killed his wife with an ax and then shot her with the carbine only after she was already dead, plain evidence of insanity. At Laska’s they said that Konrad held the muzzle of the gun to the back of his wife’s head and did not pull the trigger for a minute or two, so she knew when she felt the gun at her head that he was going to do her in this time, but made no move to defend herself. Probably he shot her at her own request, they say at the Stiegler, her life was hell and getting more agonizing every day, and it was just as well that the poor soul—which is the way people almost always referred to her everywhere—was out of it. Still, they do say that Konrad should have shot himself after shooting his wife, because all he had to look forward to now was the inescapable horror of prison or else the madhouse for life …
… but a man who kills someone close to him, says Fro, is hardly likely to act in a logical manner afterward …
… the magistrate is supposed to have said to the policemen around him that the woman’s brains on the floor reminded him in texture and color of Emmentaler cheese, says Wieser. Hoeller confirms this statement. About Konrad the magistrate is supposed to have said that he had Schridde’s hair syndrome, a symptom of stomach cancer …
… Konrad had actually kept an ax hidden in his wife’s room for some weeks, a common wood ax, but Hoeller says that Konrad did not kill his wife with the ax, which lay on the window seat behind the invalid chair for weeks gathering dust, but that he shot her with the gun. The time of the killing is supposed to have been three A.M., but other possibilities are being discussed; at Lanner’s they insist that Konrad killed his wife at four A.M., at Laska’s they make it one A.M., at Stiegler’s, five in the morning, at The Inglenook, it’s two A.M. Nobody, not e
ven Hoeller, heard a shot. Even while Konrad himself was still insisting that the lime works at Sicking was the only place in the world where it was possible for him to live and do his scientific work, Wieser says, he had actually come to feel that Sicking threatened him with a kind of doom, increasingly so during the last two years, says Fro; he knew, though he could not admit it, that he felt totally depressed and defeated here, that it was, as Wieser puts it quite pathetically in his way, a tragedy. Konrad had begun a long time ago to move heaven and earth for possession of the lime works, which had always been owned by the Konrad family, but had been parlayed into the hands of Konrad’s nephew, Hoerhager, as Konrad once confided to Fro, by means of all kinds of testamentary chicanery, between the two world wars; the idea of buying the lime works had been Konrad’s dream for three of four decades, though as time went on the dream seemed less likely ever to materialize, said Fro, but then suddenly, or as Wieser says, overnight, it became realizable. Even as a child Konrad had fixed his mind on the idea of settling in the lime works one day, Fro thinks; he had planned to move in and live there ever since he could remember; planned to take possession of the old stonework labyrinth and spend the rest of his life in it, in what he once described to Fro as the total isolation of Sicking, to live intensely to the end as he needed to live, specifically by using his head intensively, his head over which he still had perfect control; but the way his nephew Hoerhager kept raising the price and changing his mind about selling or not selling, one day he would sell and the next day he wouldn’t sell, downright sadistic it was, Konrad felt, the way his nephew would agree to sell the lime works one minute and the next minute he would deny he had ever made such a promise, or else he would threaten Konrad with selling it, but not to Konrad, then again promise to sell it to Konrad only and no one else, all of this continual wanting-to-sell then not wanting-to-sell, the incessant and absolutely unjustified raising of the purchase price (Fro), it nearly destroyed Konrad, but he wouldn’t have been Konrad if he hadn’t, in the end, despite the monstrous obstacles put in his way, succeeded in getting possession and finally moving into the lime works. Though it is certainly true, as Wieser says, that Konrad left no stone unturned for decades to get possession of the lime works, pushing and pursuing his plan more and more ruthlessly until the day he actually realized it, his wife—whom no one ever laid eyes on because of her crippled and paralyzed condition, no one that is except Hoeller, and the baker, the chimney sweep, her hairdresser, the local doctor, and the Stoerschneider woman, and about whom they say that though crippled she was a great beauty—the Konrad woman had made every effort and done all she could to keep from having to move into the lime works; while her husband, as Wieser says, had naturally thought only about his scientific work, for the completion of which the lime works had always seemed to him to be the ideal retreat, she began to dread it even before she started to take his ideas about the lime works seriously, and as he kept bringing these ideas up with a more and more passionate insistence, she would say later on, she became increasingly terrified of what her life, sad as it was already, was bound to turn into there, as her husband’s intention to move into the lime works neared fulfillment, and as we know now, her fears were certainly realized; what she wanted was to go back to Toblach, her home town, and her parents’ house, but going back to Toblach meant to him nothing less than giving up his life’s work, his aim in life, and therefore hers as well; his wife was after all his half sister, and her dependence upon him was absolute, says Wieser, the most absolute imaginable, so moving back to Toblach would have been equivalent to suicide for both of them, willful suicide, because it is in any case deadly to return, in the helpless despair of a final effort to survive, and therefore in a redoubled helplessness and despair, knowing of no other way and knowing that there is no other way, that there can be no other way, it is deadly to return in the end to one’s parents’ house in one’s home town, one’s home land, one’s so-called final refuge. Actually his wife had always thought of Toblach as the ideal refuge, in her mind the idyllic Toblach was incessantly juxtaposed to the terrifying Sicking, which she dreaded. But it was Sicking, of all places, where they both went, says Fro, because the husband’s will prevailed; she had always hated the lime works, she had always done all she could to make him give up the idea, first keeping after Konrad’s nephew Hoerhager not to sell, or at least not to sell the lime works to Konrad, then she tried to bribe the nephew, Fro says she offered him a sum in six figures to sell the lime works to someone other than Konrad, finally she took to threatening him, she would alternately warn him and threaten him and blackmail him, but to no avail, says Fro, it was Konrad who finally prevailed as always and in every instance, Fro says. The five and a half years the Konrads spent in Sicking had convinced Konrad, according to Wieser’s statement, that his decision, his ruthless determination to move into the lime works, away from the world which for decades he had regarded as worthless, offering no attraction whatsoever, a world he had always regarded as anti-historical, a world that was merely marking time, out of which he chose to move into the lime works for the sake of his scientific task, which meant his survival. The place had to be his legally purchased property, not merely a rented home. Hoerhager had of course offered to rent Konrad the place in the normal way, on a twelve-year or even a twenty-four-year lease, but Konrad had always firmly refused the offer, as Wieser says, because to live in a rented lime works would have gone against his grain, and Konrad felt that his decision and his ruthless determination had been the correct decision and the correct ruthlessness. From time to time, Konrad told Fro, the word and the idea Toblach had surfaced in his wife’s head during their first years in Sicking, this childhood notion of hers would spook around in her head for hours and then in her room and finally in the entire lime works, but as time went on it came up less often, Konrad is said to have told Fro. At the so-called Cold Food Market only a year ago Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser that it seemed to him as though Toblach was no longer surfacing, suddenly the idea of Toblach had ceased to matter, his wife had given it up, in giving up Toblach it was as though she had given herself up, he noticed. She had always opposed Sicking, Konrad said to Fro, always opposed the lime works, always pitted herself against him, Konrad, against his work, which meant of course against herself as well. She had brought Toblach into the debate against Sicking from the first moment the question of Sicking arose. In the end her opposition to the lime works, to his work, had become a habit, so that her struggle against his research for his definitive book on the sense of hearing, had become instinctive, as it were. Suddenly Toblach had ceased to exist, Konrad is supposed to have said, and: you must understand that my wife has never had anything apart from Toblach, even now she has nothing in the world apart from Toblach. Sicking was of course a dungeon, Konrad said to Fro, even at first glance it gave the impression of being just that, a workhouse, a penal institution, a prison; an impression disguised for centuries, according to Konrad, concealed behind a veneer of bad taste, he alone had ruthlessly stripped away this cheap mask to let the underlying reality emerge into the light again. This reality was made manifest, to begin with, by the barred windows he had installed in those thick walls immediately after acquiring ownership; functional iron bars, as Konrad put it, I ripped out the ornamental ironwork and installed functional iron bars, he has been quoted as saying, those thick walls and the iron bars sunk into them instantly show that this is a prison. The ornamental wrought iron with which the lime works had been decorated before Konrad’s time, relics of two centuries of poor taste, were removed at Konrad’s orders, he said to Wieser, they all had to go at once, he had torn most of them out of and off the walls with his own hands, he broke them off, knocked them off, broke them down, knocked them down, tore them down, ripped them out, and never replaced a single one of these knocked down and broken up and ripped off squiggles with any new squiggles. The lime works were now totally bare of ornamentation, Konrad is reported to have told Fro, even the paths leading up to the li
me works, though in fact there was only a single stony path leading up to the lime works as anyone could see at once, had been loosely paved with coarse gravel. Everything was simplified. He aimed to restore the lime works to their original condition, regardless of what anyone thought. Tall hedges, yes, but no ornamental bushes whatsoever. To Wieser: he, Konrad, had never been a so-called nature freak, after all; he was no nature fanatic, no nature masochist, absolutely no wilderness freak of any kind, in fact; external nature tended to inspire Konrad with horror at his own nature, never with joyful amazement; the so-called sense of wonder in contemplating nature was a mere perversion, he said. Nor did he love mankind, and if not mankind, then certainly not animals, he did not love animals even though he was incessantly, even exclusively preoccupied with nature, you might say, he was nevertheless no friend of nature, quite the contrary, particularly because of his incessant preoccupation with nature. His wife naturally thought it weird how passionately he hated nature and, as a logical consequence, all the creatures. To Fro: bare walls, functionalism, strategy for self-injury. Catastrophicephaleconomy. To Wieser: firmly locked, firmly bolted doors, closely barred windows, everything locked up, bolted, barred. Do you realize that the lime works doors used to be fastened by simple latches! Konrad is supposed to have cried, imagine, simple latches! Nowadays the doors were all secured by heavy bolts of dressed timber set deep in the walls. Set deep into those thick walls, Konrad is said to have told Wieser, bolts that have to be pushed in or pulled out by force, what with the constant humidity here it was of course always necessary to use a good deal of force. The security factor was the most important one by far. First of all, Konrad had said to his wife according to Wieser, they had to secure themselves against intrusion from the outside world from which they had at last succeeded in escaping, so all the windows had to be barred at once, and all the doors had to be bolted, and that was what in fact they did, right after moving in, Konrad told Wieser, the very day after paying an unheard of, actually an incredibly high purchase price for the lime works, the Konrads moved in and instantly had all the windows barred and all the doors bolted, they had bolts attached even to the inside doors, heavy bolts, and heavy bars on the windows, in fact, the blacksmith at first refused to make bars that heavy, Konrad said, but he finally gave in because Konrad would not yield an inch and also promised to pay quite a lot, and the carpenter made him those heavy wooden bolts, actually the blacksmith who made those heavy bars and the carpenter who made those heavy bolts are said to have shaken their heads over Konrad, but in the end his arguments are said to have convinced both the blacksmith and the carpenter, and now the blacksmith and the carpenter are both proud of their handiwork, the blacksmith is proud of his heavy bars which he shaped with extreme precision in accordance with Konrad’s strict instructions, and the carpenter is proud of the heavy bolts he made just as exactly in accordance with Konrad’s precise instructions. And to stop the curiosity seekers who kept passing the lime works, unwanted and unbidden, as is their way, from eyeing the building, Konrad is said to have told Wieser, Konrad and his wife needed high thickets, as Konrad said to his wife, we need high thickets around the lime works, the tallest-growing shrubs there are, and they had immediately ordered the tallest shrubs from Switzerland brought to Sicking where they were planted by experts. Today the lime works is totally hidden from view, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser two years ago, completely unnoticeable, unseen, and even if it should be noticed and seen, Wieser remembers Konrad saying, there is absolutely no way to get inside. The thickets have grown so high, my dear Wieser, that no one can get a glimpse of the lime works, there is no way to see the lime works, in fact, unless you are standing right in front of it (Konrad to Wieser), that is, standing a yard or half a yard from the building, which is not to see it, after all, there’s no seeing it that close up. Remember that the lime works is accessible only from the east, it’s a strange fact that the lime works is accessible only from the east, but then again it is not so strange, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, on the one hand it was strange, on the other hand not so strange after all, everything is strange on the one hand and not at all strange on the other hand (Wieser specifically recalls that bit about strange-yet-not-strange); to the north and to the west, the lime works is surrounded by water, ideally one might say, and to the south it is bounded ideally by ramparts of rock. Even access from the east is often barred in winter, because the lime works is no longer a lime works and so the snow plow no longer comes as far as the lime works, obviously no snow plow is going to come this far out to a dead, abandoned lime works, Konrad is said to have told Wieser, no workmen, no lime production, no snow plow, he said; for the sake of an individual good-for-nothing Konrad and his wife, an equally good-for-nothing Konrad, no snow plow comes in, it was economically wasteful to have the snow plow come in just for their sake, consequently the snow plow had not come that far for years, as it suddenly struck Konrad, not since his nephew Hoerhager was no longer at the lime works had the snow plow come any farther than the tavern, for Hoerhager had served in various ways as a town official, a man in public office could count on the snow plow coming all the way to his door, while I, Konrad is supposed to have said, I serve no public function, I serve no function whatsoever, certainly not a public function, he even hated the word function, there was nothing he hated more bitterly than the word functionary, a word it nauseated him even to hear, because nowadays everybody was a functionary, all of them were functionaries now, they all functioned, there are no human beings left, Wieser, nothing but functionaries, that’s why I can’t stand the expression functionary, the word functionary makes me retch, but my nephew Hoerhager was a functionary by nature, a town functionary, and to a functionary, especially a town functionary, the snow plow comes, it will always come to a functionary! Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed to Wieser, while for an old fool like me and a crippled old fool of a woman like my wife the snow plow will not come, even though it would be so easy for the snow plow to make a turn at the lime works, but it simply does not come as far as the lime works anymore. A winter harassment! Konrad is supposed to have shouted, over and over: A winter harassment! Wieser says that for over an hour Konrad kept calling it a farce that the public snow plow comes only as far as the tavern but no longer as far as the lime works. In Sicking everything was a farce, whatever you looked at in Sicking was a farce, no matter what you looked at, from whatever point of view, you were looking at a farce. However, it was also to the Konrads’ advantage that the snow plow no longer went on past the tavern to the lime works, Konrad insisted: not a soul comes stomping through that deep snow all the way to us. To be so cut off from everything and isolated naturally meant that they enjoyed absolute quiet. Wieser thinks that the absolute quiet at the lime works in winter was precisely what had so enthralled Konrad at first about the lime works. The thought haunted him, the thought that in winter there was absolute quiet at the lime works gave Konrad no peace for years on end. He nearly drove himself crazy brooding about it. To the lime works! he kept thinking, to the lime works! only the lime works! again and again, even while his wife was thinking of nothing but: Toblach, back to Toblach! but his wife was obedient to a fault. The rock spur even shielded them from the sawmill noises on the other side of it, Konrad is supposed to have said over and over, but if he was to be frank about it, Konrad conceded, sawmill noises bothered him not at all, they never had bothered him, no more than his own breathing bothered him, because like his own breathing they had always been there; he had never thought: there, that’s a noise from the sawmill, I can’t hear myself think because of it! because he had always lived and done his thinking next door to sawmills, no matter where he had lived it had somehow always been in the vicinity of one or even several sawmills, his family, all his people, even all their relatives, had always owned at least one sawmill. As to the tavern, Wieser reports Konrad saying, it stood far enough from the lime works so that Konrad never heard anything from there. Just as the rock spur keeps the sawm
ill noises out, no sounds come from the tavern either, even at its noisiest, here at the lime works he heard none of it. Sometimes you could hear an avalanche, Konrad is supposed to have said, or a rock slide, ice, water, birds, the sound of wild animals, wind, all that, yes. Because one heard hardly any sounds at the lime works, one’s hearing tended to grow remarkably acute here, especially with as hypersensitive an ear as he had. This gave him a natural advantage in the research, for his book dealing, not quite coincidentally, with the sense of hearing, after all it would bear the title The Sense of Hearing. That the Konrads lived where they did (Konrad to Wieser) was of course the result of a calculated move for the benefit of his work on Hearing. All of it, everything having to do with the lime works, my dear Wieser, is calculated, Konrad is supposed to have said. It’s all been carefully thought through beforehand, though much of it may seem to be pure chance, even pure nonsense, nevertheless it was all thought out well ahead of time. Sensitivity in a state of immunity to surprise was sensitivity perfected, deadly in fact, Konrad is supposed to have said. Fro reports Konrad saying to him as follows: when he, Konrad, was in his room working on his book, he could hear his wife breathing upstairs in her room, believe it or not, it was a fact. Of course his wife’s breathing in her room, one flight up from his, was not normally audible in his room; he had tested it out time and again; nevertheless he did in fact hear his wife breathing in her room while he was in his room. But of course he, Konrad, was chronically in a state of the greatest possible attentiveness. He could even hear human voices across the lake, even though it was normally impossible to hear human voices across the lake from the lime works. Those people on the opposite shore would be heard by him, Konrad, not when they broke into a loud laugh or anything like that, all they had to do was talk normally to each other, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. How often I hear a sound, an actual sound, and the person I have been talking with will not have heard it, though I did. I hear people talking across the lake, and I get up and walk to the window where I can hear them even better although I can’t see them, he said, but my test cases hear and see nothing, Konrad is said to have told Fro, the problem of living with other people had always consisted in the fact that he was always hearing and seeing things while the others heard and saw nothing, and it was impossible to train them, no matter who they were, in hearing and seeing. A person either hears and sees, or else a person hears, or a person sees, or else he doesn’t hear or see and you cannot teach a person to hear and to see, but a person who hears and sees can perfect his hearing and his seeing, above all perfect his hearing, because it is more important for a person to hear than to see. But as for my wife, Konrad is supposed to have said, his efforts to perfect her hearing and seeing had failed midway: suddenly, as long as ten or fifteen years ago, he had been forced to realize that it was pointless to continue to teach her to hear and to see any better, he soon gave up trying, it was in a woman’s nature to give up a disciplined mental effort, a mental effort of the will, midway, in fact she would do it every time at the moment of highest concentration and also always at the moment when success seemed assured. The Urbanchich method he had been using, especially since they moved into the lime works, in the ruthless training of his wife, he was now keeping up for his own purposes only, he had dropped it from her program altogether. As regards my hearing of conversations between all sorts of people on the opposite shore, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I could often hear words, even difficult words, and sometimes the most complicated sentences, too, with truly exciting clarity, inside the lime works. Suddenly he said: my test cases, my wife for instance, Hoeller for instance, Wieser for instance, have never yet heard what I was hearing with the utmost clarity from the opposite shore, while I hear everything too clearly, Konrad is supposed to have said, though the others never hear a thing, and in fact you yourself never hear anything from the opposite shore, Konrad said. It was a triumph, after all, to hear absolutely everything, in consequence of his rigorous training in the course of decades of study, but at the same time it was terrible. Still, there was nothing like perfect, or nearly perfect hearing, for the greatest possible clarification. To revert to the subject of the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro that everyone seeing it for the first time was instantly dumbfounded by it. Every decade saw a new addition, a superstructure tacked on, some part of it torn down, and think of the vast number of subcellars, I always say to the public works inspector, Konrad said to Fro. Here, where the water is deepest, actually the deepest spot in the lake, he, Konrad, was looking out of the window. But anyone stepping suddenly from behind the surrounding thicket to confront the lime works could not possibly have any conception of its vastness, such as was reserved only for the man who lived inside, inhabited the place head and soul, as he phrased it, and therefore able to sense all of its true extent. Not grasp it, exactly, but get the measure of it, Konrad is supposed to have said. An onlooker would be irritated, a visitor offended; while the onlooker would be both attracted and repelled by the lime works, a visitor was bound to suffer immediately every kind of disappointment. Whoever sees the place will turn around and take to his heels, whoever enters or visits will leave it and take to his heels. How often Konrad had observed a man come out from behind the thicket, look alarmed and turn back, it was always the same reaction, Konrad is supposed to have said; people step out of the thicket and instantly turn back, or else they step inside the lime works and immediately come running out again. They always have a feeling of being watched, approaching a structure like the lime works one always has a feeling of being watched, watched from all sides, soon one feels unnerved, Konrad is supposed to have said; starting out with an exceptional alertness, a high tension of all the senses, there is a gradual ebbing away of strength, everyone entering the environs of the lime works tends to succumb suddenly to deep exhaustion. One could hardly help being struck by the way one look at the lime works would make people turn back, as if suddenly deserted by the courage to knock on the door and enter. If the mere sight of the lime works does not frighten them, Konrad is supposed to have said, then they give a start when they knock at the door, though very few go so far as to knock, knocking makes a terrible noise. Every architectural detail of the lime works is the result of a thousand years of calculations. For instance, stepping through the thicket, at first glance one would assume that inside the lime works one would have very little freedom to move around, very little elbow room, but in fact there was lots of elbow room inside the lime works. But then, every preconception, as well as every preconception of a preconception, was likely to be wrong, humiliatingly so, every time. Anybody who thought at all was bound to know that. The actuality always turned out to be, actually, something else, quite the opposite, always, of the given actuality, in fact. That our very existence is pure self-deception and nothing else cannot be stated unconditionally. In the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, as in no other building I know of, and I know the largest and the handsomest and in general every possible kind of building, stone or brickwork structures of all kinds, you can walk forward and backward and on and on in every direction as much as you want without having to go the same way twice, you can progress in the most progressive way there. The construction as a whole aimed at total deceptiveness, so that the superficial onlooker would fall into the trap every time. The moment you enter the vestibule, Konrad said to Wieser, you see at once that you have been made a fool of, because the vestibule alone is three times the size of the annex, to take only one example, and of course the upstairs and the downstairs vestibules are the same size; the lime works, designed as a lordly manor, had for Konrad all the advantages of a kind of voluntary self-imprisonment at hard labor. (The vestibule leads through to the courtyard, which is paved with cobblestones, they tell me at Laska’s. Inside the lime works Konrad could walk about for hours without going crazy, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, even though the same kind of pacing the floor he did here, back and forth, this way and that, in buildings as large or
even larger, possibly, would drive him crazy in a matter of minutes. His head, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, felt at home in just such a building as the lime works, he believed; his body, too. While his wife, oriented toward Toblach as she was, felt uneasy in such a building as the lime works, found herself constantly depressed by it, Konrad himself breathed freely and existed fully only in such buildings as the lime works that were naturally responsive to the highest claims of absolute originality, what he needed were rooms where you could take at least fifteen or twenty steps forward or backward without running into any obstacles, Konrad said to Wieser, by which I mean, you realize, long steps, the kind of strides I take when concentrating on my work, brain work, while, as you know, most of the rooms you enter, most of the rooms we have to live in, time and time again, to spend the night or simply to exist in, you can barely take eight or nine steps without running your head against a wall; it has always mattered enormously to me to be able to take those fifteen steps back and forth freely, Konrad said to Wieser, the moment he entered a house, he said to Wieser, he tried it out, to see whether he could take those fifteen or twenty steps in one direction. I immediately take my first steps in one direction without regard to anything else, and I count those steps; let’s see now, I ask myself, can I take fifteen or twenty steps this way and fifteen or twenty steps back again, and I check out the situation only to discover, more often than not, that, as I told you, I cannot even take eight or nine steps in a straight line, whereas here at the lime works, Konrad said, I can easily take my twenty or thirty steps right off, in every room, wherever I want to, without running my head into a wall. In large rooms like these I can breathe again, of course, Konrad said. But his wife found large rooms oppressive. I feel depressed in small rooms, she feels depressed in large rooms. My wife is of course conditioned by the cramped rooms in Toblach, she grew up in those small, cramped Toblach rooms, in the general constrictedness of Toblach, everything in Toblach is uptight, everywhere in Toblach one always has the feeling that one is suffocating, Konrad said, and anyway in small rooms he always feels he is suffocating, the same feeling he has in mountain glens and so he has it in Toblach every time, while his sister, who is accustomed to Toblach, feels crushed by the size of a large room, in a vast landscape she feels crushed by the vastness of the landscape, under an enormous sky she feels crushed by the enormousness of the sky, with a man of stature she feels crushed by the man’s stature. By the same token Konrad always felt he was about to suffocate when he was inside the annex, which is why he so seldom visited Hoeller who lives in the annex, Konrad went to see Hoeller in the annex only as a last resort, after a few minutes inside the annex he felt as if he were running out of oxygen and rapidly suffocating: some people simply preferred small cramped rooms and others preferred big spacious rooms, Konrad is supposed to have said, a conversation of any extent with Hoeller in the annex had gradually come to be impossible, even though Hoeller was a man toward whom Konrad felt the most protective love of which he, Konrad, was capable, but the cramped space in the annex and his own violent reactions to the constricted feeling of the annex the moment he entered it, made it impossible to visit Hoeller in the annex except for the briefest possible time, Konrad is said to have told Wieser. When they moved into the lime works it was immediately obvious that his wife would move into the smallest of the rooms. But even in her room, which actually is the smallest room in the lime works, Konrad was still able, as he said to Wieser, to take easily fifteen steps forward and fifteen steps back. From the first it had been clear that his wife would move straight up to the second floor, they had both decided on this as far back as Mannheim where they were staying just before they moved to the lime works, because the second floor was the most salubrious, a judgment confirmed every time by the expert opinions of every kind of specialist, they never gave a moment’s consideration to putting her on the first floor or on the ground floor or on the third floor, Konrad said. Strange as it seems, people are always saying that the second floor is the best for a person’s health, everybody chooses the second floor if possible, they all prefer it. Myself, I moved straight into my room here on the first floor, Konrad is supposed to have said. From the first they had agreed upon this, here is where I go, into this room on the first floor, and this is where she goes, into this second-floor room. Here in the lime works he had almost all the right conditions, conditions that could not be bettered, for getting on with his work, he said, and at first he did not ask himself what it meant for his wife to be moved suddenly into the lime works, even though he knew what it meant to her, he did not keep thinking about it, one simply can’t keep thinking about a lot of things that one is aware of. That he had a window overlooking the lake where the water was deepest was an additional advantage for his work, even if he could not or would not say what kind of an advantage. It was also advantageous that his wife, too, had a window overlooking the water, though not the deepest part as in his case, because, as he said to Wieser, she must on no account have her window where the water was deepest. At first his wife had wanted a window facing on the courtyard (her usual preference for that enclosed feeling!) or even a window giving onto the rockface, but she had let him talk her into realizing the advantageousness of having a window overlooking the water instead, and in time she did in fact come to spend hours, what was he saying? whole days on end, staring into the water, Konrad said. As for himself, Konrad said, a room facing the courtyard would have been bad for his work; a room looking out at the rockface would have been impossible, out of the question. To move into a room facing the courtyard or the rockface would have been a deliberate invitation to total despair, something he was prone to fall into anyway. When it came to furnishing the house, as Konrad once explained to Fro: though we did our own rooms completely the first day, once and for all, putting in only the most indispensable things, the bare necessities, you understand, we did nothing at all about the rest of the building. Since we moved in during the winter, we had to use the barge, it took two trips by barge across the lake, Konrad said to Fro, two full loads of those hundreds of thousands of household effects we still owned even after all our travels all over the world during all those decades, Fro; it was incredible how much furniture and household stuff we still had when we moved into the lime works, despite two world wars and all those catastrophic unheavals! it was fantastic, Fro, considering that we never lifted a finger to hold on to all these furnishings and household goods, quite the contrary, neither my wife nor I ever gave a moment’s thought to the stuff, and of course all these hundreds upon thousands of furnishings and household goods represent only a fraction of what we used to have, because my wife, after all, brought a great deal of property into the marriage and I also contributed a good deal, and what with a few deaths in the family, war casualties you know, we acquired quite a bit more, though we lost much of it in the cities, we never lost anything in the country, most of it was stored in the country. Imagine, two huge barges loaded to the limit with furniture and household effects! Luckily the lake was not frozen over, though it freezes over every winter, in January it is usually frozen hard, but the year we moved into the lime works the lake had not frozen over. No one would dare to cross the frozen lake by car or truck ever again, not after that wedding party, several Konrads among them, Konrad is supposed to have said, broke through the crust about twenty years ago. For centuries people drove over that frozen lake with impunity, and then suddenly that wedding party had to break through; since that date no one would risk it. Three huge barge loads of household stuff, Konrad said to Fro, and you know how much one of these barges will hold. The chances are that barge is no longer fit for use, these days, Konrad said, not a soul has given it any attention in years, such a barge had to be oiled and painted every year at least, but nobody has ever oiled or painted that barge. Eaten up with rust and rot as it is, the barge was doubtless quite unfit for use by now, and Konrad is supposed to have said: the way everything around the lime works is eaten up with rust and rot, when you think
how much there is, lying around the lime works and eaten up with rust and rot. As I was saying, he said to Fro, for years nothing at all was done to make the lime works habitable, and when we got here we gave less than an hour to fixing up our two rooms. Of course he and his wife, Konrad said, were the most unassuming people in the world. He had gotten by all his life using only the most indispensable articles of furniture, always the same ones. Nevertheless they had somehow, despite their tendency to concentrate only on what was absolutely necessary, managed to have two full barge loads of movables to bring to the lime works. Mrs. Konrad is alleged to have said repeatedly that she could never have found enough room for all those furnishings and effects in Toblach. In Toblach not even half of the stuff would have got inside, she said. There was absolutely nothing, Konrad said to Fro, that she couldn’t somehow connect with Toblach, just to drag in Toblach somehow. The problem in moving, Konrad said to Fro, was primarily to begin with the pieces intended for the first or the second or the third floor and to avoid dragging pieces meant for the third floor to the second floor, as had happened again and again, for example, or dragging first floor pieces to the second floor or third floor pieces to the first, and so forth. By the time they had finished, almost every piece of furniture etc. was standing in the wrong place, so that the end result, as he expressed himself, was one of hopeless confusion. As you know, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, I sold quite a lot of the furnishings and stuff right after we moved in, and by now I have converted most of these wooden absurdities into cash. And to Fro, a year ago: my wife hasn’t the faintest idea that I have sold nearly all the furniture and household things; but that’s another subject. Behind her back I sold nearly all the furniture and fixtures, Konrad is supposed to have said (his own words) almost all the rooms in the lime works are completely empty now because I had to convert everything to cash these last few years, considering especially the high cost of litigation. The lawyers swallowed up most of it! He had naturally had to hire a number of hands, what with Hoeller being bedridden at the time they moved in, he was down with pleurisy, and as everyone knew it was hard even in Sicking, even if one was ready to pay dear for it, to find men for such unskilled occasional work as moving furniture, Konrad had in fact lent a hand himself, while his wife, exhausted by the hardships of moving, slumped in her invalid chair that was the first thing to be set up in its permanent place in her room; Konrad helped move the furniture and fixtures into the lime works side by side with the hired help, he is supposed to have told Fro, though of course as long as one had hired help one was obliged to get as much work as possible out of them, so he had ordered the men to work hard and quickly, not with the excruciating languor that had become customary among working men ever since they had become accustomed to being coddled and spoiled in the course of recent history, he asked them to work as quickly as he did, and the men obeyed instantly, says Fro, they suddenly began to move the furnishings and household goods with remarkable speed, and even with extraordinary skill; with zeal, one might say. Konrad evidently had a knack for getting the men to put their backs into it, Fro thinks. For the first few days he had managed to conceal his normally glaring misanthropy, suppress it enough, anyway, so that the hired men, who had heard of him but never seen him face-to-face before, took him to be a thoroughly well-meaning, kindly gentleman, whom they could look forward to using for their own purposes, such as extracting from him high pay for little work, high pay for sloppy work, etc. etc., in fact their yielding to Konrad’s orders to work fast and efficiently too was pure cunning on their part. Konrad of course realized that he had to put his best foot forward with the men, what with the terrible fix he was in, having those huge barge loads of stuff at the lime works with not a helping hand in sight. It would take months, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, to bring some order into all this furniture chaos, but in fact no order has been brought into all this furniture chaos to this very day, he said to Fro, but then, by this time, there is only a fraction of the original number of pieces etc. here in the lime works, everything else has been sold, so there’s not much point in arranging the remnants so late in the day. Especially as I intend to convert even these remnants into cash as soon as possible, Konrad is supposed to have said. To his wife he would say over and over, whenever she asked him, that all the rooms were in order, that everything was in its place in every room of the house, that little by little every single object had found its proper place, without a word to let her know that everything had in fact been sold off by then, that Konrad had never once and not for a moment considered putting the furniture in place, but had thought only and always about selling it as quickly as possible, had in fact managed to sell it off gradually at quite good prices, to antiquarians here and there, one of whom in particular had taken almost everything off his hands at a relatively high price, for sale in America, a trade at which the dealer had occasionally made profits of a thousand, even two thousand, percent, as he admitted to Konrad; who said not a word of all this to the sick woman glued to her invalid chair, to whom he went on reiterating his lies about the furnishings being in perfect order. For decades it was by lies and nothing but lies that Konrad and his wife managed to save themselves from total despair, to go on somehow, to stay in touch and endure each other for just a while longer; without lies the two of them would have become totally estranged and lost in despair, Fro thinks. My God, what do I need in a room besides a table, a chair, a wardrobe, and a bed? Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed to Fro once, when they were coming out of the tavern and saying goodbye under the horse chestnuts, as they so often did after playing rummy for four hours at a time; Konrad used to stretch their game for as long as he could so as to put off going home to his waiting wife. Fro: Konrad was afraid of going home to his wife. The lime works are out of earshot, Konrad is supposed to have said quite frequently to Wieser; anyone crying out inside the lime works was not going to be heard. If someone were to break in with criminal intent there would be no point in screaming, as the screamer would not be heard. The sawmill was out of earshot, the tavern was out of earshot, not a soul lived within earshot of the lime works. The wood cutters were out of earshot. That the Mussner property and the Trattner property had been out of earshot, as the two still unsolved murders of the owners Mussner and Trattner proved, was a matter of catastrophic consequence. Even though Konrad appreciated the total seclusion of the lime works as advantageous for his work, it did on the other hand hold a constant threat, indeed an extraordinary threat, because the types that were suddenly coming out of the woodwork everywhere, strangely enough more than ever in the present era of general affluence, came crawling out of all sorts of holes for the sole purpose of committing crimes, primarily crimes of violence and preferably the meanest, most brutal kind of violent crimes, and those types were known to shy away from nothing, from no conceivable horror they could find to commit. Basically Konrad lived, he said, in constant terror of violent criminals, his whole existence could be said to be a state of pauseless dread, as he literally put it, a dread of encountering violent types, and the lime works were virtually predestined to be the scene of violent crimes, the place was by nature a deliberate provocation to violent crime, in fact all the crimes at the lime works so far were chiefly still unsolved murders committed in the course of robbery, all the crimes (violent crimes) committed here in Sicking and environs were ninety-five percent unsolved cases, the hundreds of them committed at the lime works all unsolved just like the cases of the two landowners Mussner and Trattner, whose properties had also been isolated like the lime works and where it was customarily regarded as a miracle, as it was at the lime works, if by December 31 no violent crime had occurred there, as at the lime works alone eleven murders were known to have been committed in about a hundred years, not counting burglaries, robbery, common theft, the kind of crimes so customary no one kept count. Buildings like the lime works, in fact, attracted precisely the sort of character whose entire being was oriented toward the committing of none other than v
iolent crimes, basically it was no use at all to build walls, install locks, etc., and the so-called psychological sciences always theorizing in collaboration with the physiognomists always came up with erroneous conclusions. Nothing was more deceptive than the human face, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. That he himself carried a revolver at all times was generally known, at least since the incident with the woodcutter and game warden Koller, as well as the fact that he had a hidden weapon in readiness at all times in nearly every room of the lime works, a fact publicized in the course of the Koller trial; better to shoot someone occasionally in the shoulder or the leg, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, and get locked up for it, rather than allow oneself to be the victim because of a failure to draw, because one had become intimidated by already having a record of criminal convictions. No period in history had a better right than this period to be designated as a period of violent crime, Konrad is supposed to have said, in no previous period did people have a greater right to expect a violent crime to occur at any moment, and violent crimes not only occurred far more frequently in the country than in the city, but here in the Sicking area, as everyone knew, one had to deal daily and hourly with the most revolting forms of violent crime. The familiar thesis that the typical perpetrator of violent crimes was likely to shy away from no conceivable monstrosity, proved to be the absolute terrible truth in the Sicking area. That even Konrad’s wife had a gun within reach behind her invalid chair, as Konrad told Wieser about a year ago, is confirmed by Fro. Both he and his wife could not exist for a moment in the lime works or even in Sicking without the protection of firearms. Inside the lime works a person had to be armed at all times, had at every moment without exception to reckon with the likelihood of a crime against oneself. Only a fool would live unarmed in such a building as the lime works and in such an area as Sicking. Of course he had never sold a single one of his guns, Konrad said to Wieser, on the contrary, while I tried to sell every saleable thing on the premises, I bought up, as you know, nearly all the weapons in the Ulrich estate, you could never have enough guns when you were living in the lime works even though the place was as securely locked up, bolted, and barred as could be, any criminal determined to commit a violent crime would always find a way to get inside and do it. There was actually no way to prevent a criminal, no precautionary measure imaginable that would keep him from committing his crime, or crimes, once he had made up his mind to commit them. Even if the decision did not always originate in the criminal’s own brain—the crime or crimes of any given criminal hardly ever originated in the criminal’s own brain—the criminal’s whole being nevertheless was predisposed to the crime, or crimes, his whole being aimed at the crime, or crimes, until they have been, or it has been, committed. The nature of the criminal was such as to aim incessantly at the crimes to be committed, and once this was done, the criminal’s nature tended of course to concentrate on a fresh crime, or crimes, and so forth. You can scream, of course, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but you will not be heard. The setup inevitably attracts criminals, and that means violent criminals. (Wieser remembers these statements of Konrad’s perfectly.) There had also been many accidents at the lime works, accidents which ended lethally for people who lived or worked there, in most cases, because their cries or screams for help had not been heard. Think of the accidental explosion in early ’38, Konrad is supposed to have said, seven dead, twenty-four wounded. Yet he had refused to install a telephone in the lime works, though he knew his wife had set her heart on having one, a telephone would unquestionably be a great help to her, but there was his work to be considered, which made the installation of a phone at the lime works a thing quite out of the question. No telephone! No telephone! Konrad had exclaimed time and again, says Wieser. Naturally, if you need a doctor, a doctor must be called! he is supposed to have said. But the installation of a telephone was bound to be the end of his work, that is, it would be the end, period; he knew what he was saying. Implausible as it may seem to you, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, if I had to choose between my wife and my work, I would of course choose my work. Quite apart from the fact that the installation of a phone would by far exceed my financial means, he said, because I have suddenly awakened to the fact that, contrary to my fixed idea that I was well off, we are suddenly totally impoverished. We are penniless, which is why I sold so many of our things, of course, but my wife must not hear of it, he is supposed to have said, her faith in our inexhaustible funds implying our inexhaustible wealth is all she has left, there is nothing else left for her to cling to, but as long as she can believe that there is plenty of money, something she has been able to believe until just two years ago, he said, as Konrad himself had been able to believe too, she could be at peace. If we had a telephone, Konrad is supposed to have said, we would be in the same situation as before we moved into the lime works. What did I move into the lime works for, he asked himself, if we are to have a phone here? Of course even the most absurd kind of building had a phone nowadays, there was no place without a phone anywhere, but the lime works did not yet have a phone. There’s a phone at the tavern, there’s a phone at the sawmill, but there will be no phone at the lime works, ever. Sometimes he thought of the original purpose for which the lime works was built, and of his own purpose in living there now, the purpose for which he was misusing it, he said. How bitterly all sorts of people had slaved in the place, for instance. He would think what the lime works had once meant to the entire region, and how long it was since it had ceased to mean anything. Even though it was still referred to as the lime works, when it came up, it would after all be truer to speak of a shut-down or deactivated lime works, when referring to the lime works. People are always referring to all kinds of structures or mental complexes, Konrad is supposed to have said, that have long ceased to be the same structures or mental complexes they once were. For twenty years now the lime works had been shut down, dead. One fine day someone realized, Konrad said, that the lime works had become unprofitable, so they let the workers go and shut down the lime works. The manager had written to Hoerhager in Zurich that the lime works had ceased to make a profit and the manager proposed to Hoerhager that he shut it down, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser; liquidate the lime works, the manager is supposed to have written to Hoerhager, or rather, to have telegraphed, and Hoerhager immediately liquidated the lime works; Hoerhager, who was a bachelor, is said to have instantly liquidated the works without a moment’s hesitation, upon receiving the manager’s proposal to liquidate, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser. But the manager was a crook, Konrad said, everything about him was crooked, at least his intentions were. Hoerhager had actually never paid any attention to the lime works, Konrad told Wieser. The manager had been using Hoerhager, managers are by their very nature the exploiters of owners, all the managers in the world are exploiters, they never think of anything else than how to exploit the owners, the principle of exploiting owners has gradually been developed by them to a truly vertiginous science. At the time the lime works were liquidated, Konrad and his wife were living in Augsburg, crammed with all their possessions into a house that, as Konrad told Wieser, was well-suited to Konrad’s carrying on his research. Konrad at this time remembered the lime works, as he had remembered it for decades before and for decades to come, as his first childhood playground, a structure associated in his mind with damp, chill, darkness, getting hurt, currently owned by his peripatetic nephew Hoerhager who was then spending his time mostly in Zurich, caught up in social distractions. Already the lime works had meant to Konrad a place of eclipse, an ideal retreat for working on his book, and already in Augsburg he started to think about buying the lime works from Hoerhager, Konrad reminisced to Wieser, though he did not know, did not even dream that he would actually one day buy the lime works from his nephew, even though that day would not arrive for two decades more. Hoerhager was then at the point of liquidating the lime works at long distance, from Zurich, and in cold blood. Yet despite the fact
that the nephew never took the slightest interest in the lime works other than the financial, Hoerhager held off for decades on selling it to Konrad. My nephew probably knew that I was absolutely determined to buy the lime works, that my life, my very existence, depended upon my acquiring the lime works, and so he would not sell to me, Konrad is said to have told Wieser. My wife’s health was growing noticeably worse that time in Augsburg, as I remember, Konrad said, we kept trying every kind of specialist in nearby Munich, which was at the time world famous for its outstanding doctors, particularly its specialists for the various kinds of deformity, for cripples. In Augsburg I used to take long walks along the Lech River, Konrad recalled, it’s a usable sort of city, actually. The lime works manager was rumored to have demanded a horrendous sum of compensation from Hoerhager, Konrad told Wieser, which Hoerhager instantly agreed to pay, just as Hoerhager always instantly agreed to whatever the manager proposed, simply to avoid being bothered, Konrad supposed. The manager offered to discharge the workmen, turn off the power, lock the gates for good. Lime works like this one in Sicking, i.e., of middling size, no longer had a future, the manager wrote to Hoerhager, so he, the manager, would undertake to wind it all up in orderly fashion; as usual, Hoerhager agreed to everything the manager proposed. The manager could have Hoerhager’s power of attorney to do whatever needed to be done, Hoerhager wrote from Zurich to Sicking. I remember his being in Zurich then, Konrad said to Wieser, while we were in Augsburg, he was in Zurich, a city that takes a great interest in the advancement of culture. The lime works were liquidated within a week. All that hardly interested my nephew Hoerhager in Zurich, said Konrad, while I was always interested in anything to do with the lime works, and the liquidation of the lime works aroused my interest in Augsburg all the more, in that a shut-down, abandoned, really dead lime works was more suitable than ever for me and my scientific work, more ideal a place to live and work than ever before. I instantly dispatched a telegram to Zurich: “Buying limeworks” two words just like that, “Buying limeworks,” but Hoerhager, my offer in hand, would not sell, Konrad is said to have told Wieser. So began my decades of struggle for possession of the lime works. The harder I kept after him, Konrad said to Wieser, the less inclined Hoerhager seemed to make a deal, though he could certainly have used my money, especially on the eve of World War II, yet he would not sell to me, but on the other hand he did not sell to anyone else, either, so as not to put an end to my efforts to buy the lime works, he needed for me to go on making those desperate efforts, in which he took a sadistic delight, Konrad is said to have told Wieser. As my offer went up, his resistance stiffened. This went on for two decades. In the end, by this time we had moved to Mannheim, I did buy the lime works for a high price, probably by two hundred or three hundred percent too high a price, and probably, Konrad is said to have told Wieser, when it was already too late. Hoeller was to continue staying in the annex, on a pension, as the lime works manager is supposed to have requested and Hoerhager agreed instantly to the pension for Hoeller and to let him stay on at the annex, an additional charge Konrad took over, Hoeller’s pension and continued occupancy of the annex, along with the lime works, but he didn’t mind, on the contrary, he needed Hoeller. It was necessary to keep someone at the lime works who would be part and parcel of it, the manager wrote to Hoerhager in Zurich, and Konrad is said to have told Wieser that this was correct, a complex like the lime works needed a man like Hoeller. Hoeller had been lime works foreman for thirty years. He would have been incapable of leaving the lime works, besides; the others simply went, most of them took jobs in the brewery, the candle factory, the quarry, and that was that. Workmen simply turn their backs on their place of work, Konrad said to Wieser, their place of work is no more to them than a machine for providing them with money. To Hoeller the lime works was home. Though it must be said that the shut-down, dead state of the lime works depressed Hoeller, Konrad told Wieser, even now. It felt weird to him. Konrad struck him as weird, too, Konrad said, but Konrad for his part regarded Hoeller, quite to the contrary, with increasing warmth as a thoroughly dependable, needed man. Konrad to Fro: he (Konrad) would start by going up to the attic, then down to the third floor, then the second, the first, and finally he would walk through all the rooms on the ground floor, to make sure that there really was not another salable thing in the house except for the Francis Bacon which he had bought in Glasgow. Just looking for something that could be converted into cash, that’s all. But he found nothing. Apparently, he thought, he had sold everything already. He did not know the full extent of his indebtedness, but he knew it was enormous. His debts amounted to more than the value of the lime works. Now he had absolutely nothing left, he thought. He might go up to the attic once more, but there really was nothing at all left in the attic. Old suit cases, beer glasses, preserve jars, hat boxes, crutches. He would search every corner, because he could not believe that there could be absolutely nothing salable left in the attic, not even an old icon, nothing at all. Nothing left in the rooms, nothing on the walls, nothing. Only three years ago all these walls had still been full of things, but there was nothing hanging on them now. You could still see how much there had been, the outlines of the pictures were still visible. Now the lime works walls were bare. It had all been taken down and sold. At a ridiculous price, Konrad is said to have told Fro. But though he realized that everything was gone, that there was nothing left because he had gradually sold even the most unsalable items he’d had, he kept going back through all the rooms again, as if to reassure himself for the hundredth or the thousandth time that there was nothing left in those rooms, not one thing. The empty rooms on the ground floor are the most depressing of all, he said, according to Fro. High-ceilinged empty rooms make a terrible impression on first entering a house. He had only just been through all the rooms again, including the annex, he said, according to Fro, and there was no doubt at all that there was nothing salable left even in the annex. He said he had been considering sneaking something out of his wife’s room to sell, but that would be the hardest thing to do. In his own room there was nothing left except the Francis Bacon, which he would not sell, he would never part with that painting. I might just possibly succeed in smuggling something salable out of my wife’s room without her noticing it, he said. You must remember that I’ve nothing left in the bank, Fro quoted him saying. They had already told him at the bank that he had exhausted his account. But a man had to have some money, even after he had reduced his needs to the absolute minimum. What can we be living on? he was thinking, he told Fro, as he stepped into his wife’s room to look around for something salable there, though he thought immediately that there actually was nothing salable in his wife’s room at all, the stuff on her walls was nothing but junk, he said to Fro, his wife had always surrounded herself with junk, valuable things always depressed her, a woman who had owned so many things of value, but even when they moved into the lime works she did not want any valuable things in her room, Konrad said to Fro, he remembered this the instant he stepped into her room and noticed again that there really was nothing salable in there. All the things in my wife’s room are worthless and tasteless, he is supposed to have said, but I don’t want you to think that my wife doesn’t have good taste or a sense of value! The total absence of taste revealed on all the four walls of his wife’s room had struck him with full force, on this occasion, that whole room was an all-encompassing demonstration of a lack of taste, it was full of tasteless things, he thought, while puffing up her pillow and slipping the ottoman under her feet. The more he looked around in his wife’s room the more tasteless it seemed. Except for the sugar bowl, an heirloom from her maternal grandmother, he thought over and over, only the sugar bowl and nothing else, the sugar bowl, the sugar bowl, the sugar bowl, he thought, but to sell her sugar bowl, to take it out of the room under some pretext and to sell it suddenly struck him as absurd, they’ll give me next-to-nothing for this sugar bowl, though it actually is a fine object of value, he thought, they’ll pay me far
too little to make it worth while, he thought, according to Fro. It was ridiculous to think of selling her sugar bowl. Now he felt totally exhausted, certain that there was nothing salable left in the whole lime works, nothing to be cashed in for even a trifling amount of money, and he also remembered that he had broken off his business dealings with even the Voecklabruck antiquarian, the one with access to the American market, long since, after finally catching on to the man’s shady practices, and so he sat down, according to Fro, feeling utterly exhausted, knowing that he was through financially, sat down in the chair opposite his wife’s invalid chair where she usually sat dozing, half asleep, the way she had been for decades now. Sitting there looking at her he kept saying to himself, I will not sell the Francis Bacon, never the Francis Bacon, absolutely not, I will not sell the Francis Bacon, no I won’t, not the Francis Bacon. If the men from the bank come snooping around I shall hide it. I had better hide the Francis Bacon, Konrad kept thinking over and over. And later: eight o’clock, supper time, and time, the whole evening, half the night, has passed us by, the two of us sitting here, a couple facing each other, and we haven’t had a bite or taken a sip of anything all day, as happens so often. As a child, Konrad was the one who had been sickly most of the time, while she, as Konrad tells it, was never once sick until her accident. How often he had been forced to stay in bed, feverish, in pain, while his brothers and sisters were laughing, having fun, right under his window in the garden, free to not think about their health at all. The slightest shift in the weather was enough to make Konrad catch cold. Something cold to drink, and Konrad caught cold. Nearly all during his childhood he had suffered from headaches. Later on, when he entered secondary school, his chronic childhood headaches had ceased overnight, says Fro, but Konrad continued to be in poor health all through secondary school, most of the time he was ailing in some way though the doctors never got to the bottom of his ailments; whatever caused them—and they are said to have worsened noticeably between his twenty-second and twenty-eighth year—was never cleared up by any doctor because, as Konrad told Fro, not one of those doctors who collected such exorbitantly high fees from his parents really bothered to look into it. Doctors were always surprised at the manifestations of a disease, any disease new to them, but they never did anything to find the cause of it, even though, as Konrad said to Fro, it was in the nature of a disease to be open to exploration, diseases were there to be investigated, i.e., doctors were in a position to find the causes of disease, but they did nothing about it, they were always and in every case satisfied to be surprised by it, out of indifference and laziness where disease was concerned. Actually, whenever they made any real effort, they could find the causes of disease, and in time they would find the causes of all the diseases, Konrad remarked to Fro, but they would take centuries to do it, and since new diseases kept turning up, the doctors would gradually uncover the causes of one disease after another without ever completely uncovering the cause of all diseases. Konrad took pleasure in making that kind of remark. Everything throughout all his childhood and youth and in fact throughout all of his life, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, had simply been too much for his strength. While his brothers and sisters went in swimming together and enjoyed themselves in the water, he did not even dare look at the water for fear of catching a chill, the mere sight of the water could give him a chill. What characterized his whole childhood, his whole youth, was timidity without a respite, not fear, timidity. In addition he suffered because his sister and his brother Francis were only one year apart in age, they were practically the same age and inseparable companions in consequence, of course, while he, years older than they, which made him much weaker than they, was separated from them by the difference in age between them and him, a separateness that hurt him to the roots of his being, and so he had grown up in isolation because of the ruinous gap in age between him and them. He had always been alone. As the much older brother, his siblings had always repulsed him, excluded him from everything to do with themselves, they quite naturally drove him out into a loneliness that grew more and more complicated, into a solitude that more and more sapped the roots of his being. The misfortune of being six years older than his sister, seven years older than his brother Francis, as Fro says Konrad told him, led to his life of chronic isolation. For at least three decades, at least until he married his wife, all of his physical and spiritual forces had been focused on nothing other than extricating himself from this unfair isolation. All during his childhood he worried about losing touch with his siblings and his family in general, because of their continuing instinctive rejection of him. He had often thought: if I am not to go out of my mind altogether, I must break out of my nearly total isolation from my brother and sister, my parents, relatives, all my fellow human beings, in fact. Shut in as he was, all he could do was look on as gradually everyone turned against him. Meanwhile his parents, as he told Fro, brought him up along with the other two, if they did bring him up, that is, if you could call it that, in nearly total ignorance. Nature seems to have designed parents to function in such a way, he told Fro, as to induce in the first-born child acute depression and revulsion, so that it ends by pining away, going to seed, perishing. What superhuman energies I would have needed to cope with the unfairness of it! Konrad said. To get myself out from under the weight and swelter of such a wholly mindless upbringing. It was because of this upbringing, which ultimately he could regard as nothing less than unscrupulous, that he could not write his book, though he had been working on it most intently for two decades, more or less; he was always on the brink of writing it down, but unable to start writing it down, and all because of the unscrupulous way he had been brought up, as Fro tells it. Everything from his earliest beginnings conspired against his getting his work down on paper. One appalling phase of life after another, all adding up in the end to a catastrophic effect on his ability to write his book. Perhaps he had no right to say it, but he had a right to think it, that to look into his childhood was to look into a snake pit, into a hell. To open a door into his childhood was to open a door to darkness itself. Nothing but coldness and ruthlessness. In that pitch darkness the indifference and secret heartlessness emanating from his parents still made themselves felt. The loneliness he had learned to endure even in his earliest childhood, the principal lesson of his childhood, he made an incessant study of his loneliness, he said to Fro. At the very moment when he needed the opposite he had been struck down by the most acute loneliness imaginable. He was nearly destroyed through the sheer solitude in which he had to arrive at a decision about his special subject of study and so, yielding to his parents’ wishes, he never did embark on any program of studies, never went to a university, never took a state examination, because he simply did not have the energy to assert himself against his parents and study natural science or medicine, as he longed to do though later on when he had reached manhood he had been able to assert himself in every respect, whenever necessary, because as a child or youth he had never been able to assert himself, not even in the most insignificant ways, including of course his desire to study natural science or medicine, both of which had aroused his interest early in life, but his parents had always opposed his going to a university, they would never have let him study natural science, specifically medicine, if anything they might have let him attend agricultural school, like his father before him, they never intended to let him pursue academic studies, he was to function solely as the heir to their properties, considerable enough even after the so-called upheavals of the First World War and its attendant chaos, sizable holdings in real estate and other kinds of property; the way they saw it, and it never occurred to them to see it any other way, was that he was to come into his huge, far-flung inheritance at the high point of his life, be a man of position, and spend his life managing his estates. Possibly, Fro says Konrad told him, this parental opposition to his academic plans had broken his spirit, so that he had become habituated to living in a state of demoralization and indifference, which ult
imately incapacitated him for writing his book at all, an incapacity that grew more incurable as his wife’s illness grew worse. Ever since he could remember, whatever he started out to do had a way of ending in utter exhaustion. Even here in the lime works, Fro reports Konrad as telling him, which he had always assumed would be the one place in the world most favorable to his writing, everything had turned against it. For his failure to write his book he blamed, in addition, all sorts of illnesses occurring in and around Sicking. The fact that nobody grew old in Sicking. Although everybody gave the impression of being old, nevertheless. Wherever you went in Sicking, you would see nothing but old people, he said, even the children; if you looked at them hard enough, you were struck by the way they exhibited the repulsive mannerisms of the old. The natives had a way of catching early in life one of the hundreds of thousands of chronic diseases that were so hard to classify, and then they tended to withdraw into their chronic unclassifiable diseases, encapsulate themselves in their diseases, and simply wither away. He saw it happening all the time. All kinds of names were found for these diseases, but they invariably turned out to be all wrong because the men responsible for naming them were hopelessly superficial and loathed making an effort. The entire countryside around the lime works was a constant source of every kind of universally infectious disease, all of these diseases were supposed to be known diseases although in fact absolutely nothing was known about any of these diseases to this very day, he is understood to have said, because medical science is the most dimwitted of all, medical doctors were the most dimwitted, the most unscrupulous, and the sick, left to their diseases, tended gradually to withdraw into themselves in the most self-degrading way, they had no choice, taken in continually by their quacks as they were, all they could do was to die off. He happened to be in an ideal position to observe all this happening in the case of his own wife, to whom such and such a disease was attributed even though it was common knowledge that medical science knew nothing at all about her disease, Konrad is supposed to have said. The doctors talked about it as if it were a lung disease, for instance, Fro says Konrad told him, but in fact the so-called lung disease they talked about was no lung disease at all. Heart disease was also mentioned, but in fact this so-called heart disease was no heart disease. Whatever disease the doctors talked about was in fact something quite different from what they called it, Konrad said. They would say that so-and-so was sick in the head, that he had a head disease with such-and-such a name, when in fact nothing at all was known about that disease, including whether it was or wasn’t a head disease. The man limps, they would say, but the cause of his limping is unknown. They would talk about the kidneys and the liver, but the disease the doctors were talking about had nothing whatever to do with the liver or the kidneys of that particular patient. All of these diseases were primarily so-called psychosomatic diseases that masqueraded as organic diseases. Basically there was no such thing as organic disease. All there was were the so-called psychosomatic diseases, Fro recalls Konrad saying, and all these psychosomatic diseases, all diseases in short, that were known, which does not mean that these known diseases were fully researched diseases, but which were in any case always so-called psychosomatic diseases, ultimately became organic diseases because the doctors had no integrity, paid no attention, because of their vacuous arrogance, vacuous depravity, vacuous brutality. It was the doctors who were to blame for so-called organic disease, Konrad is reported to have said, whereas the blame for so-called psychosomatic diseases falls on nature or, if you like, the creation. It all begins in nature, or creation, but ultimately the doctors and only the doctors are to blame. But to speak of so-called psychosomatic diseases is to be on the wrong track entirely, Konrad is supposed to have said, just as much on the wrong track as to speak of organic or so-called organic diseases. Besides, all the cases in the Sicking region, Fro reports Konrad as saying, were invariably cases of premature death, everyone who died here had died prematurely, they all died here sooner than they should normally have died. To blame were the climate and the doctors, demonstrably so, and the causes of the diseases as well as the deaths were in every case something other than the official causes given. To Wieser: at the very moment when Konrad thought he could turn his attention to his work, he would suddenly hear Hoeller chopping wood. He would get up, go to look out the window, and of course see nothing; but he would hear it. It was always at the precise moment when he felt like starting to write, and everything seemed propitious to getting it all written down quickly, that Hoeller chose to start chopping wood. As though everything were in conspiracy against my writing the thing, Konrad is supposed to have said. Yesterday it was the public works inspector, today it’s Hoeller, all sorts of trifles, thousands of them, keep getting in the way of my work. Then there was his wife’s earache, probably brought on by his intensified use of her in accordance with the Urbanchich method of hearing tests and exercises, brought on by the progressive ruthlessness with which he had to make her undergo these exercises, which he had resolved to apply in a more complicated, radicalized form, increasingly so, an unshakable resolve which naturally caused growing tension between him and his wife. He couldn’t possibly stop experimenting on her now all of a sudden, he told Wieser; he had gone too far to stop. He had been progressively perfecting the Urbanchich method, until it had become a martyrdom for her, as he put it. The essence of every method was after all its total amenability to further development; its absolute pitch, as he called it. The rest could only be a matter of perfecting these experiments of his, and thereby perfecting his book, which already existed in its entirety in his head. Unfortunately the public works inspector ruined everything for me yesterday, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, and today Hoeller started with his wood chopping, and for the time being everything to do with his work had simply been wiped out. When a man had condemned himself to a scientific task such as his, Konrad said to Wieser, meaning a lifelong sentence at hard labor, it was tantamount to having surrendered himself as victim to a conspiracy that would ultimately involve the whole world and even whatever possibilities existed beyond the world. It was all part of a single conspiracy against a man, that is, against the intellectual labors he must perform. There was nothing one could do about it, except to be constantly aware of the wasting away of one’s energies, an awareness that all by itself and unaided would have to fuel the intensification of a humanly almost impossible effort on behalf of his intellectual labors, to bridge all the gaps simultaneously each moment, he thought, ultimately a high art to be mastered only by brain automatism, an art that was the only enduring refuge, the only purpose of one’s existence one might hope for and find and, ultimately, invent. But the world, especially the part of it that constituted one’s immediate environment, regarded every intellectual, scientific undertaking as an enormity directed in every case against the world, against the environment; such an undertaking, though possible only for the individual, was considered to belong by right to the mass, and the individual was always exposed to the mass’s radical opposition, which was in effect the criminality of the mass, a criminality that ended by empowering the individual to think and master and perfect precisely all the thought and action which the mass forbade and denied him all his life long. The mass denied to the individual what was possible only to the individual and not to the mass, the individual denied to the mass what was possible only to the mass, but the individual did not concern himself with the mass, ultimately he concerned himself only with himself to the advantage of the mass, just as the mass ultimately did not concern itself with the individual to the individual’s advantage, the mass recognized the individual’s achievement only after the destruction of the individual, as the individual recognized the achievement of the mass only after the destruction of the mass and so forth. If it wasn’t the public works inspector then it was the forestry commissioner, or Hoeller, or the baker, or the chimney sweep, or Wieser, or myself, or his wife, it was everyone. It then occurred to him that he did not really have to put up
with all that, and he would go down and forbid Hoeller to chop wood. When he, Konrad, was working, then Hoeller did not have to chop wood at the same time, and vice versa, when Hoeller was chopping wood, Konrad could not think or write, Hoeller would have to do his wood chopping when Konrad gave him leave to get on with it, and so forth. Hoeller instantly stopped chopping wood and went inside the annex, Konrad calling after him to do something noiseless, like repairing those torn, frazzled waste baskets Konrad had personally brought to the annex for that purpose three days ago. Unfortunately he said this in loud, accusatory tones, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, and no sooner had Hoeller disappeared inside the annex than Konrad felt remorseful about taking that tone with a man he had always been so careful to address in the gentlest possible way, and he spent hours brooding over the reasons why he might have been so loud, rough, and impatient with Hoeller, why he had suddenly lost control over his voice, i.e., over himself, especially toward Hoeller of all people; and to Wieser Konrad is supposed to have said that it was possible to speak too sharply to a person while irritated about something quite unconnected with that individual, who could only feel taken aback and often terrified by the unprovoked attack upon himself, and in this way one would have suddenly damaged a relationship with a person one happened to be warmly attached to, as Konrad was to Hoeller. However, going back to his room, he had decided that he had not really spoken too sharply to Hoeller, he told Wieser. Absolute quiet had now been restored and Konrad was able to get back to work, he said; he sat down at his desk and thought: here is the first sentence, and he wrote down his first sentence. A few more such sentences, he thought, and the book will be on its way to being written at last. But he had thought so hundreds if not thousands of times, Konrad said to Wieser, that if he could only get a few sentences down on paper, the rest of the book would gradually write itself, all at once, he had thought thousands of times, and yet he would break off after getting a few sentences down on paper, as long ago as Augsburg he had believed he would be able to get the whole thing on paper in one continuous flow, once he had gotten a few sentences down, it was the same in Augsburg and in Innsbruck and in Paris and in Aschaffenburg and in Schweinfurt and in Bolzano and in Merano and in Rome and in London and in Vienna and in Florence and in Copenhagen and in Hamburg and in Frankfurt and in Cologne and in Brussels and in Ravenna and in Rattenberg and in Toblach and in Neulengbach and in Korneuburg and in Gaenserndorf and in Calais and in Kufstein and in Munich and in Prien and in Muerzzuschlag and in Thalgau and in Pforzheim and in Mannheim. All those beginnings and ideas, lost time and again and forever. Suddenly there is a knock at the front door, downstairs, Konrad said to Wieser. At first I ignore it, he said, but one cannot ignore it indefinitely, the knocking doesn’t stop, so I finally have to get up and go down to answer it. By the time he has reached the vestibule, he has lost the connection between those beginning sentences. He opens the door, and there stands the public works inspector. Well, what is it? he asks, and then he says, Ah, it’s you! thinking that the inspector always shows up at the most inopportune times, and then Konrad said: Do come in! quite against his will, as he told Wieser, Do come in, and the works inspector came in, and then they sat down in the room to the right of the entrance, the so-called wood-paneled room. This room at the time still contained a set of chairs usually described as Viennese baroque; incidentally most comfortable to sit in. Do sit down, Konrad said to the works inspector, though it is rather cold in this so-called wood-paneled room, but if you keep your coat on you can sit here quite comfortably. I myself am quite hardened to the cold, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector, of course Konrad took the works inspector into the ice-cold room deliberately, says Wieser, hoping literally to freeze his guest out, but even though Konrad remarked that the temperature in the so-called wood-paneled room was only three degrees above zero, the inspector did not leave, on the contrary, he seemed to be quite at ease and apparently found the so-called wood-paneled room not at all too cold, but settled back in a Viennese baroque chair for quite a while. We can’t go to my room, Konrad said to the works inspector, my desk is piled high with papers, I am working on my book, as you know. Then Konrad brought his guest something to drink, even though he had absolutely no wish to talk with him, longing as he did to get back to his desk and his work, but “no, no” he (Konrad) said when the inspector asked whether he was interrupting Konrad in his work, your writing is what he is supposed to have said. Oh no, Konrad lied, thinking that the lie was about the only means of contact with another human being. Let us attend to whatever needs our attention, Konrad is supposed to have said, and the works inspector said something about grading the road and Konrad, without being asked, as he admitted, said, as you know, I am working on that book I have so often told you about. I am so entirely caught up in it, you know, he said, it’s a mania I’m afraid, I seem to be possessed by it, all there is of me, as you know it is in the nature of a mania that a man will give his entire life to it and destroy himself entirely by his obsession alone and nothing else. It’s a study of the sense of hearing, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector. As you know, Konrad said, so much has been written about the brain, but virtually nothing, at least nothing of any consequence, has been done on the auditory sense. He had been working on it for about twenty years, Konrad is supposed to have told the inspector; I started by exhausting myself, he said, slowly but with gradually increasing intensity, with these experiments, then I summed it all up, did more experiments, summed up again, and again, etc., Konrad said, then I went back to experimenting, completed the experiments, wrote a summation and another summation, etc. I constantly experiment, and a series of experiments is always followed by another series of experiments, Wieser reports Konrad as saying. Then it all fell apart, at the very peak of concentration it all fell to pieces again. But now Konrad said he had the whole thing complete in his head, all the details together and in place, the most incredible material you can imagine, he said, everything to do with the auditory sense. But no sooner have I reached my peak of concentration than it all falls apart again, Konrad said. Now I have it, I think, but at that very moment it has all collapsed. But when one has had it all in one’s head for so long, completely in one’s head for all those years, he said to the works inspector, one is bound to assume that it is only a question of time, that the auspicious moment must come sooner or later when one will suddenly be able to set it all down on paper. This was the moment he had been waiting for, it had come, as he also said several times to Wieser, the moment was here, now, as he said to Fro too, as I know, and Konrad actually said this to the inspector, the moment came every day, indeed there was not a day without such a moment when he believed the time to begin had come, and that he would now finish writing his book, but every time it came, Konrad said to the works inspector, as soon as he sat down at his desk he would be interrupted, whether, as he said, by the baker or the chimney sweep or on one occasion by Wieser or else by Fro, or by the works inspector, or Hoeller, or his wife, or the forestry commissioner, or a noise, or whatever it was. But it was quite impossible not to go down and open the door when there was a knock at the door, he said to the inspector, to let someone knock incessantly on the door without responding was something impossible for him if only because it would drive him crazy in record time. People never cease their knocking, Konrad said, even when they know they are disturbing me, delaying my work, possibly ruining my book, ruining everything, but they will not stop knocking until I get up, move the papers aside, and go down to open the door. Invariably it is the most ridiculous trifle for the sake of which I am interrupted in my work, Konrad is supposed to have said, some enormous absurdity that threatens to ruin my life’s work. To think that he had always dreamed of the lime works as a place where he and his wife would be living in perfect isolation and freedom from interruption by people, that here in the lime works the destructive apparatus of the increasingly disturbed, nervous so-called consumer society, with its chronically irritati
ng and ultimately ruinous effect on everything in the nature of intellectual effort could not touch them, that here they would have escaped all that, but in reality they continued to be irritated by people even here at the lime works, he simply did not have the strength, Konrad said to Wieser, to resist opening the door when someone knocked, he invariably yielded and opened the door, Konrad said, not from considerations of humanity, not from motives of civility about which he couldn’t have cared less, he hated every kind of propriety, he had learned to hate propriety in the course of decades of experiencing life, he hated everything to do with social forms, everything implied by civility toward people, and it was purely, as stated, a pitiable lack of personal energy that made him go down and open the door, made him desert his work, what could be more depressing than to desert a task like mine, so laboriously constructed in decades of hard work, to desert it for the sake of a chimney sweep, a baker, a works inspector, how low a man must have sunk to desert his work for the most absurd, the most trifling reason, because his wife upstairs wants her pillow straightened or needs a drink of water or wants to be read to from her favorite romantic poet, or wants the curtains drawn or opened, a piece of bread cut, her hair ribbon tightened, her garter tied, her sugar bowl filled, her spectacles set on her nose, her back rubbed with alcohol, or else because of Hoeller’s wood-chopping or Fro, or the man from the sawmill, or on your account, Wieser. Actually, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser in a tone of utter weariness, this endless knocking on my door, though quite constant in its actual sound level and intensity, in my head swells to a terrifying, ear-splitting thunderousness and drives me completely crazy. It forced him to get up, drop everything, go down and unlock the door, just to stop the knocking. Having done this, Konrad said, there was no point in being impolite about it, because the damage is done by then, so I am exquisitely polite although of course I ask myself every time I am so exquisitely polite why I am being so exquisitely polite. The whole day is ruined, everything in his head is dissipated beyond recall, there is nothing left but a few polite formulas such as, Do come in, Come in, How are you, Ah yes, or maybe just Yes indeed, or You don’t say, suddenly issuing from his lips. This time you have really ruined my work completely, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, telling him the truth for the first time. First Hoeller started it with his wood-chopping, Konrad said to the inspector, and I went down and ordered Hoeller to stop it instantly, I ordered him to repair the waste baskets and went back to my room and sat down at my desk feeling that my book was saved, because Hoeller did not actually cause an interruption to the extent of completely dissipating my concept, but now you have come knocking at the door and you’ve wrecked the whole thing, to be interrupted twice in a row in so complex a mental effort as my book is fatal. While it was still possible to return to my book after Hoeller’s relatively superficial disturbance, this second interruption makes it impossible for me to go on with what I was doing. I hope you won’t mind, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, my speaking to you so frankly about it, and went on to say that the first interruption by Hoeller had been possible to overcome, with a little skillful effort, but not the second interruption by the inspector. Besides, it makes a difference, Konrad said, whether an interruption is caused by a man like Hoeller or a man like yourself; a simple man like Hoeller or a complicated man like yourself, after all, so complicated a man, Konrad is said to have exclaimed while offering the inspector some schnapps, but the inspector is said to have declined, at first, that is, but he ended by accepting, one always declines at first but one ends by accepting, Konrad said to the inspector, a type that Konrad felt quite familiar with, the type that always declines at first and then ends by accepting anyway. It’s a fact, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, no really informative work on hearing exists, the only honest study of the subject that has any value is some three hundred years old, all the rest is botch work. Which is why I have become wholly absorbed in the idea of writing about it, doing a serious book on the subject, on the sense of hearing, has come to be a totally absorbing task for me, not at the beginning, of course, not totally absorbing before my thirtieth year, nor did it absorb me totally as yet even between my thirtieth and fortieth year, but ever since my fortieth year I have been totally absorbed by the idea of studying the sense of hearing, and writing the definitive book on it, I have been relentlessly, more and more exclusively absorbed by it. It was a fact, he said, that all thinkers tended to develop a subject of their own, until their thirtieth year, that would begin to absorb them completely one day, some time after their fortieth year, but only a very few surrender themselves wholly to their subjects, most of them flirt with their subject after the age of twenty-five and develop it for a time, but after their thirty-fifth or fortieth year they tend to drop it and drift off into society or quite simply into a life of bourgeois comfort. In this way, most regrettably, hundreds of thousands of vital scientific studies are lost to the world, works needed to bring light into the world’s darkness. As regards hearing, that would tend to be written about, quite superficially at that, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, by a medical doctor, the wrong approach entirely, or else by a philosopher, also the wrong approach. Whatever a medical man wrote about it was sure to be worthless stuff, and whatever a philosopher wrote about it was also sure to be worthless. To tackle a subject such as the sense of hearing and write it up, one had to be more than a mere medical man or a mere philosopher. To do this it was absolutely necessary to be a mathematician and a physicist as well, that is to say, one should be a master of all natural science, as well as a prophet and a superlative artist. It was simply not enough to be a medical man, or a philosopher, or a physiognomist, to write the kind of book that was needed on the sense of hearing. To think that such specialists could do justice to the subject was a misconception. What I have in mind is the formulation of a definitive statement on the subject, Konrad is supposed to have said, the final word on it, though of course the moment you achieved such finality it ceased to be final, and so forth. The principle involved was one on which Konrad said he had spoken to the works inspector before, had indeed familiarized him with it sufficiently so that he could now proceed from the premise that any final point is a starting point for a further development toward a new final point and so forth, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, according to Wieser. However, it was all much more complicated than that, because basically much simpler than we assume, which is why nothing could be elucidated with any finality, ultimately. A so-called approach to a subject would get you nowhere. Communication was impossible except by means of the work as a whole. Radical changes were to be expected, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, and said again, significantly: radical changes that would be transformations, and despite the fact that the inspector had listened to this remark with particular interest, Wieser reports that Konrad said to the inspector at this point that people tend to turn a deaf ear to the significant point, they just miss hearing it, even you, my dear inspector, miss hearing the significant point, just as everyone tends to miss hearing the most significant, or at least the highly significant remarks addressed to them, they miss them all the time, though apart from that, Konrad is said to have added, there is really no such thing as a really significant remark, not even a highly significant remark, nothing at all has any real significance and so forth, but intentionally or not, listeners tend to miss a great deal that is said to them, so that in effect they miss everything, and so forth; the unintentional is the intentional, the most unintentional the most intentional, and so forth. Whenever I am not working on my book, Konrad is supposed to have said, then it is quiet, the whole lime works is completely encapsulated in the quiet characteristic of the place. No need to describe this quiet to the works inspector, who was sufficiently acquainted with it. It was totally quiet when he, Konrad, was not working, when he was walking up and down, this way and that, turning things over in h
is mind, because when I am turning things over in my mind, he is supposed to have said, I am not actually working, i.e., of course I am working when I am thinking things over, but basically I do not really begin to do my work proper until after the phase of considerations and reconsiderations is ended, which is when I begin to do the actual work, but by then it’s all likely to be all over with the quiet here, what with Hoeller starting to chop wood all of a sudden, or else the baker arrives, or the chimney sweep, or Stoerschneider turns up, or the man from the sawmill, or you arrive, Wieser arrives, Fro arrives, someone comes knocking at the door, or else my wife needs something or other. All in the midst of this enormously demanding task, this medico-musico-metaphysical-mathematical work of mine, which is at all times so totally disruptible! As soon as I dare to sit down and start to think that the moment has come when I might be able to write the whole thing down in one sitting, someone invariably knocks at the front door, or my wife rings for a change of stockings. Even though she happens to be the most considerate person in the world, Konrad is supposed to have said. At Laska’s, too, everyone is always saying that Konrad’s wife is the most considerate person there is, and at Lanner’s it’s the same story. The moment someone says, as someone did at the Stiegler, yesterday, for instance, that Konrad is the most inconsiderate person, then someone else instantly counters with the observation that Mrs. Konrad is the most considerate person in the world. Twenty years ago, Konrad said, he had in all secrecy set his mind on writing this book of his, behind his wife’s back. And this foolishness, undertaken behind his wife’s back, held him in its grip ever since. At first he managed to keep his preoccupation with his work a secret from his wife, fearing that if she should suddenly discover that he was busying himself with a scientific work the results might be catastrophic, since she naturally knew that, as with anything else he did, he would never relinquish the undertaking until he had completed it. For years he had been able to keep it a secret, not only from his wife, of course, but from everyone else as well. She had known nothing about it in Augsburg, as yet, nor had anyone else, nor as yet in Aschaffenburg, nor in Bolzano, Merano, Munich; then suddenly, in Paris, he had revealed to her in the most casual manner that he was at work on a book. I am working on something about the sense of hearing, he is supposed to have said to his wife, about the auditory sense, no one has done anything about it yet. At that instant she realized that he, who had been everything in the world to her always, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, was lost to her—it was then she knew for certain that it was all over. It’s a fact, Konrad said to Wieser, the moment I decided to devote myself to my book on hearing, I was lost to my wife, and that was actually four or five or even six years before the moment when she suddenly knew that she had lost him. All sorts of people have already written about all kinds of things, all kinds of excellent disquisitions, dissertations, whatever, Konrad said to the works inspector, but there is no first-rate disquisition, or dissertation, or even one good essay on the sense of hearing. This fact struck me most forcibly, but at the same time I perceived in it a chance, if not the only chance, for me. Especially because the ear is indisputably more basic than the brain, if you take the ear as your point of departure, and as long as you do not take the brain as your point of departure in this context. The works inspector did not understand this point, Wieser is supposed to have said. There were so many inadequate, amateurish doctoral theses about the hearing, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, and of course the amateurishness of a doctoral dissertation was the most embarrassing kind of amateurishness. The dilettantism of the specialists was the most embarrassing kind, the most distressing thing about the specialists was their boundless dilettantism, every time. I can tell you, Konrad is supposed to have said, that I sweated through no less than two hundred dissertations on the hearing, and not one of them contained an inkling of what the hearing was all about. None of the authors had any ability to do their own thinking, at all, Konrad said; all they are is professorial ruminants. The salient characteristic of our era is, after all, the fact that the thinkers no longer do any thinking of their own. What we have nowadays is whole armies, numbering in the millions, of apprentice workmen in science and history. But anyone who dares to say so runs the risk of being declared insane. These days, the clairaudiant as well as the clairvoyant is instantly branded as a madman. The keen of ear as well as the keen-eyed are not wanted these days; when a man is keen of ear or keen of eye they simply wipe him out, lock him up, isolate him, destroy him by locking him up and isolating him. Society exercises great vigilance in guarding itself against its geniuses by being vigilantly on guard against its so-called madmen. Society is in favor of the dim, vegetative existence and nothing else. People want to be left in peace, and consequently they hate nothing more deeply than the ear and the brain. The social ideal is the totally deaf and dumb mass, and so society naturally inclines to shoot on sight any ears or brains that crop up; here is a brain, they say, shoot to kill; here is an ear, shoot it down. From the beginning mankind has been waging a war, Konrad said to Wieser, an increasingly costly, monstrous campaign against the ear and the brain; everything else is a lie. History proves that the ear and the brain are always being hunted down, shot to death. Wherever you look, ears and brains are being murdered, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Wherever there is an ear or a brain, there is hatred; where there is an ear, there is a conspiracy against the ear, where there is a brain, there is a conspiracy against the brain. The rest is lies. The dying birds of Europe are being protected, Konrad is supposed to have said, but not the dying brains, not the dying ears. But all this is ridiculous, whatever one can say is ridiculous, Konrad is supposed to have said, the moment you say something you find you have made an ass of yourself, no matter what it is, we make ourselves ridiculous, whatever we read is ridiculous, whatever we hear, ridiculous, whatever we believe, ridiculous. Open your mouth and a ridiculous statement is sure to come out, some embarrassing absurdity or other, or else an absurd embarrassment, whichever. Then Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, aren’t you cold? Konrad was inclined to believe that his guest might be feeling cold, even though Konrad himself was not cold, he had his fur vest on underneath his jacket, one had to wear fur underneath one’s outer garments here in the lime works, this quite apart from the fact that Konrad was by now hardened to the cold. The conditions prevailing in the lime works had hardened him. Everything in the lime works was cold, the cold was everything here. In fact, all of the last twenty years, he said, you might even say all my life long, I have been preoccupied with the sense of hearing. Only for as long as my book remains unwritten in my head, is it a scientific work; it will not be a work of art until after I have written it down. It is hearing that makes everything else possible. But for the uninitiated everything I say is no better than blasphemy. If I could, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, Wieser says, I would make you acquainted, even intimately acquainted, with the most important parts of my book, but it is not possible. The moment he began to explain matters he could see at once that it was absurd to try to explain. Every explanation led inescapably to a totally false outcome, the more things were explained the sicker they got, because the explanations were false in every case, and the outcome of every explanation was invariably the wrong outcome. This book of his was divided into nine parts or sections. The number 9, in fact, played a most important part in this work, everything in it was divisible by 9, everything could be extrapolated from 9; as the inspector might not be aware, the 9 was more important than the 7, and especially with regard to the auditory sense the 9 was of the greatest importance. The first section is an introduction to all the others, the ninth section is an elucidation of all the preceding ones, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, the second section naturally deals with the brain and the ear, the ear and the brain and so forth, the sixth section is entitled “The Sub-auditory Sense,” a lengthy treatise primarily on the so-called dysarthria of the ea
r, the seventh section dealt with hearing and seeing. The hearing is the most philosophical of all the senses, Konrad said to the inspector, as reported by Wieser, but he had all nine sections complete in his head, for decades by now, it was a monstrous strain on a man to keep so complicated an intellectual structure in his head in every detail, carrying it around with him in the constant and continually increasing anxiety that it would fall apart and dissipate itself from one moment to the next, dissolve into nothing, and all because he was constantly missing the right moment for capturing it all on paper. I spent two whole years preparing for the first section of my book, and in the following eighteen years I was able to develop and complete my preparations for the rest, a feat that was enough in itself to make a man suspect, as he had unfortunately found out for himself, enough to bring him under suspicion and into disrepute as a total madman, frankly and obviously a clinical case. Of all those nine parts the fifth was the hardest, in fact he still had no title for it. Nothing could be easier, of course, than to go really insane, Konrad is supposed to have said, but my task is too important to let myself be deterred by the fear of insanity. Nothing would be easier than to go crazy from one minute to the next and thereby be relieved of so monstrous a burden. To be suddenly totally psychotic, without any preceding craziness, a sudden full-fledged psychosis. But as long as he had not gotten it all down on paper it was wasted, and he said so every day to his wife, that all his work was wasted as long as it remained in his head without being set down on paper, and she would say, then why didn’t he get it down on paper, she’d been saying this for years in the same tone of voice, Konrad is supposed to have said, because she still had not caught on to the fact that it was possible to carry a book like this around in one’s head for years and even for decades without ever being able to get it written down. Women were all alike in this respect, they were simply incapable of understanding peculiarities of this sort, they will not accept them and they can go on refusing to accept them for decades on end. A book a man has in his head but not on paper has no real existence, after all, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser. I must write it down, simply write it down, he kept thinking, that’s all there is to it, to get it written down, sit down and write it, this was the thought that had begun to dominate his every waking moment, not the thought of the book as such, but the thought of writing it, of getting it written down from one moment to the next; but the more obsessed he was by this idea, the more impossible it became for him to write his book down. The problem was not so much that he had something in his head, everybody had the most monstrous things in his head, where they went on without a break to the very end of the man’s life, the problem was to get all this monstrousness out of one’s head and on to paper. It was possible to have anything in your head, and in fact everybody did have everything in his head, but on paper almost nobody had anything, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, according to Wieser. While the heads of all mankind were crammed with every kind of monstrousness, what they had on paper amounted to only the most lamentable, ridiculous, pitiful stuff. If his book did not turn out to be the most sensitive distillate of the subject conceivable, Konrad is supposed to have said, a sensitive distillate by a hypersensitive brain overstrained to that end for decades … It was in the lime works, in the total seclusion of the lime works, that he had always believed he would be able to get it all written down, all at once. A head that was totally secluded, isolated from the outside world, would be able to write this book more easily than one involved with the outside world, with society. But think what an extra effort of concentration it takes, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, to work up such a book for the first time in such a head as his and hold it there, when this head was not completely sequestered from the world, from society, let us say, because it is linked with a person who is not completely sequestered from society. Head and person, as you know, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, are inescapably linked together. Body and head are hopelessly interlinked, or, as he often thought, most gruesomely interwedged. Well, who could even begin to describe nature and its machinations, anyway. In the lime works, at any rate, Konrad is supposed to have said, lay the best imaginable chance for his work. But nothing could be accomplished without ruthlessness, you can ask my wife, Konrad is supposed to have said, I know that everyone is saying that she, my wife, is the most considerate person, while I, her husband, am the most ruthless, I am fully aware of it, nor does it upset me, because if it did all these opinions would long since have upset me to death, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, nobody’s opinion upsets me any longer, on the contrary, all these opinions, and all of them are against me as a matter of course, take me progressively a step further. To reach one’s goal one simply has to accept an enormity, or even a crime against all of so-called mankind or against an individual, as part of the deal. In my case it happens to be a book for the sake of which I am prepared to do anything and everything, and I mean prepared to sacrifice everything, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Nothing can be accomplished without a measure of ruthlessness, Konrad said, because once you let yourself in for such a piece of work as this, you are letting yourself in for doing it with extreme ruthlessness, usually against the person with whom you are living, sharing your life, and who becomes your chief victim; looking at it this way, my wife is Victim Number One, but I cannot allow myself to be in the least concerned about that. This victim is defenseless, we know that. This horrifying thought is what alone enables a man to make the horrifying mental effort he believes he has to make. Of course he knows that he will be regarded as a madman from beginning to end, precisely because he is the exact opposite of a madman, and he can expect to be incessantly jeered at. He goes through the mill of being incessantly derided. No one goes with him, unless he forces someone to go with him, a woman, for instance, whom he simply forces to come with him, because no one will, otherwise. But even if someone does come with him, Konrad is supposed to have said, he still walks alone, he walks alone into an intensifying solitude. He walks into an intensifying darkness, alone, because the thinking man always moves alone into an intensifying darkness. But back to my work! he said to himself, and: No excuses! Yet even in the lime works, nearly empty as it is, there is continual distraction. No friends, actually, Konrad is supposed to have said, actually no real friends at all, only curiosity seekers, trouble sniffers, enemies only, in fact, and one’s bitterest enemy was oneself, of course. Nevertheless progress was being made, despite all the constant impediments of one kind and another, including being negatively impeded, by omission; omission, in fact, is more decisive than its opposite. To do something by not doing it, he is supposed to have said. For example, not to do something that could be done and about which they say (on all sides!) that it must be done, was a kind of progress. It’s maddening, he is supposed to have said, but I do not permit myself to go insane. Then: my book is, at first, simply a lone decision, which later turned into being the loneliest of tasks. Virtually nothing coming from the outside. Fragility itself. A man like himself in constant fear that this ultimate in fragility would break up his head, and vice versa. Fear that everything would break in his hands. A man like himself frequently looked around for a way to defend himself, but couldn’t find anything, because defenselessness was all there was. Incessantly he was faced with the absolute threatening to destroy him. Whatever point a man like himself reached, arrived at, all he ever reached or arrived at was irritation, further irritation. But all of it is ultimately so comical, it’s all more comical than anything, which is why, he is supposed to have said, it is all quite bearable after all, because it is comical. All we have in this world is the very essence of comedy, and do what we will, we can’t escape from this comedy, for thousands of years men have tried to turn this comedy into tragedy, but their effort had to fail, in the nature of things. This whole business with the lime works here, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector, as Wieser says, is of cou
rse nothing but comedy, too. But to endure this comedy one has to empty one’s brain from time to time, sort of like emptying one’s bladder, that’s all it is, my dear inspector, micturation of the brain, to relieve the brain as one relieves the bladder, very simply, my dear inspector. Or else, think of the brain as a spiritual lung. He poured another glassful for the works inspector, who by this time was completely drunk, saying: probably it’s the interruptions that do my book the most good. To Fro: That everything he, Konrad, said, was nonsense; to me: nonsense, all nonsense; to Wieser: it’s all nonsense, naturally, Wieser, what else. Fro says that Konrad would open a window and hear the branches of the pine trees, when he opened the window overlooking the water he heard the water. He could hear the pine branches and the water even when there wasn’t a breeze stirring, even though the eye perceived no movement at all in the branches, on the water, Konrad heard the trees and the water. He could hear the incessant motion of the air. He could hear the surface of the water moving even when no such motion was perceptible to the eye, or: he could hear the movement in the deeps, the sounds of movements in the depths. He heard movement in the deepest places, he said so over and over, not only to Fro but to Wieser also, under my window the lake is at its deepest, you know, just under my window, it is as though I had always known that the deepest point is just under my window. Naturally only an ear trained to hear movement in the deepest places actually does hear what goes on in the deepest places, no other ear can hear anything coming up from those depths, none of my human guinea pigs ever hear anything there, I can take whoever I want to the window, he is supposed to have said to Fro, and ask him, do you hear anything coming up from the water? and get no for an answer, invariably, no, nothing. While I myself naturally hear not just one sound, I hear thousands of different sounds and I can distinguish these thousands of sounds from each other; why, I have filled several dozen notebooks solely on the subject of my perceptions of these thousands of sounds coming up from the deepest point in the water right under my window, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro; Fro is deeply interested in those notebooks, in fact, and hopes one day to get hold of them, if only one knew where they were, and if Konrad would let Fro borrow these notebooks, for his, Fro’s own scientific work, of course, said Fro, because it was precisely such observations of Konrad’s as these, on the sounds rising from the depths of water beneath his window, that interested Fro, so much so that he had decided against waiting until after Konrad’s trial at the Wels district court, against waiting until Konrad was convicted, because Fro could have no doubt that it was important for him to see those notebooks of Konrad’s as soon as possible, and so he, Fro, was submitting a petition to the district court at Wels to give him access to Konrad’s notebooks containing observations on the sounds at the deepest point in the lake right under Konrad’s window. Konrad will probably agree at once to let me have the notebooks, says Fro, but I am interested not only in these particular notebooks but actually in all of Konrad’s notes as well, but most of all in his manuscript, but then, Konrad has not written his manuscript to this day, says Fro, and as far as anyone can judge Konrad was not likely to be able to write it, ever, because whether he is transferred to the prison in Garsten, or to the mental institution at Niedernhardt, probably for life, he would be unable to write it in either place because he couldn’t begin to write it down without his heaps of notes accumulated in several decades of research; the writing of his book had, ultimately, become impossible for Konrad, who had short-circuited himself, so to speak, by committing the horrifying murder of his wife. This very day Fro intended to send off a letter to Konrad asking for the notebooks on sounds from the depths of the water under his window, he said. Even a man as intelligent as the late forestry commissioner, a man who was always taking a positive interest in my experiments, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, when asked whether he could hear anything from the depths while standing with Konrad at the open window overlooking the water, could hear nothing. A completely untutored person could not even hear any sounds from the surface of the water, not to mention the depths, Konrad had said to Fro as recently as the end of October. My experimental subjects hear nothing, Konrad said. Exactly the same result was obtained when he stationed himself with an experimental subject at the window overlooking the trees. The subject admitted that he saw nothing and therefore heard nothing, either. However, it was not quite that simple, even though it was also impossible to explain the process that made a person observant, on the other hand. And why bother to try explaining it? Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. He wondered, even though he marveled at the patience of his experimental subjects, the forestry commissioner, the works inspector, Hoeller, Wieser, Fro, the baker, Stoerschneider and the rest, he nevertheless asked himself why he bothered at all, considering how they always ended up by leaving him depressed over their boundless incapacity. His wife and chief experimental subject, as Konrad said himself, Fro reports, had always shown extraordinary patience with him and his researches, his efforts, his experiments and, as Konrad told Fro as recently as late October, she went on performing ever greater miracles of patience in the course of his incredibly radicalized experimentation; by using her he had developed the so-called Urbanchich method to its utmost perfection, in fact his radicalization of the method was such that he would be justified in no longer referring to it as the Urbanchich method at all, but his wife had allowed herself to be driven to a state of total exhaustion by his use of the Urbanchich method on her. Toward evening, if we happened to have started early that morning, or after midnight, if we started in the afternoon, she would be done in. Among other things, for instance, he recited to her a series of sentences with the short i sound, such as, “In the Inn district it is still dim,” a hundred times slowly, then a hundred times rapidly, and finally about two hundred times as fast as possible in a choppy manner. When he was done he demanded an immediate description of the effect his spoken sentences had on her ear and her brain, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. Then he commenced his analysis. But after only about two hours of such experimentation she would ask him how much longer it would take, Konrad told Fro, and start complaining about her earache which was steadily worsening, especially in winter; he would tell her, then, how long the experiment would take that day, whether it was to be only a brief three or four hours, or a longer six or seven hours, in any case his experiments in accordance with the Urbanchich method were important to him and he had let not a day pass without experimentation. He might say, for instance, how long is it now since I’ve experimented with the short i sound, or, how long since we’ve worked on the short o? or the short a, or the short u? He would alternate, for instance, between reciting the sentence, “In the Inn district it is still dim” into her left ear, then into her right ear, then moving from one ear to the other and back again. In one hour of such work he might produce about two pages of notes, but usually he destroyed those notes right away, so that no one could deduce his method from his notes. In the midst of an exercise he might, for instance, suddenly say to his wife, you must distinguish between the hard and the soft i. She understood perfectly, and yet she did it all wrong, time and again. So the effort had to be redoubled, which meant that the discouragement, some days, was also redoubled. If she did not follow the rules, he would tell her, the exercise was a waste of time. Sometimes it took as long as half an hour for her to catch on (to the simplest point). Naturally it was all far too demanding, especially everything connected with the Urbanchich method, far beyond her strength, he would think, but nevertheless he went on repeating the exercises prescribed for each experiment without a pause until she actually collapsed. Most of the time she sat in her chair quite motionless, with her eyes shut more often than not. Still, in the many years in which he had subjected her to the Urbanchich method, she had gotten accustomed to his kind of experimentation. The sentence “In the Inn district etc.” for instance, she had listened to for weeks on end, hundreds of times a day, every day, until he raised his hand to signal: exer
cise completed. The sentence, “In the Inn district etc.” was after all a basic sentence in his experiment, says Fro. He would say it and she would instantly comment on it. He recited it faster and faster, she commented on it faster and faster, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. After hearing her complain a thousand times that he took too long with his experiments, he finally turned a deaf ear to it, until in time he got into the habit of turning a deaf ear to her. There was no way to avoid using the Urbanchich method on her, for the sake of the book it simply had to be done. He claimed that he always finished by saying, now we can permit ourselves to stop working, and then followed it up immediately by asking: would you like me to play your record? then she would ask him to play her favorite recording, Mozart’s Haffner symphony it was, it always relaxed her. Always the same record, the same record year after year, he thought, but as long as the Haffner is what she wants, she shall have it, he said to himself time and again. Most of the time, Konrad said to Fro, he was so exhausted by the time he played the Haffner for her that he nodded off to sleep while it was still on. Probably they both were aging more rapidly in the lime works. If only he could get his book written before he grew too old, absolutely too old and unfit to write it, he is supposed to have said to Fro and to Wieser. The minute he got to his room he went to bed. But the inner restlessness into which he was driven by the outward quiet would not let him sleep even when mortally exhausted, and so he wandered all over the lime works, several times all over the lime works, and spent the rest of the night lying on his bed quite unable to fall asleep. Once you have passed that boundary line between fatigue and exhaustion, it is absurd to believe that you can fall asleep, absurd to try to sleep, to force yourself to sleep; you weren’t going to fall asleep. Instead, he got the opposite of the hoped-for relaxation, the serenity he meant when he dreamed of finding a quiet place to work; instead of being able to relax, he only grew increasingly restless, so restless that he inevitably broke his own rest by doing something or other that brought unrest into it. Here he was at last, actually at the lime works he had taken such infinite pains to get into because it was such a quiet place, the outward quiet which was of its essence and which he had always believed would give him the inward quiet he needed for his work, but he soon found out what a fundamental mistake that was! Though he realized his mistake soon enough, it was too late just the same. A terrible self-deception, a terrible disappointment. But he had worked out for himself a mechanism, he said to Fro, by means of which he could control the outward quiet, in fact the extreme outward quiet so characteristic of the lime works and its environs, gradually to gain control of it and ultimately to exploit it wholly for his own purposes, i.e., for his work. This mechanism enabled him at all times to induce inward quiet by means of the outward quiet, not by nature but by using his brain, using the mechanism itself without any special manipulation of the mechanism. To exploit and transform the outward quiet, even the extreme outward quiet, for the sake of and into inward quiet was a high art, beyond comparison with any other art not only of self-control, control of one’s nerves, that is, he thought, and even though he had reached a high degree of mastery in it he did not claim to have mastered this art at all times. Instead of concentration (on his work), he is supposed to have said, nonconcentration (on his work) suddenly manifested itself. In a word: you had to be able to break away from your outward quiet at the moment when it had ceased to induce inward quiet; in the long run outward quiet never did induce inward quiet, it did so only briefly, much too briefly for intellectual purposes. The weather played a most important part in this, as in every other respect. For instance, when the foehn, that maddening mountain wind, suddenly started to blow: the longer he walked back and forth, this way and that, in the lime works, the greater grew his inward unrest, because he then had no control over the mechanism for inducing inner quiet. He then would try various expedients, substitutes for the mechanism which wouldn’t function, such as reading his Kropotkin, or the Novalis, a book that was basically hers, but even the Novalis did not help him to calm himself, he would try sitting down, standing up, sitting down again, standing up again; alternate between opening the Kropotkin and the Novalis, pace the floor in his room, first in one direction then in another, try putting his papers in order, mix them up again, open the chest, close it again, pull out various drawers, always the same drawers, of the chest, pull out bills, notes, toss them all in a heap, pick up one or the other, read through them, drop them again, move the chair from the window to the door, the one near the door over to the window, turn out the light, turn on the light, follow a line, two lines, several lines, on a wall map. It did no good to go into the kitchen, to carry the logs from the kitchen into his own room, to get the ashes out of the fireplace, empty the pail, none of it was any use. To remind oneself of one thing or another was no use. It did not help him to speak aloud what he was thinking, or feeling, or to utter sentences, as he is supposed to have said to Fro, sentences he had just made up, totally meaningless sentences, or possibly sentences already used as material for the Urbanchich method. He would wander around, Konrad said to Fro, all over the lime works without getting anywhere near calming himself, everywhere, that is, except one place, his wife’s room, because he did not want to aggravate his wife’s depression by his own restlessness, considering that she was already in a state of deepest depression, constantly, in fact, he said to Fro; like him she would delude herself into thinking that times of unrest would alternate with times of inner peace, but in reality neither one of them ever came inwardly to rest, and so they both lived a permanent lie, not only did they lie to each other but each lied, side by side with the other, to him- and herself, while she lied to him and he to her and then simultaneously they lied to each other, in any case they lied that they were having a bearable life in the lime works, lied incessantly, although they were both trapped in an unbearable life, but if they did not simulate bearability, its unbearableness could simply not be borne, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, an unwavering simulation of leading a bearable life while actually and incessantly enduring the unendurable is simply the only way to get on with it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, he also said something like it to Wieser, he even spoke to me about the bearability of the unbearable being made possible by the pretense of bearability, in the same words, with the same invisible gestures, as I recall, that time in the timber forest; but to get back to what he was saying to Fro, he said that he would wander all over the lime works which on days of that particular kind indeed seemed boundless to him, and try to come to the end of them, but could not get to the end of the lime works because one could walk and run and crawl through the lime works and never get to the end of them, he is supposed to have said, and finally, reaching a sort of climax in the utter shamefulness of his situation, he was often reduced to putting his hands on the walls, those ice-cold rough masonry walls, the ice-cold doorframes, the ice-cold trapdoors to the attic, the icy window glass, the ice-cold wood of the few remaining pieces of furniture, saying to himself, with his eyes shut, over and over, steady now, steady, steady, man. The lime works is not exactly an idyll, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, though it is all too easy to regard the lime works as an idyllic place because one happens to have gotten stuck in one’s superficial prior judgment of the lime works; that the lime works is idyllic is only the judgment of people who judge the place on sadistic grounds, or on masochistic grounds, while in fact the lime works, as distinguished from its environs, is quite the opposite of an idyll. Visitors, for instance, tended to expect an idyll when coming to the lime works, even if they merely came to the vicinity, summer visitors as much as winter visitors, starting with their decision to visit the lime works, were expecting to enter an idyll, when in fact they had unknowingly decided to enter the very opposite of an idyll, had in effect quite unconsciously fallen victim to a total error at the very moment of their decision to go to the lime works. An idyll, they think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, as they step through the thic
ket, an idyll, as they brace themselves to knock on the front door. All the signs, before entering the thicket, when stepping out of the thicket, point to an idyll. But when they have actually stepped free of the thicket, they are horrified and turn back, if they set foot inside the lime works they are horrified and escape, some turn back as soon as they have stepped free of the thicket, and escape, the others turn and run as soon as they have set foot in the lime works, a minimal few get as far as entering the rooms inside and in no time at all they can’t bear it. People don’t instinctualize any longer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, mankind no longer instinctualizes. Aha, so that’s the idyll the Konrad couple have moved into, they may think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but in reality the Konrad couple, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, moved into quite the opposite of an idyll when they moved into the lime works. The return to an idyll, they think. Compared with the lime works, everything else is idyllic, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, London is an idyll compared with the lime works, Wuppertal is an idyll; the ugliest, the loudest, the most malodorous place is an idyll in comparison. But even the surroundings of the lime works have been deliberately falsified into an idyll. An intelligent person arriving in the area, of course, will realize at once that the place is no idyll, but most human beings, Konrad said to Wieser, are not possessed of intelligence, you know, though they may look intelligent; people appear to know, appear to understand, when in fact they know nothing and understand nothing. A dimwit is likely to be unobservant and notice nothing even after he has stepped forward out of the thicket. Konrad himself now knew without a doubt that to have gone into the lime works was to have gone into a trap. To Wieser: Last fall his wife had still been able to dress, get herself ready, unaided, but when winter came she could no longer do any of it without his help, which meant that Konrad had not only to do his room, making the fire and so on, but then had to make the fire in her room, dress her, make the bed and so on, with the inevitable catastrophic effect on his work; while for her, of course, nothing could be more depressing than being suddenly unable to dress herself any longer. How long would it be, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, before she could no longer feed herself without help, not even the smallest bite? So far she had managed to feed herself, if he cut up her meat for her, broke her bread in pieces and so on, anything further she refused to let him do for her, but the time was coming when she would no longer refuse to let him feed her, and then he would have to stick the meat and the bread in her mouth bit by bit, he would have to spoonfeed her the porridge, dribble the milk behind her teeth spoonful by spoonful. Merely to pull on her stockings had become an effort unutterably dreary to make and to watch, he could see that she could no longer bend over, nor could she any longer stretch out at full length. When she stood up, she could not stand straight, when she walked, she could not walk straight, and when she lay down, she could not lie straight, her posture was about as crooked as it could possibly get, her head hung down like an awkward weight. Everything hurt her. Frequently she could no longer say where she was hurting the most, in the body or in the head, she didn’t know whether to treat herself for bodily pains or for headache, head and body had for a long time now been one continuous pain, a pain that had become the best proof she had of her existence. All of her body and all of her head were now nothing other than one single pain, she is supposed to have said to Konrad four weeks before Christmas, that is, four weeks before her violent death. He simply couldn’t stand this any longer, he is supposed to have said when he was arrested; apart from this he is supposed to have said nothing at all. But there is no telling what our courts will do, Wieser says, depending entirely on the way a court happens to be constituted, how the jury happens to be constituted, Konrad might get the minimum sentence, or the maximum, or else he could be declared insane. As daily experience teaches, it was all anybody’s guess until the very last moment of every court trial, every time. In the last analysis there was nothing more spineless and more subject to whims and weather, sympathies and antipathies than the courts and especially juries, who could be swayed by the most unpredictable circumstances. Speaking to the public works inspector, too, the Konrad woman once said that her pains were by now all the proof she had that she was still here (alive). Konrad saw how she wanted to get over to the window and couldn’t, wanted to stand up and couldn’t, wanted to take a few steps and couldn’t, that she was cold but couldn’t pull up her blanket; and so he went and pulled up her blanket. She no longer noticed that he was wearing a dirty jacket, torn pants; that, after months of neglect, he had come to look like a derelict. The whole lime works is filthy from top to bottom, and she doesn’t see it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. That above all the bed linen was filthy dirty because it hadn’t been changed in months was something she did not see, and he couldn’t possibly clean the bed linen, he no longer had the strength to do it, because he simply didn’t have the time; as recently as six months ago she had still taken care of such things as the bed linen etc. from her invalid chair, she had swamped Hoeller with orders to clean things, but she could do this no longer, she had lost her grip on the situation, what with having to concentrate on enduring her pains, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, and how he would see that she wanted to get out of her room, but couldn’t, that she wanted to go to the woods and couldn’t, to the village, and couldn’t. That she thought about traveling, but couldn’t travel. That she needed to see people, but couldn’t see people, couldn’t have company, Konrad said. For years she had enjoyed no kind of social contact with others, meaning social contact with people congenial to both of them. However, there was really no such thing as congenial company, because in the whole world there was no person really congenial to another—an observation typical of Konrad, Wieser said. Such people as did come to see them, not recently but until about the end of October, these so-called congenial people, had not been at all congenial, they were all mere curiosity seekers, legacy hunters, swindlers, Konrad is supposed to have said. Compared with them, the works inspector, the chimney sweep, Hoeller, and he, Wieser, and Fro, were far more congenial than those so-called congenial visitors, but seeing people socially was, as far as the Konrads were concerned, anachronistic in principle. Nevertheless one could not live entirely without seeing other people, Konrad is supposed to have said, adding that it did not embarrass him to say over and over again what everybody tended to say over and over again, no matter how ridiculous, simplistic, trite it was, except that he said it in full awareness of what he was doing, unlike most people; that was the difference, as Wieser undoubtedly knew, since it did after all always make a difference who said what and how he said it, and a serious person, or, more precisely, a person who was to be taken seriously, could just go ahead and say whatever he pleased without needing to worry whether he was uttering something banal or trite, a so-called truism, because if the person who said something banal or trite or platitudinous was a serious person, a person to be taken seriously, what he said ceased to be any of these things. For the longest time they had not been seeing people at all, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, because all of the people they had to see, such as the baker, Hoeller, Stoerschneider and the rest were people they had to see on business, not at all the same thing as people one saw socially. He could see that his wife was constantly thinking of people she was longing to see, friends, relatives, it was no use at all to try talking her out of wanting to see them, no use trying to explain to her that there was no such thing as friends, and that kinfolk were basically anything but kin, that kinship was a deception, a self-deception; a mistake, in fact. At the beginning all these kinfolk and friends had still come visiting to the lime works from the Tirol and Carinthia, from Switzerland, all the Zryds from the other side of the mountains and her other kin from the north, her East Friesian relations for instance, all of them people with a lifelong conspiratorial passion of curiosity, said Konrad to Wieser, but none of them came any longer, the lime works had gradually
purged itself of this kinfolk garbage. We don’t need any of these people, Konrad is supposed to have told his wife over and over again until they all finally stayed away and no longer even dared to write. He had begun, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, by talking her out of being interested in seeing these people, and ended by showing her how impossible they were. That they would have to make do with just each other and no one else in the lime works is something he made clear to her soon enough after they moved in, but it took years for the resulting total lack of contact with her relatives to become final, not even to mention his own relatives whom he had dropped decades ago. She ultimately became resigned to this state of affairs. At first he had sacrificed himself to her, Konrad said to Fro at one time, for decades he had sacrificed himself to her and her crippled state, but now his work demanded that she sacrifice herself to him, body and soul; his conscience on this point was clear. After all, they, the Konrads, had been on the go, traveling incessantly for two decades, in every imaginable country, in every part of the globe, and always under the most tortuous circumstances; as anyone could imagine, after all, he is supposed to have told Fro, to take a totally crippled woman traveling all over the world for years is no picnic, think of what it means to drag a totally crippled woman from city to city, from one museum to another, one tourist attraction to another, one celebrity to another, what it means to put up with a minimum of existential elbowroom, freedom of action, to please a crippled woman who, like all cripples, had to indulge an insatiable craving for novelty all over the world, insatiable for everything conceivable and inconceivable, in addition to being at that time so demanding (!) in every respect that it actually overtaxed his strength to have to be with her at all times. Subsequently, of course, once he had begun the work on his book, she had to curtail her demands, gradually impose limitations on herself, subject herself to him and his conception of their life together, and this abrupt and unnerving reversal, namely that henceforth all the demands to be satisfied would be his and no longer hers, perturbed her at first, in fact he might say that she had lived for years in a state of self-destructive shock more beside him and under him than with him, until in the end she had resigned herself to living for his sake. From a person who had actually seen everything worth seeing and had met so many people worth meeting, and who owed all this to the sincere and supreme self-sacrifice of a man whose free surrender of his most productive years, indeed the most important two decades of his life, those between his thirtieth and fiftieth year, was certainly not to be expected, certainly not to be demanded as a right, such a person must naturally expect to make a commensurate sacrifice in return, without anyone’s having to appeal to her gratitude or some gratitude-connected principle involving guilt feelings. Konrad would after all have gotten his book written long since if his wife had not forced him to take her traveling all over the world. The book would have been completely written ten years ago at the latest, in London, in Paris, in Aschaffenburg, at the very latest in Basel, he is supposed to have said to Wieser. To Fro: every day she would ask him whether he had a clean shirt on, and he would answer that he did have a clean shirt on, though in reality he had been wearing the same shirt for a week or even two weeks; she no longer noticed anything, no longer saw the dirt, etc., nothing at all. When she wanted him to read to her, she of course wanted him to read her favorite novel, the one about the medieval knight-troubadour, the Minnesinger Heinrich von Ofterdingen, by her favorite Romantic poet, Novalis. So of course he deliberately read to her from his favorite, whom she couldn’t stand, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, just to annoy her, to punish her for her inattentiveness, her inattention; there was simply no more effective way to punish her for insubordination; he always punished her by reading to her from the Kropotkin. But of course I do read her the Novalis, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, when she asks me for it. I can never refuse to read Novalis to her when she insists on it. Of course she hated everything in Kropotkin, and on the other hand, she loved her Novalis. The right thing to do was to read to her alternately from the Novalis and from the Kropotkin, not only the Novalis, he is supposed to have said to Fro. After reading her a passage from the Kropotkin he usually asked her to tell him what he had just read to her, and she would not know the answer, proving that she had not listened attentively when he had read the Kropotkin to her even though she was all attention when he read her the Novalis. What was that I just read to you, my dear? he would ask abruptly, and of course she hadn’t listened to the Kropotkin and floundered pitifully in trying to make up a plausible answer. Toward the end she no longer dared to let her attention wander off when he was reading Kropotkin to her, she had learned to fear that he would make good his threats—as he did more and more often, in fact—threats to withhold food, to prolong the exercises, not to air her room. Or else he might suddenly, without warning, air the room by letting an ice-cold draft she had no way of escaping hit her directly from the window; suddenly, he read her twice as much from the Kropotkin as usual, etc. Not knowing, often, whether her failure to hear the Kropotkin was intentional or not, he often punished her unjustly, which he regretted, he said, so that to make up for it he read her the Novalis at greater length than usual, though it was exquisite self-torture for him to read the Novalis. Still, reading her the Kropotkin, he always suspected her of turning a deaf ear deliberately, because she was always able to recount flawlessly everything he read to her from Novalis, but if he asked her to repeat a Kropotkin passage she couldn’t remember a thing. Konrad also complained that she always wanted a fresh clean dress, every day, and he told Fro that he refused to give in to this, a change of dress once a week seemed quite enough to him, especially as he had to help her put it on and take it off, after all a woman could certainly wear the same dress for a week, especially when it was so much trouble to get dressed, Konrad said. He would get a bit impatient when he had to dress her, there were times when he hurt her while changing her clothes, or so the baker says who is reputed to have been present often when Mrs. Konrad was changing. Nor did Konrad leave the choice of dress always to his wife; sometimes he insisted on a dress of his own choice, and sometimes they had unrepeatable arguments (works inspector) whether he would put on her the dress he preferred or the one she wanted, but nearly always his will prevailed; Konrad is reported to have taken advantage of his wife’s extreme exhaustion to win the argument. On the one hand he would ask himself why she had to change her dress at all, after all he had long ago ceased to change his clothes, but on the other hand he would think that she couldn’t really sit in that chair for years in the same dress, so he is supposed to have told Fro. And she did still have heaps of dresses, while he still had heaps of shoes, but for a long time now he had been putting on the same pair of shoes every day, so why couldn’t she wear the same dress every day? he asked himself, he said. He was constantly kept busy airing out her room, she had to have fresh air, and there he was all day opening and closing her windows and fretting that he was not getting his writing done, feeling totally at his wife’s mercy, with no will of his own, while she did with him as she pleased and had her revenge, as for instance when she insisted that he comb her hair, and so he combed her hair for hours with neither of them uttering a syllable the whole time (Fro). Actually there was often a terrible smell in her room when left unaired for longer than usual because he was irritated with her. But sometimes she said she wanted the room aired when he had just finished airing it, she would ask him to open the window when he had just shut it, as her special way of tormenting him. Several times a day, whenever he was most likely to feel irritated by it, she would announce that she felt a draft from the door; there’s a draft, she would say, to let him know how angry she was, even though there was no discernible draft in the room, certainly not with all the doors and windows shut as they were, but she made a habit of resorting to this kind of thing as a weapon against him, until one day he told her that if she spoke to him of a draft just once more he would make a point of opening all the doors and window
s, and go away, and stay away all night, and then he might come back next morning to see what had become of her. To this she is supposed to have retorted: Why don’t you, why don’t you open all the doors and windows and leave them open all night and give me a chance to freeze to death! But she knew only too well he would never carry out his ridiculous threat, she said. Still, he had to admit that she did obey him sometimes, and then again he would obey her, but she naturally ought to obey him more often than he her, he is supposed to have said to Wieser; actually it was incorrect to say that he obeyed her, he merely acceded to her wishes. All day long I submit to her entirely, he said. Then suddenly he would rebel and that would be the beginning of a new phase when she had to obey him implicitly, and when no wish of hers was granted at all. His work required absolute obedience not only from him but from her as well. Most of the time they were both concentrating intensely on the Urbanchich exercises, which meant weeks of uninterrupted self-discipline, without a moment’s unruliness from her to be tolerated. But at times she could no longer bear to go on sitting in that chair of hers, and she would come close to losing her self-control. It happened every two or three weeks, especially on weekends, he couldn’t say why. Suddenly she would fail to answer when he asked her a question. He would ask it a second time, a third time, a fourth time—no answer. To elicit an answer from her was of the utmost importance for his book, yet she would not give him an answer. He then walked over to the window and let in some fresh air, as the air in the room actually did turn foul after those hour-long sessions of Urbanchich exercises. But even the fresh air would bring no response from her, not even when the room had become completely cooled off. He would then close the window again and begin to read the Kropotkin aloud to her, believing as he did so that this was an infallible prod to make her talk, and while he was not surprised by resistance, protests, etc., on this occasion he would find that even a lengthy reading from Kropotkin got no reaction from her at all, except to deepen her silence, Konrad is supposed to have said. When that happens he shuts the book, stands up, walks back and forth in the room, says Wieser, faster and faster, more and more noisily, tries to say something but doesn’t really know what to say, sits down, gets up again. He could of course read some Novalis to her, he thinks, but he doesn’t read the Novalis; it would mean surrender, he is supposed to have said to Wieser. To Fro: But inasmuch as I simply had to go through the exercises on i with her that day, and so little was accomplished by that time, it was quite impossible for me to turn around and walk off to my own room. Suddenly he hit upon the idea of asking her whether he should bring her something to eat from the kitchen. But he got no response at all to this. Was she in pain? Even this question brought no response of any kind. If she was in pain, something had to be done about it, would she take a pill? he asked her; no answer. He had just decided to read some Novalis to her after all, but as he was about to start she finally signaled that she wanted to get up and walk a few steps, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, and she actually let him help her up and walk her to the window and back, and again, and a third time, to the window and back to her chair, at which point she was so exhausted that he barely managed to get her back into the chair where she ended in total collapse. If only I had the patience, she is supposed to have said, if only I had the patience, but I have no patience, when he quoted her Konrad even tried to imitate her voice, according to Fro, who says that Konrad repeatedly said to him, to Fro, that is, if only I had patience, if only I had patience. But I have simply run out of all patience, she is supposed to have said. Afterward he read her a long passage of the Novalis, taking care to read in a level tone of voice, with an even distribution of emphasis, his style of delivery could certainly be described as monotonous, he is supposed to have said to Fro, an absolutely monotonous delivery was the most effective, he felt. One hour of reading aloud to her like this, and he was at last able to continue the Urbanchich exercises with her until far into the night. While reading the Novalis to her he held both her hands firmly, thus gradually calming her down. This situation recurred at intervals of a week or a week and a half, but it naturally had begun to recur at ever-decreasing intervals. As his experiments went on, she naturally did not hear him equally well at all times, as for instance if he pronounced the words all the same, power, or powerlessness loudly, she might not understand, no matter how clearly he said these words, she would fail to understand them, and yet he might pronounce the same words, all the same, power, or powerlessness in the merest whisper, and as indistinctly as possible, and she would nevertheless understand. It was a complete mystery to him how her hearing could be so absolutely unpredictable. He would say, for instance, what an effort, to walk, say it loudly and clearly, and she did not understand, whereupon he would whisper the same words almost inaudibly, what an effort, to walk, and she instantly understood him, etc. He realized, of course, that a mere change in the weather, a pain that resulted from such a change in the weather, was enough to make a different woman of her at times. But by and large he was continuing to achieve remarkable results with her using the Urbanchich method, which he was constantly expanding even as he applied it. For some time now he had been experimenting with consonants, until it became impossible to experiment further with consonants, whereupon he switched to vowels, then suddenly back to consonants, and so forth. If she suddenly showed signs of being unable to go on, a glance out of the window would invariably reveal the reason, he could see by the look of the air outside that the weather was changing, etc. From disconnected words, words that formed no sentences, he would shift to whole sentences and vice versa, from sentences to disconnected words. The ear, and her ear in particular, was so extremely sensitive to even the most inconspicuous changes in the weather, which go on incessantly, as you know, Konrad said to Wieser. There’s a change in the weather every instant, another kind of weather every instant, he said. To me: even just looking at the trees, I can see a change in the weather, looking at a rock spur, at a body of water, at the walls, there it is, a change in the weather. Fro reports: Konrad had turned abruptly from using vowels to using whole sentences in the exercises, he would pronounce the following sentence: Justice, when someone kills another, and she would hear this sentence even though he had spoken it quite indistinctly, she indisputably heard it when he mumbled it into her left ear; her comment: the i in kills stayed in her ear for about eight seconds; naturally, he thought. There were times when, merely looking out of the window in the morning, he instantly knew that the exercises of that day should involve only vowels, or only consonants, or only sentences with us or only sentences with es, or only rather long sentences with os, or only short sentences. Looking out the window, for instance, and taking a deep breath, he knew what today’s experiment should be. Or else, standing by the window, he would decide momentarily: now, up to her room and say to her quickly: swarms of birds, more and more swarms make the park swarthy, and demand her instant comment on this. On Christmas Eve, exactly a year before her violent death, he had gone to her room at about five o’clock and repeated to her the sentence: Mingling with men and women one only messes oneself up the more, saying it alternately into her right and her left ear. He said that he murmured this sentence into her ears eighty or ninety times, and exacted a comment on it every time, until she collapsed in a coma, it never occurred to him until nearly eleven P.M. that it was, after all, Christmas Eve. She had forgotten all about it on account of being so intensely preoccupied with the Urbanchich exercises, and he had failed to remind her, and so they both went to bed that night at about one A.M. without his remembering to mention it to her, next day he is supposed to have said to her: Tonight is Christmas Eve, actually it was yesterday but for us it is Christmas Eve today, of course I knew it was Christmas Eve yesterday but I didn’t draw it to your attention because we were in the midst of our experiments, so it will have to be Christmas Eve for us today, he is supposed to have said, and then she said: You terrible man! this “Terrible man!” Wieser says Konrad mimicked, using exactly her ton
e of voice. She often believed that there were times when he was not experimenting with her, Konrad, is supposed to have told Wieser, though in fact he was experimenting incessantly, even when he was merely saying Good Morning, or Good Night, when he asked her whether she wanted to change, or needed him to comb her hair, or was interested in eating something, he was always experimenting with her. He might ask her: Shall I read Novalis to you? but he was actually experimenting. Whether he was standing up or sitting down, pacing the floor, keeping silence, he was always consciously experimenting. His whole relationship with her was nothing else than one continuous experiment, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. To the works inspector: “Using the Urbanchich method, I am experimenting her (his wife) to death.” Of course her earache grew worse, it went without saying that the pain in her ear would gradually spread to her whole head, since he was intensifying his experimentation, moving on to ever harder, ever more strenuous exercises, he is supposed to have told Fro. What worked the most in his favor was that all the people with whom he experimented, meaning everybody he had anything to do with, had no inkling of the fact that he was experimenting with them whenever he was with them, and not only then. For a whole year he studied only the effects on the hearing of scratching sounds, slaps, drilling, drops, sounds of a rushing, whirring, humming sort, he is supposed to have told Fro. Blowing sounds. He had tried out hundreds of thousands of scraping noises. Her receptivity for twelve-tone music, he is supposed to have told Fro, had played the most important part in his experiments, including the orchestral works of Webern, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, the string quartets of Béla Bartok, all kinds of music. But it was all done with a view to the book as a whole; how easy it would be for a dilettante to fritter himself away, lose himself in a sea of details, Konrad is supposed to have said. To keep everything relating to the sense of hearing under surveillance simultaneously required a nearly superhuman effort. Why, his researches into the auditory sense of various kinds of animals alone had taken him not less than two years, supposedly. Konrad might often let a whole hour go by without letting his wife know that he was experimenting, only to say suddenly: Hearing Experiment I, get ready to go, and then the words lust, lost, least, followed by a so-called auditory sound-color control quiz: Is the u a somber sound? Is the o somber? Is the e somber? He often followed this up with the word streamlet, the purest word of all. He had experimented with the word streamlet for ten years, he is supposed to have told Wieser. Fro: the following procedure was repeated every day: Konrad went into his wife’s room and said something, on which she had to comment. He would accept no so-called excuses. Sometimes she dared to ask him a question, such as: Is this an experiment or not? and he would answer Yes, or No, because she believed that there were times when he was not experimenting, not knowing that he was experimenting incessantly, that to him everything was an experiment. Even though he had the whole book quite finished in his head, as he believed, he never ceased experimenting, so as to complete his work even further, to perfect it, even though it was quite complete in his head already, and although he might at any moment sit down and write it all up without fear that he did not have it fully worked out in his head, if the possibility of suddenly writing it all down should arise. He was simply filling up the time with experiments until the moment arrived, as he confidently and unwaveringly believed it would, when he would finally write it down. Once such a piece of work had been embarked upon, it was possible to do all that could be done with the Urbanchich method, he is supposed to have told Fro. His kind of experimentation, pursued for such a long time, could not suddenly be dropped without ruining everything. Without his wife, who had sacrificed herself to him entirely, he would never have the entire book worked out in his head as firmly as he did. Every day, every moment, it was she alone who made it all possible. Demonstrations of fact, again and yet again, were what made the book possible. The experimenter, he felt, had to go on experimenting, that was his job, until he ceased asking himself why he was experimenting, a question it was not his province to ask himself, he was supposed to experiment himself to death if necessary. It was simpler to experiment with short sentences, he is supposed to have said, even simpler than that to use single words, simplest of all to use vowels only. It was more complicated, more strenuous, especially, of course, for his wife, to work with long composite sentences, the longest, most intricately complex sentences, the kind it admittedly gave him the greatest pleasure to experiment with, or such sentences as this, for example: The connections which, as you know, are quite independent of the interconnection of the whole, but are nevertheless connected, in the most delicate ways, with the connections of the connection which is independent of the interconnection, and so forth. You could say, of course, that the whole thing was crazy, but then you would have to say that everything was crazy, which is the simple truth, that everything is in fact crazy, still, nobody would dare say such a thing because, if he did, everyone would say he was crazy, which could only lead to everything coming to an end, everything gradually coming to a stop of its own accord, Konrad is supposed to have said. Human beings (all mankind) owed their very existence, after all, to inconsistency (the utmost). As for himself, Konrad, there was nothing left that meant anything to him except experimental sentences, he is supposed to have said, experimentation was all there was, all he cared about, the whole world was an experiment, everything was; and then he is supposed to have said: It’s not so much the length of the sentences that matters, nor the brevity of sentences (or words) that is decisive, not just, for instance, the a and o and i and u sounds, but all of it together, always. Suddenly, he once told Fro, he was standing at the window, he could not see a thing, he could hear but he could not see, not a thing. His eyes must be failing him, he thought; they had been getting worse all the time. At such times he would have to stand at the window with his eyes shut for a long time before he could open his eyes and see again. He is also reported to have complained about the problems he had heating the place in winter; he could not let Hoeller do it because Hoeller made so much noise and such a mess doing it, so that if Hoeller does it (gets the furnace going) I lose two or three valuable hours of experimental time. But if Konrad undertook to do it himself, it cost him an enormous effort just to overcome his inner resistance to doing it. Our chimneys don’t draw, and so our stoves don’t draw, he is supposed to have said. He had to go around endlessly checking up on the stoves and stoking them. It was a good thing that the lime works stoves could be stoked from the hallways. It had taken him years to learn how to stoke the stoves in the lime works. Every single stove had to be tended differently from every other, it was a regular science! he is supposed to have said, actually a science! The temporary failure of his eyesight lasted a little longer each time, he should have seen a doctor about it long since, but he wouldn’t see a doctor. Only a year ago his eyes failed him only every three to four weeks, but by now he was stricken every day, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser. Of course it was connected with his work. Anyone who used his eyes as intensively as he did was bound to damage his eyesight, it was to be expected. His wife did not have this kind of eye trouble, although she had always suffered from poor vision, but her poor vision had not deteriorated any further in the course of time. But Konrad himself had been naturally endowed with the keenest eyesight, which he had, however, been subjecting to the severest strain, he is supposed to have told Wieser. He also had an extraordinarily good ear. His kind of eye trouble not infrequently led to total blindness, Konrad is supposed to have said; he happened to know that a close relative of his had suffered the same kind of eye trouble and then suddenly went completely blind; Konrad was afraid of this happening to him, too. One tended to think that this eye trouble would clear up, but it didn’t clear up, and one found oneself suddenly blind, from one minute to the next, no matter what one did to prevent it, nothing was any use. To Fro, Konrad is supposed to have said two days before the murder: When we moved in, we put in mostly new flooring, I think, and here I sit in
a chair opposite my wife’s chair, looking to her as though I were reading my Kropotkin, but in fact I am not reading Kropotkin at all, I can’t seem to concentrate on it, and even though I have the Kropotkin open and though I am reading in it line by line and word for word, my mind is on something entirely different, what I am thinking is that when we moved in we put in new floors, larch wood floors; larch wood darkens with time, I ordered the widest planks obtainable, irregular planks but laid by one of the best flooring men anywhere, a man who had moved from Toblach, my wife’s home town, to Sicking. Plank by plank, tongue in groove, groove to tongue, I keep thinking, and in the second story, I am thinking, I had all the window sills redone, on the third floor it was the window jambs, all the door frames on the first floor, the ground floor. On the first floor it was also necessary to install a new ceiling, I am thinking, sitting opposite my wife and pretending to be reading my Kropotkin, I turn the pages in the Kropotkin as if I had just finished reading a page. At first I did not intend to do any repairs or restorations in the lime works, but I ended by doing so much. This area is famous for its good but unreliable craftsmen, I keep thinking, but all the work I had done here in the lime works was beautifully finished, in the shortest possible time. If it’s to be done at all, I thought, then I might as well let them restore all the stucco work on the ceiling of the ground floor reception hall, and no sooner had I thought this than I ordered it all done. But no one looking at it must suspect, I said to the plasterer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, that any of this stucco work has been restored, and the plasterer understood perfectly, in fact there is not the slightest suggestion anywhere that a restoration of the stucco work on the ground floor reception hall ceiling has been effected. An excellent man, it seems to me, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I was thinking while pretending to read Kropotkin, the kind of work he did on that ceiling had to be totally inobtrusive, and he did in fact patch up and restore the stucco ornamentations on the ceilings in the most inobtrusive fashion. Wherever you look these days you can see stucco ornamentation ruined by amateurish restorations and patching, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. And we put new stoves in almost every room, in all the places that were never heated before we came, he said. He had gone into the lime works and exclaimed: Why, everything is in wrack and ruin here, the place has been totally neglected, it’s hopelessly run down! and he thought of how shocked he had been by all that neglect and deterioration, while his wife believed he was reading his Kropotkin, he is supposed to have said to Fro. Still, it turned out that the neglect had done only superficial damage, the dilapidation was only superficial, he is supposed to have told Fro. Basically the lime works were an incredibly solid piece of construction work! The lime works, in fact, represented an excellent historical record of the past four or five centuries, architecturally, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, anyone who had the time and felt like it could find here a record of every historical detail of all those centuries. Finally the senselessness of pretending to read Kropotkin all along while thinking about something quite different, in fact the opposite of Kropotkin, made me shut the book. All that continuous reading, said my wife just as I was shutting the book, weakens your eyes, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, it’s because you are incessantly reading your Kropotkin that you have all that eye trouble more and more often. Note that she doesn’t say it is my reading that does it, but that it is my reading of Kropotkin that aggravates my eye trouble. He then gets up, he says, and goes to look out the window, where he sees Hoeller passing by down there, Hoeller always passes by at this time, Konrad thinks, wearing his blue coat and swinging his ax; funny how talking with Hoeller always is so relaxing. Whenever he starts talking with Hoeller, about hunting and the weather, right away he feels more relaxed. Konrad felt he had an intimate understanding of Hoeller’s ways, and there could be nothing mysterious to Hoeller, either, about Konrad and about the way Konrad and his crippled wife had been living in the lime works for several years now, Konrad thought, as he said to Fro. The first time Konrad and I met (in the timber forest) Konrad said that although he ought to be expressing himself, if at all, with the greatest circumspection, because of his eleven or twelve previous convictions for so-called libel in this country, he nevertheless did express himself, or, as you might say, he daily committed the error of expressing himself, of expressing opinions, of telling facts that always fitted the definition of a so-called libel of somebody; no matter what he said, he always turned out to have said something libelous, but strictly speaking, you might say that everything he could say about this weird country, with its extremes of inhumanity and irresponsibility all on the increase as they were, could be considered a so-called libel, entailing the highest probability of his being hailed, in consequence, before an invariably prejudiced, biased court; such a possibility faced him at all times, especially considering his many previous convictions for libel and simple or aggravated assault, he was in perpetual danger of being denounced, slandered, charged, and convicted, no matter what he might say, or come out with, in the ears of the people around here it always registered as a so-called libelous statement, and it was only by chance that charges were not preferred against him every day of his life, because he did go out every day and saw people and inevitably expressed the opinions he held to them, because he knew the truth and so he expressed the truth, and although the opinions and truths he expressed were decidedly worth expressing and hearing, still, those involved, part and parcel as they were of this degenerate country, full of mistrustfulness as it was, his facts and opinions were invariably legally actionable and punishable. Life was not easy for a man of character, his kind of character, to endure life the way he was made, to get through it somehow, demanded the most strenuous intellectual and physical self-discipline, the utmost spiritual and physical tension, all of which indescribable inner pressures forced out and conditioned, as it were, all the things he had to say, so that he had to be resigned to being a man expressly made, designed, and bound to give offense, always, a problem he intended to solve but which he apparently did not succeed in solving. A world, he said, in which one could be hailed before a court for defamation of character, so called, and which maintained that it had such a thing as character, when obviously character was precisely what had disappeared from this world, if character had ever existed in it; not only was it a terrible, a horrifying world, but it was also a ridiculous world, but unfortunately each one of us had to resign himself to existing in a world that was not only terrible and horrifying but also ridiculous, each and every one of us had to come to terms with this fact; how many hundreds of thousands, how many millions of people had already come to terms with it, even in his own unquestionably terrible, horrifying, and ridiculous country, our own country, the most ridiculous and most terrible of them all. Speaking of his country, his own homeland, a man could not exist in it, get along in it for a single day, except by never once telling the truth, to anyone, about anything, because the lie alone kept things moving in this country, the lie with its seven veils and embroideries and masquerades and intimidations. In this country the lie is valued above all, the truth only gets one prosecuted, condemned, and ridiculed. Which is why Konrad did not conceal the fact that his entire nation had taken refuge in the lie. To tell the truth was to make yourself culpable and ridiculous, the mob or the courts decided whether a man had made himself culpable or ridiculous or culpable and ridiculous, if the truth-teller could not be made to appear culpable he was ridiculed, if he could not be ridiculed he was penalized, a man who told the truth in this country was either ridiculous or a criminal. But inasmuch as hardly anyone wanted to make himself ridiculous or legally punishable, people were terrified of being penalized, to pay high fines or go to jail or prison simply did not come naturally to people, so they all lied or kept silent. Unfortunately there were characters like himself who could not keep silent, who had in the course of time come to their senses and gotten to the bottom of the truth and therefore could not keep silent, who had to ex
press themselves, so that they exposed themselves to criminal prosecution and ridicule over and over again, then became more and more exposed to criminal prosecution under the ruling criminal code, more and more exposed to ridicule under the ruling social code. He would have to change his character from the ground up, but no one could change his character, one’s character could not be changed. So he had locked himself in, here at the lime works, to avoid yet another summons; for twenty-two days now he was completely locked up inside the lime works and had let no one enter the lime works, either. This was the first time in twenty-two days that he had set foot outside the lime works, for a walk in the timber forest, because he was in fact a restless man who needed to see people. For all those twenty-two days he had desperately needed to get out of the lime works, but he had not set foot outside the lime works, not even as far as the tavern, not even to the sawmill. He kept reassuring himself that Hoeller would certainly never inform on him, but he did not go even to the annex. People did of course continue to come to the lime works, but I never let them in, Konrad said, if I open the door, the law will get me. But then all of a sudden the works inspector arrives, and the mayor arrives, and I have to open the door, they are town officials after all, I have to open the door to the municipal council, to the district superintendent, to the section chief of the flood control unit. They all come here on official business, or else they pretend to come on official business, and if I don’t let them in they resort to official authority, forcing me to let them in, and I am terrified of getting into trouble with the law as it is, because of the things I say. However, with these so-called officials he naturally had only practical necessities to talk about, so there was no danger of getting into legal trouble on account of the things he said. And so, while he no longer set foot outside the lime works in order to avoid being charged and convicted and locked up—now that he had a criminal record, even a conviction for libel would mean imprisonment—he did speak to the so-called officials, including of course the forestry commissioner and the works inspector, but only with the greatest circumspection. To Fro, two years ago: at breakfast he would be silent while she did the talking. He was silent because he had made a habit of being silent, she talked because she had made a habit of talking (at the breakfast table). She talked incessantly at the breakfast table because she had no other opportunity to talk incessantly. He would wake up thinking about his work, but soon dropped the idea of writing and decided to start right after breakfast on the hearing exercises. Standing in the east corner of her room, he would plan to call out to her words with the u sound: Urals, uremia, Uranus, usual, union, Uruguay, usury, Utopia, etc. etc. This would be followed by words with o: Oklahoma, odious, ore, oil, open, etc. Then words with k: Caste, card, Khartoum, carefree, catastrophe, catafalque, Cabbala, Kabul, catharsis, cataracts, etc. Then words with es: Esther, Estragon, escudos, España, Eskimo, etc. Then words with al: Albania, Alba Alarcon, Alhambra, algebra, alkaloid, Almira, alms, etc. Then words with is: Istria, Ismail, Istanbul, Islam, etc. Getting out of bed he would be thinking that he could start the exercises during breakfast, so as to include the conversation (or the silence) at breakfast in the exercises. He would talk about the difference between listening and hearing, starting with an explanation of listening, then of hearing, giving ear, hearkening, pricking up one’s ears, auscultation, overhearing, jointly hearing, etc. Listening in, mishearing, lending an ear. Then suddenly he would say to her: Trying not to hear. Listening hard, he would say. He had prepared their breakfast the previous evening, so that he merely needed to carry their tray into her room in the morning, they had always breakfasted together in this way since the first day they were living together. While carrying the tray up to her room he usually had the most brilliant ideas for his book, on the use of the Urbanchich method. Holding the tray in his hands he slowly felt his way up the stairs in the dark of the vestibule, to the first floor, then the second floor, then to her room which he said he entered without knocking. Set the tray on the table, he thought, so he put the tray on the table, thinking that she was watching him doing it. At the same time he thought of her bungled efforts to dress herself, wash herself, comb herself, to stretch out, all of which, all the misery of it, he could see clearly in her face. He then tried to wash her, dress her, comb her hair, help her to stretch out. Her hair certainly needed a washing, he thought while washing her; an impression that naturally grew stronger as he combed her hair. But he had not washed his own hair for weeks, he thought, while combing her hair. The dishes must be moved from the tray to the table, he would be thinking as he speeded up the combing of her hair. First he put the water on to boil, then he hastily buttered the bread—actually, he was using margarine instead, these days. She would ask him: Did you sleep well? and he asked her: Did you sleep well? and then they answered each other; she would say: Of course not, and he: Of course not. Then he saw that the water had come to a boil and he poured the boiling water into the teapot, saying, as he told Fro: Two minutes more, and then they would ask each other, wordlessly, whether they should begin at once with the exercises. He might, for instance, decide about beginning the exercises (expanded Urbanchich method) while he was pouring the tea. Words with diphthongs, he said to himself, and it seemed to him that she realized he had begun the exercises already, at breakfast, because she was not oblivious to the expectancy with which he watched her reactions, controlled her reactions to everything he said or didn’t say (to her), how impatiently he awaited her reaction to the least trifle, or controlled her ability to react. Yesterday we indulged ourselves, he would say to her, in the most flagrantly undisciplined conduct, when we broke off our exercises two hours short of what our schedule calls for, so we cannot indulge ourselves in slacking off today, not to mention the fact that we were continually interrupting the exercises, even though we have no right to permit such interruptions. She listens to me, says nothing, eats with much appetite, Konrad said to Fro. Shortly after starting breakfast I tell her enough time has now been spent on having breakfast; I prefer short breakfasts, while she prefers to stretch breakfast time as long as possible. So he drained his cup, saying one cup is enough, and cleared away first his and then her breakfast dishes. Dawdling over breakfast is bad for creativity, he is supposed to have said, the cups go on the shelf, the bread into the breadbag, the first exercise on diphthongs begins. He would then experiment on her till eleven or half past, by which time she had been for hours impatiently awaiting lunch, to be brought either by Hoeller from the tavern or by Konrad from the kitchen; her constant waiting for him to feed her irritated him, it distracted him to the point of making him lose his temper with her, he ordered her to concentrate, why don’t you concentrate, he is supposed to have said to her time and again, hundreds of thousands of times, here I am concentrating to the very limits of my capacity while you are not concentrating at all, all you ever think about is food, or about Hoeller’s being supposed to bring the food, about meat and cauliflower and pastries, and meanwhile my mind is totally intent on applying the Urbanchich method, one would think it was only fair to expect her to concentrate one hundred percent on the Urbanchich method too, but she was so quickly exhausted, her responses lagged behind, her alertness visibly diminished from sentence to sentence, word by word, sometimes she heard nothing at all, then again not enough, whether he screamed into her left ear, her right ear, she heard nothing. The exercise ended miserably, like most of them in the last six months, a wretched performance, absolutely wretched, disgusting, he said; he would get up, pace the floor, until he suddenly caught himself listening intently for Hoeller’s step, bringing the food. But lunch never came until half past one, no telling why, unless it was a wedding breakfast at the tavern that was holding things up, he said to Fro, in which case they’d forget all about Mrs. Konrad, because the innkeeper and his staff could think of nothing but their wedding party. The moment he heard Hoeller knocking downstairs Konrad instantly left his wife’s room, says Fro, and as he was descending to the vestibule he planned to call Hoell
er to account for bringing the food so late, but then he thought, better not call him to account, just ask him, but I will call him to account, and so on, but by the time Konrad opened the door he had forgotten his intention to call Hoeller to account. When he hears the knock on the front door, Konrad says to his wife, lunch is here, that’s Hoeller downstairs, and suddenly she looks completely relaxed, he instantly sees what a great relief it is to her, and goes down. Going down the stairs to the vestibule he is thinking that the food will be cold because Hoeller has been loitering too long on his way through the icy cold of the woods or along the water’s edge, but as he opens the door he sees the steaming food hamper, it seems that the food is actually still hot, so we’re getting a hot lunch today, I won’t have to heat any of it in the kitchen, I can take it right upstairs to my wife, it won’t take more than a minute to set the table and serve it, she’s always amazed at how fast I serve a meal, this time they’re both amazed when they discover that the food hamper contains baked liver, with a fresh lettuce salad, and last but not least, a semolina soufflé, their favorite dish. Right after lunch, he thought, we will go on with the exercises, all the more energetically for having just had our favorite dish. At first she refused to go back to the exercises right after lunch, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, you think that just because we’ve had our favorite dish you are entitled to go back instantly to the exercises, she is supposed to have said, as Konrad told Fro, but he did start the exercises at once and she gave in, he stood at the corner near the window and called out the word labyrinth to her, quickly at first, ten times in succession (forcing instant comments from her) and then at longer intervals again and again the word labyrinth (without comments from her). At not quite half past four in the afternoon he decided to go to his own room, saying to her, you take a rest now, I have an idea for my book. But as he enters his room his idea for the book is suddenly gone, he cannot recapture it, pace the floor as he will, it’s gone forever. To calm himself he sits down at his desk, however, and—starts to read his Kropotkin. I’ve got to read my Kropotkin now, because this evening I shall have to read Novalis to her, he says to himself, I promised to read Novalis to her tonight, so he reads all he can of the Kropotkin now. Just as he has started to read “A Change for the Better” he hears a knock at the front door. My method is always the same, he is supposed to have said to Fro, when I hear someone knocking at the front door, I decide not to go down, then whoever it is will stop knocking. But the knocking doesn’t stop, and I finally go down. It’s the works inspector at the door, saying he must have left his measuring tape behind last time he was here. I haven’t seen it, I tell him, Konrad said to Fro, your tape must be somewhere in the vestibule, meanwhile I am thinking if only I had waited a little longer before answering his knock, he might have left, but as it is the inspector is already inside the vestibule and both of us are searching for the missing tape. But we can’t find it. It simply has to be here, the inspector is supposed to have said, but where can it be? says Konrad, so the inspector bends over, Konrad bends over, both of them searching the floor inch by inch for the tape measure, without success. Could the tape measure be up on the first floor? the inspector asks Konrad, and Konrad replies at once, but you weren’t even up there! then the inspector: You’re right, of course, I never did go up to the first floor, so it can’t be up there, and they continue their search, primarily in the so-called wood-paneled room on the ground floor, and Konrad asks if the inspector might not have lost the tape measure at the tavern; or the sawmill, where he had surely been too? says Fro, but the inspector insists that he is certain he lost his tape measure at the lime works, but then he wavers and says, is it possible, after all, that I didn’t lose it at the lime works? could I have lost it in the village? left it somewhere in my office? but no, I remember clearly that I still had it when I came to the lime works, I put it down somewhere here in the lime works, somewhere on the ground floor, could someone have removed it from here? the works inspector asked Konrad, who said: I am all alone here at the lime works, my wife, who never gets out of her invalid chair, doesn’t count after all, she can’t get up out of her chair, and I, Konrad is supposed to have said firmly to the works inspector, do not remember the tape measure at all; Konrad did not even know what the inspector’s tape measure looked like, it was a brand new tape measure, the inspector told him, but Konrad did not remember even
The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 1