seeing the new tape measure, the old tape measure was kept inside a green case, a green leather case, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, I can visualize your old tape measure in its green case, but I cannot recall the new tape measure at all, and they both allegedly spent over an hour searching for the tape measure without finding it, in the darkness of the vestibule it was impossible to find anything anyway, the inspector is supposed to have said to Konrad. They both ended up totally exhausted, lying on the floor of the ground floor vestibule, when suddenly the inspector cried out, here it is, my tape measure! and sure enough the inspector had found the tape measure, it was right inside his big outer coat’s breast pocket; he had completely forgotten that he had slipped the tape measure into his big breast pocket. Here we are hunting for that tape measure all over the place for over an hour, and all the time it’s inside my breast pocket! the inspector is supposed to have exclaimed, adding: What’s more, I probably interrupted you (Konrad) at work on your book, I am so sorry about that, whereupon Konrad said that the inspector had not disturbed him in the least, that he, Konrad, had done no writing at all all day long. I’ll never make it, Konrad said, even if all the conditions are favorable, all the human conditions, Konrad reiterated, according to Fro, but I cannot seem to make any headway on writing my book; you have not disturbed me, though of course when I am trying to work everything constitutes a disturbance, but when I am not working, you (the works inspector) cannot have disturbed anything, and so forth. While saying all this to the inspector, Konrad, according to Fro, was thinking: I am lying, everything I say is a lie. And he cursed the works inspector inwardly. This time he did not invite the works inspector to a glass of brandy as usual, not even in the wood-paneled room, in fact he did not invite the man in at all, not even into the coldest room there was, in short, absolutely not at all, and the inspector suddenly found himself outside the building again. Konrad was eavesdropping inside the front door, listening to the inspector walking away in the snow, the inspector always walks ten times more laboriously than usual in snow, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, claiming that he, Konrad, had seen the works inspector furiously throwing the tape measure, which he had just recovered with so much trouble, into the snow-covered road, gesturing violently, before he picked it up, dusted it off, and rolled it up again, the inspector was enraged at having made such a fool of himself in Konrad’s eyes, after all he was the first to start creeping around on the floor on hands and knees searching for a lost tape measure which he actually had in his breast pocket the whole time. The works inspector is a mess of neurotic complexes, Konrad is supposed to have thought as he watched the man stomping off through the snow, in that uncomfortable posture (for Konrad) one has to hold when looking through a keyhole, which I have gotten accustomed to in the course of time, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. The moment the inspector had vanished into the thicket Konrad went back to his room and back to reading his Kropotkin, but he had barely read two pages, basically not more than a quick review of what he had already read of “A Change for the Better,” when he heard a bell ring, this time upstairs, his wife demanding attention. He instantly went upstairs to her. Think of it, my dear Fro, everything I am telling you, describing to you, intimating to you, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, basically goes on here every day, over and over again! everything that goes on here goes on day after day after day, it’s the height of absurdity, and by dint of being the height of absurdity it is the height of terribleness, day after day after day. It’s true, Fro’s testimony agrees in every respect with Wieser’s testimony, the works inspector confirms everything Fro and Wieser have said, and conversely, both Wieser and Fro confirm what the works inspector says, basically one confirms the other, they all confirm each other’s testimony. What is it? Konrad is supposed to have said to his wife when he got to her room; he had been reading his Kropotkin, he had gotten no work at all done on his book that day, he had been interrupted by the inspector, then, finally, he had at least managed to get back to his Kropotkin when she rang and there was no way he could avoid going up to see what she wanted, he intended no reproach to her, he had reached the point where he never reproached her with anything in any way, but as soon as he entered her room, he said, she said at once: Read to me, meaning that he had to start reading Novalis to her. To Wieser: For many days now Konrad had noticed that his wife’s eyelids were inflamed, not that he ever mentioned it to her because he assumed she knew her eyelids were red with inflammation, after all she looked into her mirror often enough and intently enough, there were many times she would sit for an hour staring at herself in the mirror, so she was bound to know that she had inflamed eyelids, Konrad said to Wieser. Causes: dry air, solitude, age. He did not mention his observation to her, because he had given up wasting another word on any of her ailments; for him to draw her attention to some new infirmity was out. For instance, only six months ago she had still been able to sit up so straight that you could not see a certain miniature painting representing her paternal grandmother, which hung behind the invalid chair in which she sat. Now, only six months later, her posture was so slumped, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, that not only could you see the miniature in its entirety, almost, but she was bent over almost three or four inches below it. Week by week, sitting opposite his wife, Konrad claimed to have seen more and more of this miniature portrait behind her, though for weeks he had refused to believe it, but in the end he had to admit it: his wife was gradually slumping lower, the miniature rising behind her, so to speak, until Konrad felt able to calculate precisely the moment when he would see the portrait in its entirety, not that he actually worked it out, he just knew he could if he wanted to calculate the precise moment of full visibility. He thought about this, and about the fact that nowadays his wife, when he helped her up and walked with her a bit, took steps just half the length of those she could take only six months ago, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, soon she would not be able to walk all the way to the window, not even to the center of the room; soon she would not be able to get out of her chair, in fact; suppose that moment has suddenly arrived, he would think; he realizes that she can no longer stand up—and a new phase of their life together has begun. Nowadays when he reads Novalis to her she sometimes fails to understand whole passages, he is supposed to have told Fro, he asks her if she has been listening and she says yes, she has been listening attentively, but she hasn’t understood everything she heard; in this connection, it is necessary to explain that the Novalis, though she loves it, unlike him who can’t stand the Novalis, is nevertheless a difficult book, as commonly understood; this has nothing to do with the fact that when he reads her his beloved Kropotkin, to punish her for something, she deliberately pretends not to understand more than half of what he is reading. When she fails to understand her beloved Novalis though she listens with might and main, there’s no pretense about that. Now at the Laska, where I sold another of our new policies today, they say that there’s a cripple living in the lime works, the Konrad woman, that’s whom they mean in the hostelries hereabouts when they refer, as usual, to “the woman,” and this cripple, they say, is cared for, according to some, or shamefully used, according to others, by her husband, the owner of the lime works, and a mad despot to his wife. According to the gossip he is terrible, devoted, sadistic, attentive, all at the same time. They praise him for fetching her meals from the tavern, but say he is destroying his wife by using her ruthlessly as a guinea pig for his scientific experiments, his so-called Urbanchich method, of which they have no conception except what they get from Hoeller’s weird descriptions after years of watching Konrad’s practices with his wife. They say that Konrad torments his wife by saying, shouting, whispering, either very quickly or with excruciating slowness, all sorts of incomprehensible things into her agonizingly inflamed ears and then forcing her to comment on each and every one of his utterances until she comes close to fainting. Even after Mrs. Konrad has reached a point of exhaustion when she can’t rea
ct at all any more, her husband will keep at her for hours after she has collapsed into total apathy, they say at Laska’s, sometimes until four in the morning, etc. He started out being fabulously rich, they say, but it’s all gone because he’s an idiot with money, and anyway his obsession with his so-called scientific work, something to do with the sense of hearing, has left them in straits, not that you could consider him actually impoverished, but there were rumors about an impending forced auction sale of the lime works. Nevertheless, they seem to think of him as a rich man still, but you have to remember that to a common working man, anyone who has one good suit and doesn’t have to go to work in overalls at six o’clock in the morning like himself is a rich man. Konrad himself, says Wieser, would probably never have called himself a rich man, though he might reluctantly have admitted to being well-to-do, back in Zurich or even as late as his Mannheim period, even though at that time he could still be considered a rich man by even the most exacting standards, yet Konrad himself said to Fro about two years ago: I am actually poorer than any of the people who call me a rich man, but how am I to make people understand that I am telling the truth? Talking with the woodcutters and other workmen who hang around the various taverns far into the night, toward the end of winter, was Konrad’s favorite recreation, he enjoyed their conversation more than anyone’s, he is supposed to have told Wieser. But he had not gone to any of the taverns for months now, what with the way things were getting worse for them at the lime works, he even missed his tavern-going habits less as time went on. For months on end he had not talked with the workmen, woodcutters, gamekeepers, etc., nor gone even once to the woods, he had not seen the village for six months, in fact, though he did go there, but only to the bank where he would cash a check and go straight back to the lime works, having drawn out a negligible amount of money, not enough to keep one alive, but too much to let a man croak. He had not even spoken to Hoeller for weeks, unless you counted telling Hoeller to chop some wood, or not to chop wood, or taking the food hamper he brought from the tavern and handing back the empty hamper. This year Hoeller had become a changed man, Konrad did not know why he seemed to have lost the confidence of this man of extraordinary integrity, he could only guess that it might be for the same reason he had lost confidence in himself to a degree. A simple question had in the past always elicited a simple answer from Hoeller, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but nowadays all he ever got were ambiguous answers to the same simple questions. These days there was only mistrust between them, which made them uncertain with each other, full of unspoken reservations that entailed a daily circling around and around the unacknowledged source of their trouble. It was Hoeller’s cousin, the one with the seven or eight convictions for sexual offenses, who had taken to living with Hoeller in the annex, secretly, behind Konrad’s back, without his or Hoeller’s asking Konrad’s permission; ever since the cousin’s arrival Hoeller had ceased to come near Konrad except when he brought the food hamper or asked if he should chop some fire wood. According to Wieser, this means that Konrad has had to do without his conversations with Hoeller, an important source for his book; in fact, Konrad has also been deprived of the talk he valued so much with all the simple men of the region around the lime works. The Konrads preferred to spend their mornings mulling over what they would have to eat, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, instead of Konrad simply going down to the kitchen to fix something, anything, when Hoeller was not going to the tavern for their lunch, whether because he was sick or had to chop wood or the like, so that Konrad was prevented from working on his book, what the Konrads would do was to sit and talk for hours, endlessly, about sauerkraut, cauliflower, meat, egg dishes, soups and sauces, salads and cooked fruit, unable to decide in favor of any specific kind of meal. To waste the entire morning like this on planning what to eat, thinking about what to eat, was absolutely disgusting. Encounter III: at about two A.M. Konrad said, he had heard a shot nearby, it had to have been fired quite close to the lime works, he thought, but he could see nothing, even after opening the window and looking outside, nothing. But somebody had just fired a shot, he said to himself, and there’s a second shot, and a third, after the third it was quiet again … before the Konrads moved into the lime works the annex had been a meeting place for the hunting men of the area; Konrad despised hunters as much as he did the hunt, all of his ancestors had been hunters, woodsmen, all their lives their heads were full of hunting to the exclusion of everything else, a hunter was invariably a stupid man, a hunter was always and every time a congenital dimwit, a hunting moron. Konrad had never been interested in hunting. The moment he moved into the lime works he abolished all the hunting privileges associated with the lime works; no more hunting meets in the annex, he declared, and ever since then the hunters naturally hated him and he was always terrified when he walked through the woods, even just setting foot outside the lime works, afraid of being shot at or shot down by a hunter, a hunter could always feel free to gun down any man he hated, Konrad said, though he would be brought to court, but the courts would let a hunter go scot-free, or else, if a hunter was convicted of murder, they would sentence him to a ridiculous suspended sentence, hunters could kill people to their hearts’ content in this country and go scot-free. Konrad hated hunters, he said, but he loved guns, especially hunting rifles, it was a paradox but he could explain it. Then: he greased his boots with concentrated beef fat, using the ball of his thumb. Greasing his boots was already beginning to cost him a tremendous effort, it had to be done with the ball of the thumb, as he learned before he was four years old from his father, he could still remember his father teaching him how to grease his boots with the ball of his thumb, never with a rag, only the ball of the thumb, no brushes; rags were a poor substitute for the ball of the thumb, which left the leather beautifully supple, if you worked it always from the inside out and with growing intensity; Konrad always liked the smell of boot grease, Polish or Slovakian, he loved the smell of his room after greasing his boots there in the wintertime, the only time he greased his boots in his room, the rest of the year he did it out in front of the house, but he particularly remembered the wintertime greasing of his boots indoors as a pleasant chore associated with a pleasant smell. But in recent years he found himself totally exhausted after greasing his boots, on such a day he could hardly do the Urbanchich exercises, not even to mention the writing, merely to think of the book on such a day was an effort to be shunned, even if an idea for his book should occur to him after greasing his boots, it could only be an insignificant idea. After such a chore as greasing his boots or any such physical effort, these days, Konrad said, he would have to lie down on his bed, made up for the day as it was, in an indescribable state of collapse, and take several deep breaths, with his eyes on the ceiling which seemed to be in constant motion up there, he said, trying to clarify his conception of the book, divided as it was into nine parts, but in his weakened state after greasing his boots or some such effort as that, he found it impossible to think, all he could muster was a hazy outline of the book which had nothing in common with the real book except for his fear of the hard work involved, which drove him in desperation to try to think of other things, anything else rather than the book, but when he succeeded in driving the book from his mind it made him even more desperate, because to find himself thinking of anything else than the book naturally drove him to despair at once. Relax and breathe deeply, he would say to himself then, inhale, exhale, calmly now, he would say, in constant anxiety that he would be torn away from this by the sudden ringing of his wife’s bell, her so-called signal that she needed help, afraid of having to go up to her room and witness one of her bouts of helplessness, always some new form of helplessness, infirmity, incapacity. Sometimes a good idea for his book would come to him precisely during such a state of weakness in consequence of having greased his boots, etc., on occasion some of his best ideas would occur to him then, ideas of a kind that never came in the beginning, twenty years ago, because they happened to be typ
ical of old age, the very best ideas in fact, but they usually deserted him as quickly as they had come, which reduced their value for him to nil, and viewed from this perspective they were of course the most worthless, actually the most terribly worthless ideas one could have or imagine, ideas of a worthlessness a young man could not even conceive of, because a young man could not have such ideas, could not remotely understand such ideas. All that was left was the recollection of having had a good idea, a recurrent experience of having had a good, an excellent, a most important idea, a truly fundamental idea, but one never remembered the idea itself from one moment to the next, memory was something you simply couldn’t depend on, a man’s memory set him traps he’d walk into and find himself hopelessly lost in, Konrad said, a man’s memory lured him into a trap and then deserted him, it happened over and over again that a man’s memory lured him into a trap, or several traps, thousands of traps, and then deserted him, left him all alone, alone in limitless despair because he felt drained of all thought; Konrad had come to observe this geriatric phenomenon and had begun to be more and more terrified of it, he was in fact prepared to state that a man’s youthful memory was capable of turning into an old man’s memory from one moment to the next, with no warning whatsoever, suddenly you found yourself with an old man’s memory, unprepared by such warning signals as a failure, from time to time, in trifling matters, brief lapses or omissions, the way a mental footbridge or gangplank might give a bit as one passed over it; no, old age set in from one moment to the next, many a man made this abrupt passage from youth to age quite early in life, a sudden shift from being the youngest to the oldest of men, a characteristic of so-called brain workers who tended, basically, not to have a so-called extended youth, no gradual transitions from youth to age, with them the change occurred momentarily, without warning, suddenly, mortally, you found yourself in old age. A thinking man with an old man’s memory instantly lost all his ideas, the most important, the best, unless he noted them down at once, so the thinking aged man had to carry paper and pencil with him at all times, without paper and pencil he was totally lost, while a thinking young man needed no paper and pencil, he remembered everything that occurred to him, he could do anything he wanted with his brain and with his memory, effortlessly store whatever occurred to him in his brain and therefore in his memory, hold on to the most extraordinary ideas as long as he needed to and almost without effort until, suddenly, from one moment to the next, he was old. An old man needs a crutch, he needs crutches, every old man carries invisible crutches, Konrad said, all those millions and billions of old people on crutches, millions, billions, trillions of invisible crutches, my friend, no one else may see them but I see them, I am one of those who cannot help seeing these invisible billions, trillions of crutches, there’s not a moment, Konrad said, in which I do not see those billions, those trillions of crutches. Those millions of ideas, he said, that I had and lost, that I forgot from one moment to the next. Why I could populate a vast metropolis of thought with all those lost ideas of mine, I could keep it afloat, a whole world, a whole history of mankind could have lived on all the ideas that I lost. How untrustworthy my memory has become! he said; I get up and note down an idea I have just had (in bed), my best ideas all come to me in bed, and as I start to note it down, shivering with cold at my desk because I couldn’t take the time to wrap myself in a blanket, the idea is dissipated, it’s gone, no use asking myself what became of it, it’s irrecoverable, gone, I know I had an idea, a good idea, a prime, extraordinary idea, but it’s lost now. It happened to him over and over again: he would have an idea, unquestionably a good idea, perhaps not an epoch-making idea, but those are best discarded at once, because in fact there is no such thing, those so-called epoch-making ideas are all phony, he said, what he had was a useful idea, but in the very act of noting down this useful, practical idea, it gets lost. You could call this whole thing a farce, of course; everything is farcical, if you like, to call it a farce is a way of keeping oneself on the move, getting on with this whole evolutionary farce and one’s role in it, why not, but it did of course keep getting harder to do, after one’s sixtieth year it required an enormous effort to catapult oneself through this farce day by day, moment by moment, the effort became a torment, because it was the most insincere, most unnatural effort-against-the-grain, he said: While losing the idea in the midst of noting it down, I say to myself, I’ll just throw this bescribbled slip of paper away, into the waste basket with it. At his age he had begun to regret all those feeble ideas, he did not scruple to call them feebleminded ideas he had lost in the act of trying to note them down, and that had vanished in their thousands as so-called incipient but lost ideas in his waste basket. What an idea! he had thought, and What a miserable blank was what he noted down. Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words were bringing everything down, Konrad said. Depression derives from words, nothing else. To Fro, three years ago: I looked up at the ceiling, and lo and behold, the quiet that suddenly filled the whole lime works had momentarily ceased to be the sinister quiet I had become accustomed to through the years; suddenly it was a comforting quiet: not a person, not a sound, how blissful! instead of: not a person, not a sound, how terrible! It was comforting, one of those rare times when one feels that suddenly everything is possible again, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. Suddenly everything was evolving out of me, and I was evolving everything, I was the possessor of possibility, capacity. Of course I did my best to hang on to this state of mind for as long as possible, but it didn’t last, the unquestioning assurance of earlier times; just now recaptured, was gone as suddenly as it came, the ideal constellation, ideal construction of the mechanism of revulsion had turned into its opposite. How easy it was once for my brain to enter into a thought, my brain was fearless then, while nowadays my brain is afraid of every thought, it enters a thought only when relentlessly bullied into it, whereupon it instantly conks out, in self-defense. First: a natural marshaling of all one’s forces, possible in youth, Konrad is supposed to have said, then, in old age, which is suddenly all there is, the unnatural marshaling of all impossible forces. While I was not defenseless when entering into my thoughts, in earlier times, nowadays I enter into my thoughts defenselessly, unprotected though heavily armed, whereas in earlier times I entered into my thoughts totally unarmed and yet not defenseless. These days his brain and his head were preoccupied and timid compared with former times when they were neither preoccupied nor at all timid, now they were timid in every respect, every possible or impossible manifestation, and so timid a brain must unquestionably withdraw from so timid a head as his, so timid a brain and so timid a head had to withdraw from the world, and yet it was a fact that head and brain, or rather brain and head could withdraw from the world only into the world, and so forth. You could, in fact, withdraw everything from everything and again into everything, meaning that you could not withdraw at all, and so forth. This resulted in a constant state of moral despair. You could try to circumvent nature by every conceivable means, every trick you could think of, only to find yourself in the end face to face with nature. There was no escape, but on the other hand, there was no real mystery in this, either, because the head, meaning the brain inside the head, no matter how high it holds itself, is only the height of incompetence, inseparable from the piece of nature it heads up, so to speak, which it cannot really control, and so forth. Some people whom the world da
res to call philosophers—a classification that constitutes a public menace—even try bribery, Konrad said to Fro, who bought the new life policy from me yesterday. Nothing is ever mastered, everything is misused. And so: this quiet that suddenly reigned again in the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro at one time, this quiet, a false quiet as I explained to you before, because it cannot be real, so that there can be no real quiet in the lime works, and therefore no real quiet in him, Konrad; in any case, this false quiet, for which he had no actual explanation, did make it possible for him even in his old age to approach ideas, from time to time, ideas no longer rightfully his, because they were the ideas of youth, so that in his case they could not be real ideas, as he allegedly expressed it. At such times he would be lying on his bed, listening, but hearing not a person, not a sound, nothing. At such moments he would believe that it was now possible for him to sit down at his desk and begin to write his book, and so he would sit down at his desk, but even while he felt he could now begin, he could not begin. It set him back whole decades, because what he experienced was a total setback in every respect in one single moment. This book of his would not be a long one, he is supposed to have said to Fro, not at all, it might even be the shortest book ever written, but it was the hardest of all to write. It might be only a question of the beginning, what words to begin with, and so forth. Perhaps it was a question of the right moment when to begin, as everything is a question of the right moment. He had been waiting for the right moment for months, for years, for decades, in fact; but because he was waiting for it, watching for it, the moment would not come. Although he understood this quite clearly, he nevertheless kept waiting for his moment, because even when I am not waiting for this moment, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I nevertheless am waiting for this moment, still waiting for it, even now, regardless of whether I am waiting for it or not, I keep wearing myself out waiting, which is probably my real trouble. While waiting, he kept refining his points, he said, incessantly altering details, and by his endless alterations, refinements, unyielding preoccupation, unyielding experiments in preparation for writing, he made the writing impossible. A book one had completely in one’s head was probably the kind one couldn’t write down, he is supposed to have said to Fro, just as one cannot write down a symphony one has entirely in one’s head, and he did have his book entirely in his head. But he was not going to give up, he said, the book probably has to fall apart in my head before I can suddenly write it all down, he is supposed to have said to Fro, it has to be all gone, so that it can suddenly be back in its entirety, from one moment to the next. Encounter IV: With regard to his stay in Brussels of about twenty-two years ago, at which time he had briefly placed his wife in a clinic in Leeuwen, Konrad said the following, not quite but almost word for word: When I can no longer stand it in my room, because I can neither think nor write nor read nor sleep and because I can no longer do anything, not even pace the floor in my room, I mean that I am afraid that if I suddenly resume pacing the floor in my room, after having already paced the floor in my room for such a long time, even this resumption of pacing the floor will be made impossible for me because someone will knock, and because of this fear, it actually does become impossible for me to pace the floor. They knock because I am disturbing them, because my pacing the floor is disturbing someone, they knock or they shout, which I find unbearable because I am afraid that they will soon knock again or shout again or knock and shout together … then I leave my room, because I can’t stand it there any longer, and go down to the third floor and knock at the professor’s door … I knock and wait for the professor to answer the door, I stand there and wait for the professor to invite me in … and as I stand there waiting I think how cold it is, I am freezing, I don’t know whether it is eleven or twelve or one o’clock in the morning … my incessant pacing of the floor in my room has left me in a state of near unconsciousness, I keep waiting, thinking all this, every time I am standing at the professorial door, waiting to hear the professor say “Come in!” or: “The door isn’t locked!” and then I open the door and go in, I see the professor sitting at his desk … and so I wait, but I hear nothing. Nothing. I knock again. Nothing. I go on waiting and knocking until at last I decide that I ought to turn around and go back to my room, because the professor will not open his door, not today … he opened it yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that, too, he opened his door to me every day last week, every time I knocked he opened the door … but today, I start to worry, the professor won’t open up … I knock, and knock again, and listen, and hear nothing. Is the professor out? Or is he in, but out of earshot, perhaps? Could he have gone to the country again? How often the professor takes a ride out into the country, I say to myself, off he goes, unexpectedly, to the country. To all those hundreds of relatives, I guess. Suppose I were to knock a little louder? I think. Louder still? But I’ve already knocked twice or three times as loudly as before … Knock again! I say to myself. Knock again! By this time I am knocking as loudly as possible, everyone in the house must have been able to hear me, because I keep knocking more loudly than ever, and still more loudly! Someone must have heard me by now … these people all have sensitive ears, the most sensitive hearing of all … but I knock just once more, the loudest ever, and I listen, and I hear the professor, he is walking toward the door and opening it, though he opens it only half way, and I say: I hope I’m not disturbing you, though I know it’s late, but I do hope I am not disturbing you … I see now that the professor has been immersed in his work … My morphology! he says, according to Konrad, My morphology! and I say to him, Konrad says, if I am disturbing you I shall go back to my room immediately. But! I say, and the professor says: My morphology! and meanwhile I am wondering, says Konrad, why the professor has opened the door only halfway? only wide enough, in fact, so that he can stick his head out to talk to me, but not to let me inside … But listen to me, I said to him, says Konrad, if I am disturbing you I shall go back to my room at once. If I am disturbing you … at this point I see, says Konrad, that the professor is already undressed, quite naked, in fact, under his dressing gown, I can see it, and I say: You’re already undressed for the night, I see! then I must be disturbing you, and if so I shall instantly go back to my room! you need only say the word, that you do not wish to be disturbed this late … but if you wouldn’t mind, if I may just once more, I would like to come in to see you for just a few moments, I say to him, I shall leave right away, I don’t even have any idea what time it is, I tell him, I’ve been pacing the floor in my room all this time, with this problem of mine, I’m afraid I’m going crazy … as you know, my dear professor, I haven’t been working for days now, I can’t write at all, not a line, not an idea, nothing … again and again it seems to me, stop, here’s an idea, but no, in reality there’s nothing, I tell him … and so I go about all day long, obsessed with the thought that I can’t think, as I walk back and forth in my room, actually thinking the whole time that I haven’t an idea, not one single idea … because in fact I haven’t had an idea for the longest time, I say … and I wait, and pace the floor, but what I am waiting for is only you, all day long I wait for you to come home … Today you came home two hours later than usual, I tell him, yesterday it was one and a half hours later than usual, actually it was two and a half hours later than usual today … I hear you because my hearing gets keener from one day to the next, I can hear you when you are still out on the street, when you turn the key in the lock of the front door, and when you lock the door on the inside, then I hear you entering the vestibule, all day long I wait for you to enter the vestibule … Today you must have done your shopping, your errands, you probably paid your bills, went to the post office … once you are inside the vestibule, I anticipate your unlocking the door to your apartment, and when you have unlocked your door, I imagine you entering your room, taking off your coat, your shoes, then you sit down at your desk, perhaps … then you take a bite to eat, begin to write a letter perhaps,
a letter to your daughter who lives in France, to your son who lives in Rattenberg … or a business letter … or else you are working on your morphology, perhaps … I seem to hear with increasing keenness how you turn the key in the lock—lately you have been unlocking the door much faster than formerly, in the beginning—then you walk quickly into your room, you pull off your coat … then I imagine you considering whether to lie down on the bed or not, whether to lie down in your clothes or not, lie on the bed without taking off your shoes, perhaps, or else not to lie down on your bed before you go back to your work on your morphology, to lie down … then, when you lie down on your bed, when you have lain down on your bed, you realize the senselessness of your work and the senselessness of your existence … I imagine that this realization of the senselessness of everything must come to you … that you have to earn your living so miserably, to continue your research so miserably, that everyone must earn his living so miserably, must continue his research so miserably … in such growing misery, you are thinking … and that you have no one in the world, after all, Konrad is supposed to have said to the professor … that, whether you sit down at your desk or not, lie down on the bed or not, you are bound to realize the whole extent of your misfortune in life, a misfortune that seems greater every time you think about it … At this point the professor admits Konrad into the room … and, says Konrad, I go straight to his bed and I say to him, I see that your bed is already made, you have made your bed already, you evidently intended to go to bed already, or perhaps you have already been to bed? and I say to him, please don’t let me get in the way, do lie down if you feel like it, all I want is to pace the floor a bit in your room; as you know, I can no longer do it in my own room … when I pace the floor in my room, I tell him, it seems to me that everyone in the house can hear me doing it, just as you know, I am sure, when I am reading in my room, that I am reading in my room, and when I am thinking in my room, you know that I am thinking in my room, you know that I am writing when I am writing in my room, you know that I am in bed when I am in bed … I believe that all the people in the house know what I am doing … because, you know, these people know it when I am thinking, when I am thinking about my book in my room … which makes it impossible for me to do any thinking in my room, impossible to think about my book in my room, which is why I have been such a mental blank for such a long time now … and if it is impossible for me to think in my room, imagine how terrible it is for me to have to formulate a letter in my room … as a result of all this I have been unable to read for the longest time now, unable to think at all … but in your room, I said, I can still pace the floor … I can walk back and forth in your room, and relax … little by little, and after a while I can relax more deeply, I tell him, and then I can go back to my room … you see, I tell him, I am relaxing already, my whole body is relaxed now, and this relaxation slowly goes to my brain as well; when I relax in your room it is a simultaneous relaxation of body and brain … actually, I tell him, I need merely enter your room and I feel relaxed already … Isn’t it strange? considering that it has become quite impossible for me to look up anybody, ever … but I set foot in your room, and instantly I feel relaxed … Today, I tell him, you came home so late, those silly errands of yours … all those silly letters you get day after day and have to answer day after day, all your silly people … I get no letters and I answer no letters … and those repulsive colleagues of ours that you have to put up with at your university, that you have had to put up with all these years … all the annoyances that prevent you from coming home earlier … then, as you are turning the key in the lock, I tell him, each time you do it I feel you are saving me from this frightful situation, I tell him, because you know, I always feel as if I were going to suffocate, I tell him … as if I am bound to end my life by suffocating, to suffocate in the end, how grotesque to have to end in suffocation … simply because you had a few extra errands this day, and came home too late … and by the time you got to your room, I would have long since suffocated, Konrad said to the professor, actually I expect every day at the same time that I will suffocate, here I am, suffocating, I tell myself, choking on an absurdity, because you are out, as it might be, as it certainly could turn out, on one of your errands, perhaps taking the long way home, or paying an unusually extended visit to your aunt or something … but then I hear your step outside, I hear you turning the key in the lock … and I say to myself, now I can relax; you can see for yourself how much more relaxed I am since you let me into your room, I tell him, but I do hope I am not disturbing you, I think I have disturbed you often enough already, Konrad said to the professor, but if I have to be alone one more moment, he said, I always feel ready to suffocate … and then I hear you … What a lovely miniature you have here, on your wall, I tell him, I’ve never noticed these lovely miniatures before … and then I hear you unlocking your apartment door, and locking it again, and I hear you lying down on your bed and sitting down at your desk and getting up again from your desk … and then I pace the floor in my room a hundred times, back and forth, again and again, and I say to myself: now you can go down to the professor’s, at last, and then: no, not yet, not yet! no, not yet! then again, go ahead now, go down, quickly now, this minute … the indecision drives me nearly crazy, this incessant do-I-go-or-don’t-I, might I, but perhaps not … then I think: now! now I can! and in this way an hour has gone by, and I say to myself, but what if the professor is busy with his morphology … you were, in fact, busy with your morphology just now, I tell him, says Konrad, but you were too tired to work, too … you are too tired, I say to him … yet how busy! I say, and I walk over to his desk and I see that the professor has been busy working on his morphology … while I spent an hour wondering whether or not to go down to see him … Well, if I am disturbing you … do tell me if I am disturbing you … you must say that I am disturbing you, if I am disturbing you … that of course I am disturbing you, that I have been disturbing you for some time; I tell him, Konrad says: All these years I have been disturbing you … all these years I have been living in the same house with you … of course I am a harassment to you! … but you see, I tell him, says Konrad, I have been waiting for two hours, four hours, six hours, eight hours … and still I don’t go down to see you … here you are, I say to myself, waiting all this time, and still not going down to see him! … and then of course I do go down and knock on your door, I go on interminably knocking on your door until you open it and let me in … and let me pace the floor in your room, so that I can gradually begin to relax … and I do relax, and I say: Possibly tonight I shall finally make a bit of headway with my book, even if it’s only the least bit … possibly, I say, but I do say this to myself day after day, every day, I say to myself that today, when the professor gets home, you will go down to him and pace the floor in his room and then you will go back to your own room and get going on writing your book … it is exactly what I still say to myself, as you know, Fro, to this day, that now, I always say to myself, now, this time, I shall begin at last to write my book down … and to the professor I say, Konrad reported, if only I’m not disturbing you … if only I didn’t know how easily people are disturbed, a man who needs his peace, a man like yourself, professor, a man like myself, professor, … whom people disturb when he is longing only to be left alone … but unlike myself, who can no longer stand being alone, I say to the professor, you do want to be alone, and what’s so strange about this is that you have become so old being the way you are, but you do want to be alone, because of course you have to be alone … and you always do tell me when I come in to see you that you want to be alone, I say to him, says Konrad, you tell me that you must be alone, and even when you do not say it, even when it is not you who says it, even when you say nothing at all, I can hear it, I hear you saying that you want to be alone … my dear professor, I tell him, I shall leave you now, I am quite relaxed, it is altogether thanks to you that I have been able to calm myself like this … though probably even you will soon be unable to
help me relax, just as my wife can no longer help me to relax, nobody, nothing can help me, I tell him … thank you, thank you, I say, walking to the door, the professor opens it for me, and I tell him that I did not intend, certainly did not mean to disturb you and I turn around and I hear the professor going back inside his room … how quickly I got back to my own room, I think, it’s astonishing, and I sit down at my desk and get ready to write, but I can’t begin to write … I must be able to write, I think, but I can’t write … and I get up and pace the floor in my room, on and on, just as I do here at the lime works … an unfortunate natural predisposition is what makes me pace the floor in my room all night long, all night and in the morning, when the professor has long since left the house, I keep on pacing back and forth, and I feel afraid of this pacing back and forth, as I still feel afraid of it today, just as I felt afraid of it all that time ago in Brussels, I still fear this pacing back and forth today in the lime works and I pace back and forth and I walk and wait and think, I wait and walk and walk and walk … and walk … To Fro: Konrad said that he and his wife preferred to spend the entire morning, in that unsurpassable, deadly togetherness of theirs, deadly from the moment it began, in mulling over the menu, viz., what Hoeller should bring them to eat from the tavern, Konrad being either too busy with his stepped-up experimental work to go, or too exhausted physically by his work: should they have a meat course or a pasta; or perhaps neither meat nor pasta but fish, instead? and what about soup and a salad as well, both of them prized a salad beyond anything, and he would rather, said Konrad to Fro, do without meat or fish and even without soup, in fact, but, if at all possible, he did not wish to do without a salad, so they went on for hours mulling over such questions as whether Hoeller would be taking twenty or thirty or even forty minutes to bring the food from the tavern to the lime works, and it was heartbreaking (Fro) how much time and energy they would give to guessing at the possibility that Hoeller might be unusually late, impermissibly late, that is, as a result of running into someone on the way and dawdling over a conversation, instead of Konrad concentrating, as he should, all his available forces upon getting his book written; he would welcome any distraction at all, nothing was too absurd or too trivial or too insignificant to serve as a distraction from his work, his writing, even though he would awaken in the mornings smothered in a horrible miasma of conscience trouble that positively tasted like brain rot and pressed painfully against the back of his head, at the mere thought of writing his book, in fact, he no longer thought of his writing, he is supposed to have told Fro, because as time went on this thought had become the most excruciating torture to him, though he was nevertheless in any case confronted with the problem of how to go about writing his book, regardless of what he was thinking or doing or considering, anything whatever was inescapably connected with his book, with getting it written, darkening his defenseless head with shame (he never explained to Fro in what way shame entered into it). Shall we have sauerkraut or potatoes, or will they have meringues today or even those fluffy beef roulades they both loved so much, and what about apple crumb cake or apple strudel or possibly pot strudel? or bacon-dumplings or pickled meat or spleen soup if not baked-noodle soup, or boiled beef with horseradish, perhaps? on the other hand, there might be a well-aged venison with cranberry sauce; they wondered at length whether Hoeller might bring them news, political or farming or social news from the tavern, news of a death or a wedding, a baptism, a crime, and how, where, and when something might have happened that even two well-traveled people like themselves might regard as sensational, something that had been kept secret for a long time but could no longer be kept secret, and to what extent the work on the roads had progressed, as well as the so-called shore improvements and the damming of the mountain streams, how cold the lake was, how dark the woods, how dangerous the precipice, whether people were talking about Mrs. Konrad and what they were saying, at the tavern, at the sawmill, in the village, whether the rumors about themselves were still making the rounds (works inspector), just how much people really knew about the Konrads’ affairs, or really did not know, how they felt about Konrad’s not having set foot in the village in such a long time, about his not being seen in the woods for such a long time, or in the sawmill, the tavern, at the bank; whether the market had drawn a good crowd last market-day or not, what people were saying about the new church bells, whether the cost of funerals had gone up, whether the new members of the government had taken hold, whether the deer and the chamois were fewer this year, whether things represented as true were indeed true, whether things that had seemed to be true for years had turned out to be untrue, whether things that had seemed to be in doubt had cleared up, all this and more they wondered about, says Fro, and they kept thinking up more questions, more things worth looking into, for hours on end, distracting themselves with all this nonsense (Fro) so that he could forget about his book, and she about her disease, her crippled condition. It is alleged that they put it to a vote as to which of their favorite two books he should be reading to her as a reward for subjecting herself to his experimentation with the Urbanchich method, for decades now they had always filled the breaks between exercises by his reading aloud to her, either the Kropotkin memoirs, that is, his book, as in recent weeks, or the Novalis novel, her book; of course he read to her from her book if she wished it, incidentally the book that had been her declared favorite all her life, and he did read it to her for weeks on end, again and again, but he also read her his admired Kropotkin, against her will and despite her resistance, she had at first refused to listen when he read the Kropotkin aloud, but he paid no attention to her obstructionist tactics vis-a-vis Kropotkin, and by ruthlessly persisting in reading the Kropotkin to her in a loud voice week after week and then day after day he had prevailed against her, although she insisted to the very end on her instinctive dislike for this Russian book, not that she still hated it as in the beginning but she never ceased to feel mistrustful toward it. Actually Konrad believed that despite her constant grumbling he had converted her to the Kropotkin long ago, by persuasion so artfully and tirelessly applied that she hardly noticed it. They spent whole days bargaining, Wieser says, trading an hour of Kropotkin for an hour of Novalis, two hours of Kropotkin for one and a half of Novalis, or no Novalis for no Kropotkin, or a chapter of Kropotkin for one or two chapters of Novalis, etc., in which bargaining process Mrs. Konrad was naturally always at a disadvantage, according to Wieser. Basically it was always Konrad who decided what was to be read aloud. Every reading ended with a discussion of the text he had just read, conducted of course by Konrad, says Wieser, never by his wife. Now and then they would, for instance, try to relate Kropotkin to Novalis, on the basis of the passage just read, in a purely scholarly way, nothing bellettristic, an analysis that would lead them to touch on all sorts of related matters, as Konrad is supposed to have expressed it to Wieser. The most interesting kind of reading to him was the kind that opened out in every direction, he did not say in every direction of the compass, exactly, but his special preference had always been for scientific books, thoughtful twentieth century nonfiction, or books like his Kropotkin, future-oriented books, in short, while her preference was always for the humane letters of the second half of the nineteenth century, naturally, said Wieser. He, Konrad, had always despised a reading not followed by discussion or debate, at least an effort to analyze the subject, or some such immediate commentary. Of course it had taken years of the most strenuous effort on his part to make his wife at least passably familiar with this attitude of his. But if a man had the necessary patience, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, he could in the end win over the most refractory opponent to the most refractory cause, by the sheer forcefulness of his honest, fanatically precise logic; ultimately even a person like his wife could be won over by this means. A man possesses from birth what a woman has to be taught, Konrad maintained, often by the most grueling, even desperate pedagogical methods, by the use of reason as a surgical instrument to save an otherwise
helplessly dissolving, hopelessly crumbling corpus of history and nature. It was decidedly possible to take a hollow head, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, or a head crammed with intellectual garbage, and transform it into a thinking or at least a rational head, if one had the courage to try. There would be no dolts in the world if intelligent people refused to tolerate doltishness. On the other hand, Konrad is supposed to have said immediately afterwards, in the end it was really quite senseless and useless to try, though one might think of something, still it would be useless, one might do something, but it would be done in vain, whether it was done or left undone, it was no use, whatever one thought or did was no use, so a rational man tended to leave things alone to develop however they would. The intelligence itself, the man himself, was oppositional by nature, Konrad said. One came to be a man by consciously taking the opposition, by daring to act in conscious opposition. A woman did not follow suit, because this was not her way, she tended to confront the man’s, or more precisely, her husband’s solitariness without comprehension or respect, mostly, even though to have respect required no special knowledge or cultivation of the mind, bogged down as she was in her stultified world of a vulgar subculture. Konrad’s wife, as he himself said to Wieser, at least deeply respected him, though with certain reservations, in every phase of their shared life, despite the inborn resistance she shared with all others of her sex against the so-called masculine element, i.e., specifically against her own husband. Wieser and Fro both describe the last afternoon they saw Konrad, each in his own way, their statements confirming each other, though from time to time Wieser will be contradicting Fro, Fro contradicting Wieser, yet they nevertheless end by confirming one another. Fro claims to have been with Konrad, about a week and a half before the sad end of Mrs. Konrad, in the so-called wood-paneled room, oddly enough there was a fire laid on in the so-called wood-paneled room that afternoon, Konrad was expecting a visit from the so-called forestry commissioner, for a consultation about the damming of the mountain streams behind the rock spur, the forestry commissioner was due at eleven A.M., but had not yet put in an appearance at the lime works at twelve nor even at one P.M., until finally a woodcutter from the sawmill had shown up with a message that the commissioner was unable to make it, and proposed another appointment for next week, to which Konrad agreed. He poured the woodcutter out a glass of brandy and sent him back with regards to the forestry commissioner. It was shortly after this that Fro arrived at the lime works where Konrad led him straight into the wood-paneled room which was warm because he had been heating it for two days straight in anticipation of the, forestry commissioner’s visit. But now the forestry commissioner is not coming, but you are here, what a rare opportunity for a chat, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, when this room is heated one notices for the first time what a good room it is for conversation, even though it is furnished with nothing better than these dreadful, tasteless few pieces, though they are comfortable, you will have to admit; Konrad and Fro then sat down together, Fro said, in the wood-paneled room, Konrad saying that for two days now he had made no effort to think about his book, which he had not yet begun to write, because of his expectation that the forestry commissioner would be arriving to talk about damming up the mountain streams behind the rock spur, so I was concentrating on that, Konrad said, I was concentrated on that one hundred percent and totally neglected my book, he said, knowing that he simply could not afford to neglect his book at all, but it was unavoidable, the forestry commissioner had insisted on seeing him, to refuse was impossible, a man like the forestry commissioner was after all a state official with so-called high authority and could simply enforce his will, he could command admission to the lime works, demand a consultation, etc. When their expectation of the forestry commissioner had been at its height, Konrad’s wife had also been wholly concentrated on the impending visit and had instructed Konrad on the reception to be accorded the forestry commissioner, viz., to have ready sliced ham, brandy, cider, etc., and she had put on a new dress, had gotten Konrad to comb her hair quite early in the day instead of as usual starting the day with their experiments using the Urbanchich method, she asked for a manicure, ordered a new tablecloth; in short, everything on them and in them had been intent upon the promised visit, but at the height of their expectation a woodcutter had arrived, bringing the forestry commissioner’s regrets, Konrad told Fro. Now that Fro was here, sitting in the wood-paneled room, the heating of the room and the other preparations of the forestry commissioner’s visit had not been wholly in vain, since Fro could now profit by the forestry commissioner’s failure to show up, and enjoy these excellent slices of ham and the rowanberry wine which Konrad kept in reserve for only special guests such as the forestry commissioner or the district supervisor or the chief of police, and, most of all, enjoy his visit with Konrad who, in expectation of his distinguished visitor, had banished all thought of his pressing work from his mind, and even Mrs. Konrad was in an unusually sociable frame of mind, almost cheerful, Fro says, because the forestry commissioner’s cancellation had apparently taken the two of them so much by surprise that there simply was no time for their disappointment to surface, indeed it had seemed to Fro that their inability to shift quickly enough from expectancy to disappointment had caused them simply to transfer their attentions to Fro, who had as unexpectedly appeared at the right moment, so that they simply received and treated Fro as though he were the forestry commissioner, as it were, Fro said, it was the first time in all these years that I was ever received by them so graciously, their cordiality untroubled by any shadow, in fact I was received and treated as the forestry commissioner was always received and treated in the Konrads’ home, said Fro. For years Fro was accustomed to being regarded as a so-called familiar visitor to the lime works, everything pointed to this being the case, and everyone knows how so-called familiar visitors are treated everywhere, but on that day, the last day he visited the lime works, the Konrads outdid themselves in graciousness, cordiality, even noblesse, as compared with previous visits. Fro recalled that Konrad had offered him the more comfortable of the two chairs in the wood-paneled room and not, as usual, the less comfortable one, that Konrad slipped the deerskin rug under his guest’s feet, a courtesy that quite stunned Fro, and that a glass of rowanberry brandy was offered him the moment he had set foot in the room, but before the two of them sat down in the wood-paneled room together, Konrad most politely escorted Fro upstairs to visit Mrs. Konrad on the second floor, making polite conversation all the way up the stairs, such as: My dear Fro, what a long time since you’ve been here, and how are your children? My dear Fro, have you rented your fishpond yet, and you know, my dear Fro, I don’t even know whether your daughter is married or not? and: My dear Fro, your visits to us here at the lime works are growing so rare, and: My dear Fro, if ever you should want to borrow a book from my library, consider it at your disposal, I do have an excellent library as you know, it contains the most beautiful editions of the best, the most famous, and most important books, first editions only, of course, and: My dear Fro, my wife is looking forward most particularly to seeing you, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you have come to see us, my wife still remembers with such gratitude your excellent advice regarding the bushes we imported from Switzerland, my wife’s home country, as you know, my dear fellow. Exactly as if I were the forestry commissioner, Fro reminisces, that’s how Mrs. Konrad received me, in a new dress and really putting herself out to be charming. She chatted with him for half an hour about Novalis and questioned him about Kropotkin, she actually wanted him to express adverse criticisms on Kropotkin, but Fro doesn’t know Kropotkin at all, though he was careful not to admit it to Mrs. Konrad, so he wisely confined himself to responding only with certainly, oh yes, or: no, oh no no, in reply to every remark of hers on the subject of Kropotkin’s memoirs, in unwavering agreement with whatever she was saying, Fro feels that the presence of Mrs. Konrad during his visits to the lime works always activated, made operational, the good manners h
e had been taught, his proper upbringing which meant knowing always when to insert a yes, indeed or a oh no, certainly not in all the right places, a knack that would see anyone through hours of polite conversation. The Konrad woman had seemed remarkably relaxed that afternoon, when she somehow kept in check the chronic restlessness of every part of her body, so apparent at all other times, concealing it on this occasion by an unparalleled mental and emotional effort (Fro, verbatim). She ended by saying, Do come again, my dear Fro, we are always so glad to see you, after which Fro went back to the wood-paneled room on the ground floor with Konrad. Going down the stairs, Konrad continued pouring out civilities in the style originally meant for the forestry commissioner. My dear Fro, Konrad is supposed to have said on the stairs from the second to the first floor, to see a man like yourself at the lime works is always a pleasure, and, he added, on the way from the first to the ground floor, when a man like you arrives, somehow it clarifies things, all the pieces fall into place. Once seated inside the wood-paneled room they chatted about everything, on and on for three hours, sipping schnapps, nibbling ham. You see, Konrad said (as reported by Fro), her family blames me for our gradual deterioration, as they have the insolence to put it, and as they have the unquestionable right to put it, too, they say that my wife’s life and mine together are turning into a catastrophe. On the other hand, my family, excepting myself that is, Konrad said to Fro, all the other members of my family, which has sunk from the heights of a so-called classic traditional family of means to the level of a negligible family, a family of no significance, they all blame her. My side blames everything on her sickness, on her being a cripple, while her side blames me for it all, they blame it on the way my head works, on my book. In the end both sides may come to agree, Konrad said to Fro, that all of our misery can be laid to the book, so that ultimately it’s the sense of hearing that bears the whole responsibility. People are always looking for a simple basic cause behind a lot of chaotic circumstances, or strange circumstances, or in any case extraordinary circumstances, it’s natural to look for a basic cause, and it’s equally natural to grasp at the most obvious, the most superficial factor involved, the one that is easily recognizable as the most superficial factor even to an inferior intelligence, and so in our case, my dear Fro, they have seized on my book as the basic cause of what everybody agrees to consider the catastrophe leading to the inevitable complete disintegration of my wife. One’s fellow men, including of course one’s neighbors, one’s nearest and dearest, etc., tend to overestimate precisely that which is least estimable, or deserves to be regarded with the most disdain such as, for instance, the members of one’s own family, etc., even those held in the lowest esteem are still rated too highly, one tends to overestimate persons to whom one has happened to give authority over oneself, though in fact one is most likely to have delivered oneself into the hands of the lowest human element there is. In fact, every time you take your fate into your own hands you have handed yourself over to the lowest kind of human being, but this is a kind of truth no one can face up to day after day, as he should, because if he did, he would simply have to give up, give in, fall into total despair, shamefully fall to pieces, dissolve into nothing. There are plenty of people who think they can save themselves by filling up their heads with fantasies, Konrad said to Fro, but no one can be saved, which means that no head can be saved, because where there is a head, it is already irredeemably lost, there are in fact none but lost heads on none but lost bodies populating none but lost continents, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. But to tell this kind of truth to my wife is exactly like talking to a rock that has taken millions of years to go deaf. I grant you that to be unable to put your finger on the real cause of all our troubles is a torment even to a man with a complete idiot of a wife around his neck, a lifelong torment if you like, but the real cause can never be found, whatever cause you think you can spot will turn out to be a fake, all of our contemporary so-called scientific research into what causes what, all of it misapplied because it is misunderstood, inevitably comes up with nothing but fake causes, because it is in fact possible to understand the whole world, or what we believe to be the whole world, or what we think we recognize as the world on a day-to-day basis, as the result of nothing but fake causes arrived at by fake research. You could waste decades of your life trying to get the better of this self-perpetuating duplicity, but all you would get out of that was to grow old, that was all, to go under, that was all. Suppose you make a statement, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, only one sentence, say, no matter what it is, and suppose this sentence is a quotation from one of our major writers, or even one of our greatest writers, all you would succeed in doing is to besmirch, to pollute that sentence, simply by failing to exercise the self-control it would take not to pronounce that sentence at all, to say nothing at all, you would be polluting it, and once you start polluting things, the chances are you will see everywhere you look, everywhere you go, nothing but other polluters, a whole world of polluters going into the millions, or, more precisely, into the billions, is at work everywhere, it is enough to shock a man out of his mind, if he will let himself be shocked, but people no longer let themselves be shocked, this is in fact precisely what characterizes the man of today, that he refuses to be shocked by anything at all. Distress has become transformed into hypocrisy, distress is hypocrisy, the great movers and shakers of mankind, for instance, were merely even greater hypocrites than most people. Since we have nothing but polluters in the world, the world is polluted through and through. The vulgar will always remain the vulgar, and so forth. Konrad went on to say that people no longer took risks, they were cowards, every one of them, and so forth. Facing consequences was a thing of the past, nobody and nothing was consistent any more, which made everyone extremely vulnerable, and so forth. An animal was mistrustful in advance, which is how you distinguished an animal from a man, and so forth. Konrad himself, he said to Fro, had with his wife withdrawn altogether from society, which had become long since only a so-called society, one fine day they had simply withdrawn themselves from society by an act of philosophical-metaphysical violence, and so forth. A constant lack of human company, however, was as deadening as a constant immersion in company, and so forth. But what if you sat down to dinner, suddenly, with the family of a bricklayer, for instance, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, like me sitting down to dinner with Hoeller, say, Konrad is supposed to have said, forcing him (and myself) to think, merely to think, that it was natural, that it was where I belonged; and what if I perpetrated this swindle in full awareness of what I was doing, and so forth? His wife was, in fact, still keeping in touch, decades after her sickness had forced her to withdraw from society, with that same society, despite the fact that she has been parted from society for decades by the lime works, by Konrad himself, by his concentration on his book, and on her own part by her crippled condition, her invalid chair, all because the doctors are incompetent, she nevertheless keeps in touch with people, most devotedly and intimately in touch, to a degree that more than approaches perversity but actually uses perversity as a ruthless means to the end of keeping in touch, of clinging to society body and soul, Konrad said to Fro, at the same time that I keep telling myself, in every way I can, that society is nothing, that my work is everything, my wife insists that my work is nothing and society is everything. While he based his very existence on the fact that society was nothing, while his work was everything, she quite instinctively drew her being from the fact that his work was nothing, society was everything, and so forth. Given his being of sound mind and in possession of the necessary means, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, he would first of all and instantly open all the prison gates and so forth. Furthermore: religion was a clumsy attempt to subject humanity, a mass of pure chaos, to one’s will, and: when the Church spoke, it spoke as a salesman; listening to a cardinal we seem to be listening to a traveling salesman’s pitch, and so forth. On the other hand we all had a tendency to think we had alread
y heard everything, seen everything, done everything already, come to terms with everything already, but in fact it was a process that repeated itself on and on into the future, which future was a lie, and so forth. The greatest crime of all was to invent something, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. To resume: the future belonged to no one and to nothing. People kept coming around to weep on your shoulder, about their children, about their scruples, about this that and the other thing they were suffering though they had done nothing to deserve it and so forth. Maybe so, but the trouble was that for having children, for having scruples, for suffering, they expected to be compensated, and so forth. Society might pay compensation, but nature did not pay compensation. Society was setting itself up as a sort of surrogate nature, and so forth. Then: he read in the paper that Hager, the butcher, had died. Only a week ago Hager had personally brought the Konrads fresh sausages all the way to the lime works, in an old carryall of a kind it was a pity they were no longer making; it was so immensely practical. When Konrad finished reading the item about the butcher’s death he went up to his wife’s room, knocked on her door, waited for her Yes? then he walked in and told her: Hager, the butcher, is dead. Then she said: Well, so Hager, the butcher, died after all! a statement on her part that Konrad is supposed to have told Fro was deeper than met the eye, it was well worth a scientific study in depth. Two days later Konrad went up again to tell her that he had just read in the paper about the tobacconist, who had doused himself in gasoline, struck a match, and so incinerated himself, whereupon Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have said: Aha, so the tobacconist doused himself in gasoline, did he? and again Konrad felt that her comment was highly interesting, it was not the death of the tobacconist that was of scientific interest but Mrs. Konrad’s statement in response to the information that the tobacconist had doused himself in gasoline, struck a match, and so incinerated himself. Prior to doing it he had willed everything he owned, cash, merchandise, including not only the tobacconist’s specialties but stationery, piles of pencil boxes, carnival masks, etc., to his, the tobacconist’s, wife. Mrs. Konrad commented that naturally the tobacconist willed everything to his wife; again, material for investigation, you see, Konrad said to Fro in the wood-paneled room, Fro says. It took the fire brigade an hour to put out the fire, Konrad is supposed to have said to his wife, by which time there was nothing left of the tobacconist but ashes, and those firemen really made a shambles of the whole shop, whereupon Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have said: Those firemen make a shambles of the tobacco shop and ruin more than they save. About this remark of his wife’s Konrad said he would like to write a book. Don’t you see, Fro, he said, women are always saying this kind of thing, and if I were not so concentrated on my study of the auditory sense, I would not scruple to write a book about “Noteworthy Statements By My Wife In Response To Domestic Trivia Of Conversation.” The Konrads had loved the good-natured butcher and they had hated the malicious tobacconist, as Konrad allegedly reminded his wife, whereupon Mrs. Konrad said: Nihilist! and Konrad instantly realized that the word Nihilist! could have been aimed only at the tobacconist. The tobacconist had done his wife in by slowly strangling her, until he finally strangled her to death, Konrad is supposed to have told his wife, who said: Mutual dependence drives people apart, one way or the other. For the longest time Konrad and his wife had exchanged only the most laconic remarks, Fro says, they barely spoke except to say the absolutely necessary, in the fewest possible words, as Konrad is supposed to have told Fro once, for ages there had been no so-called exchange of ideas between them at all, only words, and now, after all that has happened, Fro says, the chances are that in communicating only by way of the limited range of daily commonplaces and formulas of daily necessity they were communicating nothing except their mutual hatred. Fro says that certainly in the final weeks, but possibly in the final months of their life together, verbal exchanges between Konrad and his wife had dwindled down to an absurd minimum; for instance, according to Konrad, his wife had for a long time spoken to him about a pair of mittens she was making for Konrad, she had been working on this one pair of mittens for six months, because she unraveled each mitten just before she had finished knitting it, or she might finish it completely and then suddenly insist that it was the wrong color, that she must have wool of another color for his mittens, and when she had gotten him to agree would unravel the finished mitten and start knitting a brand new one, in a new color or shade and so forth, every few days or weeks, depending upon how much of her time or his time or the time of both was taken up with the Urbanchich exercises, there she’d be, knitting a new mitten in a new color, each choice of color in worse taste than the preceding choice, her preference running to every possible shade of ugly green, until Konrad came to loathe those mittens, in fact he came to loathe her knitting as such, her constant preoccupation with her knitting, but he never let on how much he hated it, according to Fro: hypocrite that I had to become because of her endless knitting and her incessant preoccupation with her knitting, he is supposed to have told Fro, I pretended that I was pleased with her knitting and that I was pleased with the mittens, consequently, no matter what color the wool was, I like these mittens, Konrad is supposed to have said over and over to his wife, nevertheless his wife would suddenly say, every time she had finished one of those mittens, she would declare suddenly that she must unravel it, it was the wrong color, she must have new wool in the right shade, after all she had the time, and while she was saying all this she had already begun to unravel the finished mitten, the mere thought of her these days brought on a vision of her unraveling a mitten, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, that unpleasant smell of unraveled wool was permanently in his nose by now, even in his sleep, Konrad told Fro, in the kind of nervous waking-sleep characteristic of his last weeks in the lime works, he would hallucinate his wife unraveling mittens, imagine what it’s like, he said to Fro, considering that there is nothing in the world I hate more than I hate mittens. All his life long he had hated mittens, beginning with his earliest childhood when they had hung his mittens on a yard-long cord around his neck, oh how he hated them, it’s always mittens mittens mittens with her, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, no matter that I am concentrating on the Urbanchich method, concentrating on my book, on making a little headway with the method and the writing, she has nothing in her head but mittens, mittens she is knitting for me, even though I loathe mittens, imagine, my dear Fro, Konrad said, except for my earliest childhood I have never worn mittens in my life, I have tried telling her, I often said, but I never wear mittens, why do you have this mania about knitting mittens for me, I shall never wear them and yet here you are knitting away at them, he is supposed to have told her, just as she had formerly spent decades sewing nightgowns for the poor and for orphans, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, these last few years she had taken to knitting mittens, not, that is, hundreds of pairs of mittens but only the one pair of mittens, always the same pair, for her own husband, she knits them and unravels them and re-knits them and unravels them, she knits dark green mittens and bright green mittens, a pair of white mittens, a pair of black mittens, knits them and then unravels them again, Konrad said to Fro. She made him try on the same mitten hundreds of times, that terrible business of having to slip into the mitten, every time, he is supposed to have said, with her knitting needles dangling from her half-finished mitten, as he tried it on. This was not the only tic she had, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, there were also the Toblach sugar tongs she always kept asking for, an heirloom she had from her maternal grandmother, not a minute would go by but she would ask for them, give me the Toblach sugar tongs, she would say, without any visible reason, Konrad always got the tongs for her out of the table drawer, she asked for them several times a day but not, as one might suppose, only at such times when it seemed reasonable to ask for them, as for breakfast, perhaps, or when needed during meals, but at any time, suddenly when he was reading to her, for instance, especially when he was reading a favorite pa
ssage of Kropotkin to her, Konrad told Fro, that was the kind of time she chose to ask for the Toblach sugar tongs, when he handed them to her she placed them in front of her on the table, then after a while, when she hadn’t even touched her so-called Toblach sugar tongs, she is supposed to have told Konrad that he could put them back in the drawer. Konrad could have recounted a whole series of such peculiarities, he said, but he didn’t care to, such a recapitulation of his wife’s most extraordinary peculiarities would in all probability, and quite superfluously, he felt, lead to the most terrible misunderstandings; apart from which, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, he, Konrad, was himself afflicted with such peculiarities, little oddities of his own, I am quite conscious of these peculiarities of mine, Konrad is supposed to have said, I can assure you of that, my dear Fro, I might even say that I am hyperconscious, Konrad is supposed to have said. But after all, even you (Fro that is), Konrad is supposed to have said, freshening Fro’s schnapps, are not free of such peculiarities, oddities, even absurdities, we observe such things in every person we have anything at all to do with, in fact, but they trouble us only when the person involved is one with whom we live in close intimacy, so that we are forced to notice their tics repeatedly, so that these peculiarities become most unpleasant, terrible, nerve-wracking, even though the same peculiarity we find so unpleasant, so terrible, so catastrophically nerve-wracking and nerve-destroying in a person we live with we might find quite attractive, not at all terrible, not in the least irritating and so forth, in another person, someone outside our lives, a person we encounter not constantly but rarely. Actually, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, if it isn’t the mittens or the Toblach sugar tongs, then it is her pronunciation of the word unbridled or comical, a whole series of words my wife enunciates in the oddest way, she exploits the words as a way of exploiting the people around her. As for myself, Konrad is supposed to have said, I may feel suddenly compelled to walk over to the so-called chest we picked up in Southern India, open it, take out the Gorosabel rifle, slip off its safety catch and aim through the window at the extreme outcroppings of the rock spur; after holding my aim for two or three seconds I stop, put the rifle back into the chest we picked up in the South of India (a place near Moon Lake!) and lock up the chest, then I take a deep breath and my wife says behind my back: Did you take aim again at the extreme outcroppings of the rock spur? and I tell her, yes, I did take aim at the outermost point of the rock spur. Come, she says, sit down here with me, I think I have earned a chapter of my Novalis, and I actually do sit down and read her a chapter of her Novalis. When that is done, I say: and now, of course, a chapter of the Kropotkin. Right, she says. This has been our routine for years now, and not a movement, not a word more, not a movement, not a word less, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. One could say, of course, that this sort of thing puts us right next door to madness. His wife, too, was always reaching for her gun, the Mannlicher carbine fastened to the back of her chair, she had done it a hundred thousand times, Konrad told Fro, for no reason at all, pure habit, absolutely unnecessary, not even a safety exercise, or automatic reflex of any kind, that made her reach for her Mannlicher carbine, a weapon, incidentally, designed to be effective at short range only, at no more than fifteen or twenty yards, Konrad told Fro, as Fro remembered instantly when the so-called bloody deed became public knowledge. Mrs. Konrad is also alleged to have nagged her husband incessantly about his criminal record, while he countered with criticisms of her family, her family history being singularly rich, as Konrad told Fro, in every kind of morbidity and rottenness. Konrad’s previous convictions, says Fro, are so overshadowed by the enormities of his latest crime, unless you’d call it his unquestionably monstrous act of madness, that they no longer count. Basically, Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have said repeatedly to her husband, she was married not so much to a madman as to a criminal, Konrad told Fro in the wood-paneled room. Later Konrad is supposed to have said: My wife and I both know that we are done for, but we keep pretending, day after day, that we are not done for yet. They had in fact come to take a certain satisfaction in feeling that they were done for, there being nothing else left to take satisfaction in. We tell each other from time to time that we have reached the end, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, actually we do so several times a day, but even more often during our increasingly, even totally sleepless nights, relaxed in the knowledge that we say what we think, regardless of concern for a future we simply no longer have, we have at last stopped pretending, we can relax now, knowing the worst as we do, horrible as it unquestionably has been, my dear Fro, though others might see it differently, therefore act differently, therefore be treated differently, because they have always been treated differently, dear Fro, but for us the horror it has been will soon have ended, and we find it relaxing, to think that we shall soon have put it all behind us. Their coexistence (to Wieser: life together) had been all wrong from the beginning and yet, speaking man to man, which couple’s life is not all wrong, which marriage is not totally perverse, is not revealed, once it has come into being, as insincere and hateful, when even friendship is always based on a fallacy; where will you find two people living together who can honestly consider themselves happy or even intact? No, my dear Fro, the so-called shared life, regardless of who is involved, regardless of the persons, of their social position, origins, profession, turn and twist it as you like, remains as long as it lasts a forcible imposition, always painful by nature and yet, as we know, the most understandable, the most gruesome test-case of nature’s ways. But even the worst of torments can become a habit, Konrad said, and so those who live together, vegetate together, gradually become accustomed to living together, vegetating together, to their shared torment which they have brought upon themselves as nature’s way of subjecting her creatures to nature’s torments, and in the end they become accustomed to being accustomed to it. The so-called ideal life together is a lie, because there is no such thing, nor does anyone have a right to any such thing, whether one enters upon a marriage or upon a friendship, one is simply taking upon oneself, quite consciously, a condition of double despair, double exile, it is to move from the purgatory of loneliness into the hell of togetherness. Not even to mention their particular kind of togetherness. Because the double despair and double exile of two intelligent persons, two people capable of reasoning their way to a clear awareness of everything involved, is, if not always, at least temporarily, from time to time, a redoubled double despair and a redoubled double exile. She could not rise from her chair, so he had to help her up, she could not walk by herself, so he had to help her to walk, she could not do her own reading so he had to read to her, she could not relieve herself unaided, so he had to assist her with that, he had to help her to eat, and so forth. But if he, for his part, tried to tell her how overwhelmingly great the Kropotkin was, for instance, she did not understand, or how much his own book meant to him, she did not understand, or what he was thinking about, she did not understand. When he said: natural science is all there is, nothing else matters, she did not understand. When he said: politics is what counts, politics is the thing, she did not understand. If he said Pascal or Montaigne or Descartes or Dostoyevsky or Gregor Mendel or Wittgenstein or Francis Bacon, no matter who, she did not understand. When he spoke of his scientific research she would say, with her usual abruptness: You could certainly have become a distinguished scientist; or, when he talked about politics, she would say, you could certainly have become a leading political figure; when he tried to explain the importance of Francis Bacon, she would say: You could certainly have become a great artist. What she did not say, though he could read it in her face, was that he had become, instead of all that, nothing at all, a mere madman. But then, what is a madman? She simply did not believe what he tried to prove to her day after day, though he knew it could not be proved, namely, that he had perfected in his head a scientific work of fundamental importance. Of late he had become so desperate about this deadlock that he boldly called it an absolutely
epoch-making scientific work. But she only laughed and said: Whatever it is that you have in your head, I’d rather not see it; if your head could be tipped over to empty out its contents, what is likely to fall out is some ghastly mess or other, some indefinable, horrifying, utterly worthless kind of dung or rot. Your so-called book—this is how the Konrad woman dared to refer to her husband’s work-in-progress toward the end, knowing how weak he had grown—is really nothing more than a delusion. He had come to fear the very word delusion as a weapon she brandished several times a day, Konrad told Fro; she has the effrontery to say it right out, always waiting for the right moment to throw the word delusion at my head, the deadly moment whenever she thinks I have reached the point of utter defenselessness. To think that for twenty years I have believed in that delusion of yours! she is supposed to have said more than once on the very eve of the bloody deed, as they refer to it at Laska’s. It could have been the word delusion alone, Fro thinks, that brought Konrad to the point of pulling that trigger. But at Lanner’s there are some who maintain, quite to the contrary, that on the eve of the murder Konrad treated his wife more tenderly than he had in ages. At The Inglenook they say that Konrad had been planning the murder for a long time, while at the Stiegler they call it a sudden, unpremeditated, so-called impulse killing, but what if it is a case of common, premeditated murder, an opinion also represented at the Lanner, or, as they say at The Inglenook, the act of a madman, while at Laska’s there’s some speculation that Konrad had no intention at all of shooting his wife, that he had merely tried to clean the gun, which had not been cleaned for a long time, nor had it been fired for a long time, most probably, after months of disuse a gun is likely to get dusty, especially when kept in the open in a dusty room where all the wood is infested with hundreds of deathwatch beetles, and the carbine went off while he was cleaning the barrel; still, the fact that the bullet happened to enter the back of her head, or the nape of the neck, whichever, had to be more than a coincidence, they say at Laska’s, especially since at least two, maybe more, shots had been fired from the Mannlicher carbine, which was something to think about. At Lanner’s they even talk of five shots, while at the Stiegler they talk about four shots in all, two in the back of the head and two into the temples; Konrad himself has not uttered a word about it to this day to shed any further light on it, the word is that he is squatting in his cell at the Wels district jail, a completely broken man, and answers none of the hundreds of thousands of questions being put to him. Fro says that he ordered some shoes to be sent to Konrad in prison, at the same time that he actually wrote Konrad a letter expressing his hope that Konrad would let Fro have Konrad’s notes for the book, he offered to put back in order the stacks of notes that had been left scattered all over Konrad’s room after the police had searched the scene of the murder for days on end, leaving the place a shambles. Fro explained in his letter that he was the best man for the job of putting the notes in order because he was the only man—apart from Wieser, who was too overburdened with his work at the Trattner estate to concern himself with Konrad’s notes—the only man Konrad had taken into his confidence respecting the notes, more so than he had Wieser, toward whom Konrad felt a certain reserve, while Fro and Konrad had always been on the closest of terms (Fro!) and so Fro explained that he was sending shoes to Konrad with this request to authorize Fro to pick up Konrad’s notes for his book in the lime works, since the authorities had permitted access to Konrad’s room as long as eight days ago, even though the room of the murdered woman was still officially sealed, along with the whole second floor, unlike the first floor where Konrad’s room was situated, of course, and where Konrad’s notes for his book should be. Fro said that he believed these note slips, crazy or not, were of great interest, if not for the science of otology, as Fro puts it, then certainly they were of interest from a psychiatric point of view, says Fro (who speaks only of his own interest in the book itself when writing to Konrad in prison, emphasizing his respect for Konrad’s scientific work which he pretends to take very seriously indeed; but whenever he talks to me about it he always calls it the so-called book, a way of stabbing Konrad in the back, it seems to me), and this batch of notes for the so-called book, says Fro, is of the greatest interest to a lot of people, not for what it purports to be, but in another way, says Fro, and eventually they could turn out to be of quite serious consequence and of the greatest significance, depending entirely on which heads, which people, when and where. As soon as he could get his hands on these note slips he would put them in order and then pass them on to a psychologist friend of his in Gugging (Fro, verbatim), a native of Linz, though he, Fro, would keep it a secret from Konrad, of course, he knew he could trust me not to say anything about it to anyone; if the psychiatrist who was a friend of Fro’s found Konrad’s notes to be of genuine interest, then Fro could have them photocopied and put the originals back in Konrad’s room. For the moment he was still waiting, Fro said, for Konrad’s answer, he was prepared to wait because to get a letter from the district prison would certainly take at least ten times as long as from anywhere else, Fro says. Fro claims he is confident that Konrad will agree to allow him to pick up the notes for Konrad’s so-called book, because Konrad believes that Fro takes him quite seriously and is bound to feel that his notes could not be in better hands than Fro’s, and so forth. Incidentally Fro, to whom I explained his new life policy today in the last detail, though I do not have the impression that he will close the deal, he is much too cautious a man—Fro incidentally confirms Wieser’s story that Konrad dreamed about the murder a long time before he actually did it, it was about a year ago that Konrad told the following dream: Konrad dreamed that he had gotten up in the middle of the night, because of an idea that came to him for his book, and that he sat down at his desk and actually began to write it down, and by the time he had written about half of the book down he felt that he would succeed in getting down all of it, this time, that he would get it all down on paper in one sitting, so he kept at it and wrote on and on until it actually was all down on paper, all complete, finished; instantly his head dropped down on his desk in total exhaustion, as if he had fainted, but as his head lay there in near-coma on his completed manuscript on the desk, he was nevertheless observing himself in his unconscious state and observing everything else in the room, to sum up the situation: Konrad has actually been able to get his work down on paper, as he had so often imagined it, for decades on end, he had written it all in one sitting, suddenly, from one moment to the next, as he had always dreamed he would, but now that he has set down the final word on paper he has fainted dead away, fallen where he is, but observing himself in this unconscious state from every angle of his work room; it is the ideal moment, the ideal situation of his life, as for hours on end Konrad sees himself lying there unconscious in the full possession of his completed manuscript, having just finished the complete text and ended by writing on the title page, in his old-fashioned large calligraphic hand, The Sense of Hearing, his last act before his head dropped like a stone onto the title page he had just written, afterward seeing himself in this state from every possible angle, seeing the whole scene which he later described as the happiest of his life, though in fact it is unquestionably the unhappiest, basically, of his life, and then suddenly, abruptly, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, the door opened and Konrad’s wife walked in, this crippled woman chained to her invalid chair all those decades and who in reality could not have managed to take one single step unaided, in fact she could not even have pulled herself upright in her chair unaided, suddenly is standing there in Konrad’s room and comes over to the unconscious Konrad, her husband, who is watching closely the whole time, and bangs her fist down on the manuscript under his head, and says: So, behind my back you have written down your book, have you, behind my back, a fine thing, she says over and over again, behind my back, she says, while Konrad watches and hears everything all the time he is lying there in his coma with his head on the completed manuscript, even the shock o
f his wife’s fist banging down on the manuscript right next to his ear hasn’t torn him out of his coma, and here comes her fist banging down on the manuscript a second time, can you imagine, a woman whose energy has been totally drained away long since, after decades of huddling as a paralyzed cripple in her invalid chair, brutally bangs her fist on his manuscript, saying: That’s what you think, that you can sit down here in secret, you sneak, and get your book down on paper, just like that, all in one sitting, think again! and with that she grabs up the whole pack of manuscript and flings it in one powerful motion into the flaming stove. Konrad wants to leap to his feet and stop her, but he can’t budge, he can’t. So, she says, the Konrad woman says, now your book is up the chimney, your whole work gone up in flames, and: now you can start all over, wracking your brains about getting it written, for the next twenty or thirty years, it’s all gone, your book is gone, every scrap of it! At which point he suddenly wakes up, finds he can move, and realizes: a dream. I was incapable of leaving my room, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, beginning with feeling incapable of getting out of bed, incapable of doing anything at all. For two days after that dream I did not leave my room at all, of course my wife rang for me, she rang incessantly, because of course she needed my help as always, but I could not and did not give her a sign, for two whole days I stayed in my room. I went on brooding about this dream for months afterward, as you can imagine, but I never told my wife about it, I never even hinted at it, though there were times when I came close to telling her what I had dreamt, but again and again I refrained from doing so, you mustn’t tell her this dream, I kept saying to myself, every time I was tempted as I often was to tell it to her, in fact, tempted to tell it to her in all its utter ghastliness, as I often planned to do. I still see it all, vividly, how my wife enters the room and bangs her fist down on my manuscript, the first time and then again, a second time, bang, on the manuscript, and I unable to move a finger, unable to prevent her from tossing it into the fire, flinging the whole, complete finished manuscript into the fire! Even in my dream I felt it was spooky, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, what with me lying there in a dead faint, her sudden outburst of monstrous energies while I lay paralyzed, her lightning-like movements while I was totally motionless, powerless, my absolute physical passivity, though I noticed everything with surrealistic keenness as against her decisiveness in action, her horrible decisiveness, if you can imagine it, Fro, her utter ruthlessness in action! There are times when I am sorely tempted to tell her my dream, Konrad said to Fro, the whole dream, every last particle of it, and without sparing her my comments on every detail, either, but of course I don’t do it, I’m too sure it would kill her. To tell a person who figured like this in such a nightmare, to tell her in every remorseless detail, is to destroy that person, Fro, Konrad said. Wieser’s account of this dream is in complete accord with Fro’s account of it, but while Fro tells it in a highly dramatic, emotional way, as befits his own character and the degree to which he is influenced by Konrad and by Konrad’s narrative style, Wieser’s manner in retelling the dream is perfectly cool. Consequently, Wieser’s version is incomparably more effective than Fro’s rendition of the same story. Fro adds: for the first time in three or even four decades, Konrad saw his wife in that dream as she once really was, tall, stately, beautiful, even though she behaved abominably. She was always sending Konrad to the cellar to bring her up some cider, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, Fetch me some cider! she is supposed to have said practically every five minutes, Go on, get the cider! and he went down every time she asked for fresh cider, all the way down to the cellar. A jugful? Konrad is supposed to have asked her again and again, so that he would not have to go down cellar so often, but: No, a glassful will do, she is supposed to have answered every time, be sure to fetch only a glassful, I want fresh cider every time, and so he would get her a glassful at a time, never a jugful of cider, although he always offered to bring a jugful, but she refused every time, and so he had to go down cellar several times a day to fetch her a glassful of cider, Konrad told Fro, although it obviously would have made sense to bring up a large jugful of cider from the cellar so that she could drink her fresh cider all day long without his having to make his way to the cellar and up again every single time, because if you kept your large jug of cider in the cold lime works kitchen and kept it covered with a wooden board, you could freshen your glass of cider all day long just as much as if you had to go down specially for every mouthful of cider, Konrad explained, she drove him nearly crazy all day long with her orders to go down to the cellar and come up from the cellar, he wouldn’t be surprised if she took a special, malicious pleasure in watching me every time going down to the cellar or climbing up from the cellar, or even merely knowing that now he is going down to the cellar, now he is climbing up the cellar stairs, it takes a more grueling effort every time, you know, my dear Fro, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro (he said the same thing to Wieser, too) verbatim. That last time they talked, in the wood-paneled room, Konrad drew Fro into a lengthy and detailed consideration of the cider-pressing and cider-storing processes: how the casks had to be cleaned beforehand, was one of the things Konrad explained to Fro, scraped and cleaned and aired and stored while airing, which kind of pears made the right mix for a strong cider and which combination of fruit-varieties would make for a sweet cider, and that all-in-all it did not depend so much on the combinations of the varieties of pears, nor even on the method of pressing them and preparing the cider in general, what it really depended on was the kind of cellar, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro; the lime works boasted the best cellar in the country, which is why in fact they did have the best cider anywhere at the lime works. Ask whomever and wherever you would, the lime works cider was the best there was. His cousin Hoerhager, Konrad is supposed to have said, had still taken a hand personally in pressing the cider along with Hoeller and the other lime works men under Hoeller, but Konrad left the work to Hoeller and two or three of the sawmill workers recruited by him, the cider press had always been Hoeller’s affair, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. Four barrels for the Konrads (which in fact they are supposed to have polished off together in the course of each year), two barrels for Hoeller, who had always managed to drink up his two barrels in a single year, visitors at the annex, including Hoeller’s cousin who was known to be a hard drinker, didn’t count one way or the other, considering that a barrel held over two hundred liters. But Konrad had brought up his story about the cider—which incidentally was losing ground in this country, known to be the foremost pear cider country in Europe, because the people nowadays preferred drinking inferior beer to the best cider, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, it wasn’t for nothing that the natives were called cider-heads—but the reason Konrad had brought it up was only to give Fro some idea of his wife’s sadistic attitude toward Konrad, her husband, whom she certainly did not keep sending down cellar because she could not live without drinking cider, and certainly not because she had to have fresh cider every five minutes, but simply because she meant to humiliate him, Konrad, as constantly as possible; as for the cider she made him bring up, most of it she never drank at all but poured it away, into the pail, out the window, Konrad told Fro, but she kept making him go down cellar for her cider every five minutes just the same, especially at such times when he had started to read aloud to her from his Kropotkin, or to talk about the book, or when he began to talk about Francis Bacon or Wittgenstein, whom he loved to cite, his quoting from Wittgenstein’s Traktatus had in fact become a habit of his that was guaranteed to drive a woman up the wall, his wife had hated it from the first, so inevitably when he started on Wittgenstein she would send him down cellar for a glassful of cider; and Fro is supposed to have said to Konrad that this slavish obedience of his, Konrad’s, to his wife’s commands, an obedience Fro was forced to describe as doglike, nevertheless did not really exclude its opposite, as reflected in Konrad’s general conduct, his character, the fact that he always prevailed in
any difference he had with his wife, to which Konrad is supposed to have replied that of course he knew quite well why he permitted himself to be sent to the cellar every five minutes to fetch cider, etc., why he let himself be made a fool of by his wife, from time to time, Konrad said to Fro, because there is nothing more ridiculous than a man being sent again and again to the cellar for some cider and who actually goes, submissively, cider jug in hand, a man who would have to feel his way down the dark cellar stairs with an empty cider jug in one hand, then again, in the pitchdark of the lime works cellar, the brimful cider jug in his hands, blindly feeling his way up those stairs again and again, making a grotesque appearance besides, because in order to avoid catching cold in those icy cellars he was wrapped in a stinking old horse blanket or the like; all his wife was aiming at was to make him ridiculous, it was the one idea left in her head, to make a fool of him, to cut him down to size because he still considered himself a man of science, and in fact he did, he saw himself, to be quite candid, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, as a scientific philosopher. Basically, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, my wife has been able to make a fool of me, make me her house buffoon, as it were, but only because for a long time now I have let her do it, without letting her realize the part I actually play; by deliberately making her think that I am a fool and that she prevails against me, I keep the upper hand, he said. A quite transparent strategy if you saw it, too intricate to be fully explainable if not. He knew exactly why he let his wife get away with sending him on those fool’s errands to the cellar every minute, with letting him make himself ridiculous by throwing on whatever wrap was handy (horse blankets, etc.), letting her victimize him with her practical joke of nonchalantly knitting the same mitten for him year after year, and why he submitted without a murmur to trying on incessantly if not the identical mitten, then nevertheless the same mitten, again and again. Despite all that, he said to Fro, regardless of all of her sadistic tricks on him, all her endless nonsense, women were so inventive in resorting to ridiculous nonsense, absurdities, etc., he was all right, he was making headway with the Urbanchich method, the book was firmly established in his head, etc., and even though he had not been able to write any of it down to this day, it was far from a hopeless case, because, as he suddenly said to Fro, the actual writing down of an important intellectual undertaking can hardly ever be postponed too long! and, he quickly added: Admittedly, a postponement can also be ruinous to such an undertaking as this book of mine, yet in almost every case this kind of intellectual task stands to gain by a so-called conscious or unconscious postponement. Suddenly she would say: How much cider do we actually have in the cellar? and send him down to test the casks for their exact content by rapping his knuckles on them, or else she would ask: Do we have any garlic in the house? or: What time is it on your bedroom clock? so that he had to get up and go downstairs to his room to look at his wall clock there and then climb back upstairs to tell her the time on his wall clock, she could never trust either of their clocks, hers or his, only both of them together, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, but, he added, there is no depending on both of those clocks either, ultimately (according to Mrs. Konrad). Is it dark outside? she would ask over and over, or: Is it snowing outside? always just when he had begun to read her the Kropotkin. Not that he always took orders with such alacrity, Konrad said to Fro, that would be unwise, so he very often pretended not to hear what she was asking. When she said: Is it snowing outside? meaning of course: get up immediately and look out the window and tell me whether it is snowing or not, he would start reading the Kropotkin with the utmost coolness as though he had heard nothing. She might often ask six or seven times whether it is snowing outside, Konrad said to Fro, but I react not at all, I merely read and go on reading until she gives up and stops asking. Most of the time he obeyed her so-called orders only when there might be an advantage in it for him, or when he really had nothing better to do, because actually an order from her when he was, for instance, reading Kropotkin to her or reporting on his progress with the book or the like, did not necessarily annoy him every time, unfortunately his own concentration on the Kropotkin or the book or some other intellectual concern was not always wholehearted, quite the contrary, occasionally it was a relief to be sent down cellar for cider, to go to the kitchen, to go to his room, whatever. Even during his morning or evening piano playing, literally playing because he was not, of course, performing seriously on the piano (Konrad said so himself), she is alleged to have taken the liberty of ringing for him, no sooner had he sat down at the piano when she rang, whereupon he got up, put down the cover over the keyboard, waited, then sat down again to play, at which point she rang again, they often went on like that by the hour. But it was some time now since he had ceased to play the piano at all, suddenly playing the piano no longer relaxed him, somehow, Fro reports Konrad saying pathetically: it no longer worked for him! In the early years at the lime works he had played the piano day after day, starting at four A.M. usually, improving amateurishly on the piano, Wieser calls it, and specifically trying his hand at the various classical piano pieces, strangely enough, though on the other hand it was not so strange, it was quite characteristic of a dilettante like him to insist on tackling the most difficult pieces again and again and so, as I was saying, he strangely enough tackled the most complicated sonatas and concertos, etc., but had hardly touched the piano at all in the last two years, as he is supposed to have said to Fro, the cover stays on the keyboard, at first I needed the piano to relax my nerves, but nowadays I need and have something far more effective to do the job (to Wieser) and his wife too, who had for decades loved her record player, one that Konrad had given her for Christmas long ago, an HMV from London, but for years she had not asked him to play anything for her on the record player, it too had outlived its usefulness for her, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, the piano doesn’t work for me any longer just as the record player doesn’t work for her any longer, music has simply ceased to be effective for us. He used, for instance, to have to play her the Haffner symphony, conducted by Fritz Busch, for months on end, Konrad said to Fro, an excellent recording, but playing it day after day for so long he came to hate it more than any other, these days he could not even pronounce the word Haffner in his wife’s presence, merely thinking of the Haffner symphony turned his stomach, they had even thrown out all the recordings that listed Fritz Busch as conductor, they had become altogether unable to listen to Fritz Busch, one of the most outstanding conductors, orchestra leaders, as Konrad is supposed to have put it. Music had gradually become totally played out at the lime works, Konrad told Fro, to think of the trouble I took to move the piano into the lime works, and now the piano just stands there, I never play on it. However, he had not sold the piano, either, understandably, since after all he might one day begin to play the piano again, etc. Still, I do not believe that I shall ever have to depend on the piano again, Konrad said, I hope my wife will not revert to wanting a record played for her every minute. Of course I could sell the piano, actually convert the piano to cash, I hadn’t thought of that! but: No, it won’t come to that, I shall never sell the piano, I shall never sell the Francis Bacon, the Francis Bacon and the piano will not be sold. No, no more music at the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. To Fro: after breakfast, he had stayed in his wife’s room in order to proceed with the Urbanchich exercises right after breakfast. He planned to practice words with st and ts. However, his wife had first made him try on the mitten, then she needed help with combing her hair, quickly combing through her hair, he noticed it was dirty, but washing her hair was the ghastliest chore of all so he did not tell her that her hair needed washing, instead he answered her question: Is my hair dirty? with a simple No and then she asked for a new dress and he did, in fact, put another dress on her, not a new one, just another one. The dress was one he had ordered made for her by a tailor once in Mannheim, it had a stiff silk stand-up collar and was made of light gray satin that reached down to her ankl
es; it had long ceased to be fashionable, Konrad said to Fro. Finally he was beginning to get impatient to cut all that short and get on with the Urbanchich exercises, saying: Now then, let’s get started, but she only laughed and said he could do as he pleased, she for her part had no intention of doing a thing today, no Urbanchich exercises or anything, today she was going to make a holiday of it, she suddenly felt like making a holiday of it, which is after all why she had decided to put on a new dress, have her hair well combed, let him cut her nails, etc. Every two weeks or so, Konrad said to Fro, his wife would suddenly, on an ordinary weekday, announce that she felt like making a holiday of it, and refused to work, saying to Konrad: I will not work today on the Urbanchich method, not even for half an hour, though he would have settled for a half-hour’s work that day, using words with st and ts. When, out of the blue, she proclaimed a holiday, she would subject Konrad to what he described to Fro as exquisite torture by making him put on the table one or several cartons filled with ancient snapshots, which she proceeded to pile on the table and look over, hundreds of thousands of faded snapshots, one after the other, commenting on each one, her comments were always the same, Konrad said, look at that one, look at that one, she would say, picking up one snapshot at a time from the heaps on the table, staring at it, and saying, look at that one, now look at this one, after which she dropped the snapshot on another heap which thus became the one on the increase, dragging out this game which Konrad thought gave her the greatest pleasure, possibly the only pleasure she had left, for hours on end until the whole day had become a total loss as far as doing anything else was concerned. When she had finished with her heaps of snapshots and her incessant: Look at this one, look at that one, she forced Konrad to haul in several cartons full of old letters, all addressed to her five or six, but mostly ten or twenty or thirty years ago, and forcing him to read them to her aloud, incessantly breaking in, with her: Listen to that, listen to that, as her habit was, a habit that drove him up the wall though it did not drive him so far as to make him throw the whole heap of old letters at her head, although, as he said to Fro, he could barely restrain himself from doing just that. On one of these so-called holidays of hers he always knew right away that the day would end as a total loss to him, all its momentum lost to his experimental work; these so-called holidays made him feel disgusted with his wife, disgusted with himself as well, all in all a deep disgust for the revolting condition they both were in. Then there was a knock at the front door; Hoeller had brought their dinner. She is having one of her holidays, Konrad is supposed to have said on this occasion at the front door downstairs as he took the food hamper containing the dinner from Hoeller’s hand, and Hoeller instantly knew what Konrad meant, the food was still warm, so it seemed on that particular day Hoeller had not fallen in with anyone to gossip with on the way over from the tavern to the lime works, the chances were that he had not run into anyone at all, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, small wonder, what with that snowstorm we were having, and I immediately went back to my wife’s room, after all no stopover in the kitchen to warm the food was necessary. When Mrs. Konrad saw what was in the hamper she said: Isn’t it just as if the tavern people knew we were having a holiday? she was referring to the generous pieces of well-done baked liver, the beef soup with ribbon noodles, lots of so-called bird salad, and a pastry that turned out to be, after Konrad had lifted it out of the hamper and set it on a large platter, a pot cheese strudel. That kind of a day, of course, Konrad said to Fro, with a snowstorm outside, possibly can’t be spent in a better way than in eating well, drinking well, all that kind of nonsense. Anyway he couldn’t care less, nor could they both care less, he is supposed to have said to Fro, what, basically, Hoeller might bring them to eat from the tavern, they were both totally indifferent to what there was to eat, though there was a time when they had set a high value on good eating, but that was a long time ago, Konrad said, twenty years or so. These remarks about eating reminded him of the dead sawmill owner, he is supposed to have said to Fro, three weeks ago, just as I was trying to slice some boiled salt pork into very fine (they had just slaughtered a pig at the tavern not too long ago), extra thin slices, that’s how my wife likes it, but I like it that way too, trying to cut those slices finer every time, there was a knock at the front door downstairs. At first I thought, suppose I ignore that knocking? nevertheless I did go down at once and there was Hoeller at the door, surprisingly, because I thought Hoeller would be in town that day, but there he stood, suddenly, and I asked him what he was doing here. What’s up? I asked him, I was just slicing the pork, we’re having lunch, I said, and Hoeller says, the sawmill owner is dead, this is the way it happened, says Hoeller, at five o’clock this morning the sawmill owner climbed on his tractor just after calling out to his wife to get the chains out of the barn, he needed the chains for lashing on the load of tree trunks he was picking up in the wood, his wife ran to the barn for the chains, it didn’t take her more than two or three minutes to get back with the chains from the barn, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, but there was her husband hanging dead from the tractor seat, head first, he had plummeted from the driver’s seat but was still hanging from it by the seat of his pants, it was lucky the motor was turned off; his wife had thought at first he was alive, just trying to lean down from the driver’s seat to the hub of the wheel to repair something there, but as she came up to him she realized that her husband was dead already, she immediately thought that he must have had a stroke, and in fact the doctor she called diagnosed a heart attack, nothing unusual, the doctor is supposed to have said, heart attacks are a common cause of death for men between forty and fifty, the sawmill owner had just passed forty-two, they eat and drink and then they climb on their tractors, full of cholesterol, and fat from lack of exercise, riding their tractors incessantly as they do, their bodies almost motionless on and around their everlasting machines, so that the men who work the land nowadays are the most in danger of heart attacks. The sawmill owner’s wife had dragged her man off the tractor all by herself, he had fallen on the grass, imagine, Konrad said to Fro, the sawmill owner’s heavy body on the grass, a fine fellow though, the wife did not have the strength to carry her man into the house, she called in a few woodcutters and day laborers from the dam project, so with four or five others the heavy body was soon lifted up off the grass and carried into the house; once inside the house, the sawmill owner’s wife started to wonder where she could lay out her husband’s corpse, and decided that the former pigpen, which at the moment contained only a huge cider press and nothing else, would be the most suitable place for laying out her husband, she had decided on this even before she called in the doctor, and had the laborers help her wash the body, because her sisters happened to be in town that morning; the dead sawmill owner had been quickly undressed, washed, and combed, Konrad said to Fro, no sooner had the doctor left than they all went to work carpentering a temporary bier in the former pigpen, by which time the children had come home from school, and the sawmill owner’s wife’s sisters were back from town, and they all did what they could to lay out the sawmill owner on his bier in state as quickly as possible, Konrad told Fro, Hoeller described it all carefully in the smallest, seemingly insignificant detail, Konrad said. The dead man’s children had been remarkably quiet, considering that they had come home from school to find their father had suddenly fallen off his tractor and was dead, and the sawmill owner’s wife’s sisters, who had always lived at the sawmill, as Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, did their best to collect flowers for the dead man’s lying-in-state, they had wrapped him in a linen shroud which the sawmill owner’s wife had kept along with her own in one of her bedroom clothes chests, so in no time at all the sawmill had that atmosphere characteristic of a wake, Konrad said, that very definite odor of flowers and fresh linen and lifeless body and fresh wood and holy water; the news of the sawmill owner’s death had gotten around the entire region with incredible speed, Hoeller himself had heard of it within half an h
our after the death from one of the wife’s sisters who had come round to the annex to tell Hoeller and ask him to come to the sawmill and help them put the bier together and of course Hoeller who had been busy chopping wood immediately dropped what he was doing and went to the sawmill with the sawmill owner’s wife’s sister, but by the time they got there his help was no longer needed because they had already put up a provisional bier on two trestles and even laid out the corpse on it; Hoeller arriving just three-quarters of an hour after the sawmill owner’s death found the corpse already lying in state surrounded by flowers and candles though, oddly enough, Hoeller is supposed to have told Konrad, Fro says, there was blood trickling from the left corner of the dead man’s mouth, his widow kept trying to wipe the blood away with a bit of linen rag, but she did not succeed in preventing the dead man’s fresh linen shroud from showing some rather large blood stains. The children knelt, as the children of dead people always kneel, Hoeller told Konrad, as he said to Fro, beside the corpse, and little by little the room where the bier stood, which happened in the case of the dead sawmill owner to be the former pigpen with the big cider press inside, was filling up, as always in the case of a death, with condolers. Hoeller is supposed to have given Konrad an exact description of the first several hours after the death of the sawmill owner at the sawmill, finding some characteristic little thing to tell about every single one of those present at the house of mourning, for instance how the sawmill owner’s widow had said to Hoeller, while he was standing in the entry to the sawmill planning the text of the death notice, to be ordered from the Sicking printer’s, with the widow’s older sister, the widow said to Hoeller that her husband’s death had not taken her completely by surprise, in fact the two of them, she and her husband, had talked about the possibility of his having a stroke just two days previously, though of course they had ended up laughing together, which now seemed strange, yes indeed, the sawmill owner’s widow is supposed to have said to Hoeller in the entry to the sawmill, as Konrad reported it to Fro, who knows, she said to Hoeller, what will happen now, and what kind of man will be coming into the house, meaning, as Hoeller thought, that the sawmill owner’s widow was alluding to the likely successor to the sawmill owner, after all she could not live there alone with all those children, still so little, she is supposed to have said to Hoeller not two hours after the death of the sawmill owner, and: the children were no help, but what with the sawmill being after all a property worth millions, she would unquestionably find a man before not too long, you must remember, Konrad said to Fro, that the sawmill owner married into the sawmill, originally, as the sawmill was part of the widow’s original property. Getting back to his own wife, Konrad said that if there was a man in the world who could put up with her, then he was that man, and she alone in the world was the woman who could endure him, Konrad said to Fro. Today I asked her to let me read her the Kropotkin for two hours, Konrad said to Fro, but she refused, but in the end we agreed to the following: she would put up with listening to two hours of Kropotkin if he, her husband, would help her put on the black, gold-embroidered dress, as she described her wedding dress; good, Konrad said to his wife, first you put on the dress, then you listen to me reading Kropotkin for two hours. But she had no sooner put on the black, gold-embroidered dress, meaning, naturally, that he had put it on her, than she said she wanted to take it off again, now that she had it on she could see quite clearly in the mirror that the black, gold-embroidered dress no longer suited her, I mean, she said, of course it suits me, but only in a frightening sort of way. So I took off her black, gold-embroidered dress again, Konrad is supposed to have said. No sooner was it off than she asked me to put on her gray dress with the white velvet collar, so Konrad hung the black, gold-embroidered dress back inside the wardrobe, took out the gray dress with the white velvet collar, feeling all the time that his wife was watching him closely, You are watching me, aren’t you? he is supposed to have said, waiting a bit before he turned around to hear her answer, but she kept silent, Konrad said to Fro. He had hardly put the gray dress with the white velvet collar on her when she straightened up as best she could to see herself in the mirror and then said: No, this dress won’t do either. I’d rather get back into my old dress, the one I’m always wearing, and Konrad patiently took off her gray dress with the white velvet collar again, and helped her into what she is always supposed to have called her terrible everyday dress. This is the smell that suits me, my everyday smell, she is supposed to have said, as soon as she had on her so-called terrible everyday dress once more. Now where did I have this terrible thing on for the first time, she asked, and he answered: In Deggendorf, don’t you remember, in Deggendorf, it was made for you by your niece’s seamstress in Deggendorf. Right, by my niece’s seamstress in Deggendorf, Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have answered. I wore it to the ball in Landshut, too. Yes, she repeated, says Fro, the ball in Landshut. Then Konrad read to her, as agreed, Kropotkin, for two hours straight. To Wieser: Hoerhager, Konrad’s cousin, would undoubtedly have let the lime works fall into disrepair. When the Konrad’s announced that they would move into the lime works, people laughed at them. You would have to be crazy to move into the lime works, the Sickingers are supposed to have said, Konrad said to Wieser, and: those people, my dear Wieser, were right. Only two years ago I was still of the opinion that the lime works would be good for my work, but now I no longer think so, now I can see that the lime works robbed me of my last chance to get my book actually written. I mean that sometimes I think, he is supposed to have told Wieser, that the lime works is precisely why I can’t write it all down, and then at other times I think that I still have a chance to get my book written down precisely because I am living at the lime works. The two ideas keep alternating in my head, namely that the lime works will enable me to write my book, and that I shall never be able to write my book, because I am here at the lime works. Not so long ago I was of the opinion that the lime works was my only salvation, which meant that it was also hers, (his wife’s) and yet today I am surprised that I could have had such an opinion at all. Though I must admit that the moment I have said the lime works will never let me write my book, hope springs up again that the lime works will be favorable to my writing it. But if you can’t get your book written here, his wife is supposed to have said again and again, why did we move to the lime works? If you can’t get it written here, why are we making the sacrifice of living here at the lime works when we could be living so much more pleasantly anywhere else, surely there can be no doubt, Wieser reports Mrs. Konrad saying to her husband, that living at the lime works means being committed to extreme self-sacrifice, let’s not fool ourselves, to immure ourselves in the lime works is madness, unless there is a so-called higher aim to justify it. Though it was true that they had by now gotten accustomed to their existence at the lime works, the question remained in any case: what was it all for, if it was not for the sake of the book, for the sake of The Sense of Hearing? Or as she once phrased it, was it possible that this greatest of all possible sacrifices had been made in vain? While she did not really believe in the value of his book, Mrs. Konrad had once said to the works inspector, she could not really say that the book upon which her husband had expanded the major part of his intellectual life was worthless and so forth; the value of his book, Mrs. Konrad once said to the works inspector, might actually lie in quite another direction; possibly its value would be quite the opposite of what her husband believed it to be, Mrs. Konrad said to the inspector, but in any case the work had to be written, if only because it was necessary to scotch any notion that her husband, Konrad, was no better than a madman, one of the many fools who ran around everywhere claiming that they had something, no matter what, even if it was some kind of ominous scientific work, in their heads, none of which anyone ever got to see, and if only to save herself, primarily, from unbearable disgrace, she was always pleading with him to get the book out of his head and down on paper, and so forth. To be quite frank about it she had no way of knowing whether
her husband was just another fool, but on the other hand it was possible that he was both a fool and a genius, who could tell? she is supposed to have said to the inspector, because she believed her husband showed all the characteristics of genius as well as all the characteristics of a fool; Wieser surmises that she may possibly have said this kind of thing on the very day when Konrad shot her dead with one or several blasts from her Mannlicher carbine, that she might have happened to call her husband a fool on that catastrophic day, the day of the murder (Fro), all of a sudden, as she had done so often before, but this time he had lost control and killed her, because she had too often irritated him beyond endurance by calling him a fool, a madman, and even a one hundred percent highly intelligent mental case, and on such occasions, says Wieser, and this is not merely rumor but fact, on those occasions Konrad had threatened to kill her. It is my theory, not merely my suspicion but my theory, which quite possibly may turn out to be fact soon enough at the trial in Wels, Wieser said, that Konrad probably killed his wife because she had just once too often called him a fool or a madman or, her favorite expression on the subject, when she was speaking to Wieser, he said, a highly intelligent mental case. In the room where the murder took place there was no clue, of course, that such a quarrel had come about, or that she had said anything of the kind, Wieser said. But all the indications are that Konrad killed his wife because of what Konrad repeatedly referred to as her ruthless critical comments. What could be more natural than that he should suddenly shoot her down, after all, says Wieser, when he had gotten his fill of her accusations and carpings that were increasingly violent of late besides, Wieser said, of course it was the act of a madman, but as such it was quite understandable and reasonable. Konrad was feeling close to reaching the goal of a lifetime, seeing it within reach, as Wieser says, at which moment of high tension he saw his wife as getting deliberately in his way, debarring him from his life-long goal, the writing of his book. He had to kill her, in the end he simply had to kill her, says Wieser. That to kill his wife was simultaneously to kill his book, Wieser said, was another matter entirely. A woman ceaselessly nagging at her man, Wieser says, is likely to cross the line until suddenly a point has been reached at which murder becomes inevitable. Such a murder tended to make an end of everything, it destroyed everything at one blow, exactly as in the case of the Konrad woman, when in one split second the intellectual life work of an extraordinary man was annihilated as two people were killed, because there could be no question about it that Konrad himself was a dead man, even though he might continue to exist for years, whether in prison or in a mental home, whichever the court would decide, but in any case, and no matter how long he continued to live on, the fact remained that he would have been already dead for a long time, for that length of time, when he was finally buried. It shocked Wieser every time he thought of it that a human being could, by a mere careless slip, a sudden relaxation of his mind’s rational function, transform himself from an extraordinary being into the most miserable of creatures, and not himself alone but the person closest to him as well. How frequently the foremost runner in a race could be seen coming to a sudden stop. Basically, says Wieser, in killing his wife, Konrad had not killed primarily his wife but had, as it were in a sudden fit of abstraction, killed himself. For both the Konrads everything was destroyed in one moment. The man who at this moment was restlessly pacing the floor of his prison cell in Wels, or else lying stock-still on his prison cot, probably knew this clearly. Whether or not Konrad had been crazy all along, it was only a question of time when he would be crazy for good. It isn’t as if we had been compelled to move into the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, we could have gone to a number of other places like the Tirol, for instance, or Styria, as everyone knows there is no dearth of so-called scenic spots in our country, but a scenic spot was precisely what I sought to avoid, Austria is of course full of nothing but these so-called scenic spots, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, there isn’t another country in the world where so many hundreds of thousands of so-called scenic spots are crowded together in so relatively small an area, but that’s just it, that kind of beauty spot is the worst place in the world for starting or even proceeding with an intellectual undertaking well on its way, Konrad said, according to Wieser, why, if he was sure of anything he was sure of this, that a so-called scenic area, a beautiful city, would never fail to destroy the best, the most solidly planned intellectual work, destroy it root and branch, a beautiful landscape could only act as an irritant on the brain, a so-called wonder of nature invariably undermined the mind. Which was why it was harder in Austria than anywhere else, Wieser claims that Konrad said to him, to get on with an intellectual task or complete it, there was no other country where you could point to so many hundreds of thousands of neglected or abandoned ideas, jettisoned plans, unrealized original projects, genuinely immense undertakings in the sciences or the so-called fine arts and where you could point, simultaneously, to so many scenic spots; here in Austria, Konrad told Wieser in so many words, every genius has frittered himself away, everything extraordinary has ended in self-destruction, the so-called creative element has let itself be killed by the beauty of nature. A graveyard of ideas, a wasteland of perversely aborted high flights of the mind, that’s what the country was, its beauty made it our homeland, but it was the scene of incessant founderings, humiliations, suppressions of greatness. He once opened one of those huge trunks they kept in the attic at the lime works, one of those dirty, dusty trunks we all take on sea voyages, Konrad said to Wieser, as I have often told you, my wife and I traveled a great deal, during the early decades of our life together we were almost uninterruptedly on the move, partly because we feared that an abrupt change for the worse in my wife’s various kinds of ill health might nail us down altogether, would prevent even the shortest of trips from one day to the next, so that we made the longest possible journeys, Konrad said to Wieser, sea voyages for the most part, though as late as ’38, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, we took the Transsiberian railway as far as Vladivostok, then we went to China, to Japan, to the Philippines, nowadays this doesn’t mean much but in those days such travels were still monstrous undertakings, and for both my wife and myself they were of course an extraordinary physical strain, though the strain, or rather the resulting exhaustion, never hit us with its full force until after we had completed the trip, when we would be overcome with the awareness of it, and so, you see, Konrad said to Wieser, we would keep going on ever more extensive trips on the assumption that each would be our last, for reasons of health, or else it would be our last trip because I might suddenly have to settle down on account of being fully preoccupied with my task, my book on The Sense of Hearing, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. When I opened that heavy sea chest, out came a whole flood of travel brochures, steamer tickets, railway tickets, the trunk had been locked up for decades and my suddenly opening it made its contents burst out in a sudden spate—hundreds of thousands of brochures and ticket stubs from and to every conceivable place in the world came pouring out. To think that all those travels of ours have ended by leading us here into the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. In Paris, for instance, they had lived in an apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, and yet they had finally moved to the lime works, Konrad had thought and had persuaded his wife that no other place offered better conditions for getting his work done, though he had not really convinced her of it, not to this very day, and she was probably right, Konrad said the last time he saw Wieser, I should probably have listened to her and taken her to Toblach instead, that lovely little spot in the mountains would surely have brought us peace, and if not peace, exactly, at least my wife would have been happy there for the rest of her days, it would have suited her, my dear Wieser, because in Toblach she would have found what she always sought at my side, a certain contentment among her sisters and other relatives, a certain inner security and outward shelter, but because I had to make my will
prevail, as I begin to see at last, or as I think I must admit to myself, by forcing my poor wife to move with me into the lime works for the sake of an altogether hopeless cause, I have destroyed her life, annihilated myself as a person. At the time of the decision to move to the lime works, back in Mannheim, Konrad was reduced to choosing between giving in to his wife and giving himself up, sacrifice himself completely, by going to Toblach, or else move to the lime works, with its harsh climate, compared with Toblach, and Sicking was a most unfriendly town, it meant the end of hope for Mrs. Konrad; to move to Sicking was to destroy her life. Though of course we could also have gone to live in the Wilhering Cloister, Konrad said, which is surrounded by an orchard in bloom, those Cistercians would undoubtedly have taken good care of us, or else we could have gone to Lambach, or to Aschach, or Lauffen, there was even nothing to prevent us from deciding to go back to London or to Manchester, all that stood in the way was my obsession about moving to the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, and what drove me to surrender myself irrevocably to that obsession was my cousin Hoerhager’s dragging his feet in consenting to the sale, had Hoerhager simply refused to accept Konrad’s proposals to buy the lime works at any price, there is no doubt at all that the question of whether or not to move to the lime works would have resolved itself in the most painless way. But as it was, Hoerhager’s teasing evasiveness had inflamed Konrad’s mania that he must have the lime works at any cost, even though the idea that he must become the owner of the lime works, move in and live there and nowhere else, Konrad told Wieser, ultimately depended on nothing more than two or three visits Konrad had paid there as a child, at the age of four or five, and later when he was about eight or nine, for a few days in winter and a few days in summer chosen haphazardly by his parents, unsure of themselves as they were every time they had to choose a place to send him on his vacations from school, a place to send him on a brief holiday, and that was all he knew of the lime works and Sicking, and it was solely upon this experience all those decades ago, that his life-long wish to own the lime works was based. Later in life he had taken his young wife there once, as he remembered it, one October evening, rather wintry for the date, on a visit to his uncle, Hoerhager’s father, on which occasion he had found the lime works cold and unfriendly, and yet even more fascinating than on the earlier occasions, he told Wieser, and his wife had described the place as sinister afterward, it was past midnight and they were on their way to Scharnstein, as Konrad remembered, when she called the lime works a sinister place in an equally sinister landscape. She had found it oppressive, and inside the lime works she felt scared; when Konrad asked her what she was scared of, she is supposed to have said: Suddenly, of everything. To force her to move into the lime works for good and all was monstrous, Mrs. Konrad said to her husband, but then in her eyes, Fro says, Konrad had always been a monster, and Wieser says that Konrad, considering everything Wieser knew about the couple, could never have seemed other than a monster to his wife, as it was practically second nature for Konrad to represent himself as a monster all his life long, not only to his wife, until he had finally quite lost himself in the role of a monster, universally so regarded but especially so by his wife, treated as a monster by everyone around him all his life, so that is what he ultimately became, and you could therefore say that it was the people around him, especially his wife, who had made a monster out of him, says Wieser, or rather a so-called monster, it was not Konrad himself who should be blamed for this, even though the people who had driven him to the point at which it was possible for them to label him a monster, or a so-called monster, would then not scruple to blame it all on him, to blame him for being a monster. Though on the one hand it was distracting to live in the cities, life in the country, on the other hand, was distracting also, basically both cities and country places, the country as such, tended to distract one’s mind from one’s task in much the same way, from progressing in one’s intellectual work, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, ultimately everything was nothing but distraction, because city and country, city ideas and country ideas, or conceptions of the city and of the country had in recent decades begun to overlap and become completely fused and confused with one another, it had begun to be basically absurd to try to distinguish between the city and the country, they had become so completely homogenized, Konrad is supposed to have expressed it like that to Wieser. The problem of the monotonousness of the prevailing current architecture played only a subordinate part in all this, even though the vista offering itself to the observer, of a scene, an atmosphere, was equally saturated with progress-and-machine-madness, regardless of where he found himself, country or city, the same assumptions prevailed everywhere. We were, all of us, undergoing, in every respect, what he called a process of social interfusion at the end of which the so-called processed man would emerge as a monster, that is, as a machine. Konrad had naturally expected that at the lime works he would suffer a minimum of distraction, if any; Sicking had no distractions at all, by comparison the rest of the world was nothing but distractions (from his work on the book). But whatever he may have thought about the lime works and about the book it had all been a mistake, every bit of it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. In the last analysis a man tended to yield instinctively to a form of indirect blackmail exerted on him by his own personality. Though of course he had carefully gone over every pro and contra having to do with their moving into the lime works, as had his wife whom, however, he did not really consult as a person who would have a deciding vote in the matter; he merely took her into consideration. What was so fascinating about their move was that it was an abandoned lime works they were going into. Besides, after decades of extensive but ultimately aimless traveling, the Konrads had finally had enough of traveling. At least as far as he was concerned. Traveling ultimately wore you out, the new experiences came to lose their newness all too soon, the great varieties of people came to look all alike, the circumstances and connections in which they turned up came to have a sameness, as did the looks of the landscapes, always the same as one moved toward them and away from them, the conditions, climatic, social, hostile, political, natural, medical, etc. etc. had a sameness that tired one out. In time the world tended to use itself up simply, and what was most depressing of all in traveling around, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, you kept being increasingly confronted with the world’s increasingly evident shabbiness, until this was what you were facing incessantly and on to the end, so to speak. To try to escape from all this by moving oneself into some remote shelter was also an error, of course, as he fully realized by now, but so would any other solution they might have hit upon have been an error. The lime works had offered itself as a turning point, though not as a radical about-face, there was no such thing, but at least as a quarter-turn in every degree, as Konrad is supposed to have expressed himself to Wieser, and Konrad had assumed that it would be possible for him to make one more such turn later, even if by no more than a few degrees. They could foresee that they would soon be suffocating in their Paris apartment, Konrad said to Wieser, and they had to face it, to suffocate in the thick of a human mass, for instance on the Boulevard Haussmann, Konrad said, was unquestionably the most terrible way to go. But, don’t you see, Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed, to Wieser, there are so many ways to be ruined, to founder! in which connection several books, by a writer whose name he had forgotten, came to mind, an Austrian writer, and anyway the name didn’t matter, the person didn’t matter, no writer’s person or biography ever mattered, his work was everything, the writer himself was nothing, despite the despicable vulgarity of all those who insisted upon confusing the writer’s person with his work, the general public had been corrupted by certain historical and literary processes of the first half of the nineteenth century into daring, with the shameless impertinence characteristic of them, to confuse the written work with the writer’s personal concerns, using the writer’s person to effect a vicious crippling of the writer’s work, always shuttling back and
forth between the writer’s private person and his product, and so forth, more and more confusing the producer and the product, all of which led to a monstrous distortion of the entire culture, bringing into being a culture which was a monstrosity, and so forth, but to get back to the man’s writings, reading him was like reading a madman, a writing madman, but he was in fact quite the opposite of a madman, and Konrad recommended to Wieser some titles, fragments in which certain goings-on were described that were highly relevant to what was going on in his life, although the proceedings in the books were metaphysical in nature, while his own original undertaking was anything but metaphysical, in fact Konrad did not hesitate to describe his entire development as organic from first to last, and though it had a decidedly speculative bond with the metaphysical it did not in any sense derive its being from metaphysics, Wieser says. Basically Konrad’s own development could not in any respect be regarded as a so-called thing of the imagination, absolutely not, it was strictly a physical process, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, at bottom it was nothing more than an infinitely sad story of a marriage, astounding, shocking if you chose, and yet it could just as well be regarded as almost laughably commonplace, even though it might seem strange, extraordinary, crazy, to the superficial observer. But there was no use talking about it. The mitten: while watching her knit his mitten he asks himself: Why is she knitting that mitten, always the same one? but he also asks himself why, instead of continually working on that mitten, doesn’t she take time out to mend his socks, patch his shirts, his torn vest, all my clothes have big holes in them, everywhere, he said to himself, but she sits here knitting that mitten. Her own cap needs mending, so does her blouse, too, but no, she keeps working away at that mitten. The lime works have been the finish of her, he thought, watching her at work on that mitten. A person like his wife could hardly be considered a living human being any longer, even if you made every conceivable kind of allowance, emotional, rational, anything you pleased, not in the condition she was in after nearly five years at the lime works, he would think as he looked on while she kept at her knitting. There had been nothing between them for a long time now, nothing more than what he could only call mutual ignoration. But on the other hand, whatever had been between them previously, all their traveling together and so forth, had ultimately predestined them for this very life of theirs at the lime works. The lime works were our destination, our destination was to be done to death by the lime works. Before we moved into the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, we were constantly and to the greatest extent in the company of other people, but after we moved into the lime works we were totally deprived of human companionship, totally out of human society, which was bound to lead, first, to despair, then to spiritual and emotional desolation, then to sickness and death. Absolutely nothing at all happens here! Konrad exclaimed, according to Wieser. But even to consider the kind of senselessness it was to move into the lime works as a form of heroism was suicidal. Although even his wife had persuaded herself, during their first two years at the lime works, that their complete withdrawal from the world into the lime works would be his salvation, Konrad himself, though he had at first naturally regarded the move as his (my) salvation, Konrad said to Wieser, after only six months he said to himself that this would possibly be his (my) salvation, then, after a year or so, he thought this would probably be his (my) salvation, but after two years he said to himself that of course this cannot be his (my) salvation, and after three years at the lime works she, Mrs. Konrad, faced up to the fact that, to the contrary, the lime works meant Konrad’s total destruction, although he himself was not yet aware of it, still kept suppressing his awareness of it while clinging to the hope that it might still be possible for him to get his book written here. In the end the two of them had taken to assuring each other that, as Wieser says, at least it cost next to nothing to live at the lime works. This was true enough, as everyone knows you could live at an absurdly low cost, by comparison with costs elsewhere, especially the big cities, in such remote country places as the Sicking area, but to let this fact come up as a reason for moving to the lime works, even if it came up only inside their own heads, had seemed to them extraordinarily humiliating. But at times they would actually settle for this as an acceptable reason, i.e., the thought that the lime works could actually be credited with having cut down on their living expenses necessarily seemed to be a saving thought for a few hours or days, as Konrad explained to Wieser. Considering, after all, that they had hardly any money left, Konrad confided to Wieser; hardly any money left at all, by then. Which reminds me of Wieser’s description of Konrad’s description of Konrad’s last trip to the bank: This morning I went to the bank, Konrad told Wieser, they let me have another ten thousand, these will be the last ten thousand, of course, they said to me. The young teller at the counter wouldn’t give me anything at all, you understand, but I went straight to the manager. The manager received me at once, most politely, of course. You know the manager’s office, of course, that little cubbyhole where the air is always so bad because they never open the window, but it’s only fair to remember, in this connection, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, that if they opened the manager’s office window the air coming in from outside would be even worse, the window being right above the parking space, you know. Well, in I went, to see the manager, those dark green metal filing cabinets, you know, Konrad said. The first thing to meet the eye, unavoidably, as you enter the manager’s cubbyhole of an office, is the portrait of the bank’s founder, Derflinger, hanging on the wall. Mustache with uptwisted ends, peasant face and so forth. The manager and I shake hands, says Konrad, I am invited to sit down, I sit down. On the desk in front of him the manager has my entire file, as I see immediately. Which means that the manager and I are about to have a final, the final, serious talk, I thought, and I was right; the manager started to leaf through my file, then he got on the phone, talking to somebody about the contents of my file, then he sent for the clerk, and another clerk, and a third, a fourth, a fifth, all having to do with my file, accounts, statements, etc., then he phones again, then he ponders the file, phones again, ponders over my papers again, etc. Actually the manager has all the papers relating to my account at hand, meaning all the papers accumulated through all the years I have had dealings with the bank. As the manager leafs through these papers I keep thinking that he may not let me draw any money at all, there is no telling by the look on his face: will he give me the money, won’t he give me the money, any money, he will, he won’t, I keep thinking, unable to decide one way or the other. Still more papers are brought in from time to time, men and women clerks wear themselves out bringing in all sorts of documents connected with my account. Finally one of the clerks is even ordered to fetch a ladder, and to climb up the ladder in order to pull out and bring down some papers from a drawer high up under the ceiling of the little office. The manager urges the clerk to get on with it, but the clerk argues that he can’t climb up the ladder any faster than he is climbing already, and later that he can’t climb down any faster than he is climbing down already, without getting hurt, he says he doesn’t want to break his neck, to which the manager finds nothing to say, probably restraining himself because the clerk is a good clerk, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Then the manager noticed that through all this I had kept my coat on, so he leaped from his chair to help me out of my coat and hang it up on a coathook on his door, but I forestalled him by leaping up myself, took off the coat, and hung it on the coathook myself. It is warmer than usual in here, the manager said, and Konrad agreed, yes, it is rather warm. It was undoubtedly because of this that the manager was wearing only a lightweight summer suit, as Konrad had noticed at once, finding it odd that the manager was wearing this lightweight summer suit in the bank in the winter time, but, as the manager said to Konrad, according to Wieser, here in this room (he did not call it a cubbyhole, which it was) one cannot function in winter clothes, if you dress too warmly you catch a chill, all because of th
e central heating, one is always sitting in this overheated room (not “cubbyhole”) and worries about catching cold because one is feeling much too warm. Furthermore, it was impossible to regulate the circulation of fresh air inside the whole building. Meanwhile the documents kept piling higher on the manager’s desk, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, until it seemed I would lose sight of the manager altogether behind the mountain range of documents and files between us on his desk. At the end I could not see the manager at all, but I could still hear what he was saying. His face was hidden from me, Konrad told Wieser, but I could still hear his voice. Earlier Konrad had been struck by the fact, he said, that some of the clerks did not greet him when they entered the manager’s office, among them three out of the four women clerks who had come in, and Konrad attributed their conduct to his being so deeply indebted to the bank, still he felt that it was outrageous of them to snub so conspicuously a man like himself, a client of the bank who had kept up such excellent business relations with the bank for such a long time. Thinking it over, however, he decided that it might not have been a deliberate snub but only carelessness, that it was unintentional, and so forth. Meanwhile the manager was telephoning, over and over again, with the teller at the counter in the outer office, with the clerks in the offices upstairs, in the so-called credit division. At long last a number of promissory notes Konrad had signed during the past year and that had come due long since, were brought into the manager’s office. Konrad now understood that he was not going to get any money from the bank this time, but rather that he would be asked to pay his debts instead, beginning with these notes. Konrad was certain that his wife knew nothing about all this, according to Wieser, because he always kept their financial situation to himself, he had in fact developed a highly skilled technique for keeping secret anything relating to their so-called financial affairs. Now he feared that the catastrophic state of their financial condition would come to light and everything would come crashing down about their ears with shocking effect, Konrad told Wieser. He was thinking about this while the manager kept busying himself with Konrad’s financial papers and kept the clerks running back and forth on errands connected with these papers so that Konrad began to think that it was the haste with which they were kept moving that had prevented them from greeting him in the first place. While Konrad was sitting there in the bank everything that was going on combined to give him the impression that he was its sole center and focus, everything the bank did seemed concentrated entirely on him. The manager was still telephoning for yet another document relating to my account, Konrad told Wieser, there was no end to the papers the bank held concerning me. Bank clerks all have the same faces, Konrad said, banking people’s heads were stuffed with nothing but paper money and their faces were made of nothing but paper money. By staring hard at the founder’s, Derflinger’s, portrait, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, by gluing my eyes to the founder’s peasant face for considerable stretches of time, I managed to keep my naturally increasing perturbation under control. Again I thought I might after all be given some money, but this hope soon turned out to be baseless, and I resigned myself to the expectation that the manager would never again give me any money, in fact I heard him say so, although he had actually said nothing at all about money, what he did say was: How hot it is in here! and I understood him to mean that he would not give me any more money, which would have meant, Konrad said to Wieser, no, I cannot actually tell you what this would have meant, because it would have meant something too terrible to be imagined. What I suddenly heard the manager saying, actually, was that you (that is, myself) owe something above two million, most of it is owed to our bank, and if we subtract the value of your property, that still leaves a debt of at least one and a half million, the manager said. Your property is far from adequate coverage for your debts! the manager said repeatedly, Konrad claimed; he thought he heard the manager say: Your property is very far from sufficient to cover your debts! three or four or five or six times, even though the manager is supposed to have made this statement only once, I keep hearing it over and over again all the time, Konrad said to Wieser. And then the manager pronounced the following sentence, which I also keep hearing over and over again, I simply cannot get it out of my head: And as you know, we have taken steps to institute a forced auction of the lime works. Of course so admittedly painful a proceeding had been postponed for as long as possible, but it was no longer possible to put it off, it had become a matter that brooks no delay, and the expression brooks no delay was another that Konrad simply could not get out of his head, it kept running through his head for days and weeks on end until the day he committed the murder. For years Konrad had gone to the bank and asked for money and the bank had simply handed over the money, for years this had been a bi-weekly occurrence, a habit, Konrad would simply spend a morning going from the lime works to Sicking, to enter the bank and withdraw a lesser or larger sum, as the manager phrased it, actually the bank always let him withdraw whatever sum he asked for without the least difficulty, whether it was five thousand or ten thousand or two thousand or one thousand or five hundred, or twenty thousand and so forth. It had never occurred to the bank to refuse to let Konrad draw any sum whatsoever, the bank had always met every one of Konrad’s claims on it with good grace, in fact, as the manager found he must say, rather handsomely. But the time had come when this had to end. In the circumstances, Konrad said to Wieser, I naturally decided to get up and leave instantly, to go, to get clean out of there was what I was thinking, and I did actually rise and take my coat from the hook on the door, Konrad said to Wieser, I held out my hand to the manager, and the manager, who had of course leaped up from his chair as soon as I had gotten up from mine, gave me his hand and said: Very well, you can withdraw ten thousand, we will of course let you have another ten thousand. The manager actually said “of course,” Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, of course of course of course I keep hearing him saying it even now, he was saying of course, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, it was grotesque, he did it from sheer habit, according to Konrad, of course, when it would have been so much more a matter of course, Konrad said, to have given me nothing more. The manager also used the expression “oblige,” “to oblige you” just like that. As I had used to withdraw the round sum of ten thousand at the beginning of the month, Konrad said to Wieser, I went, after shaking the manager’s hand and saying goodbye to him, and withdrew the round sum of ten thousand, as was my habit. I slipped the money in my pocket and left the bank for the last time, I left the bank once and for all, Konrad said to Wieser. I did a little shopping, I bought shoelaces, tallow, bond paper, shirt buttons, fresh mitten wool for my wife, and went back to the lime works. The bank certainly had behaved handsomely once again, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. On the way home I naturally realized the utter hopelessness of our situation. Actually, if we spend the absolute minimum, I was thinking, while I walked as far as the rock spur and back to the tavern and from the tavern to the sawmill and from the sawmill to the rock spur and behind the annex and past the annex to the lime works, we have a few weeks more, and if we spend less than that, even, we might eke out a few months on these ten thousand. If we can reduce our requirements from the minimal to something even more minimal in expenditures, it’s no problem, because we are, Wieser reports Konrad saying, the most unassuming two people in the world. Of course I must get my book written in this period of grace, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but once my book is written nothing else matters, and it is just possible that the most hopeless situation is the most favorable to the writing of the book. Insofar as I was able to let this idea gain ground until it became my dominant idea, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, I no longer felt any uneasiness, quite the contrary, I walked whistling into my room. That evening, as I recall, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, she suddenly said, interrupting my reading from Kropotkin, dance, following it up immediately with the word carnival dance. She pronounces the words carniva
l dance several times in a row, I heard the words carnival dance several times in a row. Then she says: Do you remember? and then she pronounces the words Venice, Parma, Florence, Nice, Paris, Deggendorf, Landshut, Schönbrunn, Mannheim, Sighartsein, she says, and Henndorf. But it all goes back at least thirty years, she says. Dances, dances, she cries, again and again: You put up a lot of resistance, but I never gave up, I simply would not give up. In Paris, in Rome, remember? Let’s go dancing, dancing! I said, and we went dancing, we went to all the dances. My insistence was more ruthless than your resistance. You dressed me, in Rome you put on my red dress, in Florence my blue dress, in Venice the blue dress, in Parma the white dress, the dress with the long train in Madrid, she says. Suddenly she says: the dress with the train, yes, the dress with the long train, I want to wear it, put it on me now, yes, do put it on me, put it on me! and so I put on her the dress with the train. Come, the mirror, she demands, and then: come on, my face powder compact. And she powders her face and looks in the mirror, she alternates between powdering her face and looking in the mirror. Suddenly she says: I don’t see anything, I can’t see a thing. Actually, Konrad said to Wieser, she couldn’t see the mirror for the cloud of loose face powder she had generated. It could be a good thing that I can’t see myself, she says, and then goes on covering herself with more powder. Her whole dress is covered with powder, by this time, Konrad told Wieser, and meanwhile she keeps on saying: I must put more powder on, I must cover myself with powder, from top to bottom, she says, and when the powder in the compact is all used up she says: don’t we have more face powder somewhere? there’s got to be more face powder! find it, find it, she says, and sure enough I find a second compact and she goes on covering her face with more powder, Konrad said to Wieser, until suddenly I can no longer see her face at all, she has completely covered her face with powder. I’m all powdered up! all powdered up! she says: all powdered up! she cries, Konrad said, and suddenly she is laughing and crying: all covered with powder, all powdered over, I’ve covered myself all up with powder! and she laughs and cries and laughs and cries, the same thing over and over. Then she suddenly falls silent and straightens up a bit and says: that’s good. And again: that’s good. And then: The play is finished. Broken off. The play is broken off, finished. Here’s a scandal! Imagine, she cries out, Konrad told Wieser, we’ve got a scandal here, a scandal in our house, a scandal! Then, after a brief silence: that’s good, she says, that’s good. She is utterly exhausted, and I take off her dress, the dress with the train. You must give this dress a good shaking, she says, Konrad told Wieser, the whole dress is covered with face powder, go out into the hall and give it a good shaking out! and I do as she tells me, and shake out the dress in the hall. At eleven I tell her Good Night and go to my room, Konrad said, but in my room I find that I have left the Kropotkin in her room, so I go back to her room to fetch my Kropotkin. To my surprise I find her already fast asleep, probably from exhaustion. I feel my way to the table in the dark, and pick up the Kropotkin and go back to my own room. Reading Kropotkin relaxes me. About two A.M., the time I usually fall asleep, Konrad told Wieser, I fell asleep. To Fro: It wasn’t the first time we sat together in total darkness. We’d eaten nothing for supper. I can’t lift a finger to do the least thing, cut my fingernails, cut my toenails, nothing, Konrad said. Absolute passivity. I tell her: I shall now read to you from the Kropotkin, but I can’t do it, or I say, I shall read the Novalis, but I can’t do it. There’s the depressing awareness, too, of sitting forever opposite my totally exhausted wife. Buck up, I say to myself, and read her the Kropotkin again, try; or, come on now, try the Novalis again, but I can’t begin, I can’t even muster the strength to pick myself up and walk to my own room. Sitting opposite her, I become more clearly cognizant of my wife’s run-down, shabby state, of my own run-down, shabby state. Looking out of the window, though I can’t see anything in the darkness, I know nevertheless that the weather is the cause of all this. The weather alone can drive a person like myself and a person like her crazy, on top of all our basic reasons for despair. Both of us immobile in our chairs. Till dawn we sit without a word, utterly exhausted, utterly worn out and utterly exhausted in our chairs, half awake, clutching at each other from time to time, in silence, so as not to go out of our minds from one moment to the next. The funeral of the sawmill owner: Hoeller comes to fetch me to the funeral, Konrad says to Fro, we walk together under the rock spur to the sawmill. I’d managed to dig up some black articles of clothing and to put them on, Konrad says to Fro. A pair of warm woolen socks I once bought in Mannheim for the funeral of my cousin Albert, my youngest cousin. And the warm black vest I picked up in Hamburg, and I have my black Borsalino on my head. The black woolen muffler around my neck, of course. Black shoes, bought in Venice. A man has to be careful, Hoeller is supposed to have said to Konrad, he goes to a funeral and is liable to catch his death. I’ve seen it many times, myself, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro; a man attends a funeral, catches a chill, and the next thing you know it’s his own funeral. On our way to the rock spur, I muse about the sawmill owner and myself, and it seems to me we always got along quite well, he and I. A man who owns black clothes wears his black clothes to a funeral, I am thinking, while on the way to the sawmill. The moment you reach the house of mourning you go straight to the room where the corpse lies in state. You press the widow’s or the widower’s hand. You say something about what a good, dear person the departed was. Walking in procession behind the coffin everyone walks slowly, not speaking, only murmuring. Not a word is understood. Special funerals attract hundreds of people. The sawmill owner’s funeral is a special funeral. Following a special funeral attended by special kinds of people and with a special kind of clergyman officiating, everyone enters a special kind of restaurant and eats a special kind of meal, I am thinking, Konrad said. A special kind of vehicle, specially decorated and drawn by specially groomed, specially decorated horses, rolls along, followed by specially concerned persons. The funeral cortege is a special arrangement, a special liturgy is pronounced at the graveside, all of it involving naturally a special expense. The day of such a funeral is a special day, I am thinking, Konrad says to Fro, as I walk toward the sawmill, toward which hundreds of people are walking now, all of them in black, Konrad says to Fro, and sometimes Hoeller is in front of me, sometimes he is behind me, because my walk is irregular, but in the end Hoeller is walking beside me again and I am thinking: the fire chief is going to make a special speech. As we reach the sawmill I can actually see that everybody is dressed specially for the occasion. Especially fine wreaths, especially white, clean clothes on the children, the especially costly-looking coffin. Finally, at the open grave, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I wonder whether to keep my hat on, or not, if I take the hat off I shall catch my death of cold, if I keep it on, people will talk, so I keep my hat on. The fire chief makes an especially short speech, which at first takes me aback, Konrad says to Fro, until I remember that the fire chief and the sawmill owner were enemies, which explains the shortness of the fire chief’s speech. The priest’s sermon is all the longer. The depth of an open grave always shocks me afresh, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, we do our best to be brave and put up a bold front, but the depth of those open graves frightens us every time. Did I have no differences with the sawmill owner, I am thinking, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, and No, I had no differences of any kind with the sawmill owner, Konrad is supposed to have decided on the way home from the funeral. Actually, Konrad says, the sawmill owner was a decent fellow, as he told Hoeller on their way back to the lime works, though afterwards he brooded for a long time over why he said this, and most of all about why he said it to Hoeller on the way home, why he said that the sawmill owner was a decent fellow, he could just as well have said a good fellow, or at least a fellow you couldn’t find fault with, unobjectionable and so forth. The Konrads had planned to spend the rest of that day reading, he reading aloud to her alternately from the Kropotkin and the Novalis,
as I was reading I kept on thinking about the funeral, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, and these thoughts were affecting my voice so that it sounded strange. Fro: a dream of Konrad’s: in a sudden, not readily classifiable fit of insanity (catatonia?) Konrad had taken to painting the whole interior of the lime works black, from all the way up under the roof to all the way downward, gradually, to the ground, using a mat black varnish, several pailfuls of which he had found in the attic. He would not leave the lime works, he said to himself, until he had finished painting the entire interior with this mat black varnish, it was of the greatest importance to him to get it all painted black, everything inside the lime works, with this paint he had found in the attic. Ceilings, walls, whatever was left of the furniture, all of it was painted black inside and out, and he even painted his wife’s room, then everything inside his wife’s room, and finally he painted his wife black inside and out, imagine it if you can, everything in her room including her French invalid chair, simply everything as I said, and finally everything in his own room, he needed exactly seven days, Fro says, to paint the whole lime works and the whole interior and everything inside the interior black inside and out. The instant he finished, Fro says, he locked up the lime works and ran past the annex and up the rock spur, from the top of which he hurled himself down. Fro, today: Konrad lives in constant fear that the man from the bank might come knocking on his door, which is why he doesn’t open the door. A man from the bank, or one of the policemen might be standing outside his front door, and so Konrad no longer leaves his room, even when his wife is ringing or knocking for help. Fro himself was admitted to the lime works only at a moment of abysmal despair. Konrad heard a knock at the front door quite often, someone knocking with intrepid stubbornness, but Konrad did not believe it was Hoeller, because Hoeller would not do such a thing. The knocking gave the impression of someone wanting to smash up the lime works. Konrad is supposed to have said: sitting in my chair I hear this knocking, and I wait from one knock to the next, the irregular intervals between knocks made it impossible for him to guess who it might be. Is it someone from the bank? someone from the police? he wonders. He stays immobile in his chair. He won’t open the door. He practices self-restraint. He listens to his wife’s ringing for hours, but he thinks: there’s no sense in going up there. Nothing makes any sense, he thinks. To Wieser, with whom I was able to close the deal on his life insurance policy today, Konrad is supposed to have said that the immense amount of material he had collected in his head for his book was in itself enough to destroy this kind of book; the probability that such a work might be destroyed by the sheer immensity of the material, the constantly increasing immensity of the material, was a probability that kept increasing in direct ratio to the increase in the quantity of the material. Ultimately the quantity of conceptual material was likely to crush a man altogether. At first he had believed that the book was a decided possibility for him, then he believed it was decidedly impossible, and went on alternating between its possibility and its impossibility, but the intervals in which he thought it would be possible for him to write the book were growing shorter, while the intervals in which the book seemed to be a lost cause were growing longer. But he had never quite lost the sense of the possibility of starting to write it, of being able to get started, actually he believed even now (only six months ago, that is!) that he would suddenly feel able to sit down and write it all in one sitting, as he is supposed to have expressed himself to Wieser. After all it was a simple matter of sitting down and starting to write the book, only a question of a favorable constellation of circumstances that would suddenly enable him to get it all down on paper once he got started, which he could not believe would fail to come along sooner or later. Every such constellation of circumstances occurs some time at the right moment, Konrad is supposed to have said, favorable or unfavorable, it was only a question of recognizing the one right moment of such a favorable or unfavorable constellation when it came along. Basically it was simply a matter of sitting down and writing whatever it was you had to write. Once the right moment presents itself, it must be utilized, and he had merely lacked the chance, hitherto, to seize and utilize the right moment, though undoubtedly the right moment had presented itself to him quite often already, he had only to think of the favorable time in Brussels or in Mannheim or the even more favorable time in Merano or Deggendorf or Landshut, it was only that he had been unable to utilize any of them, at the right moment everything was always ready, but one failed to utilize it, most people never managed to utilize the uniquely favorable moments in life, though this was not much of a consolation to him, Konrad hoped he would not turn out to be one of their number, especially considering how important his book was, but inside every man, every brain, every head there was, he always said, the possibility of everything coming together just once, and it was this everything just once that he so longed to recognize and utilize, sooner or later, though he rather wished it would be in the immediate future. As for unutilized favorable constellations, times, moments, etc., he had plenty of those to show in his life, most people were made up of such so-called unutilized favorable (or unfavorable) constellations, everywhere you looked you saw nothing but unutilized constellations, favorable or unfavorable in character; besides, who could decide whether a constellation was favorable or unfavorable, since one might be favorable precisely because the other was unfavorable and vice versa, the unfavorable being favorable for one (head) and vice versa, it depended on the individual (head, to turn an unfavorable constellation into a favorable one, or turn a favorable constellation into a favorable one, or a favorable into an unfavorable, etc.). Besides, Konrad did not have much time left, he is supposed to have said as long as two years ago, for one thing I shall not live much longer, and then I live basically in constant distress, and basically there is never enough time, and so forth. On top of all that it was quite clear to him that he was already an old man, an old man who had an old head on his shoulders. And here was another consideration: a work such as this might be rendered worthless by being written down too soon, even though it had been completely written down, it might turn out to be a wholly wasted effort; or else it might be useless, absolutely worthless, if written down too late. But there was no way of fixing the exact time for writing such a book, this precisely was what was so terrible about it, the unique, exact, correct moment had to present itself of its own accord. He could so easily destroy the labor of decades by choosing the wrong moment or even by misunderstanding the right moment. Or else: what if he had to break off writing the book in mid-career, stopped cold by the sudden terrifying thought that he would not be able to complete it? Another possibility: suppose the book is made worthless by being actually completed, in writing, just as worthless as it is now because it has not been written down? It could be ruined simply by being precipitately written, or by being written in too circumspect a way, written too late, whichever. Small wonder, then, that he had let every propitious moment come and pass him by, weakened further by each missed opportunity, so that he could foresee being altogether too weak to write the book down when the moment to do so actually came. He would rather not know how many extraordinary products of the human intellect had been lost by precipitousness, how many by procrastination, how many extraordinary lives had been destroyed by such precipitousness or procrastination in the mind. Of course it was known how many had failed through carelessness or inattention or because of overcautiousness or excessive attention. He, Konrad said, had invested everything he was and everything he had in his (unwritten) book. But to say so publicly, to make a public avowal that he had indeed invested his all in the book was more than he dared, more than he could permit himself to do. For one thing, he was a megalomaniac in the most fatal sense of the term, as his wife certainly never hesitated to inform him, actually her daily pointed remarks on the subject made him cruelly aware of the fact, as cruelly as only such a cripple of a woman could persist in her unsparing criticisms, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, and y
et, on the other hand, he had only been feeling his way for decades hampered by the enormous timidity and fearfulness inspired by his task and increased by facing up to it, creeping in terror from one possibility of getting hurt to the next. So that if he should actually say it, just once, that he had invested all he had in his work, in the book he had entirely in his head, no one would believe him, he could not hope to be taken seriously, he would simply be making a fool of himself once again. He had, in fact, said this very thing to his wife, day after day, namely, that he had invested all of himself in his book, which he had entirely in his head, as he took good care to emphasize every time, to which she responded day after day by calling him a fool every time, he was a fool, she said, and she was his victim. Well then: so she was the cripple who had become the fool’s victim, you might say that one cripple had been victimized by another, one fool fooled by another, she was a cripple of a fool while he was a fool of a cripple and so forth. The opposition, the enemy, he is supposed to have said, is always bound to be in the majority. Enemies are all there is, he is supposed to have said, because even our friends are enemies, we delude ourselves into seeing a friend by putting a mask of friendship on an enemy’s face to keep the enemy out of sight, we set up the stage and let the friend enter and sit down temporarily at center stage, because we happen to need to believe in his friendship, until the time comes when we drive him away, because we are suddenly able to recognize the friend as our enemy, as just another enemy among all the other enemies that populate our stage. More enemies disguised as friends keep emerging from backstage, Konrad is supposed to have said, from every side they keep coming, out of the deepest darkness, enemies as friends, friends as enemies, all enemies, in short, and we let them down ourselves in swarms from the flyloft. The loquacity of our enemies in the guise of friends (and vice versa!) populating our stage is only our infinitely cunning, snare-setting prompter all over the stage, a stage we designed ourselves with great skill in the service of our own self-deceiving hypocrisy. The curtain goes up, our enemies (as friends and vice versa) come on stage, said Konrad, until death drops the great iron curtain, instantly crushing most of the actors. It was his own fault, no doubt about it, that he had obeyed his parents in not taking up a regular course of studies at a university, not going through with it, not completing it, as he should have, because by doing so he made himself a lifelong outsider as a scientist, though on the one hand he enjoyed the advantage of pursuing his work quite independently, but on the other hand there was the disadvantage of being completely cast upon his own resources, in utter isolation, so that he could progress only by making the most arduous efforts, having to supply the missing foundation of a so-called regular course of studies by susbtituting for it as a foundation the most extreme personal effort in the area of his unquestionably greatest talent, his gift for the natural sciences, it certainly had not been easy, but luckily for him he had never lost courage or the sense of having to take a risk where his work, that is, where natural science and therefore his work was concerned, on the contrary, the more the apparently insurmountable difficulties had increased day by day and from one so-called scientific moment to the next, he felt challenged to surmount them, and it was precisely his greatest difficulties which had spurred him on to surmount his greatest obstacles, gradually, so that he had ended up with good data and a good conscience, well able to devote himself, or as he called it, to give himself up to working on his book, which he had entitled beforehand The Sense of Hearing. In accordance with family tradition Konrad’s parents forced him to concentrate, not on his graduate studies, a type of endeavor held in the lowest possible esteem in his parents’ world, but rather and exclusively upon the enormously extensive, widely ramifying landed properties that, one had to admit in retrospect, had given life to the families who had held it for all those centuries with the marvelous economic productiveness of its natural beauties, as Konrad phrased it, though to force Konrad in this direction merely revealed the dullness of those whom a good or evil fortune has made into rich proprietors, a dullness especially manifest, as a quite deadly hereditary trait, in his own immediate family. Instead of letting him go where he wanted to go, to a university, they had fetched him home from boarding school and tried to talk him out of following his so-called megalomaniac head and into seeing instead, as they saw, the greatest natural form of happiness in not learning anything at all, and forced him instead to turn his entire attention exclusively to that in which they saw fulfillment for themselves, and therefore dared to see fulfillment for him as well, namely, to real estate and buildings, to sawmills, storage cellars, lime works, rental properties, fisheries, to wood and stone and to the lower and the higher kinds of cattle. But Konrad’s total lack of interest in his family property, in property as such, had manifested itself unmistakably in his youth, it was there for anyone to see, no one in his immediate circle could have been blind to his native and ever increasing indifference to property, which in fact had resulted in the Konrads’ having lost virtually everything they had ever owned (as Konrad said a year ago). His parents knew that he was interested only in his scientific studies, and not at all in their property, and with what enthusiasm he regarded the study of natural science, which they had not permitted him to pursue, how passionately he could have devoted himself to so pure a disinterested pursuit of scientific learning, had they only permitted it, but they in turn held such pursuits in the deepest contempt, they loathed his intellectual aspirations with all the omnipotence of their traditions, and they would in the end have crushed him totally with the weight of their centuries on the property where they forced him to stay, had they not suddenly died, relatively young in years, Konrad said, one right after the other. After their death it was too late for him to take up an academic course of study, but he felt free and able to develop freely and had made up for lost time in an amazingly short span of years. Despite everything that had stood in his way, in fact, Konrad had in a relatively few years reached the point where he had his book all complete in his head, he is supposed to have told Wieser, regardless of all the obstacles put in his way, and in defiance of the most hateful kind of obstacles, he had been able to generate his book unaided in the back of his head, as it were. With him it was always the same sequence, Konrad said to Wieser, hearing came first, then he saw, then he could begin to think, no matter what was involved. He had to begin by hearing, which enabled him to see, which in turn enabled him to think. He had tried to make this characteristic clearer to his wife day after day, but in vain. But he did think every day that it was a good thing he had started so early in the day on the Urbanchich exercises, in the early twilight before dawn, and in fact often even before the twilight, it was for both of them the time of greatest receptivity and best judgment, two faculties that tended to wane toward noon, to experience a certain resurgence after the midday meal, reaching a high point around five o’clock in the afternoon, and then they slowly declined, though registering a sporadic flicker of life between about eight and nine in the evening, until complete exhaustion set in by about midnight. He would tell his wife over and over again that a scientist had to arm himself for such a task as his book with the greatest secrecy but also with the utmost ruthlessness, of course she listened to him, but on this point in particular she resisted him with all her might. Apart from this one point he had learned to eschew all statements of principle on the book decades ago, for as long as the book was still suspended in air, as he is supposed to have expressed it, as long as he had not yet brought the book into safe harbor by writing it down. To Wieser, Konrad is also supposed to have said that he did his best, pacing the floor in his room for hours. But instead of thinking about my book, and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps instead until I am about to go mad. Instead of thinking about my book, the most important thing of all, I keep digressing to irrelevancies. Several times in the course of this floor-pacing the notion had popped into his head to go down and chop wood with Hoeller; pacing the floor, he is
supposed to have told Wieser, I think about going down to Hoeller and chopping wood with Hoeller for a whole hour until I realize that it makes no sense to go down and chop wood with Hoeller, but still I keep casting about for some distraction from my work instead of doing my utmost to concentrate on the book as I should. You can’t concentrate on the main thing while at the same time digressing to irrelevancies without doing damage, the greatest possible damage! to the main thing, Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed in conversation with Wieser. But even though he knew this, he nevertheless kept on incessantly thinking about his book and simultaneously about something completely irrelevant, such as thinking at noon about what they would both have for supper, thinking in the evening about what they would have for breakfast, thinking at breakfast about what to have for lunch, what to order Hoeller to pick up at the tavern, etc. Wieser says that Konrad told him how, suddenly, in the midst of thinking about his book, he would suddenly think about his Paris apartment, his apartment in Mannheim, their house in Bolzano, any number of things quite unrelated to the book, he would take a peek, as it were, into his apartment in Paris at a time when he should be concentrating one hundred percent on his book, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser; all sorts of unrelated images would intrude upon the image I have of my book, pop into it and destroy it for me, shatter the clear image I have of my book into thousands upon thousands of unrelated images, imaginary human faces, etc. etc. There was always something to prevent him from writing his book, in Paris and London it was the huge extent of the city, in Berlin, it was the superficiality, in Vienna it was the feeblemindedness of the people, in Munich, the foehn blowing down from the Alps, no matter what it was, the mountains, the sea, the spring, the summer, the coldest of winters, the rainiest of all summers, then again family quarrels, the catastrophic nature of politics, or finally and always his own wife, there was always something that made it impossible for him to write. They had moved to so many places, entirely for the sake of the as yet unwritten book, and they had left so many places, precipitately, for the sake of the unwritten book, they had left Paris post-haste, London post-haste, Mannheim post-haste, Vienna post-haste, not knowing in the morning that by that evening they would have their trunks packed and broken off all their ties to the city in which they had been living for weeks, for months, usually in the belief that it was to be for always, and yet by that evening they would have found a distant city to move to for life, only to go through the same process of settling down for good only to suddenly pack up and leave, Konrad actually said: leave head over heels, Wieser recalls. For instance, Wieser says, Konrad told him that from the moment Hoeller’s nephew, that shady character, a criminal through and through, had moved in with Hoeller at the annex, Konrad had been able to think of nothing else but this nephew for weeks, even though he should have been concentrating one hundred percent on his book, while incessantly pacing the floor in his room and then in his wife’s room, criss-crossing the room in every direction, thinking hard about the book, which he simply had to start writing, but at the same time thinking with the greatest intensity about Hoeller’s nephew, who had appeared so abruptly out of the dark and who struck Konrad as a weird criminal type, fascinated by the question of what this nephew of Hoeller’s meant by living in the annex, what he wanted there, and meanwhile Konrad’s book suffered from neglect, suffered irreparably from the withdrawal of Konrad’s attention. Over and over Konrad asked himself: How old is Hoeller’s nephew, anyway? meanwhile neglecting the work on his book, and: What kind of clothes is he wearing? and: What color is his hair, anyway? and: Isn’t the fellow rather weird? and: He has long legs and a powerful torso and gigantic hands, the largest hands I’ve ever seen, he kept thinking, meanwhile neglecting his book. On one occasion Konrad is supposed to have confided the following thoughts to Wieser: Pacing the floor in my room, I keep thinking that Hoeller’s nephew must be planning to do me in because he thinks that I have money, he doesn’t know that I have no money at all, he naturally believes that I am well off, there is a type of habitual criminal, after all, Konrad thought while pacing the floor, that isn’t sick at all but is simply a malignant character, and one must be on one’s guard against them. Konrad heard the two men laughing together, all the way from the annex, he kept hearing Hoeller and his nephew laughing, and he naturally asked himself: What is the meaning of this laughter? Isn’t there something weird about it? It was possible that the two of them were conspiring against him, Konrad thought, but he promptly shook off any such ideas as absurd and managed to suppress them; for days he was troubled by the thought that he was sabotaging his book by letting his mind dwell on Hoeller’s nephew and Hoeller himself, on their relationship to each other, or, if not sabotaging his book exactly, he was certainly lessening any chance of writing his book. He also knew that it was morbid to brood about not being able to write his book, about never getting it written at all, it was morbid to the point of becoming a disease, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser. Nevertheless he must have heard aright, because when he was standing outside the annex at one A.M. (!) he heard the two of them, Hoeller and his nephew, laughing again inside the annex, even though it was pitch dark inside, and yet I hear the two of them laughing, how strange, Konrad is supposed to have said. It wasn’t loud laughter, exactly, nor was it suppressed laughter, either, it was just a weird kind of laughter. Thinking that the two of them, Hoeller and his nephew, were laughing in the middle of the night inside the darkness of that annex, Konrad had felt so irritated the rest of the night that he simply could not get back to sleep at all, Konrad is supposed to have said, instead he had to get out of bed and pace the floor, constantly thinking about those two in the annex, occasionally looking out of the window in the direction of the annex to see if the lights were back on, by any chance, but he saw no light, yet the two of them did laugh together, or could he possibly have been mistaken? and as he kept asking himself this question it was growing light outside. Lately I wear myself out brooding over the most absurd notions, all of them pretexts for not writing, for not facing the fact that I am simply unable to write my book, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, if only I could write, if I could have written my book, everything would be different, I’d be feeling all relieved inside, meaning that I could be indifference personified, I could let myself be old and indifferent, cool, what could be more desirable? Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. But the last time he spoke to Wieser, Konrad is supposed to have confided the following to him: At about half past two in the morning he had gone down once more to the annex, absent-mindedly slipping into a jacket too light for the season, bareheaded, in his bedroom slippers, imagine! and stationed himself under the annex windows to eavesdrop. At first he heard nothing and he was freezing, but the excitement of eavesdropping saved him from catching cold, he thought, because a body fully tensed up in an act of supreme attention would not take a chill, and Konrad’s head and body had been tensed to their utmost in the act of eavesdropping, pressing himself to the wall of the annex under the windows; it was not curiosity that drove him back to the annex to eavesdrop, it was fear, real fear, and an enormous, soothing mistrustfulness toward this nephew of Hoeller’s who was suddenly playing so dominant a role in the lime works area, this stranger who had slipped into the annex behind Konrad’s back, probably seeking a refuge from the long arm of the law, Konrad would of course be the first to grant a refuge to any fugitive from the law, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, it went without saying that he would have protected, hidden, rescued from the fangs of the law, any man threatened by the law, his sympathies were entirely on the side of all fugitives from the law, the law pursued chiefly the innocent, the most innocent, Konrad is supposed to have said, the law persecuted the poorest of the poor, anyone who was being hunted down by the police had to be given shelter in every way, and when Konrad said in every way he meant exactly that, he meant by every available means, because he was acquainted with the law’s way with people, he had himself been raped by the law a number of ti
mes, he is supposed to have said, the law raped the individual and therefore the individual had to be protected from the law; however, Hoeller’s nephew frightened him, and anyway Konrad had a feeling that Hoeller’s nephew was by no means helpless and entitled to protection, but that he was a public menace, not by nature or anything he couldn’t help but out of deliberate viciousness; anyway, to get back to his story, Konrad suddenly heard the two of them laughing again, Hoeller and his nephew were in there laughing, Konrad could hear them even through the double storm windows, they must have been sitting on the corner bench in the kitchen, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, sitting there in the pitch dark and apparently talking about something to do with him, Konrad, one thing in particular, always the same thing, and from time to time they would laugh about it; what led Konrad to the conclusion and then to the conviction that they were talking about him was the nature of their conversation, though he admitted that he could not understand a single word they said, despite the fact that he could hear everything, but it did seem to him that he heard them pronouncing the name Konrad several times, alternately Konrad and the Konrad woman was what he heard, he thought, so that evidently the subject of their conversation was himself and his wife, as he soon clearly understood; other words he thought he distinguished were lime works, annex, and finally the word cash box, after which the two of them laughed again, it was three o’clock by this time, and the two of them had suddenly risen, Konrad heard them walking from the kitchen to the entry which meant, Konrad thought, that they were about to come out of the annex, so he made tracks away from there, he actually ran back to the lime works and as quickly as he could up to his room, not without first shooting all the bolts and locking all the locks, every last one. Once in his room, still breathless from running, he is supposed to have listened intently, for any sounds from Hoeller and his nephew, but he didn’t hear a thing, looking out of the window he could see nothing but the darkness so that by the time Konrad was in bed at last he is supposed to have asked himself whether his weird experience, or what seemed to be a weird experience that he had just barely survived, was in fact a real experience, because it was after all possible that I only imagined all that I believed I saw and heard while pressed against the annex wall, eavesdropping; thinking that he might merely have imagined the whole thing, Konrad finally fell asleep, and when he woke up early that morning his first thought was that Hoeller and his nephew might have been fast asleep all night long, after going to bed as early as six or seven in the evening, and that he merely imagined all the weird things he remembered, he said. He told Wieser that he told his wife the whole story of his nighttime experience in every minute detail, and she commented that he was clearly the victim of overwork, that he had so drained himself of energy by overdoing the Urbanchich exercises that experiences such as he had just recounted from the night before could be the natural result of his weakened condition, as long as he understood that these were imaginary experiences, not realities, the Konrad woman is supposed to have said to her husband; you are suffering from delusions, she said, nothing more than delusions. Instead of sticking to his writing, to writing his book, he let his mind wander off in every conceivable direction, distracting himself in ways that bordered on the absurd, such as for instance the idea of walking out of the lime works to chop wood with Hoeller, going into the timber forest with Hoeller, lumbering, carpentry at the annex, tying brooms, anything. Every second day, in fact, Konrad said to Wieser, he would actually dress warmly, in work clothes, as Hoeller recalls, and leave the lime works wearing ankle warmers, a woolen cap, and his long leather pants, of course, planning to join the loggers in the forest, walking briskly away from the house but after passing the thicket he turned right back, recognizing the absurdity of what he was doing and saying to himself: I’ve got to get back to my work, my book, back to my desk, back to making sense. But no sooner had he started back to doing the sensible thing, i.e., back to his work, to his desk, to the stack of papers piled on his desk in preparation for writing, he began to be plagued by doubts whether he was doing the right thing after all in not going to join the loggers in the forest, in not doing something irrational, in fact, instead of making an effort for the hundredth or thousandth time to tackle the work on his desk, the same doomed effort, his doubts becoming stronger as he reentered the lime works and back in his room the closer he approached his desk where his work awaited him, the less he felt like writing; however, at this point he dressed himself properly for the day ahead indoors; then he lay down on his bed to brood, trying not to despair but not succeeding, so he got up again, paced the floor, and waited for his wife to ring. When she rings I shall go to her room, and she will ask me if I have made any progress with my writing, and I shall say: No, as I always do, simply by not answering the question, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, remarking that the proverbial sentence: No answer is also an answer, certainly applied to what went on between the two of them day after day to an extraordinary degree. All the proverbial truths, in fact, he said to Wieser, had come to roost for him and his wife in the lime works, as a clear if heartbreaking expression of their daily truth, reality, and hardship. Lately he tended to say to his wife, again and again: I’m going to the woods, to join the woodcutters, I’m going with Hoeller to the woods, to do some logging. He once did go daily to the lumbermen in the woods, but he had not done this for years now. He never realized until just a while ago that he had long ceased to take his walks of inspection into the forest. I am not going to the sawmill any more, I am not going to the tavern any more, I won’t go to see Fro, I won’t go to see Wieser any more, I won’t go again to see the works inspector, the forestry commissioner, he is supposed to have said to his wife over and over and in the way he merely listed all the people and things he would no longer see or attend to, there was so much bitter reproach against his wife that he could spare himself reproaching her with all the other things he might mention. The book and you are killing me between you, he is supposed to have said to her repeatedly toward the end. He often wondered, for instance, whether it might not help if he attended to his lapsed correspondence, even though it was not really the way out of his more and more frightening predicament, it was years since he had written a letter or a card to anyone, there was a huge pile of unanswered correspondence from every corner of the world on top of the bureau in his room, the drawers too were stuffed full of unanswered letters, so many people had written to him from time to time, with a persistence impossible to understand because, surely, a man who did not answer his mail was clearly serving notice that he had no desire to stay in touch with the correspondent, and Konrad had long since ceased to answer hundreds of thousands of letters and cards, but his correspondents would not leave him in peace, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, they kept on writing, it was only after years of not hearing from him in reply that these innumerable correspondents, largely people I detest from the bottom of my heart, Konrad is supposed to have said, finally desisted from writing to him; to be perfectly frank, he is supposed to have said, I haven’t been receiving any mail for years now, my wife still gets mail, the most insignificant kind of mail you can imagine, embarrassing letters from former servants, for instance, who write partly out of loyalty, partly because they hope to be remembered in her will, but also because it is customary, has been customary for centuries, they write to recall themselves to her memory, possibly one or another even writes to her out of pity, Konrad is alleged to have told Wieser, my wife differs from me, I despise being pitied, I hate it in fact, while she accepts pity as a kind of medicine, even in its lowest form, the rudimentary greeting on a postcard, despite his having tried for years to dissuade her from answering all these letters and cards, it was far too much trouble for her considering the strain she was undergoing for the book’s sake, but she insisted on answering all her mail, meaning that she made him answer it for her, because as you know, my dear Wieser, my wife is in no shape to write letters or postcards, in the first place she can’t see, and s
he can’t hold a pen or pencil steadily enough to write with it, just taking one in hand makes her extremely jittery, her entire body begins to tremble with resistance against the act of writing, so that he had to answer all her mail in her name, all she did was sign the letters, he had to mail the letters and the cards too, which meant taking them to the post office, or at least making sure that Hoeller took them to the village, not to mention the fact that these mailings cost a lot of money, when they certainly had no money to waste on such nonsense as letters and cards addressed to a lot of totally useless people whom he estimated to number in their hundreds still, and yet, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, from time to time I wonder whether I myself shouldn’t go back to answering all the unanswered letters and cards on my bureau, give a sign of life to one or another of my correspondents, some of whom must have been thinking that I died years ago, because if a man like myself isn’t heard from for any length of time and doesn’t reply to his mail, to two or three letters in a row, people are likely to assume that he is dead, though if I died they would probably hear about it, so from time to time it occurs to me that it might be advisable, though I can’t say why, to sit down and answer all those letters and cards, get back in touch with all those people from whom he hadn’t heard a thing, actually, in a long time, because of his own failure to continue the correspondence, to find out what had happened to all of them, at least; a sudden curiosity would seize him like a fever and he would actually sit down at his desk to reopen his correspondence with all the people who must be feeling rebuffed by him because he had dropped the correspondence without giving any reason, but even in the act of arranging his stationery and filling his pen with ink he would suddenly think how idiotic of him to write letters all of a sudden when he could use the time and the same effort to write his book, the time he would be wasting trying to think up answers that were no longer awaited, to letters from forgotten correspondents, could be put to so much better use in writing his book, and so he would give up the idea of reviving a correspondence interrupted now for three or four years, and he would remove the stationery from his desk and bring back the bond paper for his manuscript and arrange it in front of him on the desk. But as soon as he had the stack of paper for the manuscript back in place, i.e., when he had restored the ideal conditions for working on the book, he became incapable of setting to work writing it, he would sit there for a time, a long time, staring at the stack of fresh paper, until it was clear to him that, once more, he could not begin to write, whereupon he would move the stationery back in place on the desk, and so it went for hours, the stationery alternating with the manuscript paper in front of him on his desk, the business of manuscript paper forward, manuscript paper back, stationery forward, stationery back, was enough in itself to make writing impossible, whether to write the manuscript or to reopen the correspondence, so he did neither, but instead took to pacing the floor of his room every which way, thinking alternately about the book and the interrupted correspondence, thinking what an immense number of letters I would have to write, and thinking alternately, how immensely difficult it was to start writing the book, and then he would think: I shan’t write any letters, or, I won’t write the book, I shall write neither the letters nor the book, and he would think: in every one of these letters I would have to start by thanking them, always the same formula of thanks, one letter like the other and basically every one of these letters is nothing more than a demand, demands for money or other demands, vulgar demands, outrageous demands, on the one hand these people always want money, on the other hand they want affection, recommendations, he thought, so he really couldn’t answer all these letters, since he had neither money nor any affection to give, in fact he couldn’t care less about these people. All of these letter and card writers were angling for some advantage, to get something or other out of him. Basically there’s something underhanded about all of them, all these letters and cards without exception are dictated by some veiled or hidden or even shamelessly undisguised infamous motive. To the attic with the whole pile! he would think, off to the attic with them at once! and instantly begin to make a single pile of all those letters and cards, hundreds of thousands of them, a man could be suffocated by the mere smell of so many hundreds of thousands of letters in one heap, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser; while embarked on this he realized of course that he was doing something to distract himself from writing the book, something new, because piling the letters in one heap and then carrying them gradually up to the attic was a brand new thing to do, compared with the two, three dozen kinds of things he had done for years, over and over, to distract himself from writing the book, things like sweeping up, wiping up, pulling nails from the walls, shining shoes, washing socks, etc., chores that had begun long since to nauseate him, all of his disgusting maneuverings to distract himself from what he should be doing nauseated him, so he grabbed an armful of letters, Wieser says, and dragged it up to the attic, and invariably, as always, banged his head against the great wooden beam over the door to the attic, running his head against it with such force, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, that I thought I had cracked my skull, but actually the pain let up fairly soon and the wound, though bleeding profusely, was quite superficial; so he went on dragging armfuls of letters and cards up to the attic, thinking all the while: this whole correspondence has been a big mistake, all correspondence is a mistake! At the end, after the last of the letters and cards had been dragged up to the attic, he collapsed with exhaustion, on the bed in his room, naturally too weak by this time, supposedly, to give the least thought to his book, in a state of exhaustion too profound even for him to feel the usual irritation, the profound irritation he has felt for years, at the fact that everything on his desk is now arranged perfectly so that he could begin at once to write his book, as he explained to Wieser: precisely because I can see clearly that I can begin to write at any moment, that everything is arranged and in perfect order for starting to write, everything is pointing toward this moment of readiness to write, the very awareness that everything is pushing me in that direction naturally makes it impossible for me to start writing. Every time it occurs to him that the very sight of his desk with everything on it prepared and ready, so that he can begin to write his book, is just what makes it impossible for him to begin writing, the thought that this is so becomes unbearable, so he gets up and drinks a glass of water. He immediately follows this up with a second glass of water swallowed in one long gulp, though in the midst of this gulp he is already thinking whether he isn’t going to catch a terrible cold from drinking the ice-cold water down so fast, because it’s a fact that drinking a glass of icy water too fast one is bound to catch cold, which he always lived in fear of doing, but, on the other hand he had never actually caught cold that way. Just one week before he shot his wife, however, he did say that it suddenly came to him that he had actually caught cold by drinking down a glass of cold water too quickly. According to Wieser: Konrad suddenly found himself unable to speak, he tried to speak but couldn’t. To calm himself down Konrad left the kitchen where he had just taken a quick drink of water and went back to his own room where he lay down, but quickly got up again, in constant terror that this as he hoped only momentary loss of his voice might possibly incapacitate him for carrying on with the Urbanchich method and put a sudden stop to his further experimental studies, causing him to lose his grip not only on the Urbanchich method but on his book itself. He made several attempts to speak, but in vain. You can imagine my wife’s pretended horror, her open relief, her secret joy at my sudden speechlessness, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, when I confronted her with the fact that I had lost my voice. But just as suddenly as his voice had disappeared, it came back and he could talk again; I remember exactly how it happened, Konrad said to Wieser, all at once I said naturally, I heard myself saying the word naturally, and it occurred to me that my sudden loss of voice probably was linked in some way to my eye trouble, I remember thinking that now I shall be losing m
y voice alternately with losing my eyesight, from this day on the fading of my voice will alternate with the fading of my vision. Yet, although he believed that now he could speak again, meaning that he could speak again quite normally, he ought to hasten upstairs to continue the experimental work using the Urbanchich method, with his wife, he nevertheless did not leap up in his usual impulsive way but stayed abed, Wieser says, thinking, as he told Wieser: now the both of us are badly in need of help, to such a degree that help becomes almost impossible to give. From here on out nothing but inadequacy and infirmity was in the cards for them both. His wife deserved a better fate than a man like himself, Konrad thought, as he said to Wieser, not me, not me, not me, he said to himself over and over again. And yet a woman as greatly in need of help as his wife, more dependent on help than anyone, and who deserved to have found the most helpful man in the world, had nevertheless turned herself over unconditionally to Konrad, because by the time they married she had long since been sick and crippled, Konrad told Wieser, her disease began to manifest itself years before they married, it had in fact broken out suddenly with all its terrible ramifications before the actual marriage ceremony took place; Konrad had in fact married her knowing full well that she was already gravely diseased and crippled, he actually knew then, he said to Wieser, that her crippling disease was incurable. Konrad did not really understand why he had chosen to marry a sick, crippled woman, whose crippling disease would in all probability, as he insists he knew perfectly well at the time, worsen from year to year; actually, he married her precisely because of her crippling disease which would make her completely dependent on him, that was it, he said to himself: I am marrying a woman who will be totally dependent on me, a woman who needs me, needs me absolutely, he reflected at the time, a woman who cannot exist without me, or at least thinks she cannot exist without me, but who in turn will be available to me unconditionally for my purposes, i.e., for my scientific research, a woman I can use in any way I need to use her, a woman I shall even be free to abuse, misuse, if necessary, as Konrad explained to Wieser, if the exigencies of my scientific circumstances demand it. But to get back to his room where Konrad was gradually getting used to the idea, and resigned to the fact of his recurrent eye trouble, as previously mentioned, as well as to his having to suffer a temporary loss of his voice from time to time, because it was becoming clear to him as he lay on his bed thinking about it that the momentary loss of his voice had not been caused by his rapid drinking down of that glass of icy water, as he had at first believed though not for long and only because the cold water seemed the most obvious immediate cause of his sudden mutism, but that actually the sudden loss of his voice was as mysterious as his eye trouble, both were equally inexplicable organic weaknesses arising from within, from inside his head, that is, in which, as he is supposed to have said to Wieser, quite a few other infirmities, even more disastrous ones than the two under consideration, were at this moment busily hatching out, no doubt about it: in no time at all his head was certain to breed him a lot of organic infirmities, cessations of organic functions, which were quite likely, in the circumstances, to have lethal effects quite soon. Konrad could not believe in his chances of living more than a couple of years more, he is supposed to have said just eight days before he shot his wife dead. Well, on the day he completely lost his voice for the first time he lay on his bed for hours, he is supposed to have said, occasionally wondering why she (his wife) didn’t ring for him, what could be the reason she did not ring? but actually he was only thinking how not to tell her that his temporary loss of vision was not all, that he would be suffering from a recurrent loss of voice as well, because he did not want to tell her about his new trouble, not out of consideration for her feelings, but in order to avoid giving her a pretext for urging him to drop the Urbanchich exercises and generally weakening his position in the area of the work to be done. So-called spasms, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, meaning that he alternately could not see or speak, occasionally both vision and voice might fail him simultaneously, for a few moments, and of course he might find himself unable to see or speak for lengthy periods of time, or unable either to see or speak for lengthy stretches, but what matters the most, he said, is that I can hear, after all, and I do hear extraordinarily well, although I must say that I would not be surprised to find myself suddenly also unable to hear, but it was precisely his uninterrupted work with the Urbanchich method, his incessant experimentation with everything related to the hearing that would prevent any sudden weakening or any sudden loss of hearing, though on the other hand, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, it was of course possible that it was just such an incessant application of the Urbanchich method, incessant experimentation with the hearing that might in fact cause a sudden failure of hearing, a sudden cessation of the hearing function, naturally a man could cause his hearing to cease by making inordinate demands on it; in fact, Wieser says he wonders whether Konrad might not have actually suffered a hearing failure the night he did his wife in; that Konrad suffered a lessening of his auditory capacity for the first time that particular night was a genuine possibility, and the more he thought about it the more firmly Wieser believed that Konrad must have suffered a seizure of auditory failure on the night of the murder. To Fro, whom I finally managed to sell his policy, Konrad is supposed to have said that his, Konrad’s, great mistake was to have kept on waiting for an even more favorable moment, the most favorable moment possible to serve as a point of departure for writing his book, because he had always clung to the belief that the ideal, even the most ideal constellation of circumstances for enabling him to write his book was just around the corner, but in waiting for this moment he had lost more and more time or, as Konrad expressed it, the most valuable time, so that at last he was forced to admit to himself that he had now reached the end of his forces (!), that for two or even three decades he had waited in vain for the ideal moment in which to begin writing his book, and just before the disaster (this is what Fro calls the murder of Mrs. Konrad by her husband) Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro that he realized there was no such thing as an ideal, not to mention a most ideal moment in which to write such a work as his, because there simply could be no such ideal moment, or most ideal moment, or point of time whatever for any undertaking or cause of any kind. Like thousands of others before him, Konrad said, he too had fallen victim to a mad dream of one day suddenly bringing his great labor to fruition by writing it all down in one consistent outpouring, all triggered by the optimal point in time, the unique moment for perfect concentration on writing it. And now he would never be able to write it, neither in the prison at Stein nor in the mental institution at Niedernhardt; Konrad’s book, like Konrad himself, was a lost cause (Wieser), an immense life work, as one must assume (says Fro, doing a sudden complete about-face) totally wiped out. Here was a failure, owing to a chronic deferment, of the realization of a concept that was basically all there, wholly and flawlessly extant in his (Konrad’s) head, as the book was, a perfect, fantastic, scientific work extant in his brain though unrealized either for lack of courage, of the necessary decisiveness, and finally the failure of intellectual audacity; it was certainly most depressing to think that such a work had remained unrealized on paper where it would have been of great benefit to others, to the world of science, to all posterity. Konrad had certainly not been lacking in the necessary ruthlessness, even or perhaps especially toward himself, for the execution of his tremendous task, during those decades that had dragged on at such humiliating length, as he is supposed to have phrased it himself, though on the other hand they had passed at a terrifying clip, but he had lacked what was perhaps the most important quality of all: fearlessness in the face of realization, of concretization, fearlessness, simply, when it came to turning his head over, suddenly, from one moment to the next, ruthlessly flipping it over to drop everything inside his head onto the paper, all in one motion.
The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 2