The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (11 page)

weight. Everything hurt her. Frequently she could no longer say where she was hurting the most, in the body or in the head, she didn’t know whether to treat herself for bodily pains or for headache, head and body had for a long time now been one continuous pain, a pain that had become the best proof she had of her existence. All of her body and all of her head were now nothing other than one single pain, she is supposed to have said to Konrad four weeks before Christmas, that is, four weeks before her violent death. He simply couldn’t stand this any longer, he is supposed to have said when he was arrested; apart from this he is supposed to have said nothing at all. But there is no telling what our courts will do, Wieser says, depending entirely on the way a court happens to be constituted, how the jury happens to be constituted, Konrad might get the minimum sentence, or the maximum, or else he could be declared insane. As daily experience teaches, it was all anybody’s guess until the very last moment of every court trial, every time. In the last analysis there was nothing more spineless and more subject to whims and weather, sympathies and antipathies than the courts and especially juries, who could be swayed by the most unpredictable circumstances. Speaking to the public works inspector, too, the Konrad woman once said that her pains were by now all the proof she had that she was still here (alive). Konrad saw how she wanted to get over to the window and couldn’t, wanted to stand up and couldn’t, wanted to take a few steps and couldn’t, that she was cold but couldn’t pull up her blanket; and so he went and pulled up her blanket. She no longer noticed that he was wearing a dirty jacket, torn pants; that, after months of neglect, he had come to look like a derelict. The whole lime works is filthy from top to bottom, and she doesn’t see
it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. That above all the bed linen was filthy dirty because it hadn’t been changed in months was something she did not see, and he couldn’t possibly clean the bed linen, he no longer had the strength to do it, because he simply didn’t have the time; as recently as six months ago she had still taken care of such things as the bed linen etc. from her invalid chair, she had swamped Hoeller with orders to clean things, but she could do this no longer, she had lost her grip on the situation, what with having to concentrate on enduring her pains, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, and how he would see that she wanted to get out of her room, but couldn’t, that she wanted to go to the woods and couldn’t, to the village, and couldn’t. That she thought about traveling, but couldn’t travel. That she needed to see people, but couldn’t see people, couldn’t have company, Konrad said. For years she had enjoyed no kind of social contact with others, meaning social contact with people congenial to both of them. However, there was really no such thing as congenial company, because in the whole world there was no person really congenial to another—an observation typical of Konrad, Wieser said. Such people as did come to see them, not recently but until about the end of October, these so-called congenial people, had not been at all congenial, they were all mere curiosity seekers, legacy hunters, swindlers, Konrad is supposed to have said. Compared with them, the works inspector, the chimney sweep, Hoeller, and he, Wieser, and Fro, were far more congenial than those so-called congenial visitors, but seeing people socially was, as far as the Konrads were concerned, anachronistic in principle. Nevertheless one could not live entirely without seeing other people, Konrad is supposed to have said, adding
that it did not embarrass him to say over and over again what everybody tended to say over and over again, no matter how ridiculous, simplistic, trite it was, except that he said it in full awareness of what he was doing, unlike most people; that was the difference, as Wieser undoubtedly knew, since it did after all always make a difference who said what and how he said it, and a serious person, or, more precisely, a person who was to be taken seriously, could just go ahead and say whatever he pleased without needing to worry whether he was uttering something banal or trite, a so-called truism, because if the person who said something banal or trite or platitudinous was a serious person, a person to be taken seriously, what he said ceased to be any of these things. For the longest time they had not been seeing people at all, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, because all of the people they had to see, such as the baker, Hoeller, Stoerschneider and the rest were people they had to see on business, not at all the same thing as people one saw socially. He could see that his wife was constantly thinking of people she was longing to see, friends, relatives, it was no use at all to try talking her out of wanting to see them, no use trying to explain to her that there was no such thing as friends, and that kinfolk were basically anything but kin, that kinship was a deception, a self-deception; a mistake, in fact. At the beginning all these kinfolk and friends had still come visiting to the lime works from the Tirol and Carinthia, from Switzerland, all the Zryds from the other side of the mountains and her other kin from the north, her East Friesian relations for instance, all of them people with a lifelong conspiratorial passion of curiosity, said Konrad to Wieser, but none of them came any longer, the lime works had gradually purged itself of this
kinfolk garbage. We don’t need any of these people, Konrad is supposed to have told his wife over and over again until they all finally stayed away and no longer even dared to write. He had begun, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, by talking her out of being interested in seeing these people, and ended by showing her how impossible they were. That they would have to make do with just each other and no one else in the lime works is something he made clear to her soon enough after they moved in, but it took years for the resulting total lack of contact with her relatives to become final, not even to mention his own relatives whom he had dropped decades ago. She ultimately became resigned to this state of affairs. At first he had sacrificed himself to her, Konrad said to Fro at one time, for decades he had sacrificed himself to her and her crippled state, but now his work demanded that she sacrifice herself to him, body and soul; his conscience on this point was clear. After all, they, the Konrads, had been on the go, traveling incessantly for two decades, in every imaginable country, in every part of the globe, and always under the most tortuous circumstances; as anyone could imagine, after all, he is supposed to have told Fro, to take a totally crippled woman traveling all over the world for years is no picnic, think of what it means to drag a totally crippled woman from city to city, from one museum to another, one tourist attraction to another, one celebrity to another, what it means to put up with a minimum of existential elbowroom, freedom of action, to please a crippled woman who, like all cripples, had to indulge an insatiable craving for novelty all over the world, insatiable for everything conceivable and inconceivable, in addition to being at that time so demanding (!) in every respect that it
actually overtaxed his strength to have to be with her at all times. Subsequently, of course, once he had begun the work on his book, she had to curtail her demands, gradually impose limitations on herself, subject herself to him and his conception of their life together, and this abrupt and unnerving reversal, namely that henceforth all the demands to be satisfied would be his and no longer hers, perturbed her at first, in fact he might say that she had lived for years in a state of self-destructive shock more beside him and under him than with him, until in the end she had resigned herself to living for his sake. From a person who had actually seen everything worth seeing and had met so many people worth meeting, and who owed all this to the sincere and supreme self-sacrifice of a man whose free surrender of his most productive years, indeed the most important two decades of his life, those between his thirtieth and fiftieth year, was certainly not to be expected, certainly not to be demanded as a right, such a person must naturally expect to make a commensurate sacrifice in return, without anyone’s having to appeal to her gratitude or some gratitude-connected principle involving guilt feelings. Konrad would after all have gotten his book written long since if his wife had not forced him to take her traveling all over the world. The book would have been completely written ten years ago at the latest, in London, in Paris, in Aschaffenburg, at the very latest in Basel, he is supposed to have said to Wieser. To Fro: every day she would ask him whether he had a clean shirt on, and he would answer that he did have a clean shirt on, though in reality he had been wearing the same shirt for a week or even two weeks; she no longer noticed anything, no longer saw the dirt, etc., nothing at all. When she wanted
him to read to her, she of course wanted him to read her favorite novel, the one about the medieval knight-troubadour, the Minnesinger Heinrich von Ofterdingen, by her favorite Romantic poet, Novalis. So of course he deliberately read to her from his favorite, whom she couldn’t stand, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, just to annoy her, to punish her for her inattentiveness, her inattention; there was simply no more effective way to punish her for insubordination; he always punished her by reading to her from the Kropotkin. But of course I do read her the Novalis, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, when she asks me for it. I can never refuse to read Novalis to her when she insists on it. Of course she hated everything in Kropotkin, and on the other hand, she loved her Novalis. The right thing to do was to read to her alternately from the Novalis and from the Kropotkin, not only the Novalis, he is supposed to have said to Fro. After reading her a passage from the Kropotkin he usually asked her to tell him what he had just read to her, and she would not know the answer, proving that she had not listened attentively when he had read the Kropotkin to her even though she was all attention when he read her the Novalis. What was that I just read to you, my dear? he would ask abruptly, and of course she hadn’t listened to the Kropotkin and floundered pitifully in trying to make up a plausible answer. Toward the end she no longer dared to let her attention wander off when he was reading Kropotkin to her, she had learned to fear that he would make good his threats—as he did more and more often, in fact—threats to withhold food, to prolong the exercises, not to air her room. Or else he might suddenly, without warning, air the room by letting an ice-cold draft she had no way of escaping hit
her directly from the window; suddenly, he read her twice as much from the Kropotkin as usual, etc. Not knowing, often, whether her failure to hear the Kropotkin was intentional or not, he often punished her unjustly, which he regretted, he said, so that to make up for it he read her the Novalis at greater length than usual, though it was exquisite self-torture for him to read the Novalis. Still, reading her the Kropotkin, he always suspected her of turning a deaf ear deliberately, because she was always able to recount flawlessly everything he read to her from Novalis, but if he asked her to repeat a Kropotkin passage she couldn’t remember a thing. Konrad also complained that she always wanted a fresh clean dress, every day, and he told Fro that he refused to give in to this, a change of dress once a week seemed quite enough to him, especially as he had to help her put it on and take it off, after all a woman could certainly wear the same dress for a week, especially when it was so much trouble to get dressed, Konrad said. He would get a bit impatient when he had to dress her, there were times when he hurt her while changing her clothes, or so the baker says who is reputed to have been present often when Mrs. Konrad was changing. Nor did Konrad leave the choice of dress always to his wife; sometimes he insisted on a dress of his own choice, and sometimes they had unrepeatable arguments (works inspector) whether he would put on her the dress he preferred or the one she wanted, but nearly always his will prevailed; Konrad is reported to have taken advantage of his wife’s extreme exhaustion to win the argument. On the one hand he would ask himself why she had to change her dress at all, after all he had long ago ceased to change his clothes, but on the other hand he would think that she
couldn’t really sit in that chair for years in the same dress, so he is supposed to have told Fro. And she did still have heaps of dresses, while he still had heaps of shoes, but for a long time now he had been putting on the same pair of shoes every day, so why couldn’t she wear the same dress every day? he asked himself, he said. He was constantly kept busy airing out her room, she had to have fresh air, and there he was all day opening and closing her windows and fretting that he was not getting his writing done, feeling totally at his wife’s mercy, with no will of his own, while she did with him as she pleased and had her revenge, as for instance when she insisted that he comb her hair, and so he combed her hair for hours with neither of them uttering a syllable the whole time (Fro). Actually there was often a terrible smell in her room when left unaired for longer than usual because he was irritated with her. But sometimes she said she wanted the room aired when he had just finished airing it, she would ask him to open the window when he had just shut it, as her special way of tormenting him. Several times a day, whenever he was most likely to feel irritated by it, she would announce that she felt a draft from the door; there’s a draft, she would say, to let him know how angry she was, even though there was no discernible draft in the room, certainly not with all the doors and windows shut as they were, but she made a habit of resorting to this kind of thing as a weapon against him, until one day he told her that if she spoke to him of a draft just once more he would make a point of opening all the doors and windows, and go away, and stay away all night, and then he might come back next morning to see what had become of her. To this she is supposed to have retorted: Why don’t
you, why don’t you open all the doors and windows and leave them open all night and give me a chance to freeze to death! But she knew only too well he would never carry out his ridiculous threat, she said. Still, he had to admit that she did obey him sometimes, and then again he would obey her, but she naturally ought to obey him more often than he her, he is supposed to have said to Wieser; actually it was incorrect to say that he obeyed her, he merely acceded to her wishes. All day long I submit to her entirely, he said. Then suddenly he would rebel and that would be the beginning of a new phase when she had to obey him implicitly, and when no wish of hers was granted at all. His work required absolute obedience not only from him but from her as well. Most of the time they were both concentrating intensely on the Urbanchich exercises, which meant weeks of uninterrupted self-discipline, without a moment’s unruliness from her to be tolerated. But at times she could no longer bear to go on sitting in that chair of hers, and she would come close to losing her self-control. It happened every two or three weeks, especially on weekends, he couldn’t say why. Suddenly she would fail to answer when he asked her a question. He would ask it a second time, a third time, a fourth time—no answer. To elicit an answer from her was of the utmost importance for his book, yet she would not give him an answer. He then walked over to the window and let in some fresh air, as the air in the room actually did turn foul after those hour-long sessions of Urbanchich exercises. But even the fresh air would bring no response from her, not even when the room had become completely cooled off. He would then close the window again and begin to read the Kropotkin aloud to her, believing as he did so that