The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (15 page)

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 typical 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 dares 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