The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (18 page)

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 already 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