The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (19 page)

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 passage 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,