The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (21 page)

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 ankles; 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 hour 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