The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (22 page)

first several hours after the death of the sawmill owner at the sawmill, finding some characteristic little thing to tell about every single one of those present at the house of mourning, for instance how the sawmill owner’s widow had said to Hoeller, while he was standing in the entry to the sawmill planning the text of the death notice, to be ordered from the Sicking printer’s, with the widow’s older sister, the widow said to Hoeller that her husband’s death had not taken her completely by surprise, in fact the two of them, she and her husband, had talked about the possibility of his having a stroke just two days previously, though of course they had ended up laughing together, which now seemed strange, yes indeed, the sawmill owner’s widow is supposed to have said to Hoeller in the entry to the sawmill, as Konrad reported it to Fro, who knows, she said to Hoeller, what will happen now, and what kind of man will be coming into the house, meaning, as Hoeller thought, that the sawmill owner’s widow was alluding to the likely successor to the sawmill owner, after all she could not live there alone with all those children, still so little, she is supposed to have said to Hoeller not two hours after the death of the sawmill owner, and: the children were no help, but what with the sawmill being after all a property worth millions, she would unquestionably find a man before not too long, you must remember, Konrad said to Fro, that the sawmill owner married into the sawmill, originally, as the sawmill was part of the widow’s original property. Getting back to his own wife, Konrad said that if there was a man in the world who could put up with her, then he was that man, and she alone in the world was the woman who could endure him, Konrad said to Fro. Today I asked her to let me read her the Kropotkin for two hours, Konrad said to Fro, but
she refused, but in the end we agreed to the following: she would put up with listening to two hours of Kropotkin if he, her husband, would help her put on the black, gold-embroidered dress, as she described her wedding dress; good, Konrad said to his wife, first you put on the dress, then you listen to me reading Kropotkin for two hours. But she had no sooner put on the black, gold-embroidered dress, meaning, naturally, that he had put it on her, than she said she wanted to take it off again, now that she had it on she could see quite clearly in the mirror that the black, gold-embroidered dress no longer suited her, I mean, she said, of course it suits me, but only in a frightening sort of way. So I took off her black, gold-embroidered dress again, Konrad is supposed to have said. No sooner was it off than she asked me to put on her gray dress with the white velvet collar, so Konrad hung the black, gold-embroidered dress back inside the wardrobe, took out the gray dress with the white velvet collar, feeling all the time that his wife was watching him closely, You are watching me, aren’t you? he is supposed to have said, waiting a bit before he turned around to hear her answer, but she kept silent, Konrad said to Fro. He had hardly put the gray dress with the white velvet collar on her when she straightened up as best she could to see herself in the mirror and then said: No, this dress won’t do either. I’d rather get back into my old dress, the one I’m always wearing, and Konrad patiently took off her gray dress with the white velvet collar again, and helped her into what she is always supposed to have called her terrible everyday dress. This is the smell that suits me, my everyday smell, she is supposed to have said, as soon as she had on her so-called terrible everyday dress once more. Now where did I have this terrible thing on for the first time, she asked, and he answered:
In Deggendorf, don’t you remember, in Deggendorf, it was made for you by your niece’s seamstress in Deggendorf. Right, by my niece’s seamstress in Deggendorf, Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have answered. I wore it to the ball in Landshut, too. Yes, she repeated, says Fro, the ball in Landshut. Then Konrad read to her, as agreed, Kropotkin, for two hours straight. To Wieser: Hoerhager, Konrad’s cousin, would undoubtedly have let the lime works fall into disrepair. When the Konrad’s announced that they would move into the lime works, people laughed at them. You would have to be crazy to move into the lime works, the Sickingers are supposed to have said, Konrad said to Wieser, and: those people, my dear Wieser, were right. Only two years ago I was still of the opinion that the lime works would be good for my work, but now I no longer think so, now I can see that the lime works robbed me of my last chance to get my book actually written. I mean that sometimes I think, he is supposed to have told Wieser, that the lime works is precisely why I can’t write it all down, and then at other times I think that I still have a chance to get my book written down precisely because I am living at the lime works. The two ideas keep alternating in my head, namely that the lime works will enable me to write my book, and that I shall never be able to write my book, because I am here at the lime works. Not so long ago I was of the opinion that the lime works was my only salvation, which meant that it was also hers, (his wife’s) and yet today I am surprised that I could have had such an opinion at all. Though I must admit that the moment I have said the lime works will never let me write my book, hope springs up again that the lime works will be favorable to my writing it. But if you can’t get your book written here, his wife is supposed to have
said again and again, why did we move to the lime works? If you can’t get it written here, why are we making the sacrifice of living here at the lime works when we could be living so much more pleasantly anywhere else, surely there can be no doubt, Wieser reports Mrs. Konrad saying to her husband, that living at the lime works means being committed to extreme self-sacrifice, let’s not fool ourselves, to immure ourselves in the lime works is madness, unless there is a so-called higher aim to justify it. Though it was true that they had by now gotten accustomed to their existence at the lime works, the question remained in any case: what was it all for, if it was not for the sake of the book, for the sake of
The Sense of Hearing?
Or as she once phrased it, was it possible that this greatest of all possible sacrifices had been made in vain? While she did not really believe in the value of his book, Mrs. Konrad had once said to the works inspector, she could not really say that the book upon which her husband had expanded the major part of his intellectual life was worthless and so forth; the value of his book, Mrs. Konrad once said to the works inspector, might actually lie in quite another direction; possibly its value would be quite the opposite of what her husband believed it to be, Mrs. Konrad said to the inspector, but in any case the work had to be written, if only because it was necessary to scotch any notion that her husband, Konrad, was no better than a madman, one of the many fools who ran around everywhere claiming that they had something, no matter what, even if it was some kind of ominous scientific work, in their heads, none of which anyone ever got to see, and if only to save herself, primarily, from unbearable disgrace, she was always pleading with him to get the book out of his head and down on paper, and so forth. To be quite frank about it she had no
way of knowing whether her husband was just another fool, but on the other hand it was possible that he was both a fool and a genius, who could tell? she is supposed to have said to the inspector, because she believed her husband showed all the characteristics of genius as well as all the characteristics of a fool; Wieser surmises that she may possibly have said this kind of thing on the very day when Konrad shot her dead with one or several blasts from her Mannlicher carbine, that she might have happened to call her husband a fool on that catastrophic day, the day of the murder (Fro), all of a sudden, as she had done so often before, but this time he had lost control and killed her, because she had too often irritated him beyond endurance by calling him a fool, a madman, and even a one hundred percent highly intelligent mental case, and on such occasions, says Wieser, and this is not merely rumor but fact, on those occasions Konrad had threatened to kill her. It is my theory, not merely my suspicion but my theory, which quite possibly may turn out to be fact soon enough at the trial in Wels, Wieser said, that Konrad probably killed his wife because she had just once too often called him a fool or a madman or, her favorite expression on the subject, when she was speaking to Wieser, he said, a highly intelligent mental case. In the room where the murder took place there was no clue, of course, that such a quarrel had come about, or that she had said anything of the kind, Wieser said. But all the indications are that Konrad killed his wife because of what Konrad repeatedly referred to as her ruthless critical comments. What could be more natural than that he should suddenly shoot her down, after all, says Wieser, when he had gotten his fill of her accusations and carpings that were increasingly violent of late besides, Wieser said, of course it was the act of a madman,
but as such it was quite understandable and reasonable. Konrad was feeling close to reaching the goal of a lifetime, seeing it within reach, as Wieser says, at which moment of high tension he saw his wife as getting deliberately in his way, debarring him from his life-long goal, the writing of his book. He had to kill her, in the end he simply had to kill her, says Wieser. That to kill his wife was simultaneously to kill his book, Wieser said, was another matter entirely. A woman ceaselessly nagging at her man, Wieser says, is likely to cross the line until suddenly a point has been reached at which murder becomes inevitable. Such a murder tended to make an end of everything, it destroyed everything at one blow, exactly as in the case of the Konrad woman, when in one split second the intellectual life work of an extraordinary man was annihilated as two people were killed, because there could be no question about it that Konrad himself was a dead man, even though he might continue to exist for years, whether in prison or in a mental home, whichever the court would decide, but in any case, and no matter how long he continued to live on, the fact remained that he would have been already dead for a long time, for that length of time, when he was finally buried. It shocked Wieser every time he thought of it that a human being could, by a mere careless slip, a sudden relaxation of his mind’s rational function, transform himself from an extraordinary being into the most miserable of creatures, and not himself alone but the person closest to him as well. How frequently the foremost runner in a race could be seen coming to a sudden stop. Basically, says Wieser, in killing his wife, Konrad had not killed primarily his wife but had, as it were in a sudden fit of abstraction, killed himself. For both the Konrads everything was destroyed in one moment. The
man who at this moment was restlessly pacing the floor of his prison cell in Wels, or else lying stock-still on his prison cot, probably knew this clearly. Whether or not Konrad had been crazy all along, it was only a question of time when he would be crazy for good. It isn’t as if we had been compelled to move into the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, we could have gone to a number of other places like the Tirol, for instance, or Styria, as everyone knows there is no dearth of so-called scenic spots in our country, but a scenic spot was precisely what I sought to avoid, Austria is of course full of nothing but these so-called scenic spots, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, there isn’t another country in the world where so many hundreds of thousands of so-called scenic spots are crowded together in so relatively small an area, but that’s just it, that kind of beauty spot is the worst place in the world for starting or even proceeding with an intellectual undertaking well on its way, Konrad said, according to Wieser, why, if he was sure of anything he was sure of this, that a so-called scenic area, a beautiful city, would never fail to destroy the best, the most solidly planned intellectual work, destroy it root and branch, a beautiful landscape could only act as an irritant on the brain, a so-called wonder of nature invariably undermined the mind. Which was why it was harder in Austria than anywhere else, Wieser claims that Konrad said to him, to get on with an intellectual task or complete it, there was no other country where you could point to so many hundreds of thousands of neglected or abandoned ideas, jettisoned plans, unrealized original projects, genuinely immense undertakings in the sciences or the so-called fine arts and where you could point, simultaneously, to so many scenic spots; here in Austria, Konrad told Wieser in so many words,
every genius has frittered himself away, everything extraordinary has ended in self-destruction, the so-called creative element has let itself be killed by the beauty of nature. A graveyard of ideas, a wasteland of perversely aborted high flights of the mind, that’s what the country was, its beauty made it our homeland, but it was the scene of incessant founderings, humiliations, suppressions of greatness. He once opened one of those huge trunks they kept in the attic at the lime works, one of those dirty, dusty trunks we all take on sea voyages, Konrad said to Wieser, as I have often told you, my wife and I traveled a great deal, during the early decades of our life together we were almost uninterruptedly on the move, partly because we feared that an abrupt change for the worse in my wife’s various kinds of ill health might nail us down altogether, would prevent even the shortest of trips from one day to the next, so that we made the longest possible journeys, Konrad said to Wieser, sea voyages for the most part, though as late as ’38, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, we took the Transsiberian railway as far as Vladivostok, then we went to China, to Japan, to the Philippines, nowadays this doesn’t mean much but in those days such travels were still monstrous undertakings, and for both my wife and myself they were of course an extraordinary physical strain, though the strain, or rather the resulting exhaustion, never hit us with its full force until after we had completed the trip, when we would be overcome with the awareness of it, and so, you see, Konrad said to Wieser, we would keep going on ever more extensive trips on the assumption that each would be our last, for reasons of health, or else it would be our last trip because I might suddenly have to settle down on account of being fully preoccupied with my task, my book on