The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (23 page)

The Sense of
Hearing
, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. When I opened that heavy sea chest, out came a whole flood of travel brochures, steamer tickets, railway tickets, the trunk had been locked up for decades and my suddenly opening it made its contents burst out in a sudden spate—hundreds of thousands of brochures and ticket stubs from and to every conceivable place in the world came pouring out. To think that all those travels of ours have ended by leading us here into the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. In Paris, for instance, they had lived in an apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, and yet they had finally moved to the lime works, Konrad had thought and had persuaded his wife that no other place offered better conditions for getting his work done, though he had not really convinced her of it, not to this very day, and she was probably right, Konrad said the last time he saw Wieser, I should probably have listened to her and taken her to Toblach instead, that lovely little spot in the mountains would surely have brought us peace, and if not peace, exactly, at least my wife would have been happy there for the rest of her days, it would have suited her, my dear Wieser, because in Toblach she would have found what she always sought at my side, a certain contentment among her sisters and other relatives, a certain inner security and outward shelter, but because I had to make my will prevail, as I begin to see at last, or as I think I must admit to myself, by forcing my poor wife to move with me into the lime works for the sake of an altogether hopeless cause, I have destroyed her life, annihilated myself as a person. At the time of the decision to move to the lime works, back in Mannheim, Konrad was reduced to choosing between giving in to his wife and giving himself up, sacrifice himself completely, by going to Toblach,
or else move to the lime works, with its harsh climate, compared with Toblach, and Sicking was a most unfriendly town, it meant the end of hope for Mrs. Konrad; to move to Sicking was to destroy her life. Though of course we could also have gone to live in the Wilhering Cloister, Konrad said, which is surrounded by an orchard in bloom, those Cistercians would undoubtedly have taken good care of us, or else we could have gone to Lambach, or to Aschach, or Lauffen, there was even nothing to prevent us from deciding to go back to London or to Manchester, all that stood in the way was my obsession about moving to the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, and what drove me to surrender myself irrevocably to that obsession was my cousin Hoerhager’s dragging his feet in consenting to the sale, had Hoerhager simply refused to accept Konrad’s proposals to buy the lime works at any price, there is no doubt at all that the question of whether or not to move to the lime works would have resolved itself in the most painless way. But as it was, Hoerhager’s teasing evasiveness had inflamed Konrad’s mania that he must have the lime works at any cost, even though the idea that he must become the owner of the lime works, move in and live there and nowhere else, Konrad told Wieser, ultimately depended on nothing more than two or three visits Konrad had paid there as a child, at the age of four or five, and later when he was about eight or nine, for a few days in winter and a few days in summer chosen haphazardly by his parents, unsure of themselves as they were every time they had to choose a place to send him on his vacations from school, a place to send him on a brief holiday, and that was all he knew of the lime works and Sicking, and it was solely upon this experience all those decades ago, that his life-long wish to own the lime works was
based. Later in life he had taken his young wife there once, as he remembered it, one October evening, rather wintry for the date, on a visit to his uncle, Hoerhager’s father, on which occasion he had found the lime works cold and unfriendly, and yet even more fascinating than on the earlier occasions, he told Wieser, and his wife had described the place as sinister afterward, it was past midnight and they were on their way to Scharnstein, as Konrad remembered, when she called the lime works a sinister place in an equally sinister landscape. She had found it oppressive, and inside the lime works she felt scared; when Konrad asked her what she was scared of, she is supposed to have said:
Suddenly, of everything
. To force her to move into the lime works for good and all was monstrous, Mrs. Konrad said to her husband, but then in her eyes, Fro says, Konrad had always been a monster, and Wieser says that Konrad, considering everything Wieser knew about the couple, could never have seemed other than a monster to his wife, as it was practically second nature for Konrad to represent himself as a monster all his life long, not only to his wife, until he had finally quite lost himself in the role of a monster, universally so regarded but especially so by his wife, treated as a monster by everyone around him all his life, so that is what he ultimately became, and you could therefore say that it was the people around him, especially his wife, who had made a monster out of him, says Wieser, or rather a so-called monster, it was not Konrad himself who should be blamed for this, even though the people who had driven him to the point at which it was possible for them to label him a monster, or a so-called monster, would then not scruple to blame it all on him, to blame him for being a monster. Though on the one hand it was distracting to live in the
cities, life in the country, on the other hand, was distracting also, basically both cities and country places, the country as such, tended to distract one’s mind from one’s task in much the same way, from progressing in one’s intellectual work, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, ultimately everything was nothing but distraction, because city and country, city ideas and country ideas, or conceptions of the city and of the country had in recent decades begun to overlap and become completely fused and confused with one another, it had begun to be basically absurd to try to distinguish between the city and the country, they had become so completely homogenized, Konrad is supposed to have expressed it like that to Wieser. The problem of the monotonousness of the prevailing current architecture played only a subordinate part in all this, even though the vista offering itself to the observer, of a scene, an atmosphere, was equally saturated with progress-and-machine-madness, regardless of where he found himself, country or city, the same assumptions prevailed everywhere. We were, all of us, undergoing, in every respect, what he called a process of social interfusion at the end of which the so-called processed man would emerge as a monster, that is, as a machine. Konrad had naturally expected that at the lime works he would suffer a minimum of distraction, if any; Sicking had no distractions at all, by comparison the rest of the world was nothing but distractions (from his work on the book). But whatever he may have thought about the lime works and about the book it had all been a mistake, every bit of it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. In the last analysis a man tended to yield instinctively to a form of indirect blackmail exerted on him by his own personality. Though of course he had carefully gone over every pro and contra having to do
with their moving into the lime works, as had his wife whom, however, he did not really consult as a person who would have a deciding vote in the matter; he merely took her into consideration. What was so fascinating about their move was that it was an abandoned lime works they were going into. Besides, after decades of extensive but ultimately aimless traveling, the Konrads had finally had enough of traveling. At least as far as he was concerned. Traveling ultimately wore you out, the new experiences came to lose their newness all too soon, the great varieties of people came to look all alike, the circumstances and connections in which they turned up came to have a sameness, as did the looks of the landscapes, always the same as one moved toward them and away from them, the conditions, climatic, social, hostile, political, natural, medical, etc. etc. had a sameness that tired one out. In time the world tended to use itself up simply, and what was most depressing of all in traveling around, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, you kept being increasingly confronted with the world’s increasingly evident shabbiness, until this was what you were facing incessantly and on to the end, so to speak. To try to escape from all this by moving oneself into some remote shelter was also an error, of course, as he fully realized by now, but so would any other solution they might have hit upon have been an error. The lime works had offered itself as a turning point, though not as a radical about-face, there was no such thing, but at least as a quarter-turn in every degree, as Konrad is supposed to have expressed himself to Wieser, and Konrad had assumed that it would be possible for him to make one more such turn later, even if by no more than a few degrees. They could foresee that they would soon be suffocating in their Paris apartment, Konrad said to Wieser,
and they had to face it, to suffocate in the thick of a human mass, for instance on the Boulevard Haussmann, Konrad said, was unquestionably the most terrible way to go. But, don’t you see, Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed, to Wieser, there are so many ways to be ruined, to founder! in which connection several books, by a writer whose name he had forgotten, came to mind, an Austrian writer, and anyway the name didn’t matter, the person didn’t matter, no writer’s person or biography ever mattered, his work was everything, the writer himself was nothing, despite the despicable vulgarity of all those who insisted upon confusing the writer’s person with his work, the general public had been corrupted by certain historical and literary processes of the first half of the nineteenth century into daring, with the shameless impertinence characteristic of them, to confuse the written work with the writer’s personal concerns, using the writer’s person to effect a vicious crippling of the writer’s work, always shuttling back and forth between the writer’s private person and his product, and so forth, more and more confusing the producer and the product, all of which led to a monstrous distortion of the entire culture, bringing into being a culture which was a monstrosity, and so forth, but to get back to the man’s writings, reading him was like reading a madman, a writing madman, but he was in fact quite the opposite of a madman, and Konrad recommended to Wieser some titles, fragments in which certain goings-on were described that were highly relevant to what was going on in his life, although the proceedings in the books were metaphysical in nature, while his own original undertaking was anything but metaphysical, in fact Konrad did not hesitate to describe his entire development as organic from first to last, and though it had a decidedly
speculative bond with the metaphysical it did not in any sense derive its being from metaphysics, Wieser says. Basically Konrad’s own development could not in any respect be regarded as a so-called thing of the imagination, absolutely not, it was strictly a physical process, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, at bottom it was nothing more than an infinitely sad story of a marriage, astounding, shocking if you chose, and yet it could just as well be regarded as almost laughably commonplace, even though it might seem strange, extraordinary, crazy, to the superficial observer. But there was no use talking about it. The mitten: while watching her knit his mitten he asks himself: Why is she knitting that mitten, always the same one? but he also asks himself why, instead of continually working on that mitten, doesn’t she take time out to mend his socks, patch his shirts, his torn vest, all my clothes have big holes in them, everywhere, he said to himself, but she sits here knitting that mitten. Her own cap needs mending, so does her blouse, too, but no, she keeps working away at that mitten. The lime works have been the finish of her, he thought, watching her at work on that mitten. A person like his wife could hardly be considered a living human being any longer, even if you made every conceivable kind of allowance, emotional, rational, anything you pleased, not in the condition she was in after nearly five years at the lime works, he would think as he looked on while she kept at her knitting. There had been nothing between them for a long time now, nothing more than what he could only call mutual ignoration. But on the other hand, whatever had been between them previously, all their traveling together and so forth, had ultimately predestined them for this very life of theirs at the lime works. The lime works were our destination, our destination was to
be done to death by the lime works. Before we moved into the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, we were constantly and to the greatest extent in the company of other people, but after we moved into the lime works we were totally deprived of human companionship, totally out of human society, which was bound to lead, first, to despair, then to spiritual and emotional desolation, then to sickness and death. Absolutely nothing at all happens here! Konrad exclaimed, according to Wieser. But even to consider the kind of senselessness it was to move into the lime works as a form of heroism was suicidal. Although even his wife had persuaded herself, during their first two years at the lime works, that their complete withdrawal from the world into the lime works would be his salvation, Konrad himself, though he had at first naturally regarded the move as his (my) salvation, Konrad said to Wieser, after only six months he said to himself that this would possibly be his (my) salvation, then, after a year or so, he thought this would probably be his (my) salvation, but after two years he said to himself that of course this cannot be his (my) salvation, and after three years at the lime works she, Mrs. Konrad, faced up to the fact that, to the contrary, the lime works meant Konrad’s total destruction, although he himself was not yet aware of it, still kept suppressing his awareness of it while clinging to the hope that it might still be possible for him to get his book written here. In the end the two of them had taken to assuring each other that, as Wieser says, at least it cost next to nothing to live at the lime works. This was true enough, as everyone knows you could live at an absurdly low cost, by comparison with costs elsewhere, especially the big cities, in such remote country places as the Sicking area, but to let this fact come up as a reason for