The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (24 page)

moving to the lime works, even if it came up only inside their own heads, had seemed to them extraordinarily humiliating. But at times they would actually settle for this as an acceptable reason, i.e., the thought that the lime works could actually be credited with having cut down on their living expenses necessarily seemed to be a saving thought for a few hours or days, as Konrad explained to Wieser. Considering, after all, that they had hardly any money left, Konrad confided to Wieser; hardly any money left at all, by then. Which reminds me of Wieser’s description of Konrad’s description of Konrad’s last trip to the bank: This morning I went to the bank, Konrad told Wieser, they let me have another ten thousand, these will be the last ten thousand, of course, they said to me. The young teller at the counter wouldn’t give me anything at all, you understand, but I went straight to the manager. The manager received me at once, most politely, of course. You know the manager’s office, of course, that little cubbyhole where the air is always so bad because they never open the window, but it’s only fair to remember, in this connection, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, that if they opened the manager’s office window the air coming in from outside would be even worse, the window being right above the parking space, you know. Well, in I went, to see the manager, those dark green metal filing cabinets, you know, Konrad said. The first thing to meet the eye, unavoidably, as you enter the manager’s cubbyhole of an office, is the portrait of the bank’s founder, Derflinger, hanging on the wall. Mustache with uptwisted ends, peasant face and so forth. The manager and I shake hands, says Konrad, I am invited to sit down, I sit down. On the desk in front of him the manager has my entire file, as I see immediately. Which
means that the manager and I are about to have a final, the final, serious talk, I thought, and I was right; the manager started to leaf through my file, then he got on the phone, talking to somebody about the contents of my file, then he sent for the clerk, and another clerk, and a third, a fourth, a fifth, all having to do with my file, accounts, statements, etc., then he phones again, then he ponders the file, phones again, ponders over my papers again, etc. Actually the manager has all the papers relating to my account at hand, meaning all the papers accumulated through all the years I have had dealings with the bank. As the manager leafs through these papers I keep thinking that he may not let me draw any money at all, there is no telling by the look on his face: will he give me the money, won’t he give me the money, any money, he will, he won’t, I keep thinking, unable to decide one way or the other. Still more papers are brought in from time to time, men and women clerks wear themselves out bringing in all sorts of documents connected with my account. Finally one of the clerks is even ordered to fetch a ladder, and to climb up the ladder in order to pull out and bring down some papers from a drawer high up under the ceiling of the little office. The manager urges the clerk to get on with it, but the clerk argues that he can’t climb up the ladder any faster than he is climbing already, and later that he can’t climb down any faster than he is climbing down already, without getting hurt, he says he doesn’t want to break his neck, to which the manager finds nothing to say, probably restraining himself because the clerk is a good clerk, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Then the manager noticed that through all this I had kept my coat on, so he leaped from his chair to help me out of my coat and
hang it up on a coathook on his door, but I forestalled him by leaping up myself, took off the coat, and hung it on the coathook myself. It is warmer than usual in here, the manager said, and Konrad agreed, yes, it is rather warm. It was undoubtedly because of this that the manager was wearing only a lightweight summer suit, as Konrad had noticed at once, finding it odd that the manager was wearing this lightweight summer suit in the bank in the winter time, but, as the manager said to Konrad, according to Wieser, here in this room (he did not call it a cubbyhole, which it was) one cannot function in winter clothes, if you dress too warmly you catch a chill, all because of the central heating, one is always sitting in this overheated room (not “cubbyhole”) and worries about catching cold because one is feeling much too warm. Furthermore, it was impossible to regulate the circulation of fresh air inside the whole building. Meanwhile the documents kept piling higher on the manager’s desk, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, until it seemed I would lose sight of the manager altogether behind the mountain range of documents and files between us on his desk. At the end I could not see the manager at all, but I could still hear what he was saying. His face was hidden from me, Konrad told Wieser, but I could still hear his voice. Earlier Konrad had been struck by the fact, he said, that some of the clerks did not greet him when they entered the manager’s office, among them three out of the four women clerks who had come in, and Konrad attributed their conduct to his being so deeply indebted to the bank, still he felt that it was outrageous of them to snub so conspicuously a man like himself, a client of the bank who had kept up such excellent business relations with the bank for such a long time. Thinking it over,
however, he decided that it might not have been a deliberate snub but only carelessness, that it was unintentional, and so forth. Meanwhile the manager was telephoning, over and over again, with the teller at the counter in the outer office, with the clerks in the offices upstairs, in the so-called credit division. At long last a number of promissory notes Konrad had signed during the past year and that had come due long since, were brought into the manager’s office. Konrad now understood that he was not going to get any money from the bank this time, but rather that he would be asked to pay his debts instead, beginning with these notes. Konrad was certain that his wife knew nothing about all this, according to Wieser, because he always kept their financial situation to himself, he had in fact developed a highly skilled technique for keeping secret anything relating to their so-called financial affairs. Now he feared that the catastrophic state of their financial condition would come to light and everything would come crashing down about their ears with shocking effect, Konrad told Wieser. He was thinking about this while the manager kept busying himself with Konrad’s financial papers and kept the clerks running back and forth on errands connected with these papers so that Konrad began to think that it was the haste with which they were kept moving that had prevented them from greeting him in the first place. While Konrad was sitting there in the bank everything that was going on combined to give him the impression that he was its sole center and focus, everything the bank did seemed concentrated entirely on him. The manager was still telephoning for yet another document relating to my account, Konrad told Wieser, there was no end to the papers the bank held concerning me. Bank clerks all have the same faces,
Konrad said, banking people’s heads were stuffed with nothing but paper money and their faces were made of nothing but paper money. By staring hard at the founder’s, Derflinger’s, portrait, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, by gluing my eyes to the founder’s peasant face for considerable stretches of time, I managed to keep my naturally increasing perturbation under control. Again I thought I might after all be given some money, but this hope soon turned out to be baseless, and I resigned myself to the expectation that the manager would never again give me any money, in fact I heard him say so, although he had actually said nothing at all about money, what he did say was: How hot it is in here! and I understood him to mean that he would not give me any more money, which would have meant, Konrad said to Wieser, no, I cannot actually tell you what this would have meant, because it would have meant something too terrible to be imagined. What I suddenly heard the manager saying, actually, was that you (that is, myself) owe something above two million, most of it is owed to our bank, and if we subtract the value of your property, that still leaves a debt of at least one and a half million, the manager said. Your property is far from adequate coverage for your debts! the manager said repeatedly, Konrad claimed; he thought he heard the manager say: Your property is very far from sufficient to cover your debts! three or four or five or six times, even though the manager is supposed to have made this statement only once, I keep hearing it over and over again all the time, Konrad said to Wieser. And then the manager pronounced the following sentence, which I also keep hearing over and over again, I simply cannot get it out of my head: And as you know, we have taken steps to institute a
forced auction of the lime works. Of course so admittedly painful a proceeding had been postponed for as long as possible, but it was no longer possible to put it off, it had become a matter that brooks no delay, and the expression
brooks no delay
was another that Konrad simply could not get out of his head, it kept running through his head for days and weeks on end until the day he committed the murder. For years Konrad had gone to the bank and asked for money and the bank had simply handed over the money, for years this had been a bi-weekly occurrence, a habit, Konrad would simply spend a morning going from the lime works to Sicking, to enter the bank and withdraw a lesser or larger sum, as the manager phrased it, actually the bank always let him withdraw whatever sum he asked for without the least difficulty, whether it was five thousand or ten thousand or two thousand or one thousand or five hundred, or twenty thousand and so forth. It had never occurred to the bank to refuse to let Konrad draw any sum whatsoever, the bank had always met every one of Konrad’s claims on it with good grace, in fact, as the manager found he must say, rather handsomely. But the time had come when this had to end. In the circumstances, Konrad said to Wieser, I naturally decided to get up and leave instantly, to go, to get clean out of there was what I was thinking, and I did actually rise and take my coat from the hook on the door, Konrad said to Wieser, I held out my hand to the manager, and the manager, who had of course leaped up from his chair as soon as I had gotten up from mine, gave me his hand and said: Very well, you can withdraw ten thousand, we will of course let you have another ten thousand. The manager actually said “of course,” Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser,
of course
of course of course
I keep hearing him saying it even now, he was saying
of course
, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, it was grotesque, he did it from sheer habit, according to Konrad, of course, when it would have been so much more a matter of course, Konrad said, to have given me nothing more. The manager also used the expression “oblige,” “to oblige you” just like that. As I had used to withdraw the round sum of ten thousand at the beginning of the month, Konrad said to Wieser, I went, after shaking the manager’s hand and saying goodbye to him, and withdrew the round sum of ten thousand, as was my habit. I slipped the money in my pocket and left the bank for the last time, I left the bank once and for all, Konrad said to Wieser. I did a little shopping, I bought shoelaces, tallow, bond paper, shirt buttons, fresh mitten wool for my wife, and went back to the lime works. The bank certainly had behaved handsomely once again, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. On the way home I naturally realized the utter hopelessness of our situation. Actually, if we spend the absolute minimum, I was thinking, while I walked as far as the rock spur and back to the tavern and from the tavern to the sawmill and from the sawmill to the rock spur and behind the annex and past the annex to the lime works, we have a few weeks more, and if we spend less than that, even, we might eke out a few months on these ten thousand. If we can reduce our requirements from the minimal to something even more minimal in expenditures, it’s no problem, because we are, Wieser reports Konrad saying, the most unassuming two people in the world. Of course I must get my book written in this period of grace, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but once my book is written nothing else matters,
and it is just possible that the most hopeless situation is the most favorable to the writing of the book. Insofar as I was able to let this idea gain ground until it became my dominant idea, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, I no longer felt any uneasiness, quite the contrary, I walked whistling into my room. That evening, as I recall, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, she suddenly said, interrupting my reading from Kropotkin,
dance
, following it up immediately with the word
carnival dance
. She pronounces the words
carnival dance
several times in a row, I heard the words
carnival dance
several times in a row. Then she says: Do you remember? and then she pronounces the words
Venice, Parma, Florence, Nice, Paris, Deggendorf, Landshut, Schönbrunn, Mannheim, Sighartsein
, she says, and
Henndorf
. But it all goes back at least thirty years, she says. Dances, dances, she cries, again and again: You put up a lot of resistance, but I never gave up, I simply would not give up. In Paris, in Rome, remember? Let’s go dancing, dancing! I said, and we went dancing, we went to all the dances. My insistence was more ruthless than your resistance. You dressed me, in Rome you put on my red dress, in Florence my blue dress, in Venice the blue dress, in Parma the white dress, the dress with the long train in Madrid, she says. Suddenly she says: the dress with the train, yes, the dress with the long train, I want to wear it, put it on me now, yes, do put it on me, put it on me! and so I put on her the dress with the train. Come, the mirror, she demands, and then: come on, my face powder compact. And she powders her face and looks in the mirror, she alternates between powdering her face and looking in the mirror. Suddenly she says: I don’t see anything, I can’t see a thing. Actually, Konrad said to Wieser, she
couldn’t see the mirror for the cloud of loose face powder she had generated. It could be a good thing that I can’t see myself, she says, and then goes on covering herself with more powder. Her whole dress is covered with powder, by this time, Konrad told Wieser, and meanwhile she keeps on saying: I must put more powder on, I must cover myself with powder, from top to bottom, she says, and when the powder in the compact is all used up she says: don’t we have more face powder somewhere? there’s got to be more face powder! find it, find it, she says, and sure enough I find a second compact and she goes on covering her face with more powder, Konrad said to Wieser, until suddenly I can no longer see her face at all, she has completely covered her face with powder. I’m all powdered up! all powdered up! she says: all powdered up! she cries, Konrad said, and suddenly she is laughing and crying: all covered with powder, all powdered over, I’ve covered myself all up with powder! and she laughs and cries and laughs and cries, the same thing over and over. Then she suddenly falls silent and straightens up a bit and says: that’s good. And again: that’s good. And then: The play is finished. Broken off. The play is broken off, finished. Here’s a scandal! Imagine, she cries out, Konrad told Wieser, we’ve got a scandal here, a scandal in our house, a scandal! Then, after a brief silence: that’s good, she says, that’s good. She is utterly exhausted, and I take off her dress, the dress with the train. You must give this dress a good shaking, she says, Konrad told Wieser, the whole dress is covered with face powder, go out into the hall and give it a good shaking out! and I do as she tells me, and shake out the dress in the hall. At eleven I tell her Good Night and go to my room, Konrad said, but in my room I find that I