The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (25 page)

have left the Kropotkin in her room, so I go back to her room to fetch my Kropotkin. To my surprise I find her already fast asleep, probably from exhaustion. I feel my way to the table in the dark, and pick up the Kropotkin and go back to my own room. Reading Kropotkin relaxes me. About two
A.M.
, the time I usually fall asleep, Konrad told Wieser, I fell asleep. To Fro: It wasn’t the first time we sat together in total darkness. We’d eaten nothing for supper. I can’t lift a finger to do the least thing, cut my fingernails, cut my toenails, nothing, Konrad said. Absolute passivity. I tell her: I shall now read to you from the Kropotkin, but I can’t do it, or I say, I shall read the Novalis, but I can’t do it. There’s the depressing awareness, too, of sitting forever opposite my totally exhausted wife. Buck up, I say to myself, and read her the Kropotkin again, try; or, come on now, try the Novalis again, but I can’t begin, I can’t even muster the strength to pick myself up and walk to my own room. Sitting opposite her, I become more clearly cognizant of my wife’s run-down, shabby state, of my own run-down, shabby state. Looking out of the window, though I can’t see anything in the darkness, I know nevertheless that the weather is the cause of all this. The weather alone can drive a person like myself and a person like her crazy, on top of all our basic reasons for despair. Both of us immobile in our chairs. Till dawn we sit without a word, utterly exhausted, utterly worn out and utterly exhausted in our chairs, half awake, clutching at each other from time to time, in silence, so as not to go out of our minds from one moment to the next. The funeral of the sawmill owner: Hoeller comes to fetch me to the funeral, Konrad says to Fro, we walk together under the rock spur to the sawmill. I’d managed to dig up some black articles
of clothing and to put them on, Konrad says to Fro. A pair of warm woolen socks I once bought in Mannheim for the funeral of my cousin Albert, my youngest cousin. And the warm black vest I picked up in Hamburg, and I have my black Borsalino on my head. The black woolen muffler around my neck, of course. Black shoes, bought in Venice. A man has to be careful, Hoeller is supposed to have said to Konrad, he goes to a funeral and is liable to catch his death. I’ve seen it many times, myself, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro; a man attends a funeral, catches a chill, and the next thing you know it’s his own funeral. On our way to the rock spur, I muse about the sawmill owner and myself, and it seems to me we always got along quite well, he and I. A man who owns black clothes wears his black clothes to a funeral, I am thinking, while on the way to the sawmill. The moment you reach the house of mourning you go straight to the room where the corpse lies in state. You press the widow’s or the widower’s hand. You say something about what a good, dear person the departed was. Walking in procession behind the coffin everyone walks slowly, not speaking, only murmuring. Not a word is understood. Special funerals attract hundreds of people. The sawmill owner’s funeral is a special funeral. Following a special funeral attended by special kinds of people and with a special kind of clergyman officiating, everyone enters a special kind of restaurant and eats a special kind of meal, I am thinking, Konrad said. A special kind of vehicle, specially decorated and drawn by specially groomed, specially decorated horses, rolls along, followed by specially concerned persons. The funeral cortege is a special arrangement, a special liturgy is pronounced at the graveside, all of it involving naturally a
special expense. The day of such a funeral is a special day, I am thinking, Konrad says to Fro, as I walk toward the sawmill, toward which hundreds of people are walking now, all of them in black, Konrad says to Fro, and sometimes Hoeller is in front of me, sometimes he is behind me, because my walk is irregular, but in the end Hoeller is walking beside me again and I am thinking: the fire chief is going to make a special speech. As we reach the sawmill I can actually see that everybody is dressed specially for the occasion. Especially fine wreaths, especially white, clean clothes on the children, the especially costly-looking coffin. Finally, at the open grave, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I wonder whether to keep my hat on, or not, if I take the hat off I shall catch my death of cold, if I keep it on, people will talk, so I keep my hat on. The fire chief makes an especially short speech, which at first takes me aback, Konrad says to Fro, until I remember that the fire chief and the sawmill owner were enemies, which explains the shortness of the fire chief’s speech. The priest’s sermon is all the longer. The depth of an open grave always shocks me afresh, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, we do our best to be brave and put up a bold front, but the depth of those open graves frightens us every time. Did I have no differences with the sawmill owner, I am thinking, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, and No, I had no differences of any kind with the sawmill owner, Konrad is supposed to have decided on the way home from the funeral. Actually, Konrad says, the sawmill owner was a decent fellow, as he told Hoeller on their way back to the lime works, though afterwards he brooded for a long time over why he said this, and most of all about why he said it to Hoeller on the way home, why he said that
the sawmill owner was a decent fellow, he could just as well have said a good fellow, or at least a fellow you couldn’t find fault with, unobjectionable and so forth. The Konrads had planned to spend the rest of that day reading, he reading aloud to her alternately from the Kropotkin and the Novalis, as I was reading I kept on thinking about the funeral, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, and these thoughts were affecting my voice so that it sounded strange. Fro: a dream of Konrad’s: in a sudden, not readily classifiable fit of insanity (catatonia?) Konrad had taken to painting the whole interior of the lime works black, from all the way up under the roof to all the way downward, gradually, to the ground, using a mat black varnish, several pailfuls of which he had found in the attic. He would not leave the lime works, he said to himself, until he had finished painting the entire interior with this mat black varnish, it was of the greatest importance to him to get it all painted black, everything inside the lime works, with this paint he had found in the attic. Ceilings, walls, whatever was left of the furniture, all of it was painted black inside and out, and he even painted his wife’s room, then everything inside his wife’s room, and finally he painted his wife black inside and out, imagine it if you can, everything in her room including her French invalid chair, simply everything as I said, and finally everything in his own room, he needed exactly seven days, Fro says, to paint the whole lime works and the whole interior and everything inside the interior black inside and out. The instant he finished, Fro says, he locked up the lime works and ran past the annex and up the rock spur, from the top of which he hurled himself down. Fro, today: Konrad lives in constant fear that the man from the bank might
come knocking on his door, which is why he doesn’t open the door. A man from the bank, or one of the policemen might be standing outside his front door, and so Konrad no longer leaves his room, even when his wife is ringing or knocking for help. Fro himself was admitted to the lime works only at a moment of abysmal despair. Konrad heard a knock at the front door quite often, someone knocking with intrepid stubbornness, but Konrad did not believe it was Hoeller, because Hoeller would not do such a thing. The knocking gave the impression of someone wanting to smash up the lime works. Konrad is supposed to have said: sitting in my chair I hear this knocking, and I wait from one knock to the next, the irregular intervals between knocks made it impossible for him to guess who it might be. Is it someone from the bank? someone from the police? he wonders. He stays immobile in his chair. He won’t open the door. He practices self-restraint. He listens to his wife’s ringing for hours, but he thinks: there’s no sense in going up there. Nothing makes any sense, he thinks. To Wieser, with whom I was able to close the deal on his life insurance policy today, Konrad is supposed to have said that the immense amount of material he had collected in his head for his book was in itself enough to destroy this kind of book; the probability that such a work might be destroyed by the sheer immensity of the material, the constantly increasing immensity of the material, was a probability that kept increasing in direct ratio to the increase in the quantity of the material. Ultimately the quantity of conceptual material was likely to crush a man altogether. At first he had believed that the book was a decided possibility for him, then he believed it was decidedly impossible, and went on alternating between its possibility
and its impossibility, but the intervals in which he thought it would be possible for him to write the book were growing shorter, while the intervals in which the book seemed to be a lost cause were growing longer. But he had never quite lost the sense of the possibility of starting to write it, of being able to get started, actually he believed even now (only six months ago, that is!) that he would suddenly feel able to sit down and write it all in one sitting, as he is supposed to have expressed himself to Wieser. After all it was a simple matter of sitting down and starting to write the book, only a question of a favorable constellation of circumstances that would suddenly enable him to get it all down on paper once he got started, which he could not believe would fail to come along sooner or later. Every such constellation of circumstances occurs some time at the right moment, Konrad is supposed to have said, favorable or unfavorable, it was only a question of recognizing the one right moment of such a favorable or unfavorable constellation when it came along. Basically it was simply a matter of sitting down and writing whatever it was you had to write. Once the right moment presents itself, it must be utilized, and he had merely lacked the chance, hitherto, to seize and utilize the right moment, though undoubtedly the right moment had presented itself to him quite often already, he had only to think of the favorable time in Brussels or in Mannheim or the even more favorable time in Merano or Deggendorf or Landshut, it was only that he had been unable to utilize any of them, at the right moment everything was always ready, but one failed to utilize it, most people never managed to utilize the uniquely favorable moments in life, though this was not much of a consolation to him, Konrad hoped he would not
turn out to be one of their number, especially considering how important his book was, but inside every man, every brain, every head there was, he always said, the possibility of everything coming together just once, and it was this
everything just once
that he so longed to recognize and utilize, sooner or later, though he rather wished it would be in the immediate future. As for unutilized favorable constellations, times, moments, etc., he had plenty of those to show in his life, most people were made up of such so-called unutilized favorable (or unfavorable) constellations, everywhere you looked you saw nothing but unutilized constellations, favorable or unfavorable in character; besides, who could decide whether a constellation was favorable or unfavorable, since one might be favorable precisely because the other was unfavorable and vice versa, the unfavorable being favorable for one (head) and vice versa, it depended on the individual (head, to turn an unfavorable constellation into a favorable one, or turn a favorable constellation into a favorable one, or a favorable into an unfavorable, etc.). Besides, Konrad did not have much time left, he is supposed to have said as long as two years ago, for one thing I shall not live much longer, and then I live basically in constant distress, and basically there is never enough time, and so forth. On top of all that it was quite clear to him that he was already an old man, an old man who had an old head on his shoulders. And here was another consideration: a work such as this might be rendered worthless by being written down too soon, even though it had been completely written down, it might turn out to be a wholly wasted effort; or else it might be useless, absolutely worthless, if written down too late. But there was no way of fixing the exact time for writing such
a book, this precisely was what was so terrible about it, the unique, exact, correct moment had to present itself of its own accord. He could so easily destroy the labor of decades by choosing the wrong moment or even by misunderstanding the right moment. Or else: what if he had to break off writing the book in mid-career, stopped cold by the sudden terrifying thought that he would not be able to complete it? Another possibility: suppose the book is made worthless by being actually completed, in writing, just as worthless as it is now because it has not been written down? It could be ruined simply by being precipitately written, or by being written in too circumspect a way, written too late, whichever. Small wonder, then, that he had let every propitious moment come and pass him by, weakened further by each missed opportunity, so that he could foresee being altogether too weak to write the book down when the moment to do so actually came. He would rather not know how many extraordinary products of the human intellect had been lost by precipitousness, how many by procrastination, how many extraordinary lives had been destroyed by such precipitousness or procrastination in the mind. Of course it was known how many had failed through carelessness or inattention or because of overcautiousness or excessive attention. He, Konrad said, had invested everything he was and everything he had in his (unwritten) book. But to say so publicly, to make a public avowal that he had indeed invested his all in the book was more than he dared, more than he could permit himself to do. For one thing, he was a megalomaniac in the most fatal sense of the term, as his wife certainly never hesitated to inform him, actually her daily pointed remarks on the subject made him cruelly aware of the fact, as cruelly as
only such a cripple of a woman could persist in her unsparing criticisms, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, and yet, on the other hand, he had only been feeling his way for decades hampered by the enormous timidity and fearfulness inspired by his task and increased by facing up to it, creeping in terror from one possibility of getting hurt to the next. So that if he should actually say it, just once, that he had invested all he had in his work, in the book he had entirely in his head, no one would believe him, he could not hope to be taken seriously, he would simply be making a fool of himself once again. He had, in fact, said this very thing to his wife, day after day, namely, that he had invested all of himself in his book, which he had entirely in his head, as he took good care to emphasize every time, to which she responded day after day by calling him a fool every time, he was a fool, she said, and she was his victim. Well then: so she was the cripple who had become the fool’s victim, you might say that one cripple had been victimized by another, one fool fooled by another, she was a cripple of a fool while he was a fool of a cripple and so forth. The opposition, the enemy, he is supposed to have said, is always bound to be in the majority. Enemies are all there is, he is supposed to have said, because even our friends are enemies, we delude ourselves into seeing a friend by putting a mask of friendship on an enemy’s face to keep the enemy out of sight, we set up the stage and let the friend enter and sit down temporarily at center stage, because we happen to need to believe in his friendship, until the time comes when we drive him away, because we are suddenly able to recognize the friend as our enemy, as just another enemy among all the other enemies that populate our stage. More enemies disguised