The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (26 page)

as friends keep emerging from backstage, Konrad is supposed to have said, from every side they keep coming, out of the deepest darkness, enemies as friends, friends as enemies, all enemies, in short, and we let them down ourselves in swarms from the flyloft. The loquacity of our enemies in the guise of friends (and vice versa!) populating our stage is only our infinitely cunning, snare-setting prompter all over the stage, a stage we designed ourselves with great skill in the service of our own self-deceiving hypocrisy. The curtain goes up, our enemies (as friends and vice versa) come on stage, said Konrad, until death drops the great iron curtain, instantly crushing most of the actors. It was his own fault, no doubt about it, that he had obeyed his parents in not taking up a regular course of studies at a university, not going through with it, not completing it, as he should have, because by doing so he made himself a lifelong outsider as a scientist, though on the one hand he enjoyed the advantage of pursuing his work quite independently, but on the other hand there was the disadvantage of being completely cast upon his own resources, in utter isolation, so that he could progress only by making the most arduous efforts, having to supply the missing foundation of a so-called regular course of studies by susbtituting for it as a foundation the most extreme personal effort in the area of his unquestionably greatest talent, his gift for the natural sciences, it certainly had not been easy, but luckily for him he had never lost courage or the sense of having to take a risk where his work, that is, where natural science and therefore his work was concerned, on the contrary, the more the apparently insurmountable difficulties had increased day by day and from one so-called scientific moment to the next, he felt challenged
to surmount them, and it was precisely his greatest difficulties which had spurred him on to surmount his greatest obstacles, gradually, so that he had ended up with good data and a good conscience, well able to devote himself, or as he called it, to give himself up to working on his book, which he had entitled beforehand
The Sense of Hearing
. In accordance with family tradition Konrad’s parents forced him to concentrate, not on his graduate studies, a type of endeavor held in the lowest possible esteem in his parents’ world, but rather and exclusively upon the enormously extensive, widely ramifying landed properties that, one had to admit in retrospect, had given life to the families who had held it for all those centuries with the marvelous economic productiveness of its natural beauties, as Konrad phrased it, though to force Konrad in this direction merely revealed the dullness of those whom a good or evil fortune has made into rich proprietors, a dullness especially manifest, as a quite deadly hereditary trait, in his own immediate family. Instead of letting him go where he wanted to go, to a university, they had fetched him home from boarding school and tried to talk him out of following his so-called megalomaniac head and into seeing instead, as they saw, the greatest natural form of happiness in not learning anything at all, and forced him instead to turn his entire attention exclusively to that in which they saw fulfillment for themselves, and therefore dared to see fulfillment for him as well, namely, to real estate and buildings, to sawmills, storage cellars, lime works, rental properties, fisheries, to wood and stone and to the lower and the higher kinds of cattle. But Konrad’s total lack of interest in his family property, in property as such, had manifested itself unmistakably in his youth, it was there for anyone to
see, no one in his immediate circle could have been blind to his native and ever increasing indifference to property, which in fact had resulted in the Konrads’ having lost virtually everything they had ever owned (as Konrad said a year ago). His parents knew that he was interested only in his scientific studies, and not at all in their property, and with what enthusiasm he regarded the study of natural science, which they had not permitted him to pursue, how passionately he could have devoted himself to so pure a disinterested pursuit of scientific learning, had they only permitted it, but they in turn held such pursuits in the deepest contempt, they loathed his intellectual aspirations with all the omnipotence of their traditions, and they would in the end have crushed him totally with the weight of their centuries on the property where they forced him to stay, had they not suddenly died, relatively young in years, Konrad said, one right after the other. After their death it was too late for him to take up an academic course of study, but he felt free and able to develop freely and had made up for lost time in an amazingly short span of years. Despite everything that had stood in his way, in fact, Konrad had in a relatively few years reached the point where he had his book all complete in his head, he is supposed to have told Wieser, regardless of all the obstacles put in his way, and in defiance of the most hateful kind of obstacles, he had been able to generate his book unaided in the back of his head, as it were. With him it was always the same sequence, Konrad said to Wieser, hearing came first, then he saw, then he could begin to think, no matter what was involved. He had to begin by hearing, which enabled him to see, which in turn enabled him to think. He had tried to make this characteristic clearer to his wife day
after day, but in vain. But he did think every day that it was a good thing he had started so early in the day on the Urbanchich exercises, in the early twilight before dawn, and in fact often even before the twilight, it was for both of them the time of greatest receptivity and best judgment, two faculties that tended to wane toward noon, to experience a certain resurgence after the midday meal, reaching a high point around five o’clock in the afternoon, and then they slowly declined, though registering a sporadic flicker of life between about eight and nine in the evening, until complete exhaustion set in by about midnight. He would tell his wife over and over again that a scientist had to arm himself for such a task as his book with the greatest secrecy but also with the utmost ruthlessness, of course she listened to him, but on this point in particular she resisted him with all her might. Apart from this one point he had learned to eschew all statements of principle on the book decades ago, for as long as the book was still suspended in air, as he is supposed to have expressed it, as long as he had not yet brought the book into safe harbor by writing it down. To Wieser, Konrad is also supposed to have said that he did his best, pacing the floor in his room for hours. But instead of thinking about my book, and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps instead until I am about to go mad. Instead of thinking about my book, the most important thing of all, I keep digressing to irrelevancies. Several times in the course of this floor-pacing the notion had popped into his head to go down and chop wood with Hoeller; pacing the floor, he is supposed to have told Wieser, I think about going down to Hoeller and chopping wood with Hoeller for a whole hour until I realize that it makes no sense to go down
and chop wood with Hoeller, but still I keep casting about for some distraction from my work instead of doing my utmost to concentrate on the book as I should. You can’t concentrate on the main thing while at the same time digressing to irrelevancies without doing damage, the greatest possible damage! to the main thing, Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed in conversation with Wieser. But even though he knew this, he nevertheless kept on incessantly thinking about his book and simultaneously about something completely irrelevant, such as thinking at noon about what they would both have for supper, thinking in the evening about what they would have for breakfast, thinking at breakfast about what to have for lunch, what to order Hoeller to pick up at the tavern, etc. Wieser says that Konrad told him how, suddenly, in the midst of thinking about his book, he would suddenly think about his Paris apartment, his apartment in Mannheim, their house in Bolzano, any number of things quite unrelated to the book, he would take a peek, as it were, into his apartment in Paris at a time when he should be concentrating one hundred percent on his book, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser; all sorts of unrelated images would intrude upon the image I have of my book, pop into it and destroy it for me, shatter the clear image I have of my book into thousands upon thousands of unrelated images, imaginary human faces, etc. etc. There was always something to prevent him from writing his book, in Paris and London it was the huge extent of the city, in Berlin, it was the superficiality, in Vienna it was the feeblemindedness of the people, in Munich, the foehn blowing down from the Alps, no matter what it was, the mountains, the sea, the spring, the summer, the coldest of winters, the rainiest of all summers, then
again family quarrels, the catastrophic nature of politics, or finally and always his own wife, there was always something that made it impossible for him to write. They had moved to so many places, entirely for the sake of the as yet unwritten book, and they had left so many places, precipitately, for the sake of the unwritten book, they had left Paris post-haste, London post-haste, Mannheim post-haste, Vienna post-haste, not knowing in the morning that by that evening they would have their trunks packed and broken off all their ties to the city in which they had been living for weeks, for months, usually in the belief that it was to be for always, and yet by that evening they would have found a distant city to move to for life, only to go through the same process of settling down for good only to suddenly pack up and leave, Konrad actually said: leave head over heels, Wieser recalls. For instance, Wieser says, Konrad told him that from the moment Hoeller’s nephew, that shady character, a criminal through and through, had moved in with Hoeller at the annex, Konrad had been able to think of nothing else but this nephew for weeks, even though he should have been concentrating one hundred percent on his book, while incessantly pacing the floor in his room and then in his wife’s room, criss-crossing the room in every direction, thinking hard about the book, which he simply had to start writing, but at the same time thinking with the greatest intensity about Hoeller’s nephew, who had appeared so abruptly out of the dark and who struck Konrad as a weird criminal type, fascinated by the question of what this nephew of Hoeller’s meant by living in the annex, what he wanted there, and meanwhile Konrad’s book suffered from neglect, suffered irreparably from the withdrawal of Konrad’s attention. Over
and over Konrad asked himself: How old is Hoeller’s nephew, anyway? meanwhile neglecting the work on his book, and: What kind of clothes is he wearing? and: What color is his hair, anyway? and: Isn’t the fellow rather weird? and: He has long legs and a powerful torso and gigantic hands, the largest hands I’ve ever seen, he kept thinking, meanwhile neglecting his book. On one occasion Konrad is supposed to have confided the following thoughts to Wieser: Pacing the floor in my room, I keep thinking that Hoeller’s nephew must be planning to do me in because he thinks that I have money, he doesn’t know that I have no money at all, he naturally believes that I am well off, there is a type of habitual criminal, after all, Konrad thought while pacing the floor, that isn’t sick at all but is simply a malignant character, and one must be on one’s guard against them. Konrad heard the two men laughing together, all the way from the annex, he kept hearing Hoeller and his nephew laughing, and he naturally asked himself: What is the meaning of this laughter? Isn’t there something weird about it? It was possible that the two of them were conspiring against him, Konrad thought, but he promptly shook off any such ideas as absurd and managed to suppress them; for days he was troubled by the thought that he was sabotaging his book by letting his mind dwell on Hoeller’s nephew and Hoeller himself, on their relationship to each other, or, if not sabotaging his book exactly, he was certainly lessening any chance of writing his book. He also knew that it was morbid to brood about not being able to write his book, about never getting it written at all, it was morbid to the point of becoming a disease, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser. Nevertheless he must have heard aright, because when he was standing outside
the annex at one
A.M.
(!) he heard the two of them, Hoeller and his nephew, laughing again inside the annex, even though it was pitch dark inside, and yet I hear the two of them laughing, how strange, Konrad is supposed to have said. It wasn’t loud laughter, exactly, nor was it suppressed laughter, either, it was just a weird kind of laughter. Thinking that the two of them, Hoeller and his nephew, were laughing in the middle of the night inside the darkness of that annex, Konrad had felt so irritated the rest of the night that he simply could not get back to sleep at all, Konrad is supposed to have said, instead he had to get out of bed and pace the floor, constantly thinking about those two in the annex, occasionally looking out of the window in the direction of the annex to see if the lights were back on, by any chance, but he saw no light, yet the two of them did laugh together, or could he possibly have been mistaken? and as he kept asking himself this question it was growing light outside. Lately I wear myself out brooding over the most absurd notions, all of them pretexts for not writing, for not facing the fact that I am simply unable to write my book, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, if only I could write, if I could have written my book, everything would be different, I’d be feeling all relieved inside, meaning that I could be indifference personified, I could let myself be old and indifferent, cool, what could be more desirable? Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. But the last time he spoke to Wieser, Konrad is supposed to have confided the following to him: At about half past two in the morning he had gone down once more to the annex, absent-mindedly slipping into a jacket too light for the season, bareheaded, in his bedroom slippers, imagine! and stationed himself under the annex
windows to eavesdrop. At first he heard nothing and he was freezing, but the excitement of eavesdropping saved him from catching cold, he thought, because a body fully tensed up in an act of supreme attention would not take a chill, and Konrad’s head and body had been tensed to their utmost in the act of eavesdropping, pressing himself to the wall of the annex under the windows; it was not curiosity that drove him back to the annex to eavesdrop, it was fear, real fear, and an enormous, soothing mistrustfulness toward this nephew of Hoeller’s who was suddenly playing so dominant a role in the lime works area, this stranger who had slipped into the annex behind Konrad’s back, probably seeking a refuge from the long arm of the law, Konrad would of course be the first to grant a refuge to any fugitive from the law, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, it went without saying that he would have protected, hidden, rescued from the fangs of the law, any man threatened by the law, his sympathies were entirely on the side of all fugitives from the law, the law pursued chiefly the innocent, the most innocent, Konrad is supposed to have said, the law persecuted the poorest of the poor, anyone who was being hunted down by the police had to be given shelter in every way, and when Konrad said in every way he meant exactly that, he meant by every available means, because he was acquainted with the law’s way with people, he had himself been raped by the law a number of times, he is supposed to have said, the law raped the individual and therefore the individual had to be protected from the law; however, Hoeller’s nephew frightened him, and anyway Konrad had a feeling that Hoeller’s nephew was by no means helpless and entitled to protection, but that he was a public menace, not by nature or anything