The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (27 page)

he couldn’t help but out of deliberate viciousness; anyway, to get back to his story, Konrad suddenly heard the two of them laughing again, Hoeller and his nephew were in there laughing, Konrad could hear them even through the double storm windows, they must have been sitting on the corner bench in the kitchen, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, sitting there in the pitch dark and apparently talking about something to do with him, Konrad, one thing in particular, always the same thing, and from time to time they would laugh about it; what led Konrad to the conclusion and then to the conviction that they were talking about him was the nature of their conversation, though he admitted that he could not understand a single word they said, despite the fact that he could hear everything, but it did seem to him that he heard them pronouncing the name
Konrad
several times, alternately
Konrad
and the
Konrad woman
was what he heard, he thought, so that evidently the subject of their conversation was himself and his wife, as he soon clearly understood; other words he thought he distinguished were
lime works, annex
, and finally the word
cash box
, after which the two of them laughed again, it was three o’clock by this time, and the two of them had suddenly risen, Konrad heard them walking from the kitchen to the entry which meant, Konrad thought, that they were about to come out of the annex, so he made tracks away from there, he actually ran back to the lime works and as quickly as he could up to his room, not without first shooting all the bolts and locking all the locks, every last one. Once in his room, still breathless from running, he is supposed to have listened intently, for any sounds from Hoeller and his nephew, but he didn’t hear a thing, looking out of the window he could see nothing but the
darkness so that by the time Konrad was in bed at last he is supposed to have asked himself whether his weird experience, or what seemed to be a weird experience that he had just barely survived, was in fact a real experience, because it was after all possible that I only imagined all that I believed I saw and heard while pressed against the annex wall, eavesdropping; thinking that he might merely have imagined the whole thing, Konrad finally fell asleep, and when he woke up early that morning his first thought was that Hoeller and his nephew might have been fast asleep all night long, after going to bed as early as six or seven in the evening, and that he merely imagined all the weird things he remembered, he said. He told Wieser that he told his wife the whole story of his nighttime experience in every minute detail, and she commented that he was clearly the victim of overwork, that he had so drained himself of energy by overdoing the Urbanchich exercises that experiences such as he had just recounted from the night before could be the natural result of his weakened condition, as long as he understood that these were imaginary experiences, not realities, the Konrad woman is supposed to have said to her husband; you are suffering from delusions, she said, nothing more than delusions. Instead of sticking to his writing, to writing his book, he let his mind wander off in every conceivable direction, distracting himself in ways that bordered on the absurd, such as for instance the idea of walking out of the lime works to chop wood with Hoeller, going into the timber forest with Hoeller, lumbering, carpentry at the annex, tying brooms, anything. Every second day, in fact, Konrad said to Wieser, he would actually dress warmly, in work clothes, as Hoeller recalls, and leave the lime works wearing ankle warmers, a
woolen cap, and his long leather pants, of course, planning to join the loggers in the forest, walking briskly away from the house but after passing the thicket he turned right back, recognizing the absurdity of what he was doing and saying to himself: I’ve got to get back to my work, my book, back to my desk, back to making sense. But no sooner had he started back to doing the sensible thing, i.e., back to his work, to his desk, to the stack of papers piled on his desk in preparation for writing, he began to be plagued by doubts whether he was doing the right thing after all in not going to join the loggers in the forest, in not doing something irrational, in fact, instead of making an effort for the hundredth or thousandth time to tackle the work on his desk, the same doomed effort, his doubts becoming stronger as he reentered the lime works and back in his room the closer he approached his desk where his work awaited him, the less he felt like writing; however, at this point he dressed himself properly for the day ahead indoors; then he lay down on his bed to brood, trying not to despair but not succeeding, so he got up again, paced the floor, and waited for his wife to ring. When she rings I shall go to her room, and she will ask me if I have made any progress with my writing, and I shall say: No, as I always do, simply by not answering the question, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, remarking that the proverbial sentence:
No answer is also an answer
, certainly applied to what went on between the two of them day after day to an extraordinary degree. All the proverbial truths, in fact, he said to Wieser, had come to roost for him and his wife in the lime works, as a clear if heartbreaking expression of their daily truth, reality, and hardship. Lately he tended to say to his wife, again and again: I’m going to
the woods, to join the woodcutters, I’m going with Hoeller to the woods, to do some logging. He once did go daily to the lumbermen in the woods, but he had not done this for years now. He never realized until just a while ago that he had long ceased to take his walks of inspection into the forest. I am not going to the sawmill any more, I am not going to the tavern any more, I won’t go to see Fro, I won’t go to see Wieser any more, I won’t go again to see the works inspector, the forestry commissioner, he is supposed to have said to his wife over and over and in the way he merely listed all the people and things he would no longer see or attend to, there was so much bitter reproach against his wife that he could spare himself reproaching her with all the other things he might mention. The book and you are killing me between you, he is supposed to have said to her repeatedly toward the end. He often wondered, for instance, whether it might not help if he attended to his lapsed correspondence, even though it was not really the way out of his more and more frightening predicament, it was years since he had written a letter or a card to anyone, there was a huge pile of unanswered correspondence from every corner of the world on top of the bureau in his room, the drawers too were stuffed full of unanswered letters, so many people had written to him from time to time, with a persistence impossible to understand because, surely, a man who did not answer his mail was clearly serving notice that he had no desire to stay in touch with the correspondent, and Konrad had long since ceased to answer hundreds of thousands of letters and cards, but his correspondents would not leave him in peace, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, they kept on writing, it was only after years of not hearing from him in reply that these innumerable
correspondents, largely people I detest from the bottom of my heart, Konrad is supposed to have said, finally desisted from writing to him; to be perfectly frank, he is supposed to have said, I haven’t been receiving any mail for years now, my wife still gets mail, the most insignificant kind of mail you can imagine, embarrassing letters from former servants, for instance, who write partly out of loyalty, partly because they hope to be remembered in her will, but also because it is customary, has been customary for centuries, they write to recall themselves to her memory, possibly one or another even writes to her out of pity, Konrad is alleged to have told Wieser, my wife differs from me, I despise being pitied, I hate it in fact, while she accepts pity as a kind of medicine, even in its lowest form, the rudimentary greeting on a postcard, despite his having tried for years to dissuade her from answering all these letters and cards, it was far too much trouble for her considering the strain she was undergoing for the book’s sake, but she insisted on answering all her mail, meaning that she made him answer it for her, because as you know, my dear Wieser, my wife is in no shape to write letters or postcards, in the first place she can’t see, and she can’t hold a pen or pencil steadily enough to write with it, just taking one in hand makes her extremely jittery, her entire body begins to tremble with resistance against the act of writing, so that he had to answer all her mail in her name, all she did was sign the letters, he had to mail the letters and the cards too, which meant taking them to the post office, or at least making sure that Hoeller took them to the village, not to mention the fact that these mailings cost a lot of money, when they certainly had no money to waste on such nonsense as letters and cards addressed to a lot of totally useless people
whom he estimated to number in their hundreds still, and yet, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, from time to time I wonder whether I myself shouldn’t go back to answering all the unanswered letters and cards on my bureau, give a sign of life to one or another of my correspondents, some of whom must have been thinking that I died years ago, because if a man like myself isn’t heard from for any length of time and doesn’t reply to his mail, to two or three letters in a row, people are likely to assume that he is dead, though if I died they would probably hear about it, so from time to time it occurs to me that it might be advisable, though I can’t say why, to sit down and answer all those letters and cards, get back in touch with all those people from whom he hadn’t heard a thing, actually, in a long time, because of his own failure to continue the correspondence, to find out what had happened to all of them, at least; a sudden curiosity would seize him like a fever and he would actually sit down at his desk to reopen his correspondence with all the people who must be feeling rebuffed by him because he had dropped the correspondence without giving any reason, but even in the act of arranging his stationery and filling his pen with ink he would suddenly think how idiotic of him to write letters all of a sudden when he could use the time and the same effort to write his book, the time he would be wasting trying to think up answers that were no longer awaited, to letters from forgotten correspondents, could be put to so much better use in writing his book, and so he would give up the idea of reviving a correspondence interrupted now for three or four years, and he would remove the stationery from his desk and bring back the bond paper for his manuscript and arrange it in front of him on the desk. But as soon as he had the stack
of paper for the manuscript back in place, i.e., when he had restored the ideal conditions for working on the book, he became incapable of setting to work writing it, he would sit there for a time, a long time, staring at the stack of fresh paper, until it was clear to him that, once more, he could not begin to write, whereupon he would move the stationery back in place on the desk, and so it went for hours, the stationery alternating with the manuscript paper in front of him on his desk, the business of manuscript paper forward, manuscript paper back, stationery forward, stationery back, was enough in itself to make writing impossible, whether to write the manuscript or to reopen the correspondence, so he did neither, but instead took to pacing the floor of his room every which way, thinking alternately about the book and the interrupted correspondence, thinking what an immense number of letters I would have to write, and thinking alternately, how immensely difficult it was to start writing the book, and then he would think: I shan’t write any letters, or, I won’t write the book, I shall write neither the letters nor the book, and he would think: in every one of these letters I would have to start by thanking them, always the same formula of thanks, one letter like the other and basically every one of these letters is nothing more than a demand, demands for money or other demands, vulgar demands, outrageous demands, on the one hand these people always want money, on the other hand they want affection, recommendations, he thought, so he really couldn’t answer all these letters, since he had neither money nor any affection to give, in fact he couldn’t care less about these people. All of these letter and card writers were angling for some advantage, to get something or other out of him. Basically there’s something underhanded about all
of them, all these letters and cards without exception are dictated by some veiled or hidden or even shamelessly undisguised infamous motive. To the attic with the whole pile! he would think, off to the attic with them at once! and instantly begin to make a single pile of all those letters and cards, hundreds of thousands of them, a man could be suffocated by the mere smell of so many hundreds of thousands of letters in one heap, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser; while embarked on this he realized of course that he was doing something to distract himself from writing the book, something new, because piling the letters in one heap and then carrying them gradually up to the attic was a brand new thing to do, compared with the two, three dozen kinds of things he had done for years, over and over, to distract himself from writing the book, things like sweeping up, wiping up, pulling nails from the walls, shining shoes, washing socks, etc., chores that had begun long since to nauseate him, all of his disgusting maneuverings to distract himself from what he should be doing nauseated him, so he grabbed an armful of letters, Wieser says, and dragged it up to the attic, and invariably, as always, banged his head against the great wooden beam over the door to the attic, running his head against it with such force, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, that I thought I had cracked my skull, but actually the pain let up fairly soon and the wound, though bleeding profusely, was quite superficial; so he went on dragging armfuls of letters and cards up to the attic, thinking all the while: this whole correspondence has been a big mistake, all correspondence is a mistake! At the end, after the last of the letters and cards had been dragged up to the attic, he collapsed with exhaustion, on the bed in his room, naturally too weak by this time,
supposedly, to give the least thought to his book, in a state of exhaustion too profound even for him to feel the usual irritation, the profound irritation he has felt for years, at the fact that everything on his desk is now arranged perfectly so that he could begin at once to write his book, as he explained to Wieser: precisely because I can see clearly that I can begin to write at any moment, that everything is arranged and in perfect order for starting to write, everything is pointing toward this moment of readiness to write, the very awareness that everything is pushing me in that direction naturally makes it impossible for me to start writing. Every time it occurs to him that the very sight of his desk with everything on it prepared and ready, so that he can begin to write his book, is just what makes it impossible for him to begin writing, the thought that this is so becomes unbearable, so he gets up and drinks a glass of water. He immediately follows this up with a second glass of water swallowed in one long gulp, though in the midst of this gulp he is already thinking whether he isn’t going to catch a terrible cold from drinking the ice-cold water down so fast, because it’s a fact that drinking a glass of icy water too fast one is bound to catch cold, which he always lived in fear of doing, but, on the other hand he had never actually caught cold that way. Just one week before he shot his wife, however, he did say that it suddenly came to him that he had actually caught cold by drinking down a glass of cold water too quickly. According to Wieser: Konrad suddenly found himself unable to speak, he tried to speak but couldn’t. To calm himself down Konrad left the kitchen where he had just taken a quick drink of water and went back to his own room where he lay down, but quickly got up again, in constant terror that this as he hoped only momentary loss