The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (7 page)

He would get up, go to look out the window, and of course see nothing; but he would hear it. It was always at the precise moment when he felt like starting to write, and everything seemed propitious to getting it all written down quickly, that Hoeller chose to start chopping wood. As though everything were in conspiracy against my writing the thing, Konrad is supposed to have said. Yesterday it was the public works inspector, today it’s Hoeller, all sorts of trifles, thousands of them, keep getting in the way of my work. Then there was his wife’s earache, probably brought on by his intensified use of her in accordance with the Urbanchich method of hearing tests and exercises, brought on by the progressive ruthlessness with which he had to make her undergo these exercises, which he had resolved to apply in a more complicated, radicalized form, increasingly so, an unshakable resolve which naturally caused growing tension between him and his wife. He couldn’t possibly stop experimenting on her now all of a sudden, he told Wieser; he had gone too far to stop. He had been progressively perfecting the Urbanchich method, until it had become a martyrdom for her, as he put it. The essence of every method was after all its total amenability to further development; its absolute pitch, as he called it. The rest could only be a matter of perfecting these experiments of his, and thereby perfecting his book, which already existed in its entirety in his head. Unfortunately the public works inspector ruined everything for me yesterday, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, and today Hoeller started with his wood chopping, and for the time being everything to do with his work had simply been wiped out. When a man had condemned himself to a scientific task such as his, Konrad said to Wieser,
meaning a lifelong sentence at hard labor, it was tantamount to having surrendered himself as victim to a conspiracy that would ultimately involve the whole world and even whatever possibilities existed beyond the world. It was all part of a single conspiracy against a man, that is, against the intellectual labors he must perform. There was nothing one could do about it, except to be constantly aware of the wasting away of one’s energies, an awareness that all by itself and unaided would have to fuel the intensification of a humanly almost impossible effort on behalf of his intellectual labors, to bridge all the gaps simultaneously each moment, he thought, ultimately a high art to be mastered only by brain automatism, an art that was the only enduring refuge, the only purpose of one’s existence one might hope for and find and, ultimately, invent. But the world, especially the part of it that constituted one’s immediate environment, regarded every intellectual, scientific undertaking as an enormity directed in every case against the world, against the environment; such an undertaking, though possible only for the individual, was considered to belong by right to the mass, and the individual was always exposed to the mass’s radical opposition, which was in effect the criminality of the mass, a criminality that ended by empowering the individual to think and master and perfect precisely all the thought and action which the mass forbade and denied him all his life long. The mass denied to the individual what was possible only to the individual and not to the mass, the individual denied to the mass what was possible only to the mass, but the individual did not concern himself with the mass, ultimately he concerned himself only with himself to the advantage of the mass, just as the mass ultimately did not
concern itself with the individual to the individual’s advantage, the mass recognized the individual’s achievement only after the destruction of the individual, as the individual recognized the achievement of the mass only after the destruction of the mass and so forth. If it wasn’t the public works inspector then it was the forestry commissioner, or Hoeller, or the baker, or the chimney sweep, or Wieser, or myself, or his wife, it was everyone. It then occurred to him that he did not really have to put up with all that, and he would go down and forbid Hoeller to chop wood. When he, Konrad, was working, then Hoeller did not have to chop wood at the same time, and vice versa, when Hoeller was chopping wood, Konrad could not think or write, Hoeller would have to do his wood chopping when Konrad gave him leave to get on with it, and so forth. Hoeller instantly stopped chopping wood and went inside the annex, Konrad calling after him to do something noiseless, like repairing those torn, frazzled waste baskets Konrad had personally brought to the annex for that purpose three days ago. Unfortunately he said this in loud, accusatory tones, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, and no sooner had Hoeller disappeared inside the annex than Konrad felt remorseful about taking that tone with a man he had always been so careful to address in the gentlest possible way, and he spent hours brooding over the reasons why he might have been so loud, rough, and impatient with Hoeller, why he had suddenly lost control over his voice, i.e., over himself, especially toward Hoeller of all people; and to Wieser Konrad is supposed to have said that it was possible to speak too sharply to a person while irritated about something quite unconnected with that individual, who could only feel taken aback and often terrified
by the unprovoked attack upon himself, and in this way one would have suddenly damaged a relationship with a person one happened to be warmly attached to, as Konrad was to Hoeller. However, going back to his room, he had decided that he had not really spoken too sharply to Hoeller, he told Wieser. Absolute quiet had now been restored and Konrad was able to get back to work, he said; he sat down at his desk and thought: here is the first sentence, and he wrote down his first sentence. A few more such sentences, he thought, and the book will be on its way to being written at last. But he had thought so hundreds if not thousands of times, Konrad said to Wieser, that if he could only get a few sentences down on paper, the rest of the book would gradually write itself, all at once, he had thought thousands of times, and yet he would break off after getting a few sentences down on paper, as long ago as Augsburg he had believed he would be able to get the whole thing on paper in one continuous flow, once he had gotten a few sentences down, it was the same in Augsburg and in Innsbruck and in Paris and in Aschaffenburg and in Schweinfurt and in Bolzano and in Merano and in Rome and in London and in Vienna and in Florence and in Copenhagen and in Hamburg and in Frankfurt and in Cologne and in Brussels and in Ravenna and in Rattenberg and in Toblach and in Neulengbach and in Korneuburg and in Gaenserndorf and in Calais and in Kufstein and in Munich and in Prien and in Muerzzuschlag and in Thalgau and in Pforzheim and in Mannheim. All those beginnings and ideas, lost time and again and forever. Suddenly there is a knock at the front door, downstairs, Konrad said to Wieser. At first I ignore it, he said, but one cannot ignore it indefinitely, the knocking
doesn’t stop, so I finally have to get up and go down to answer it. By the time he has reached the vestibule, he has lost the connection between those beginning sentences. He opens the door, and there stands the public works inspector. Well, what is it? he asks, and then he says, Ah, it’s you! thinking that the inspector always shows up at the most inopportune times, and then Konrad said: Do come in! quite against his will, as he told Wieser, Do come in, and the works inspector came in, and then they sat down in the room to the right of the entrance, the so-called wood-paneled room. This room at the time still contained a set of chairs usually described as Viennese baroque; incidentally most comfortable to sit in. Do sit down, Konrad said to the works inspector, though it is rather cold in this so-called wood-paneled room, but if you keep your coat on you can sit here quite comfortably. I myself am quite hardened to the cold, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector, of course Konrad took the works inspector into the ice-cold room deliberately, says Wieser, hoping literally to freeze his guest out, but even though Konrad remarked that the temperature in the so-called wood-paneled room was only three degrees above zero, the inspector did not leave, on the contrary, he seemed to be quite at ease and apparently found the so-called wood-paneled room not at all too cold, but settled back in a Viennese baroque chair for quite a while. We can’t go to my room, Konrad said to the works inspector, my desk is piled high with papers, I am working on my book, as you know. Then Konrad brought his guest something to drink, even though he had absolutely no wish to talk with him, longing as he did to get back to his desk and his work, but “no, no” he (Konrad) said when the
inspector asked whether he was interrupting Konrad in his work,
your writing
is what he is supposed to have said. Oh no, Konrad lied, thinking that the lie was about the only means of contact with another human being. Let us attend to whatever needs our attention, Konrad is supposed to have said, and the works inspector said something about grading the road and Konrad, without being asked, as he admitted, said, as you know, I am working on that book I have so often told you about. I am so entirely caught up in it, you know, he said, it’s a mania I’m afraid, I seem to be possessed by it, all there is of me, as you know it is in the nature of a mania that a man will give his entire life to it and destroy himself entirely by his obsession alone and nothing else. It’s a study of the sense of hearing, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector. As you know, Konrad said, so much has been written about the brain, but virtually nothing, at least nothing of any consequence, has been done on the auditory sense. He had been working on it for about twenty years, Konrad is supposed to have told the inspector; I started by exhausting myself, he said, slowly but with gradually increasing intensity, with these experiments, then I summed it all up, did more experiments, summed up again, and again, etc., Konrad said, then I went back to experimenting, completed the experiments, wrote a summation and another summation, etc. I constantly experiment, and a series of experiments is always followed by another series of experiments, Wieser reports Konrad as saying. Then it all fell apart, at the very peak of concentration it all fell to pieces again. But now Konrad said he had the whole thing complete in his head, all the details together and in place, the most incredible material you can imagine,
he said, everything to do with the auditory sense. But no sooner have I reached my peak of concentration than it all falls apart again, Konrad said.
Now I have it
, I think, but at that very moment it has all collapsed. But when one has had it all in one’s head for so long, completely in one’s head for all those years, he said to the works inspector, one is bound to assume that it is only a question of time, that the auspicious moment must come sooner or later when one will suddenly be able to set it all down on paper. This was the moment he had been waiting for, it had come, as he also said several times to Wieser, the moment was here, now, as he said to Fro too, as I know, and Konrad actually said this to the inspector, the moment came every day, indeed there was not a day without such a moment when he believed the time to begin had come, and that he would now finish writing his book, but every time it came, Konrad said to the works inspector, as soon as he sat down at his desk he would be interrupted, whether, as he said, by the baker or the chimney sweep or on one occasion by Wieser or else by Fro, or by the works inspector, or Hoeller, or his wife, or the forestry commissioner, or a noise, or whatever it was. But it was quite impossible not to go down and open the door when there was a knock at the door, he said to the inspector, to let someone knock incessantly on the door without responding was something impossible for him if only because it would drive him crazy in record time. People never cease their knocking, Konrad said, even when they know they are disturbing me, delaying my work, possibly ruining my book, ruining everything, but they will not stop knocking until I get up, move the papers aside, and go down to open the door. Invariably it is the most ridiculous trifle for
the sake of which I am interrupted in my work, Konrad is supposed to have said, some enormous absurdity that threatens to ruin my life’s work. To think that he had always dreamed of the lime works as a place where he and his wife would be living in perfect isolation and freedom from interruption by people, that here in the lime works the destructive apparatus of the increasingly disturbed, nervous so-called consumer society, with its chronically irritating and ultimately ruinous effect on everything in the nature of intellectual effort could not touch them, that here they would have escaped all that, but in reality they continued to be irritated by people even here at the lime works, he simply did not have the strength, Konrad said to Wieser, to resist opening the door when someone knocked, he invariably yielded and opened the door, Konrad said, not from considerations of humanity, not from motives of civility about which he couldn’t have cared less, he hated every kind of propriety, he had learned to hate propriety in the course of decades of experiencing life, he hated everything to do with social forms, everything implied by civility toward people, and it was purely, as stated, a pitiable lack of personal energy that made him go down and open the door, made him desert his work, what could be more depressing than to desert a task like mine, so laboriously constructed in decades of hard work, to desert it for the sake of a chimney sweep, a baker, a works inspector, how low a man must have sunk to desert his work for the most absurd, the most trifling reason, because his wife upstairs wants her pillow straightened or needs a drink of water or wants to be read to from her favorite romantic poet, or wants the curtains drawn or opened, a piece of bread cut, her hair ribbon tightened, her
garter tied, her sugar bowl filled, her spectacles set on her nose, her back rubbed with alcohol, or else because of Hoeller’s wood-chopping or Fro, or the man from the sawmill, or on your account, Wieser. Actually, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser in a tone of utter weariness, this endless knocking on my door, though quite constant in its actual sound level and intensity, in my head swells to a terrifying, ear-splitting thunderousness and drives me completely crazy. It forced him to get up, drop everything, go down and unlock the door, just to stop the knocking. Having done this, Konrad said, there was no point in being impolite about it, because the damage is done by then, so I am exquisitely polite although of course I ask myself every time I am so exquisitely polite why I am being so exquisitely polite. The whole day is ruined, everything in his head is dissipated beyond recall, there is nothing left but a few polite formulas such as, Do come in, Come in, How are you, Ah yes, or maybe just Yes indeed, or You don’t say, suddenly issuing from his lips. This time you have really ruined my work completely, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser, telling him the truth for the first time. First Hoeller started it with his wood-chopping, Konrad said to the inspector, and I went down and ordered Hoeller to stop it instantly, I ordered him to repair the waste baskets and went back to my room and sat down at my desk feeling that my book was saved, because Hoeller did not actually cause an interruption to the extent of completely dissipating my concept, but now you have come knocking at the door and you’ve wrecked the whole thing, to be interrupted twice in a row in so complex a mental effort as my book is fatal. While it was still possible to return to my book after Hoeller’s