Correction: A Novel (10 page)

Though Roithamer was still far from having conceived even the idea of building his Cone, he was already fascinated by the building of Hoeller’s house and by the manner in which Hoeller had personally designed and created the house, unbeknownst to him as yet the idea of building the Cone for his sister had already been born inside him, even before the actual building of the Cone for his sister, and in the middle of the Kobernausser forest at that, existed even as a gleam in his conscious mind, his witnessing of Hoeller s art in building, and Hoeller s work on his house in the Aurach gorge must certainly be rated as an art, Roithamer said, had long since started him thinking about the Cone, sparked the idea of building the Cone, and this idea, to build the Cone and to build it, actualize it, in the Kobernausser forest, came to him in Hoeller’s house, it was in Hoeller’s house that Roithamer had decided, unconsciously at first, but then suddenly inspired by the idea of building the Cone, he reached the fully conscious decision of building the Cone, after watching Hoeller building his house, seeing the progressive stages of that project, in the Aurach gorge, Roithamer decided to confront such a project himself and to build something that so far, as Hoeller had also felt, no one before him had ever built (Roithamer), Roithamer’s constant watching of Hoeller’s building project had effected the creation of the Cone in Roithamer, at first in his head, then on paper, on hundreds, on thousands of papers, then at last in reality, because he, Roithamer, was the kind of man who had to create a reality, always a reality, out of what he had at first only imagined, to make it a fact, just as Hoeller had to turn into a fact the habitation he had at first only imagined for himself in the Aurach gorge, all that preparatory work for Roithamer’s Cone had in reality been done, as I now saw clearly, by Hoeller when he decided to build himself a house in the Aurach gorge, suddenly to sell the old house he had inherited from his parents and build himself the new one in the Aurach gorge with the proceeds plus some bank loans and the strength of his determination and his actual force of mind, he himself, Hoeller, had been hesitant at first in
daring
to tackle his project, but then he’d hastened with all the more energy to get it
done
. Like all country folk he, Hoeller, had acquired the basics of building by constantly watching building operations from childhood on, but had expanded his knowledge, once he had decided to build on his own, by private studies and reading of the technical literature, and had managed to perfect himself, up to a point, in the art of building himself a house to live in, basically it was the same process as the one followed later on by Roithamer, that sudden concentration of all his forces in Roithamer, the same Hoeller had been the first to experience, on the building of his work of art, with all the possibilities of expanding his knowledge of the art of building, of steadily developing and perfecting it, this total concentration on building in Hoeller had probably fascinated Roithamer years before his own decision to build the Cone, just as he’d always been highly interested, even absorbed, as I know, in building, the art of building, especially the art of building homes. But whether Roithamer knew that Hoeller had been both cause and model for his own building art, I don’t know, even though Roithamer was always talking about Hoeller’s building activity, meaning he always talked of it with the greatest respect, he was quite possibly not at all aware that Hoeller and Hoeller’s building activity was the cause of his own building activity, that he, Roithamer, might never have thought of building anything without Hoeller and Hoeller’s decision to build himself a house in the Aurach gorge. But just as Hoeller had wanted to build something special, a home, the contrary of what everybody else did, something contrary to all the precepts and all the concepts of the others, contrary to their reason, and in the most dangerous spot besides, something to make their eyes pop, Roithamer also wanted to build something special, something different from all the others, a cone, meaning a cone-to-live-in for his sister, and to top it off, as they said, inhuman in scale, in inhuman surroundings, at an inhuman location, namely in the middle of the Kobernausser forest. They both proceeded in the same way, each seeking to realize himself by means of what they both believed to be, Roithamer as well as Hoeller, and both achieved, an unusual deed in building a unique work of art, each in his own style. It was a good half hour before I broke the silence in which the Hoeller family had been sitting at table watching me without letup, to say that I thought Roithamer had hit on the idea of building the Cone while watching the Hoellers’ house being built. Since neither Hoeller nor his wife had anything to say to my remark, I fell silent again thinking that I was right, that everything in Hoeller’s house proved to me that Roithamer had been motivated to build his Cone by the building of Hoeller’s house, the briefest stay in Hoeller’s house was enough to confirm this supposition of mine, but this supposition had never yet been so clearly confirmed as it was while I had been sitting at table with the Hoellers considering the circumstances that had led to the building of Roithamer’s Cone, as they had led to the building of Hoeller’s house. Hoeller had to build his house in the Aurach gorge, considering all (his) circumstances, Roithamer had to build his Cone in the middle of the Kobernausser forest, all (his) circumstances considered. And in fact everything in Hoeller’s house, I thought, twist and turn it how you will, is original, just as everything in and about Roithamer’s Cone is original, the more closely you study it, consider it, observe, check and recheck every detail, the more absolutely original it must be called. And so, I thought, Roithamer had always sat here at this table, as I was sitting here now, in Hoeller’s family room with Hoeller’s family in the evening, at noon Roithamer was on his own, as I happen to know, he ate hardly anything at noon, a mouthful of clear cold water, a piece of bread at the most, were enough for him, but in the evening, exhausted from his work, he could indulge himself in a little contact with the Hoellers, in their company, he could go down to their family room to share their meal with them, it isn’t every day that a man like Roithamer, incessantly preoccupied with his kind of work, can afford to have such contact with people like the Hoellers, not just any time, but only at quite definite times and at quite regular intervals, such as in the evenings, after he had quite exhausted himself up in Hoeller’s garret, and couldn’t have gone on, not one moment longer, in Hoeller’s garret, Mrs. Hoeller’s three or four knocks on the ceiling, viz. the attic floor, with the hazel stick, were actually always his signal for dropping his work and getting to his feet and going down to the Hoeller family room, I know about this routine and I can imagine that Roithamer greatly valued their adherence to this routine as a ritual, Hoeller’s wife knocking three or four times on the ceiling, viz. the attic floor, which Roithamer had often told me about in England, had been his signal for dropping his work, and Hoeller’s wife, Roithamer said, always timed these knocks exactly right, not a moment too soon and not a moment too late. He, Roithamer, had never told Hoeller’s wife that she always knocked at the right moment, but she must have assumed that it always was the right moment because it was never followed by any kind of protest on Roithamer’s part. Not that Hoeller’s wife and I had ever come to any special understanding about it, but I had instantly grasped that her knocks on the ceiling, viz. the attic floor, meant that supper was ready and that she expected me to come down and join them at the table. In Hoeller’s workshop the noise made by the chamfer bit Hoeller was probably using also stopped immediately after the knocking, a sign that Hoeller too was stopping work and coming in to supper from his workshop. But even had I not been noticing and observing all this for myself, Roithamer had described it all to me, the whole process, how pleased he had been at her punctuality every time Hoeller’s wife knocked with her hazel stick, which meant that he had apparently never considered her knocking a disturbance, it often came as a liberation from some blind alley he had constructed, speculated, thought himself into, andsoforth. The Hoellers, I thought, were probably behaving toward me now as they had behaved toward Roithamer, the moment I had moved into Hoeller’s garret I had become locked into the mechanism of their behavior with Roithamer, everyone who now lives in Hoeller’s garret after Roithamer is probably locked into the same behavior mechanism that functioned for Roithamer, and now it is I who live in Hoeller’s garret, though there would probably be others living there after me, even if Hoeller denies it, I thought, the sort of people suitable for Hoeller’s garret, and it seemed to me that the Hoellers regarded me as nothing else than the man who had taken Roithamer’s place. Most of all it was from the behavior of Hoeller’s children at table that I immediately deduced that they thought they had to behave toward me as they had behaved toward Roithamer. Suddenly I’d discovered on the wall opposite, near the door, a death notice on which I could read Roithamer’s name, all the way across the room, it was a big room, I could read Roithamer’s name. Everything in this room and in this house, I thought, still shows the impact of Roithamer’s suicide, which was of course classified by everyone, Hoeller included, as the result of
mental confusion
, so-called, and I thought that everyone in Hoeller’s house still behaves, such a long time after Roithamer’s death, as if Roithamer were still among them.

To the left of the door in the wall opposite the window is where they, the Hoellers, had pinned Roithamer’s death notice, and to the right of the door, the death notice of Roithamer’s sister. For a long time to come the mood throughout the whole valley will probably be determined by these two dead people, I thought, and most noticeably in Hoeller’s house with which these two, each in his or her own way, had such strong ties, the one by actually having lived here, in fact until his own violent death, the other as his sister, because she was always welcome in Hoeller’s house and especially popular with Hoeller’s children, with whom she had made friends. While Roithamer had been drawn to Hoeller, originally, by Hoeller having been his schoolmate, and subsequently by Hoeller’s idea of building his house in the Aurach gorge and Roithamer’s sudden clear perception, derived from this building plan, of the kinship between himself and Hoeller, whose inward and outward simplicity had always been attractive to Roithamer,
Hoeller’s house as a
building
, in itself which had interested Roithamer so much that he often took part all day long, for weeks on end, in the building of Hoeller’s house, it was not in Altensam he spent his vacations from England but taking part in the building of Hoeller’s house, then it was, for Roithamer’s sister, Hoeller’s children for whose sake she often visited the Hoellers, at Christmas or Easter, Roithamer’s sister always brought Hoeller’s children presents particularly suited to these children, from time to time she would buy them completely new outfits and take them on trips to the lakes or even into town.

The Aurach gorge with Hoeller’s house, so perfectly, because so functionally, adapted to the Aurach gorge, had always been the destination, in their last years, of these two people whose faces I now saw pictured on those death notices on :he wall opposite me, I thought, and I couldn’t take it in that the deaths of those two should have come so quickly and, after all, so unexpectedly, plunging everything in the Aurach valley into such gloom as had certainly been prevalent here for some time now, ever since the death of those two. The Hoellers had always had a tender spot in their hearts, as I know, for the two Roithamers, as they most affectionately referred to the now dead brother and sister, who were so different from their brothers and parents, they had never looked down on the simple inhabitants of the valley and the villages below Altensam, as their birth might have entitled them to do, as the people hereabouts put it, but had rather, from earliest childhood on, felt more kinship with them than with their own family, the two Roithamers had felt closer to the Hoellers than to their own brothers, their own parents, and they had never made a mystery of it. Whenever they had a moment they’d used it, as I’ve said, to escape from Altensam and go down to the valley, to go down there was all they ever wanted, and always preferably to the Hoellers. It was owing to those two that in earlier days, when they were still children, Hoeller’s house was always filled with life, first the old house and then the new-built Hoeller house, the two young Roithamers had always seen to it that the rather overburdened and drab life of the Hoellers in the Aurach valley, which tended by nature to a certain even, depressing grayness, was brightened up and so made bearable again, every time. By their mere presence, being basically amusing people, Roithamer and his sister had often rescued the Hoellers from one of their usual states of despair, as young people almost always will. They owed much to the two Roithamers just as, conversely, the two Roithamers owed much to the Hoellers. This catastrophe, I suddenly said when we had all finished eating, need not have happened, meaning the death of the sister and the suicide of the brother, though what I had been thinking just then was that everything had led directly to this catastrophe and that actually it had to happen.

Because my remark that Roithamer had probably got the idea of building the Cone from Hoeller’s building his home in the Aurach gorge had brought no reply, whether in agreement or disagreement, for such a long time, from the Hoellers, I felt blocked about saying anything else, yet it was after all impossible to keep sitting in silence at table with the Hoellers, merely eyeing the family room, and anyway I felt that the Hoellers were waiting for me to come up with something, something to say, but I, looking at those death notices on the wall opposite, was not about to come up with another remark for them, it was still possible, I thought, that even after so long a pause Hoeller might have something to say in response to my previous remark or even that Hoeller’s wife, who’d been most attentive toward me, might say something, but what really puzzled me was that the children, who were probably not always so quiet and whom I knew to be not at all tongue-tied, hadn’t a word to say, though they had long since finished eating and drinking and were now sitting there, elbows on the table, poised as if only waiting for their father to give the signal to rise, so they could jump up and run out of the room. The darkness outside was now total, suddenly I heard the roaring of the Aurach again, fatigue couldn’t have been the only reason for Hoeller’s not talking, so I tried again to get a conversation going by making a second remark. Everything’s so very quiet now in Altensam, I said, after the death of our friend Roithamer’s sister and after his own death, nothing but closed blinds, I said, locked gates, everything makes it look like a house of death, the whole valley has been darkened even more under the impact of the two Roithamers’ deaths, wherever you go, that pervasive silence, this speechless wait-and-see attitude of all the people, which simply must be linked with the deaths of the two Roithamers, it was foreseeable, meaning from a certain point in time onward, I said, whereupon they suddenly all listened to me even more attentively than before, and I said that Roithamer’s sister had been doomed, that splendid creature, who simply couldn’t bear the fact of the Cone, that her brother had made his idea come true, to build the Cone for her, meaning
for her alone and particularly in the middle of the
Kobernausser forest
, Roithamer himself had fully realized, when he came back to England after the Cone was finished and presented to his sister, that the perfected Cone could not actually be the greatest, in fact the supreme happiness for her, as he had believed, could have believed, but that it actually meant her death, because there can be no doubt whatsoever that Roithamer’s sister was destroyed by the creation of the perfect Cone, from the moment the Cone was finished, when it was presented to her, as I recapitulated the story for the Hoellers, she was suddenly a different person, at that moment she fell prey to a terminal disease, to this day no one knows what this terminal disease was, people like Roithamer’s sister tend to go suddenly into a decline, all at once at a certain moment in their lives, a moment naturally favorable to such a terminal disease, and they can then be seen slowly
sinking deeper into sickness
, developing a pathological eccentricity, little by little falling victim to this disease quite in accordance with their nature, because in reality, so I said to the Hoellers, Roithamer’s sister never believed that her brother could make his idea of building the Cone for her come true, she had always considered it a crazy, an unrealizable idea, but then she had underestimated her brother’s abilities and his toughness and his unyielding nature, though she loved her brother above all others, and so she had deceived herself about her own brother, who was closer to her than anybody. Roithamer, I told the Hoellers, was a man who wouldn’t let anything in the world deter him from whatever aim he had once set his mind on, nor was he a dreamer, because he was every inch a scientist, as well as being consistent and incorruptible in every way, he was a
natural scientist
and the very fact that he taught at an English university made him every inch a realist, I myself, I told the Hoellers, had never in my life met a man with a more down-to-earth head on his shoulders, no character more precise in his thinking and in making his will prevail.