The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (12 page)

BOOK: The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International)
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this was an infallible prod to make her talk, and while he was not surprised by resistance, protests, etc., on this occasion he would find that even a lengthy reading from Kropotkin got no reaction from her at all, except to deepen her silence, Konrad is supposed to have said. When that happens he shuts the book, stands up, walks back and forth in the room, says Wieser, faster and faster, more and more noisily, tries to say something but doesn’t really know what to say, sits down, gets up again. He could of course read some Novalis to her, he thinks, but he doesn’t read the Novalis; it would mean surrender, he is supposed to have said to Wieser. To Fro: But inasmuch as I simply had to go through the exercises on
i
with her that day, and so little was accomplished by that time, it was quite impossible for me to turn around and walk off to my own room. Suddenly he hit upon the idea of asking her whether he should bring her something to eat from the kitchen. But he got no response at all to this. Was she in pain? Even this question brought no response of any kind. If she was in pain, something had to be done about it, would she take a pill? he asked her; no answer. He had just decided to read some Novalis to her after all, but as he was about to start she finally signaled that she wanted to get up and walk a few steps, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, and she actually let him help her up and walk her to the window and back, and again, and a third time, to the window and back to her chair, at which point she was so exhausted that he barely managed to get her back into the chair where she ended in total collapse. If only I had the patience, she is supposed to have said, if only I had the patience, but I have no patience, when he quoted her Konrad even tried to imitate her voice, according to Fro,
who says that Konrad repeatedly said to him, to Fro, that is, if only I had patience, if only I had patience. But I have simply run out of all patience, she is supposed to have said. Afterward he read her a long passage of the Novalis, taking care to read in a level tone of voice, with an even distribution of emphasis, his style of delivery could certainly be described as monotonous, he is supposed to have said to Fro, an absolutely monotonous delivery was the most effective, he felt. One hour of reading aloud to her like this, and he was at last able to continue the Urbanchich exercises with her until far into the night. While reading the Novalis to her he held both her hands firmly, thus gradually calming her down. This situation recurred at intervals of a week or a week and a half, but it naturally had begun to recur at ever-decreasing intervals. As his experiments went on, she naturally did not hear him equally well at all times, as for instance if he pronounced the words
all the same, power
, or
powerlessness
loudly, she might not understand, no matter how clearly he said these words, she would fail to understand them, and yet he might pronounce the same words,
all the same, power
, or
powerlessness
in the merest whisper, and as indistinctly as possible, and she would nevertheless understand. It was a complete mystery to him how her hearing could be so absolutely unpredictable. He would say, for instance,
what an effort, to walk
, say it loudly and clearly, and she did not understand, whereupon he would whisper the same words almost inaudibly,
what an effort, to walk
, and she instantly understood him, etc. He realized, of course, that a mere change in the weather, a pain that resulted from such a change in the weather, was enough to make a different woman of her at times. But by and large he was continuing
to achieve remarkable results with her using the Urbanchich method, which he was constantly expanding even as he applied it. For some time now he had been experimenting with consonants, until it became impossible to experiment further with consonants, whereupon he switched to vowels, then suddenly back to consonants, and so forth. If she suddenly showed signs of being unable to go on, a glance out of the window would invariably reveal the reason, he could see by the look of the air outside that the weather was changing, etc. From disconnected words, words that formed no sentences, he would shift to whole sentences and vice versa, from sentences to disconnected words. The ear, and her ear in particular, was so extremely sensitive to even the most inconspicuous changes in the weather, which go on incessantly, as you know, Konrad said to Wieser. There’s a change in the weather every instant, another kind of weather every instant, he said. To me: even just looking at the trees, I can see a change in the weather, looking at a rock spur, at a body of water, at the walls, there it is, a change in the weather. Fro reports: Konrad had turned abruptly from using vowels to using whole sentences in the exercises, he would pronounce the following sentence:
Justice, when someone kills another
, and she would hear this sentence even though he had spoken it quite indistinctly, she indisputably heard it when he mumbled it into her left ear; her comment: the
i
in
kills
stayed in her ear for about eight seconds; naturally, he thought. There were times when, merely looking out of the window in the morning, he instantly knew that the exercises of that day should involve only vowels, or only consonants, or only sentences with
u
s or only sentences with
e
s, or only rather long sentences with
o
s, or only short sentences. Looking
out the window, for instance, and taking a deep breath, he knew what today’s experiment should be. Or else, standing by the window, he would decide momentarily: now, up to her room and say to her quickly:
swarms of birds, more and more swarms make the park swarthy
, and demand her instant comment on this. On Christmas Eve, exactly a year before her violent death, he had gone to her room at about five o’clock and repeated to her the sentence:
Mingling with men and women one only messes oneself up the more
, saying it alternately into her right and her left ear. He said that he murmured this sentence into her ears eighty or ninety times, and exacted a comment on it every time, until she collapsed in a coma, it never occurred to him until nearly eleven
P.M.
that it was, after all, Christmas Eve. She had forgotten all about it on account of being so intensely preoccupied with the Urbanchich exercises, and he had failed to remind her, and so they both went to bed that night at about one
A.M.
without his remembering to mention it to her, next day he is supposed to have said to her: Tonight is Christmas Eve, actually it was yesterday but for us it is Christmas Eve today, of course I knew it was Christmas Eve yesterday but I didn’t draw it to your attention because we were in the midst of our experiments, so it will have to be Christmas Eve for us today, he is supposed to have said, and then she said: You terrible man! this “Terrible man!” Wieser says Konrad mimicked, using exactly her tone of voice. She often believed that there were times when he was not experimenting with her, Konrad, is supposed to have told Wieser, though in fact he was experimenting incessantly, even when he was merely saying Good Morning, or Good Night, when he asked her whether she wanted to change, or needed him to comb her hair, or was
interested in eating something, he was always experimenting with her. He might ask her: Shall I read Novalis to you? but he was actually experimenting. Whether he was standing up or sitting down, pacing the floor, keeping silence, he was always consciously experimenting. His whole relationship with her was nothing else than one continuous experiment, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. To the works inspector: “Using the Urbanchich method, I am experimenting her (his wife) to death.” Of course her earache grew worse, it went without saying that the pain in her ear would gradually spread to her whole head, since he was intensifying his experimentation, moving on to ever harder, ever more strenuous exercises, he is supposed to have told Fro. What worked the most in his favor was that all the people with whom he experimented, meaning everybody he had anything to do with, had no inkling of the fact that he was experimenting with them whenever he was with them, and not only then. For a whole year he studied only the effects on the hearing of scratching sounds, slaps, drilling, drops, sounds of a rushing, whirring, humming sort, he is supposed to have told Fro. Blowing sounds. He had tried out hundreds of thousands of scraping noises. Her receptivity for twelve-tone music, he is supposed to have told Fro, had played the most important part in his experiments, including the orchestral works of Webern, Schoenberg’s
Moses and Aaron
, the string quartets of Béla Bartok, all kinds of music. But it was all done with a view to the book as a whole; how easy it would be for a dilettante to fritter himself away, lose himself in a sea of details, Konrad is supposed to have said. To keep everything relating to the sense of hearing under surveillance simultaneously required a nearly superhuman effort. Why,
his researches into the auditory sense of various kinds of animals alone had taken him not less than two years, supposedly. Konrad might often let a whole hour go by without letting his wife know that he was experimenting, only to say suddenly: Hearing Experiment I, get ready to go, and then the words
lust, lost, least
, followed by a so-called auditory sound-color control quiz: Is the
u
a somber sound? Is the
o
somber? Is the
e
somber? He often followed this up with the word
streamlet
, the purest word of all. He had experimented with the word
streamlet
for ten years, he is supposed to have told Wieser. Fro: the following procedure was repeated every day: Konrad went into his wife’s room and said something, on which she had to comment. He would accept no so-called excuses. Sometimes she dared to ask him a question, such as: Is this an experiment or not? and he would answer
Yes
, or
No
, because she believed that there were times when he was not experimenting, not knowing that he was experimenting incessantly, that to him
everything
was an experiment. Even though he had the whole book quite finished in his head, as he believed, he never ceased experimenting, so as to complete his work even further, to perfect it, even though it was quite complete in his head already, and although he might at any moment sit down and write it all up without fear that he did not have it fully worked out in his head, if the possibility of suddenly writing it all down should arise. He was simply filling up the time with experiments until the moment arrived, as he confidently and unwaveringly believed it would, when he would finally write it down. Once such a piece of work had been embarked upon, it was possible to do all that could be done with the Urbanchich method, he is supposed to have told Fro. His
kind of experimentation, pursued for such a long time, could not suddenly be dropped without ruining everything. Without his wife, who had sacrificed herself to him entirely, he would never have the entire book worked out in his head as firmly as he did. Every day, every moment, it was she alone who made it all possible. Demonstrations of fact, again and yet again, were what made the book possible. The experimenter, he felt, had to go on experimenting, that was his job, until he ceased asking himself why he was experimenting, a question it was not his province to ask himself, he was supposed to experiment himself to death if necessary. It was simpler to experiment with short sentences, he is supposed to have said, even simpler than that to use single words, simplest of all to use vowels only. It was more complicated, more strenuous, especially, of course, for his wife, to work with long composite sentences, the longest, most intricately complex sentences, the kind it admittedly gave him the greatest pleasure to experiment with, or such sentences as this, for example:
The connections which, as you know, are quite independent of the interconnection of the whole, but are nevertheless connected, in the most delicate ways, with the connections of the connection which is independent of the interconnection
, and so forth. You could say, of course, that the whole thing was crazy, but then you would have to say that everything was crazy, which is the simple truth, that everything is in fact crazy, still, nobody would dare say such a thing because, if he did, everyone would say
he
was crazy, which could only lead to everything coming to an end, everything gradually coming to a stop of its own accord, Konrad is supposed to have said. Human beings (all mankind) owed their very existence, after all, to inconsistency (the utmost).
As for himself, Konrad, there was nothing left that meant anything to him except experimental sentences, he is supposed to have said, experimentation was all there was, all he cared about, the whole world was an experiment, everything was; and then he is supposed to have said: It’s not so much the length of the sentences that matters, nor the brevity of sentences (or words) that is decisive, not just, for instance, the
a
and
o
and
i
and
u
sounds, but all of it together, always. Suddenly, he once told Fro, he was standing at the window, he could not see a thing, he could hear but he could not see, not a thing. His eyes must be failing him, he thought; they had been getting worse all the time. At such times he would have to stand at the window with his eyes shut for a long time before he could open his eyes and see again. He is also reported to have complained about the problems he had heating the place in winter; he could not let Hoeller do it because Hoeller made so much noise and such a mess doing it, so that if Hoeller does it (gets the furnace going) I lose two or three valuable hours of experimental time. But if Konrad undertook to do it himself, it cost him an enormous effort just to overcome his inner resistance to doing it. Our chimneys don’t draw, and so our stoves don’t draw, he is supposed to have said. He had to go around endlessly checking up on the stoves and stoking them. It was a good thing that the lime works stoves could be stoked from the hallways. It had taken him years to learn how to stoke the stoves in the lime works. Every single stove had to be tended differently from every other, it was a regular science! he is supposed to have said, actually a science! The temporary failure of his eyesight lasted a little longer each time, he should have seen a doctor about it long since, but he wouldn’t see a doctor.

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