The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (13 page)

Only a year ago his eyes failed him only every three to four weeks, but by now he was stricken every day, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser. Of course it was connected with his work. Anyone who used his eyes as intensively as he did was bound to damage his eyesight, it was to be expected. His wife did not have this kind of eye trouble, although she had always suffered from poor vision, but her poor vision had not deteriorated any further in the course of time. But Konrad himself had been naturally endowed with the keenest eyesight, which he had, however, been subjecting to the severest strain, he is supposed to have told Wieser. He also had an extraordinarily good ear. His kind of eye trouble not infrequently led to total blindness, Konrad is supposed to have said; he happened to know that a close relative of his had suffered the same kind of eye trouble and then suddenly went completely blind; Konrad was afraid of this happening to him, too. One tended to think that this eye trouble would clear up, but it didn’t clear up, and one found oneself suddenly blind, from one minute to the next, no matter what one did to prevent it, nothing was any use. To Fro, Konrad is supposed to have said two days before the murder: When we moved in, we put in mostly new flooring, I think, and here I sit in a chair opposite my wife’s chair, looking to her as though I were reading my Kropotkin, but in fact I am not reading Kropotkin at all, I can’t seem to concentrate on it, and even though I have the Kropotkin open and though I am reading in it line by line and word for word, my mind is on something entirely different, what I am thinking is that when we moved in we put in new floors, larch wood floors; larch wood darkens with time, I ordered the widest planks obtainable, irregular planks but laid by one
of the best flooring men anywhere, a man who had moved from Toblach, my wife’s home town, to Sicking. Plank by plank, tongue in groove, groove to tongue, I keep thinking, and in the second story, I am thinking, I had all the window sills redone, on the third floor it was the window jambs, all the door frames on the first floor, the ground floor. On the first floor it was also necessary to install a new ceiling, I am thinking, sitting opposite my wife and pretending to be reading my Kropotkin, I turn the pages in the Kropotkin as if I had just finished reading a page. At first I did not intend to do any repairs or restorations in the lime works, but I ended by doing so much. This area is famous for its good but unreliable craftsmen, I keep thinking, but all the work I had done here in the lime works was beautifully finished, in the shortest possible time. If it’s to be done at all, I thought, then I might as well let them restore all the stucco work on the ceiling of the ground floor reception hall, and no sooner had I thought this than I ordered it all done. But no one looking at it must suspect, I said to the plasterer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, that any of this stucco work has been restored, and the plasterer understood perfectly, in fact there is not the slightest suggestion anywhere that a restoration of the stucco work on the ground floor reception hall ceiling has been effected. An excellent man, it seems to me, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I was thinking while pretending to read Kropotkin, the kind of work he did on that ceiling had to be totally inobtrusive, and he did in fact patch up and restore the stucco ornamentations on the ceilings in the most inobtrusive fashion. Wherever you look these days you can see stucco ornamentation ruined by amateurish restorations and patching, Konrad is supposed to
have told Fro. And we put new stoves in almost every room, in all the places that were never heated before we came, he said. He had gone into the lime works and exclaimed: Why, everything is in wrack and ruin here, the place has been totally neglected, it’s hopelessly run down! and he thought of how shocked he had been by all that neglect and deterioration, while his wife believed he was reading his Kropotkin, he is supposed to have said to Fro. Still, it turned out that the neglect had done only superficial damage, the dilapidation was only superficial, he is supposed to have told Fro. Basically the lime works were an incredibly solid piece of construction work! The lime works, in fact, represented an excellent historical record of the past four or five centuries, architecturally, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, anyone who had the time and felt like it could find here a record of every historical detail of all those centuries. Finally the senselessness of pretending to read Kropotkin all along while thinking about something quite different, in fact the opposite of Kropotkin, made me shut the book. All that continuous reading, said my wife just as I was shutting the book, weakens your eyes, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, it’s because you are incessantly reading your Kropotkin that you have all that eye trouble more and more often. Note that she doesn’t say it is my reading that does it, but that it is my reading of Kropotkin that aggravates my eye trouble. He then gets up, he says, and goes to look out the window, where he sees Hoeller passing by down there, Hoeller always passes by at this time, Konrad thinks, wearing his blue coat and swinging his ax; funny how talking with Hoeller always is so relaxing. Whenever he starts talking with Hoeller, about hunting and the weather, right away he feels more relaxed. Konrad felt
he had an intimate understanding of Hoeller’s ways, and there could be nothing mysterious to Hoeller, either, about Konrad and about the way Konrad and his crippled wife had been living in the lime works for several years now, Konrad thought, as he said to Fro. The first time Konrad and I met (in the timber forest) Konrad said that although he ought to be expressing himself, if at all, with the greatest circumspection, because of his eleven or twelve previous convictions for so-called libel in this country, he nevertheless did express himself, or, as you might say, he daily committed the error of expressing himself, of expressing opinions, of telling facts that always fitted the definition of a so-called libel of somebody; no matter what he said, he always turned out to have said something libelous, but strictly speaking, you might say that everything he could say about this weird country, with its extremes of inhumanity and irresponsibility all on the increase as they were, could be considered a so-called libel, entailing the highest probability of his being hailed, in consequence, before an invariably prejudiced, biased court; such a possibility faced him at all times, especially considering his many previous convictions for libel and simple or aggravated assault, he was in perpetual danger of being denounced, slandered, charged, and convicted, no matter what he might say, or come out with, in the ears of the people around here it always registered as a so-called libelous statement, and it was only by chance that charges were not preferred against him every day of his life, because he did go out every day and saw people and inevitably expressed the opinions he held to them, because he knew the truth and so he expressed the truth, and although the opinions and truths he expressed were decidedly worth expressing and hearing,
still, those involved, part and parcel as they were of this degenerate country, full of mistrustfulness as it was, his facts and opinions were invariably legally actionable and punishable. Life was not easy for a man of character, his kind of character, to endure life the way he was made, to get through it somehow, demanded the most strenuous intellectual and physical self-discipline, the utmost spiritual and physical tension, all of which indescribable inner pressures forced out and conditioned, as it were, all the things he had to say, so that he had to be resigned to being a man expressly made, designed, and bound to give offense, always, a problem he intended to solve but which he apparently did not succeed in solving. A world, he said, in which one could be hailed before a court for defamation of character, so called, and which maintained that it had such a thing as character, when obviously character was precisely what had disappeared from this world, if character had ever existed in it; not only was it a terrible, a horrifying world, but it was also a ridiculous world, but unfortunately each one of us had to resign himself to existing in a world that was not only terrible and horrifying but also ridiculous, each and every one of us had to come to terms with this fact; how many hundreds of thousands, how many millions of people had already come to terms with it, even in his own unquestionably terrible, horrifying, and ridiculous country, our own country, the most ridiculous and most terrible of them all. Speaking of his country, his own homeland, a man could not exist in it, get along in it for a single day, except by never once telling the truth, to anyone, about anything, because the lie alone kept things moving in this country, the lie with its seven veils and embroideries and masquerades and intimidations. In this country
the lie is valued above all, the truth only gets one prosecuted, condemned, and ridiculed. Which is why Konrad did not conceal the fact that his entire nation had taken refuge in the lie. To tell the truth was to make yourself culpable and ridiculous, the mob or the courts decided whether a man had made himself culpable or ridiculous or culpable
and
ridiculous, if the truth-teller could not be made to appear culpable he was ridiculed, if he could not be ridiculed he was penalized, a man who told the truth in this country was either ridiculous or a criminal. But inasmuch as hardly anyone wanted to make himself ridiculous or legally punishable, people were terrified of being penalized, to pay high fines or go to jail or prison simply did not come naturally to people, so they all lied or kept silent. Unfortunately there were characters like himself who could not keep silent, who had in the course of time come to their senses and gotten to the bottom of the truth and therefore could not keep silent, who had to express themselves, so that they exposed themselves to criminal prosecution and ridicule over and over again, then became more and more exposed to criminal prosecution under the ruling criminal code, more and more exposed to ridicule under the ruling social code. He would have to change his character from the ground up, but no one could change his character, one’s character could not be changed. So he had locked himself in, here at the lime works, to avoid yet another summons; for twenty-two days now he was completely locked up inside the lime works and had let no one enter the lime works, either. This was the first time in twenty-two days that he had set foot outside the lime works, for a walk in the timber forest, because he was in fact a restless man who needed to see people. For all those twenty-two days he had desperately
needed to get out of the lime works, but he had not set foot outside the lime works, not even as far as the tavern, not even to the sawmill. He kept reassuring himself that Hoeller would certainly never inform on him, but he did not go even to the annex. People did of course continue to come to the lime works, but I never let them in, Konrad said, if I open the door, the law will get me. But then all of a sudden the works inspector arrives, and the mayor arrives, and I have to open the door, they are town officials after all, I have to open the door to the municipal council, to the district superintendent, to the section chief of the flood control unit. They all come here on official business, or else they pretend to come on official business, and if I don’t let them in they resort to official authority, forcing me to let them in, and I am terrified of getting into trouble with the law as it is, because of the things I say. However, with these so-called officials he naturally had only practical necessities to talk about, so there was no danger of getting into legal trouble on account of the things he said. And so, while he no longer set foot outside the lime works in order to avoid being charged and convicted and locked up—now that he had a criminal record, even a conviction for libel would mean imprisonment—he did speak to the so-called officials, including of course the forestry commissioner and the works inspector, but only with the greatest circumspection. To Fro, two years ago: at breakfast he would be silent while she did the talking. He was silent because he had made a habit of being silent, she talked because she had made a habit of talking (at the breakfast table). She talked incessantly at the breakfast table because she had no other opportunity to talk incessantly. He would wake up thinking about his work, but soon dropped the idea of writing and decided
to start right after breakfast on the hearing exercises. Standing in the east corner of her room, he would plan to call out to her words with the
u
sound:
Urals, uremia, Uranus, usual, union, Uruguay, usury, Utopia
, etc. etc. This would be followed by words with
o: Oklahoma, odious, ore, oil, open
, etc. Then words with
k: Caste, card, Khartoum, carefree, catastrophe, catafalque, Cabbala, Kabul, catharsis, cataracts
, etc. Then words with
es: Esther, Estragon, escudos, España, Eskimo
, etc. Then words with
al: Albania, Alba Alarcon, Alhambra, algebra, alkaloid, Almira, alms
, etc. Then words with
is: Istria, Ismail, Istanbul, Islam
, etc. Getting out of bed he would be thinking that he could start the exercises during breakfast, so as to include the conversation (or the silence) at breakfast in the exercises. He would talk about the difference between listening and hearing, starting with an explanation of listening, then of hearing, giving ear, hearkening, pricking up one’s ears, auscultation, overhearing, jointly hearing, etc. Listening in, mishearing, lending an ear. Then suddenly he would say to her: Trying not to hear. Listening hard, he would say. He had prepared their breakfast the previous evening, so that he merely needed to carry their tray into her room in the morning, they had always breakfasted together in this way since the first day they were living together. While carrying the tray up to her room he usually had the most brilliant ideas for his book, on the use of the Urbanchich method. Holding the tray in his hands he slowly felt his way up the stairs in the dark of the vestibule, to the first floor, then the second floor, then to her room which he said he entered without knocking. Set the tray on the table, he thought, so he put the tray on the table, thinking that she was watching him doing it. At the same