The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (14 page)

time he thought of her bungled efforts to dress herself, wash herself, comb herself, to stretch out, all of which, all the misery of it, he could see clearly in her face. He then tried to wash her, dress her, comb her hair, help her to stretch out. Her hair certainly needed a washing, he thought while washing her; an impression that naturally grew stronger as he combed her hair. But he had not washed his own hair for weeks, he thought, while combing her hair. The dishes must be moved from the tray to the table, he would be thinking as he speeded up the combing of her hair. First he put the water on to boil, then he hastily buttered the bread—actually, he was using margarine instead, these days. She would ask him: Did you sleep well? and he asked her: Did you sleep well? and then they answered each other; she would say: Of course not, and he: Of course not. Then he saw that the water had come to a boil and he poured the boiling water into the teapot, saying, as he told Fro: Two minutes more, and then they would ask each other, wordlessly, whether they should begin at once with the exercises. He might, for instance, decide about beginning the exercises (expanded Urbanchich method) while he was pouring the tea. Words with diphthongs, he said to himself, and it seemed to him that she realized he had begun the exercises already, at breakfast, because she was not oblivious to the expectancy with which he watched her reactions, controlled her reactions to everything he said or didn’t say (to her), how impatiently he awaited her reaction to the least trifle, or controlled her ability to react. Yesterday we indulged ourselves, he would say to her, in the most flagrantly undisciplined conduct, when we broke off our exercises two hours short of what our schedule calls for, so we cannot indulge ourselves in slacking
off today, not to mention the fact that we were continually interrupting the exercises, even though we have no right to permit such interruptions. She listens to me, says nothing, eats with much appetite, Konrad said to Fro. Shortly after starting breakfast I tell her enough time has now been spent on having breakfast; I prefer short breakfasts, while she prefers to stretch breakfast time as long as possible. So he drained his cup, saying one cup is enough, and cleared away first his and then her breakfast dishes. Dawdling over breakfast is bad for creativity, he is supposed to have said, the cups go on the shelf, the bread into the breadbag, the first exercise on diphthongs begins. He would then experiment on her till eleven or half past, by which time she had been for hours impatiently awaiting lunch, to be brought either by Hoeller from the tavern or by Konrad from the kitchen; her constant waiting for him to feed her irritated him, it distracted him to the point of making him lose his temper with her, he ordered her to concentrate, why don’t you concentrate, he is supposed to have said to her time and again, hundreds of thousands of times, here I am concentrating to the very limits of my capacity while you are not concentrating at all, all you ever think about is food, or about Hoeller’s being supposed to bring the food, about meat and cauliflower and pastries, and meanwhile my mind is totally intent on applying the Urbanchich method, one would think it was only fair to expect her to concentrate one hundred percent on the Urbanchich method too, but she was so quickly exhausted, her responses lagged behind, her alertness visibly diminished from sentence to sentence, word by word, sometimes she heard nothing at all, then again not enough, whether he screamed into her left ear, her right ear, she heard nothing.
The exercise ended miserably, like most of them in the last six months, a wretched performance, absolutely wretched, disgusting, he said; he would get up, pace the floor, until he suddenly caught himself listening intently for Hoeller’s step, bringing the food. But lunch never came until half past one, no telling why, unless it was a wedding breakfast at the tavern that was holding things up, he said to Fro, in which case they’d forget all about Mrs. Konrad, because the innkeeper and his staff could think of nothing but their wedding party. The moment he heard Hoeller knocking downstairs Konrad instantly left his wife’s room, says Fro, and as he was descending to the vestibule he planned to call Hoeller to account for bringing the food so late, but then he thought, better not call him to account, just ask him, but I will call him to account, and so on, but by the time Konrad opened the door he had forgotten his intention to call Hoeller to account. When he hears the knock on the front door, Konrad says to his wife, lunch is here, that’s Hoeller downstairs, and suddenly she looks completely relaxed, he instantly sees what a great relief it is to her, and goes down. Going down the stairs to the vestibule he is thinking that the food will be cold because Hoeller has been loitering too long on his way through the icy cold of the woods or along the water’s edge, but as he opens the door he sees the steaming food hamper, it seems that the food is actually still hot, so we’re getting a hot lunch today, I won’t have to heat any of it in the kitchen, I can take it right upstairs to my wife, it won’t take more than a minute to set the table and serve it, she’s always amazed at how fast I serve a meal, this time they’re both amazed when they discover that the food hamper contains baked liver, with a fresh lettuce salad, and last but not least, a semolina
soufflé, their favorite dish. Right after lunch, he thought, we will go on with the exercises, all the more energetically for having just had our favorite dish. At first she refused to go back to the exercises right after lunch, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, you think that just because we’ve had our favorite dish you are entitled to go back instantly to the exercises, she is supposed to have said, as Konrad told Fro, but he did start the exercises at once and she gave in, he stood at the corner near the window and called out the word
labyrinth
to her, quickly at first, ten times in succession (forcing instant comments from her) and then at longer intervals again and again the word
labyrinth
(without comments from her). At not quite half past four in the afternoon he decided to go to his own room, saying to her, you take a rest now, I have an idea for my book. But as he enters his room his idea for the book is suddenly gone, he cannot recapture it, pace the floor as he will, it’s gone forever. To calm himself he sits down at his desk, however, and—starts to read his Kropotkin. I’ve got to read my Kropotkin now, because this evening I shall have to read Novalis to her, he says to himself, I promised to read Novalis to her tonight, so he reads all he can of the Kropotkin now. Just as he has started to read “A Change for the Better” he hears a knock at the front door. My method is always the same, he is supposed to have said to Fro, when I hear someone knocking at the front door, I decide not to go down, then whoever it is will stop knocking. But the knocking doesn’t stop, and I finally go down. It’s the works inspector at the door, saying he must have left his measuring tape behind last time he was here. I haven’t seen it, I tell him, Konrad said to Fro, your tape must be somewhere in the vestibule, meanwhile I am thinking if only
I had waited a little longer before answering his knock, he might have left, but as it is the inspector is already inside the vestibule and both of us are searching for the missing tape. But we can’t find it. It simply has to be here, the inspector is supposed to have said, but where can it be? says Konrad, so the inspector bends over, Konrad bends over, both of them searching the floor inch by inch for the tape measure, without success. Could the tape measure be up on the first floor? the inspector asks Konrad, and Konrad replies at once, but you weren’t even up there! then the inspector: You’re right, of course, I never did go up to the first floor, so it can’t be up there, and they continue their search, primarily in the so-called wood-paneled room on the ground floor, and Konrad asks if the inspector might not have lost the tape measure at the tavern; or the sawmill, where he had surely been too? says Fro, but the inspector insists that he is certain he lost his tape measure at the lime works, but then he wavers and says, is it possible, after all, that I didn’t lose it at the lime works? could I have lost it in the village? left it somewhere in my office? but no, I remember clearly that I still had it when I came to the lime works, I put it down somewhere here in the lime works, somewhere on the ground floor, could someone have removed it from here? the works inspector asked Konrad, who said: I am all alone here at the lime works, my wife, who never gets out of her invalid chair, doesn’t count after all, she can’t get up out of her chair, and I, Konrad is supposed to have said firmly to the works inspector, do not remember the tape measure at all; Konrad did not even know what the inspector’s tape measure looked like, it was a brand new tape measure, the inspector told him, but Konrad did not remember even

seeing the new tape measure, the old tape
measure was kept inside a green case, a green leather case, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, I can visualize your old tape measure in its green case, but I cannot recall the new tape measure at all, and they both allegedly spent over an hour searching for the tape measure without finding it, in the darkness of the vestibule it was impossible to find anything anyway, the inspector is supposed to have said to Konrad. They both ended up totally exhausted, lying on the floor of the ground floor vestibule, when suddenly the inspector cried out, here it is, my tape measure! and sure enough the inspector had found the tape measure, it was right inside his big outer coat’s breast pocket; he had completely forgotten that he had slipped the tape measure into his big breast pocket. Here we are hunting for that tape measure all over the place for over an hour, and all the time it’s inside my breast pocket! the inspector is supposed to have exclaimed, adding: What’s more, I probably interrupted you (Konrad) at work on your book, I am so sorry about that, whereupon Konrad said that the inspector had not disturbed him in the least, that he, Konrad, had done no writing at all all day long. I’ll never make it, Konrad said, even if all the conditions are favorable, all the human conditions, Konrad reiterated, according to Fro, but I cannot seem to make any headway on writing my book; you have not disturbed me, though of course when I am trying to work everything constitutes a disturbance, but when I am not working, you (the works inspector) cannot have disturbed anything, and so forth. While saying all this to the inspector, Konrad, according to Fro, was thinking: I am lying, everything I say is a lie. And he cursed the works inspector inwardly. This time he did not invite the works inspector to a glass of brandy as usual, not even in the wood-paneled
room, in fact he did not invite the man in at all, not even into the coldest room there was, in short, absolutely not at all, and the inspector suddenly found himself outside the building again. Konrad was eavesdropping inside the front door, listening to the inspector walking away in the snow, the inspector always walks ten times more laboriously than usual in snow, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, claiming that he, Konrad, had seen the works inspector furiously throwing the tape measure, which he had just recovered with so much trouble, into the snow-covered road, gesturing violently, before he picked it up, dusted it off, and rolled it up again, the inspector was enraged at having made such a fool of himself in Konrad’s eyes, after all he was the first to start creeping around on the floor on hands and knees searching for a lost tape measure which he actually had in his breast pocket the whole time. The works inspector is a mess of neurotic complexes, Konrad is supposed to have thought as he watched the man stomping off through the snow, in that uncomfortable posture (for Konrad) one has to hold when looking through a keyhole, which I have gotten accustomed to in the course of time, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. The moment the inspector had vanished into the thicket Konrad went back to his room and back to reading his Kropotkin, but he had barely read two pages, basically not more than a quick review of what he had already read of “A Change for the Better,” when he heard a bell ring, this time upstairs, his wife demanding attention. He instantly went upstairs to her. Think of it, my dear Fro, everything I am telling you, describing to you, intimating to you, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, basically goes on here every day, over and over again! everything that goes on here goes
on day after day after day, it’s the height of absurdity, and by dint of being the height of absurdity it is the height of terribleness, day after day after day. It’s true, Fro’s testimony agrees in every respect with Wieser’s testimony, the works inspector confirms everything Fro and Wieser have said, and conversely, both Wieser and Fro confirm what the works inspector says, basically one confirms the other, they all confirm each other’s testimony. What is it? Konrad is supposed to have said to his wife when he got to her room; he had been reading his Kropotkin, he had gotten no work at all done on his book that day, he had been interrupted by the inspector, then, finally, he had at least managed to get back to his Kropotkin when she rang and there was no way he could avoid going up to see what she wanted, he intended no reproach to her, he had reached the point where he never reproached her with anything in any way, but as soon as he entered her room, he said, she said at once: Read to me, meaning that he had to start reading Novalis to her. To Wieser: For many days now Konrad had noticed that his wife’s eyelids were inflamed, not that he ever mentioned it to her because he assumed she knew her eyelids were red with inflammation, after all she looked into her mirror often enough and intently enough, there were many times she would sit for an hour staring at herself in the mirror, so she was bound to know that she had inflamed eyelids, Konrad said to Wieser. Causes: dry air, solitude, age. He did not mention his observation to her, because he had given up wasting another word on any of her ailments; for him to draw her attention to some new infirmity was out. For instance, only six months ago she had still been able to sit up so straight that you could not see a certain miniature painting
representing her paternal grandmother, which hung behind the invalid chair in which she sat. Now, only six months later, her posture was so slumped, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, that not only could you see the miniature in its entirety, almost, but she was bent over almost three or four inches below it. Week by week, sitting opposite his wife, Konrad claimed to have seen more and more of this miniature portrait behind her, though for weeks he had refused to believe it, but in the end he had to admit it: his wife was gradually slumping lower, the miniature rising behind her, so to speak, until Konrad felt able to calculate precisely the moment when he would see the portrait in its entirety, not that he actually worked it out, he just knew he could if he wanted to calculate the precise moment of full visibility. He thought about this, and about the fact that nowadays his wife, when he helped her up and walked with her a bit, took steps just half the length of those she could take only six months ago, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, soon she would not be able to walk all the way to the window, not even to the center of the room; soon she would not be able to get out of her chair, in fact; suppose that moment has suddenly arrived, he would think; he realizes that she can no longer stand up—and a new phase of their life together has begun. Nowadays when he reads Novalis to her she sometimes fails to understand whole passages, he is supposed to have told Fro, he asks her if she has been listening and she says yes, she has been listening attentively, but she hasn’t understood everything she heard; in this connection, it is necessary to explain that the Novalis, though she loves it, unlike him who can’t stand the Novalis, is nevertheless a difficult book, as commonly understood; this has nothing to do with
the fact that when he reads her his beloved Kropotkin, to punish her for something, she deliberately pretends not to understand more than half of what he is reading. When she fails to understand her beloved Novalis though she listens with might and main, there’s no pretense about that. Now at the Laska, where I sold another of our new policies today, they say that there’s a cripple living in the lime works, the Konrad woman, that’s whom they mean in the hostelries hereabouts when they refer, as usual, to “the woman,” and this cripple, they say, is cared for, according to some, or shamefully used, according to others, by her husband, the owner of the lime works, and a mad despot to his wife. According to the gossip he is terrible, devoted, sadistic, attentive, all at the same time. They praise him for fetching her meals from the tavern, but say he is destroying his wife by using her ruthlessly as a guinea pig for his scientific experiments, his so-called Urbanchich method, of which they have no conception except what they get from Hoeller’s weird descriptions after years of watching Konrad’s practices with his wife. They say that Konrad torments his wife by saying, shouting, whispering, either very quickly or with excruciating slowness, all sorts of incomprehensible things into her agonizingly inflamed ears and then forcing her to comment on each and every one of his utterances until she comes close to fainting. Even after Mrs. Konrad has reached a point of exhaustion when she can’t react at all any more, her husband will keep at her for hours after she has collapsed into total apathy, they say at Laska’s, sometimes until four in the morning, etc. He started out being fabulously rich, they say, but it’s all gone because he’s an idiot with money, and anyway his obsession with his so-called scientific work, something
to do with the sense of hearing, has left them in straits, not that you could consider him actually impoverished, but there were rumors about an impending forced auction sale of the lime works. Nevertheless, they seem to think of him as a rich man still, but you have to remember that to a common working man, anyone who has one good suit and doesn’t have to go to work in overalls at six o’clock in the morning like himself is a rich man. Konrad himself, says Wieser, would probably never have called himself a rich man, though he might reluctantly have admitted to being well-to-do, back in Zurich or even as late as his Mannheim period, even though at that time he could still be considered a rich man by even the most exacting standards, yet Konrad himself said to Fro about two years ago: I am actually poorer than any of the people who call me a rich man, but how am I to make people understand that I am telling the truth? Talking with the woodcutters and other workmen who hang around the various taverns far into the night, toward the end of winter, was Konrad’s favorite recreation, he enjoyed their conversation more than anyone’s, he is supposed to have told Wieser. But he had not gone to any of the taverns for months now, what with the way things were getting worse for them at the lime works, he even missed his tavern-going habits less as time went on. For months on end he had not talked with the workmen, woodcutters, gamekeepers, etc., nor gone even once to the woods, he had not seen the village for six months, in fact, though he did go there, but only to the bank where he would cash a check and go straight back to the lime works, having drawn out a negligible amount of money, not enough to keep one alive, but too much to let a man croak. He had not even spoken to Hoeller for weeks, unless you counted
telling Hoeller to chop some wood, or not to chop wood, or taking the food hamper he brought from the tavern and handing back the empty hamper. This year Hoeller had become a changed man, Konrad did not know why he seemed to have lost the confidence of this man of extraordinary integrity, he could only guess that it might be for the same reason he had lost confidence in himself to a degree. A simple question had in the past always elicited a simple answer from Hoeller, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but nowadays all he ever got were ambiguous answers to the same simple questions. These days there was only mistrust between them, which made them uncertain with each other, full of unspoken reservations that entailed a daily circling around and around the unacknowledged source of their trouble. It was Hoeller’s cousin, the one with the seven or eight convictions for sexual offenses, who had taken to living with Hoeller in the annex, secretly, behind Konrad’s back, without his or Hoeller’s asking Konrad’s permission; ever since the cousin’s arrival Hoeller had ceased to come near Konrad except when he brought the food hamper or asked if he should chop some fire wood. According to Wieser, this means that Konrad has had to do without his conversations with Hoeller, an important source for his book; in fact, Konrad has also been deprived of the talk he valued so much with all the simple men of the region around the lime works. The Konrads preferred to spend their mornings mulling over what they would have to eat, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, instead of Konrad simply going down to the kitchen to fix something, anything, when Hoeller was not going to the tavern for their lunch, whether because he was sick or had to chop wood or the like, so that Konrad was
prevented from working on his book, what the Konrads would do was to sit and talk for hours, endlessly, about sauerkraut, cauliflower, meat, egg dishes, soups and sauces, salads and cooked fruit, unable to decide in favor of any specific kind of meal. To waste the entire morning like this on planning what to eat, thinking about what to eat, was absolutely disgusting. Encounter III: at about two
A.M.
Konrad said, he had heard a shot nearby, it had to have been fired quite close to the lime works, he thought, but he could see nothing, even after opening the window and looking outside, nothing. But somebody had just fired a shot, he said to himself, and there’s a second shot, and a third, after the third it was quiet again … before the Konrads moved into the lime works the annex had been a meeting place for the hunting men of the area; Konrad despised hunters as much as he did the hunt, all of his ancestors had been hunters, woodsmen, all their lives their heads were full of hunting to the exclusion of everything else, a hunter was invariably a stupid man, a hunter was always and every time a congenital dimwit, a hunting moron. Konrad had never been interested in hunting. The moment he moved into the lime works he abolished all the hunting privileges associated with the lime works; no more hunting meets in the annex, he declared, and ever since then the hunters naturally hated him and he was always terrified when he walked through the woods, even just setting foot outside the lime works, afraid of being shot at or shot down by a hunter, a hunter could always feel free to gun down any man he hated, Konrad said, though he would be brought to court, but the courts would let a hunter go scot-free, or else, if a hunter was convicted of murder, they would sentence him to a ridiculous suspended
sentence, hunters could kill people to their hearts’ content in this country and go scot-free. Konrad hated hunters, he said, but he loved guns, especially hunting rifles, it was a paradox but he could explain it. Then: he greased his boots with concentrated beef fat, using the ball of his thumb. Greasing his boots was already beginning to cost him a tremendous effort, it had to be done with the ball of the thumb, as he learned before he was four years old from his father, he could still remember his father teaching him how to grease his boots with the ball of his thumb, never with a rag, only the ball of the thumb, no brushes; rags were a poor substitute for the ball of the thumb, which left the leather beautifully supple, if you worked it always from the inside out and with growing intensity; Konrad always liked the smell of boot grease, Polish or Slovakian, he loved the smell of his room after greasing his boots there in the wintertime, the only time he greased his boots in his room, the rest of the year he did it out in front of the house, but he particularly remembered the wintertime greasing of his boots indoors as a pleasant chore associated with a pleasant smell. But in recent years he found himself totally exhausted after greasing his boots, on such a day he could hardly do the Urbanchich exercises, not even to mention the writing, merely to think of the book on such a day was an effort to be shunned, even if an idea for his book should occur to him after greasing his boots, it could only be an insignificant idea. After such a chore as greasing his boots or any such physical effort, these days, Konrad said, he would have to lie down on his bed, made up for the day as it was, in an indescribable state of collapse, and take several deep breaths, with his eyes on the ceiling which seemed to be in constant motion up there, he