The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (20 page)

as he had always dreamed he would, but now that he has set down the final word on paper he has fainted dead away, fallen where he is, but observing himself in this unconscious state from every angle of his work room; it is the ideal moment, the ideal situation of his life, as for hours on end Konrad sees himself lying there unconscious in the full possession of his completed manuscript, having just finished the complete text and ended by writing on the title page, in his old-fashioned large calligraphic hand,
The Sense of Hearing
, his last act before his head dropped like a stone onto the title page he had just written, afterward seeing himself in this state from every possible angle, seeing the whole scene which he later described as the happiest of his life, though in fact it is unquestionably the unhappiest, basically, of his life, and then suddenly, abruptly, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, the door opened and Konrad’s wife walked in, this crippled woman chained to her invalid chair all those decades and who in reality could not have managed to take one single step unaided, in fact she could not even have pulled herself upright in her chair unaided, suddenly is standing there in Konrad’s room and comes over to the unconscious Konrad, her husband, who is watching closely the whole time, and bangs her fist down on the manuscript under his head, and says: So, behind my back you have written down your book, have you, behind my back, a fine thing, she says over and over again, behind my back, she says, while Konrad watches and hears everything all the time he is lying there in his coma with his head on the completed manuscript, even the shock of his wife’s fist banging down on the manuscript right next to his ear hasn’t torn him out of his coma, and here comes her fist banging down on the manuscript a second time, can
you imagine, a woman whose energy has been totally drained away long since, after decades of huddling as a paralyzed cripple in her invalid chair, brutally bangs her fist on his manuscript, saying: That’s what you think, that you can sit down here in secret, you sneak, and get your book down on paper, just like that, all in one sitting, think again! and with that she grabs up the whole pack of manuscript and flings it in one powerful motion into the flaming stove. Konrad wants to leap to his feet and stop her, but he can’t budge, he can’t. So, she says, the Konrad woman says, now your book is up the chimney, your whole work gone up in flames, and: now you can start all over, wracking your brains about getting it written, for the next twenty or thirty years, it’s all gone, your book is gone, every scrap of it! At which point he suddenly wakes up, finds he can move, and realizes: a dream. I was incapable of leaving my room, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, beginning with feeling incapable of getting out of bed, incapable of doing anything at all. For two days after that dream I did not leave my room at all, of course my wife rang for me, she rang incessantly, because of course she needed my help as always, but I could not and did not give her a sign, for two whole days I stayed in my room. I went on brooding about this dream for months afterward, as you can imagine, but I never told my wife about it, I never even hinted at it, though there were times when I came close to telling her what I had dreamt, but again and again I refrained from doing so, you mustn’t tell her this dream, I kept saying to myself, every time I was tempted as I often was to tell it to her, in fact, tempted to tell it to her in all its utter ghastliness, as I often planned to do. I still see it all, vividly, how my wife enters the room and bangs her fist
down on my manuscript, the first time and then again, a second time, bang, on the manuscript, and I unable to move a finger, unable to prevent her from tossing it into the fire, flinging the whole, complete finished manuscript into the fire! Even in my dream I felt it was spooky, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, what with me lying there in a dead faint, her sudden outburst of monstrous energies while I lay paralyzed, her lightning-like movements while I was totally motionless, powerless, my absolute physical passivity, though I noticed everything with surrealistic keenness as against her decisiveness in action, her horrible decisiveness, if you can imagine it, Fro, her utter ruthlessness in action! There are times when I am sorely tempted to tell her my dream, Konrad said to Fro, the whole dream, every last particle of it, and without sparing her my comments on every detail, either, but of course I don’t do it, I’m too sure it would kill her. To tell a person who figured like this in such a nightmare, to tell her in every remorseless detail, is to destroy that person, Fro, Konrad said. Wieser’s account of this dream is in complete accord with Fro’s account of it, but while Fro tells it in a highly dramatic, emotional way, as befits his own character and the degree to which he is influenced by Konrad and by Konrad’s narrative style, Wieser’s manner in retelling the dream is perfectly cool. Consequently, Wieser’s version is incomparably more effective than Fro’s rendition of the same story. Fro adds: for the first time in three or even four decades, Konrad saw his wife in that dream as she once really was, tall, stately, beautiful, even though she behaved abominably. She was always sending Konrad to the cellar to bring her up some cider, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, Fetch me some cider! she is supposed to have said practically every five minutes,
Go on, get the cider! and he went down every time she asked for fresh cider, all the way down to the cellar. A jugful? Konrad is supposed to have asked her again and again, so that he would not have to go down cellar so often, but: No, a glassful will do, she is supposed to have answered every time, be sure to fetch only a glassful, I want fresh cider every time, and so he would get her a glassful at a time, never a jugful of cider, although he always offered to bring a jugful, but she refused every time, and so he had to go down cellar several times a day to fetch her a glassful of cider, Konrad told Fro, although it obviously would have made sense to bring up a large jugful of cider from the cellar so that she could drink her fresh cider all day long without his having to make his way to the cellar and up again every single time, because if you kept your large jug of cider in the cold lime works kitchen and kept it covered with a wooden board, you could freshen your glass of cider all day long just as much as if you had to go down specially for every mouthful of cider, Konrad explained, she drove him nearly crazy all day long with her orders to go down to the cellar and come up from the cellar, he wouldn’t be surprised if she took a special, malicious pleasure in watching me every time going down to the cellar or climbing up from the cellar, or even merely knowing that now he is going down to the cellar, now he is climbing up the cellar stairs, it takes a more grueling effort every time, you know, my dear Fro, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro (he said the same thing to Wieser, too) verbatim. That last time they talked, in the wood-paneled room, Konrad drew Fro into a lengthy and detailed consideration of the cider-pressing and cider-storing processes: how the casks had to be cleaned beforehand, was one of the things Konrad explained to Fro,
scraped and cleaned and aired and stored while airing, which kind of pears made the right mix for a strong cider and which combination of fruit-varieties would make for a sweet cider, and that all-in-all it did not depend so much on the combinations of the varieties of pears, nor even on the method of pressing them and preparing the cider in general, what it really depended on was the kind of cellar, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro; the lime works boasted the best cellar in the country, which is why in fact they did have the best cider anywhere at the lime works. Ask whomever and wherever you would, the lime works cider was the best there was. His cousin Hoerhager, Konrad is supposed to have said, had still taken a hand personally in pressing the cider along with Hoeller and the other lime works men under Hoeller, but Konrad left the work to Hoeller and two or three of the sawmill workers recruited by him, the cider press had always been Hoeller’s affair, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. Four barrels for the Konrads (which in fact they are supposed to have polished off together in the course of each year), two barrels for Hoeller, who had always managed to drink up his two barrels in a single year, visitors at the annex, including Hoeller’s cousin who was known to be a hard drinker, didn’t count one way or the other, considering that a barrel held over two hundred liters. But Konrad had brought up his story about the cider—which incidentally was losing ground in this country, known to be the foremost pear cider country in Europe, because the people nowadays preferred drinking inferior beer to the best cider, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, it wasn’t for nothing that the natives were called cider-heads—but the reason Konrad had brought it up was only to give Fro some idea of his wife’s sadistic attitude toward
Konrad, her husband, whom she certainly did not keep sending down cellar because she could not live without drinking cider, and certainly not because she had to have fresh cider every five minutes, but simply because she meant to humiliate him, Konrad, as constantly as possible; as for the cider she made him bring up, most of it she never drank at all but poured it away, into the pail, out the window, Konrad told Fro, but she kept making him go down cellar for her cider every five minutes just the same, especially at such times when he had started to read aloud to her from his Kropotkin, or to talk about the book, or when he began to talk about Francis Bacon or Wittgenstein, whom he loved to cite, his quoting from Wittgenstein’s
Traktatus
had in fact become a habit of his that was guaranteed to drive a woman up the wall, his wife had hated it from the first, so inevitably when he started on Wittgenstein she would send him down cellar for a glassful of cider; and Fro is supposed to have said to Konrad that this slavish obedience of his, Konrad’s, to his wife’s commands, an obedience Fro was forced to describe as doglike, nevertheless did not really exclude its opposite, as reflected in Konrad’s general conduct, his character, the fact that he always prevailed in any difference he had with his wife, to which Konrad is supposed to have replied that of course he knew quite well why he permitted himself to be sent to the cellar every five minutes to fetch cider, etc., why he let himself be made a fool of by his wife, from time to time, Konrad said to Fro, because there is nothing more ridiculous than a man being sent again and again to the cellar for some cider and who actually goes, submissively, cider jug in hand, a man who would have to feel his way down the dark cellar stairs with an empty cider jug in one hand, then again, in the
pitchdark of the lime works cellar, the brimful cider jug in his hands, blindly feeling his way up those stairs again and again, making a grotesque appearance besides, because in order to avoid catching cold in those icy cellars he was wrapped in a stinking old horse blanket or the like; all his wife was aiming at was to make him ridiculous, it was the one idea left in her head, to make a fool of him, to cut him down to size because he still considered himself a man of science, and in fact he did, he saw himself, to be quite candid, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, as a scientific philosopher. Basically, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, my wife has been able to make a fool of me, make me her house buffoon, as it were, but only because for a long time now I have let her do it, without letting her realize the part I actually play; by deliberately making her think that I am a fool and that she prevails against me, I keep the upper hand, he said. A quite transparent strategy if you saw it, too intricate to be fully explainable if not. He knew exactly why he let his wife get away with sending him on those fool’s errands to the cellar every minute, with letting him make himself ridiculous by throwing on whatever wrap was handy (horse blankets, etc.), letting her victimize him with her practical joke of nonchalantly knitting the same mitten for him year after year, and why he submitted without a murmur to trying on incessantly if not the identical mitten, then nevertheless the same mitten, again and again. Despite all that, he said to Fro, regardless of all of her sadistic tricks on him, all her endless nonsense, women were so inventive in resorting to ridiculous nonsense, absurdities, etc., he was all right, he was making headway with the Urbanchich method, the book was firmly established in his head, etc., and even though he had not been able to
write any of it down to this day, it was far from a hopeless case, because, as he suddenly said to Fro, the actual writing down of an important intellectual undertaking can hardly ever be postponed too long! and, he quickly added: Admittedly, a postponement can also be ruinous to such an undertaking as this book of mine, yet in almost every case this kind of intellectual task stands to gain by a so-called conscious or unconscious postponement. Suddenly she would say: How much cider do we actually have in the cellar? and send him down to test the casks for their exact content by rapping his knuckles on them, or else she would ask: Do we have any garlic in the house? or: What time is it on your bedroom clock? so that he had to get up and go downstairs to his room to look at his wall clock there and then climb back upstairs to tell her the time on his wall clock, she could never trust either of their clocks, hers or his, only both of them together, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, but, he added, there is no depending on both of those clocks either, ultimately (according to Mrs. Konrad). Is it dark outside? she would ask over and over, or: Is it snowing outside? always just when he had begun to read her the Kropotkin. Not that he always took orders with such alacrity, Konrad said to Fro, that would be unwise, so he very often pretended not to hear what she was asking. When she said: Is it snowing outside? meaning of course: get up immediately and look out the window and tell me whether it is snowing or not, he would start reading the Kropotkin with the utmost coolness as though he had heard nothing. She might often ask six or seven times whether it is snowing outside, Konrad said to Fro, but I react not at all, I merely read and go on reading until she gives up and stops asking. Most of the time he obeyed her so-called orders only