The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (4 page)

the feeling that one is suffocating, Konrad said, and anyway in small rooms he always feels he is suffocating, the same feeling he has in mountain glens and so he has it in Toblach every time, while his sister, who is accustomed to Toblach, feels crushed by the size of a large room, in a vast landscape she feels crushed by the vastness of the landscape, under an enormous sky she feels crushed by the enormousness of the sky, with a man of stature she feels crushed by the man’s stature. By the same token Konrad always felt he was about to suffocate when he was inside the annex, which is why he so seldom visited Hoeller who lives in the annex, Konrad went to see Hoeller in the annex only as a last resort, after a few minutes inside the annex he felt as if he were running out of oxygen and rapidly suffocating: some people simply preferred small cramped rooms and others preferred big spacious rooms, Konrad is supposed to have said, a conversation of any extent with Hoeller in the annex had gradually come to be impossible, even though Hoeller was a man toward whom Konrad felt the most protective love of which he, Konrad, was capable, but the cramped space in the annex and his own violent reactions to the constricted feeling of the annex the moment he entered it, made it impossible to visit Hoeller in the annex except for the briefest possible time, Konrad is said to have told Wieser. When they moved into the lime works it was immediately obvious that his wife would move into the smallest of the rooms. But even in her room, which actually is the smallest room in the lime works, Konrad was still able, as he said to Wieser, to take easily fifteen steps forward and fifteen steps back. From the first it had been clear that his wife would move straight up to the second floor, they had both decided on this as far back as Mannheim where they
were staying just before they moved to the lime works, because the second floor was the most salubrious, a judgment confirmed every time by the expert opinions of every kind of specialist, they never gave a moment’s consideration to putting her on the first floor or on the ground floor or on the third floor, Konrad said. Strange as it seems, people are always saying that the second floor is the best for a person’s health, everybody chooses the second floor if possible, they all prefer it. Myself, I moved straight into my room here on the first floor, Konrad is supposed to have said. From the first they had agreed upon this, here is where I go, into this room on the first floor, and this is where she goes, into this second-floor room. Here in the lime works he had almost all the right conditions, conditions that could not be bettered, for getting on with his work, he said, and at first he did not ask himself what it meant for his wife to be moved suddenly into the lime works, even though he knew what it meant to her, he did not keep thinking about it, one simply can’t keep thinking about a lot of things that one is aware of. That he had a window overlooking the lake where the water was deepest was an additional advantage for his work, even if he could not or would not say what kind of an advantage. It was also advantageous that his wife, too, had a window overlooking the water, though not the deepest part as in his case, because, as he said to Wieser, she must on no account have her window where the water was deepest. At first his wife had wanted a window facing on the courtyard (her usual preference for that enclosed feeling!) or even a window giving onto the rockface, but she had let him talk her into realizing the advantageousness of having a window overlooking the water instead, and in time she did in fact come to spend hours, what was he
saying? whole days on end, staring into the water, Konrad said. As for himself, Konrad said, a room facing the courtyard would have been bad for his work; a room looking out at the rockface would have been impossible, out of the question. To move into a room facing the courtyard or the rockface would have been a deliberate invitation to total despair, something he was prone to fall into anyway. When it came to furnishing the house, as Konrad once explained to Fro: though we did our own rooms completely the first day, once and for all, putting in only the most indispensable things, the bare necessities, you understand, we did nothing at all about the rest of the building. Since we moved in during the winter, we had to use the barge, it took two trips by barge across the lake, Konrad said to Fro, two full loads of those hundreds of thousands of household effects we still owned even after all our travels all over the world during all those decades, Fro; it was incredible how much furniture and household stuff we still had when we moved into the lime works, despite two world wars and all those catastrophic unheavals! it was fantastic, Fro, considering that we never lifted a finger to hold on to all these furnishings and household goods, quite the contrary, neither my wife nor I ever gave a moment’s thought to the stuff, and of course all these hundreds upon thousands of furnishings and household goods represent only a fraction of what we used to have, because my wife, after all, brought a great deal of property into the marriage and I also contributed a good deal, and what with a few deaths in the family, war casualties you know, we acquired quite a bit more, though we lost much of it in the cities, we never lost anything in the country, most of it was stored in the country. Imagine, two huge barges loaded to the limit with furniture
and household effects! Luckily the lake was not frozen over, though it freezes over every winter, in January it is usually frozen hard, but the year we moved into the lime works the lake had not frozen over. No one would dare to cross the frozen lake by car or truck ever again, not after that wedding party, several Konrads among them, Konrad is supposed to have said, broke through the crust about twenty years ago. For centuries people drove over that frozen lake with impunity, and then suddenly that wedding party had to break through; since that date no one would risk it. Three huge barge loads of household stuff, Konrad said to Fro, and you know how much one of these barges will hold. The chances are that barge is no longer fit for use, these days, Konrad said, not a soul has given it any attention in years, such a barge had to be oiled and painted every year at least, but nobody has ever oiled or painted that barge. Eaten up with rust and rot as it is, the barge was doubtless quite unfit for use by now, and Konrad is supposed to have said: the way everything around the lime works is eaten up with rust and rot, when you think how much there is, lying around the lime works and eaten up with rust and rot. As I was saying, he said to Fro, for years nothing at all was done to make the lime works habitable, and when we got here we gave less than an hour to fixing up our two rooms. Of course he and his wife, Konrad said, were the most unassuming people in the world. He had gotten by all his life using only the most indispensable articles of furniture, always the same ones. Nevertheless they had somehow, despite their tendency to concentrate only on what was absolutely necessary, managed to have two full barge loads of movables to bring to the lime works. Mrs. Konrad is alleged to have said repeatedly that she could never have
found enough room for all those furnishings and effects in Toblach. In Toblach not even half of the stuff would have got inside, she said. There was absolutely nothing, Konrad said to Fro, that she couldn’t somehow connect with Toblach, just to drag in Toblach somehow. The problem in moving, Konrad said to Fro, was primarily to begin with the pieces intended for the first or the second or the third floor and to avoid dragging pieces meant for the third floor to the second floor, as had happened again and again, for example, or dragging first floor pieces to the second floor or third floor pieces to the first, and so forth. By the time they had finished, almost every piece of furniture etc. was standing in the wrong place, so that the end result, as he expressed himself, was one of hopeless confusion. As you know, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, I sold quite a lot of the furnishings and stuff right after we moved in, and by now I have converted most of these wooden absurdities into cash. And to Fro, a year ago: my wife hasn’t the faintest idea that I have sold nearly all the furniture and household things; but that’s another subject. Behind her back I sold nearly all the furniture and fixtures, Konrad is supposed to have said (his own words) almost all the rooms in the lime works are completely empty now because I had to convert everything to cash these last few years, considering especially the high cost of litigation. The lawyers swallowed up most of it! He had naturally had to hire a number of hands, what with Hoeller being bedridden at the time they moved in, he was down with pleurisy, and as everyone knew it was hard even in Sicking, even if one was ready to pay dear for it, to find men for such unskilled occasional work as moving furniture, Konrad had in fact lent a hand himself, while his wife, exhausted by the
hardships of moving, slumped in her invalid chair that was the first thing to be set up in its permanent place in her room; Konrad helped move the furniture and fixtures into the lime works side by side with the hired help, he is supposed to have told Fro, though of course as long as one had hired help one was obliged to get as much work as possible out of them, so he had ordered the men to work hard and quickly, not with the excruciating languor that had become customary among working men ever since they had become accustomed to being coddled and spoiled in the course of recent history, he asked them to work as quickly as he did, and the men obeyed instantly, says Fro, they suddenly began to move the furnishings and household goods with remarkable speed, and even with extraordinary skill; with zeal, one might say. Konrad evidently had a knack for getting the men to put their backs into it, Fro thinks. For the first few days he had managed to conceal his normally glaring misanthropy, suppress it enough, anyway, so that the hired men, who had heard of him but never seen him face-to-face before, took him to be a thoroughly well-meaning, kindly gentleman, whom they could look forward to using for their own purposes, such as extracting from him high pay for little work, high pay for sloppy work, etc. etc., in fact their yielding to Konrad’s orders to work fast and efficiently too was pure cunning on their part. Konrad of course realized that he had to put his best foot forward with the men, what with the terrible fix he was in, having those huge barge loads of stuff at the lime works with not a helping hand in sight. It would take months, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, to bring some order into all this furniture chaos, but in fact no order has been brought into all this furniture
chaos to this very day, he said to Fro, but then, by this time, there is only a fraction of the original number of pieces etc. here in the lime works, everything else has been sold, so there’s not much point in arranging the remnants so late in the day. Especially as I intend to convert even these remnants into cash as soon as possible, Konrad is supposed to have said. To his wife he would say over and over, whenever she asked him, that all the rooms were in order, that everything was in its place in every room of the house, that little by little every single object had found its proper place, without a word to let her know that everything had in fact been sold off by then, that Konrad had never once and not for a moment considered putting the furniture in place, but had thought only and always about selling it as quickly as possible, had in fact managed to sell it off gradually at quite good prices, to antiquarians here and there, one of whom in particular had taken almost everything off his hands at a relatively high price, for sale in America, a trade at which the dealer had occasionally made profits of a thousand, even two thousand, percent, as he admitted to Konrad; who said not a word of all this to the sick woman glued to her invalid chair, to whom he went on reiterating his lies about the furnishings being in perfect order. For decades it was by lies and nothing but lies that Konrad and his wife managed to save themselves from total despair, to go on somehow, to stay in touch and endure each other for just a while longer; without lies the two of them would have become totally estranged and lost in despair, Fro thinks. My God, what do I need in a room besides a table, a chair, a wardrobe, and a bed? Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed to Fro once, when they were coming out of the tavern and saying goodbye
under the horse chestnuts, as they so often did after playing rummy for four hours at a time; Konrad used to stretch their game for as long as he could so as to put off going home to his waiting wife. Fro: Konrad was afraid of going home to his wife. The lime works are out of earshot, Konrad is supposed to have said quite frequently to Wieser; anyone crying out inside the lime works was not going to be heard. If someone were to break in with criminal intent there would be no point in screaming, as the screamer would not be heard. The sawmill was out of earshot, the tavern was out of earshot, not a soul lived within earshot of the lime works. The wood cutters were out of earshot. That the Mussner property and the Trattner property had been out of earshot, as the two still unsolved murders of the owners Mussner and Trattner proved, was a matter of catastrophic consequence. Even though Konrad appreciated the total seclusion of the lime works as advantageous for his work, it did on the other hand hold a constant threat, indeed an extraordinary threat, because the types that were suddenly coming out of the woodwork everywhere, strangely enough more than ever in the present era of general affluence, came crawling out of all sorts of holes for the sole purpose of committing crimes, primarily crimes of violence and preferably the meanest, most brutal kind of violent crimes, and those types were known to shy away from nothing, from no conceivable horror they could find to commit. Basically Konrad lived, he said, in constant terror of violent criminals, his whole existence could be said to be a state of pauseless dread, as he literally put it, a dread of encountering violent types, and the lime works were virtually predestined to be the scene of violent crimes, the place was by nature a deliberate
provocation to violent crime, in fact all the crimes at the lime works so far were chiefly still unsolved murders committed in the course of robbery, all the crimes (violent crimes) committed here in Sicking and environs were ninety-five percent unsolved cases, the hundreds of them committed at the lime works all unsolved just like the cases of the two landowners Mussner and Trattner, whose properties had also been isolated like the lime works and where it was customarily regarded as a miracle, as it was at the lime works, if by December 31 no violent crime had occurred there, as at the lime works alone eleven murders were known to have been committed in about a hundred years, not counting burglaries, robbery, common theft, the kind of crimes so customary no one kept count. Buildings like the lime works, in fact, attracted precisely the sort of character whose entire being was oriented toward the committing of none other than violent crimes, basically it was no use at all to build walls, install locks, etc., and the so-called psychological sciences always theorizing in collaboration with the physiognomists always came up with erroneous conclusions. Nothing was more deceptive than the human face, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. That he himself carried a revolver at all times was generally known, at least since the incident with the woodcutter and game warden Koller, as well as the fact that he had a hidden weapon in readiness at all times in nearly every room of the lime works, a fact publicized in the course of the Koller trial; better to shoot someone occasionally in the shoulder or the leg, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, and get locked up for it, rather than allow oneself to be the victim because of a failure to draw, because one had become intimidated by already