The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (6 page)

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money, even after he had reduced his needs to the absolute minimum. What can we be living on? he was thinking, he told Fro, as he stepped into his wife’s room to look around for something salable there, though he thought immediately that there actually was nothing salable in his wife’s room at all, the stuff on her walls was nothing but junk, he said to Fro, his wife had always surrounded herself with junk, valuable things always depressed her, a woman who had owned so many things of value, but even when they moved into the lime works she did not want any valuable things in her room, Konrad said to Fro, he remembered this the instant he stepped into her room and noticed again that there really was nothing salable in there. All the things in my wife’s room are worthless and tasteless, he is supposed to have said, but I don’t want you to think that my wife doesn’t have good taste or a sense of
value! The total absence of taste revealed on all the four walls of his wife’s room had struck him with full force, on this occasion, that whole room was an all-encompassing demonstration of a lack of taste, it was full of tasteless things, he thought, while puffing up her pillow and slipping the ottoman under her feet. The more he looked around in his wife’s room the more tasteless it seemed. Except for the sugar bowl, an heirloom from her maternal grandmother, he thought over and over, only the sugar bowl and nothing else, the sugar bowl, the sugar bowl, the sugar bowl, he thought, but to sell her sugar bowl, to take it out of the room under some pretext and to sell it suddenly struck him as absurd, they’ll give me next-to-nothing for this sugar bowl, though it actually is a fine object of value, he thought, they’ll pay me far too little to make it worth while, he thought, according to Fro. It was ridiculous to think of selling her sugar bowl. Now he felt totally exhausted, certain that there was nothing salable left in the whole lime works, nothing to be cashed in for even a trifling amount of money, and he also remembered that he had broken off his business dealings with even the Voecklabruck antiquarian, the one with access to the American market, long since, after finally catching on to the man’s shady practices, and so he sat down, according to Fro, feeling utterly exhausted, knowing that he was through financially, sat down in the chair opposite his wife’s invalid chair where she usually sat dozing, half asleep, the way she had been for decades now. Sitting there looking at her he kept saying to himself, I will not sell the Francis Bacon, never the Francis Bacon, absolutely not, I will not sell the Francis Bacon, no I won’t, not the Francis Bacon. If the men from the bank come snooping
around I shall hide it. I had better hide the Francis Bacon, Konrad kept thinking over and over. And later: eight o’clock, supper time, and time, the whole evening, half the night, has passed us by, the two of us sitting here, a couple facing each other, and we haven’t had a bite or taken a sip of anything all day, as happens so often. As a child, Konrad was the one who had been sickly most of the time, while she, as Konrad tells it, was never once sick until her accident. How often he had been forced to stay in bed, feverish, in pain, while his brothers and sisters were laughing, having fun, right under his window in the garden, free to not think about their health at all. The slightest shift in the weather was enough to make Konrad catch cold. Something cold to drink, and Konrad caught cold. Nearly all during his childhood he had suffered from headaches. Later on, when he entered secondary school, his chronic childhood headaches had ceased overnight, says Fro, but Konrad continued to be in poor health all through secondary school, most of the time he was ailing in some way though the doctors never got to the bottom of his ailments; whatever caused them—and they are said to have worsened noticeably between his twenty-second and twenty-eighth year—was never cleared up by any doctor because, as Konrad told Fro, not one of those doctors who collected such exorbitantly high fees from his parents really bothered to look into it. Doctors were always surprised at the manifestations of a disease, any disease new to them, but they never did anything to find the cause of it, even though, as Konrad said to Fro, it was in the nature of a disease to be open to exploration, diseases were there to be investigated, i.e., doctors were in a position to find the causes of disease, but they did nothing about it,
they were always and in every case satisfied to be surprised by it, out of indifference and laziness where disease was concerned. Actually, whenever they made any real effort, they could find the causes of disease, and in time they would find the causes of all the diseases, Konrad remarked to Fro, but they would take centuries to do it, and since new diseases kept turning up, the doctors would gradually uncover the causes of one disease after another without ever completely uncovering the cause of all diseases. Konrad took pleasure in making that kind of remark. Everything throughout all his childhood and youth and in fact throughout all of his life, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, had simply been too much for his strength. While his brothers and sisters went in swimming together and enjoyed themselves in the water, he did not even dare look at the water for fear of catching a chill, the mere sight of the water could give him a chill. What characterized his whole childhood, his whole youth, was timidity without a respite, not fear, timidity. In addition he suffered because his sister and his brother Francis were only one year apart in age, they were practically the same age and inseparable companions in consequence, of course, while he, years older than they, which made him much weaker than they, was separated from them by the difference in age between them and him, a separateness that hurt him to the roots of his being, and so he had grown up in isolation because of the ruinous gap in age between him and them. He had always been alone. As the much older brother, his siblings had always repulsed him, excluded him from everything to do with themselves, they quite naturally drove him out into a loneliness that grew more and more complicated, into a solitude that more and more sapped the
roots of his being. The misfortune of being six years older than his sister, seven years older than his brother Francis, as Fro says Konrad told him, led to his life of chronic isolation. For at least three decades, at least until he married his wife, all of his physical and spiritual forces had been focused on nothing other than extricating himself from this unfair isolation. All during his childhood he worried about losing touch with his siblings and his family in general, because of their continuing instinctive rejection of him. He had often thought: if I am not to go out of my mind altogether, I must break out of my nearly total isolation from my brother and sister, my parents, relatives, all my fellow human beings, in fact. Shut in as he was, all he could do was look on as gradually everyone turned against him. Meanwhile his parents, as he told Fro, brought him up along with the other two, if they did bring him up, that is, if you could call it that, in nearly total ignorance. Nature seems to have designed parents to function in such a way, he told Fro, as to induce in the first-born child acute depression and revulsion, so that it ends by pining away, going to seed, perishing. What superhuman energies I would have needed to cope with the unfairness of it! Konrad said. To get myself out from under the weight and swelter of such a wholly mindless upbringing. It was because of this upbringing, which ultimately he could regard as nothing less than unscrupulous, that he could not write his book, though he had been working on it most intently for two decades, more or less; he was always on the brink of writing it down, but unable to start writing it down, and all because of the unscrupulous way he had been brought up, as Fro tells it. Everything from his earliest beginnings conspired against his getting his work
down on paper. One appalling phase of life after another, all adding up in the end to a catastrophic effect on his ability to write his book. Perhaps he had no right to say it, but he had a right to think it, that to look into his childhood was to look into a snake pit, into a hell. To open a door into his childhood was to open a door to darkness itself. Nothing but coldness and ruthlessness. In that pitch darkness the indifference and secret heartlessness emanating from his parents still made themselves felt. The loneliness he had learned to endure even in his earliest childhood, the principal lesson of his childhood, he made an incessant study of his loneliness, he said to Fro. At the very moment when he needed the opposite he had been struck down by the most acute loneliness imaginable. He was nearly destroyed through the sheer solitude in which he had to arrive at a decision about his special subject of study and so, yielding to his parents’ wishes, he never did embark on any program of studies, never went to a university, never took a state examination, because he simply did not have the energy to assert himself against his parents and study natural science or medicine, as he longed to do though later on when he had reached manhood he had been able to assert himself in every respect, whenever necessary, because as a child or youth he had never been able to assert himself, not even in the most insignificant ways, including of course his desire to study natural science or medicine, both of which had aroused his interest early in life, but his parents had always opposed his going to a university, they would never have let him study natural science, specifically medicine, if anything they might have let him attend agricultural school, like his father before him, they never intended to let him pursue academic
studies, he was to function solely as the heir to their properties, considerable enough even after the so-called upheavals of the First World War and its attendant chaos, sizable holdings in real estate and other kinds of property; the way they saw it, and it never occurred to them to see it any other way, was that he was to come into his huge, far-flung inheritance at the high point of his life, be a man of position, and spend his life managing his estates. Possibly, Fro says Konrad told him, this parental opposition to his academic plans had broken his spirit, so that he had become habituated to living in a state of demoralization and indifference, which ultimately incapacitated him for writing his book at all, an incapacity that grew more incurable as his wife’s illness grew worse. Ever since he could remember, whatever he started out to do had a way of ending in utter exhaustion. Even here in the lime works, Fro reports Konrad as telling him, which he had always assumed would be the one place in the world most favorable to his writing, everything had turned against it. For his failure to write his book he blamed, in addition, all sorts of illnesses occurring in and around Sicking. The fact that nobody grew old in Sicking. Although everybody gave the impression of being old, nevertheless. Wherever you went in Sicking, you would see nothing but old people, he said, even the children; if you looked at them hard enough, you were struck by the way they exhibited the repulsive mannerisms of the old. The natives had a way of catching early in life one of the hundreds of thousands of chronic diseases that were so hard to classify, and then they tended to withdraw into their chronic unclassifiable diseases, encapsulate themselves in their diseases, and simply wither away. He saw it happening all the time.
All kinds of names were found for these diseases, but they invariably turned out to be all wrong because the men responsible for naming them were hopelessly superficial and loathed making an effort. The entire countryside around the lime works was a constant source of every kind of universally infectious disease, all of these diseases were supposed to be known diseases although in fact absolutely nothing was known about any of these diseases to this very day, he is understood to have said, because medical science is the most dimwitted of all, medical doctors were the most dimwitted, the most unscrupulous, and the sick, left to their diseases, tended gradually to withdraw into themselves in the most self-degrading way, they had no choice, taken in continually by their quacks as they were, all they could do was to die off. He happened to be in an ideal position to observe all this happening in the case of his own wife, to whom such and such a disease was attributed even though it was common knowledge that medical science knew nothing at all about her disease, Konrad is supposed to have said. The doctors talked about it as if it were a lung disease, for instance, Fro says Konrad told him, but in fact the so-called lung disease they talked about was no lung disease at all. Heart disease was also mentioned, but in fact this so-called heart disease was no heart disease. Whatever disease the doctors talked about was in fact something quite different from what they called it, Konrad said. They would say that so-and-so was sick in the head, that he had a head disease with such-and-such a name, when in fact nothing at all was known about that disease, including whether it was or wasn’t a head disease. The man limps, they would say, but the cause of his limping is unknown. They would talk about the kidneys
and the liver, but the disease the doctors were talking about had nothing whatever to do with the liver or the kidneys of that particular patient. All of these diseases were primarily so-called psychosomatic diseases that masqueraded as organic diseases. Basically there was no such thing as organic disease. All there was were the so-called psychosomatic diseases, Fro recalls Konrad saying, and all these psychosomatic diseases, all diseases in short, that were known, which does not mean that these known diseases were fully researched diseases, but which were in any case always so-called psychosomatic diseases, ultimately became organic diseases because the doctors had no integrity, paid no attention, because of their vacuous arrogance, vacuous depravity, vacuous brutality. It was the doctors who were to blame for so-called organic disease, Konrad is reported to have said, whereas the blame for so-called psychosomatic diseases falls on nature or, if you like, the creation. It all begins in nature, or creation, but ultimately the doctors and only the doctors are to blame. But to speak of so-called psychosomatic diseases is to be on the wrong track entirely, Konrad is supposed to have said, just as much on the wrong track as to speak of organic or so-called organic diseases. Besides, all the cases in the Sicking region, Fro reports Konrad as saying, were invariably cases of premature death, everyone who died here had died prematurely, they all died here sooner than they should normally have died. To blame were the climate and the doctors, demonstrably so, and the causes of the diseases as well as the deaths were in every case something other than the official causes given. To Wieser: at the very moment when Konrad thought he could turn his attention to his work, he would suddenly hear Hoeller chopping wood.