The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (10 page)

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sound, such as, “In the Inn district it is still dim,” a hundred times slowly, then a hundred times rapidly, and finally about two hundred times as fast as possible in a choppy manner. When he was done he demanded an immediate description of the effect his spoken sentences had on her ear and her brain, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. Then he commenced his analysis. But after only about two hours of such experimentation she would ask him how much longer it would take, Konrad told Fro, and start complaining about her earache which was steadily worsening, especially in winter; he would tell her, then, how long the experiment would take that day, whether it was to be only a brief three or four hours, or a longer six or seven hours, in any case his experiments in accordance with the Urbanchich method were important to him and he had let not a day pass without experimentation. He might say, for instance, how long is it now since I’ve experimented with the short
i
sound, or, how long since we’ve worked on the short
o
? or the short
a
, or the short
u
? He would alternate, for instance, between reciting the sentence, “In the Inn district it is still dim” into her left ear, then into her right ear, then moving from one ear to the other and back again. In one hour of such work he might produce about two pages of notes, but usually he destroyed those notes right away, so that no one could deduce his method from his notes. In the midst of an exercise he might, for instance, suddenly say to his wife, you must distinguish between the hard and the soft
i
. She understood perfectly, and yet she did it all wrong, time and again. So the effort had to be redoubled, which meant that the discouragement, some days, was also redoubled. If she did not follow the
rules, he would tell her, the exercise was a waste of time. Sometimes it took as long as half an hour for her to catch on (to the simplest point). Naturally it was all far too demanding, especially everything connected with the Urbanchich method, far beyond her strength, he would think, but nevertheless he went on repeating the exercises prescribed for each experiment without a pause until she actually collapsed. Most of the time she sat in her chair quite motionless, with her eyes shut more often than not. Still, in the many years in which he had subjected her to the Urbanchich method, she had gotten accustomed to his kind of experimentation. The sentence “In the Inn district etc.” for instance, she had listened to for weeks on end, hundreds of times a day, every day, until he raised his hand to signal: exercise completed. The sentence, “In the Inn district etc.” was after all a basic sentence in his experiment, says Fro. He would say it and she would instantly comment on it. He recited it faster and faster, she commented on it faster and faster, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. After hearing her complain a thousand times that he took too long with his experiments, he finally turned a deaf ear to it, until in time he got into the habit of turning a deaf ear to her. There was no way to avoid using the Urbanchich method on her, for the sake of the book it simply had to be done. He claimed that he always finished by saying, now we can permit ourselves to stop working, and then followed it up immediately by asking: would you like me to play your record? then she would ask him to play her favorite recording, Mozart’s
Haffner
symphony it was, it always relaxed her. Always the same record, the same record year after year, he thought, but as long as the
Haffner
is what she wants, she shall have it, he said to himself time and again. Most of the time, Konrad said
to Fro, he was so exhausted by the time he played the
Haffner
for her that he nodded off to sleep while it was still on. Probably they both were aging more rapidly in the lime works. If only he could get his book written before he grew too old, absolutely too old and unfit to write it, he is supposed to have said to Fro and to Wieser. The minute he got to his room he went to bed. But the inner restlessness into which he was driven by the outward quiet would not let him sleep even when mortally exhausted, and so he wandered all over the lime works, several times all over the lime works, and spent the rest of the night lying on his bed quite unable to fall asleep. Once you have passed that boundary line between fatigue and exhaustion, it is absurd to believe that you can fall asleep, absurd to try to sleep, to force yourself to sleep; you weren’t going to fall asleep. Instead, he got the opposite of the hoped-for relaxation, the serenity he meant when he dreamed of finding a quiet place to work; instead of being able to relax, he only grew increasingly restless, so restless that he inevitably broke his own rest by doing something or other that brought unrest into it. Here he was at last, actually at the lime works he had taken such infinite pains to get into because it was such a quiet place, the outward quiet which was of its essence and which he had always believed would give him the inward quiet he needed for his work, but he soon found out what a fundamental mistake that was! Though he realized his mistake soon enough, it was too late just the same. A terrible self-deception, a terrible disappointment. But he had worked out for himself a mechanism, he said to Fro, by means of which he could control the outward quiet, in fact the extreme outward quiet so characteristic of the lime works and its environs, gradually to gain control of it and ultimately to
exploit it wholly for his own purposes, i.e., for his work. This mechanism enabled him at all times to induce inward quiet by means of the outward quiet, not by nature but by using his brain, using the mechanism itself without any special manipulation of the mechanism. To exploit and transform the outward quiet, even the extreme outward quiet, for the sake of and into inward quiet was a high art, beyond comparison with any other art not only of self-control, control of one’s nerves, that is, he thought, and even though he had reached a high degree of mastery in it he did not claim to have mastered this art at all times. Instead of concentration (on his work), he is supposed to have said, nonconcentration (on his work) suddenly manifested itself. In a word: you had to be able to break away from your outward quiet at the moment when it had ceased to induce inward quiet; in the long run outward quiet never did induce inward quiet, it did so only briefly, much too briefly for intellectual purposes. The weather played a most important part in this, as in every other respect. For instance, when the foehn, that maddening mountain wind, suddenly started to blow: the longer he walked back and forth, this way and that, in the lime works, the greater grew his inward unrest, because he then had no control over the mechanism for inducing inner quiet. He then would try various expedients, substitutes for the mechanism which wouldn’t function, such as reading his Kropotkin, or the Novalis, a book that was basically hers, but even the Novalis did not help him to calm himself, he would try sitting down, standing up, sitting down again, standing up again; alternate between opening the Kropotkin and the Novalis, pace the floor in his room, first in one direction then in another, try putting his papers in order, mix them up again, open the
chest, close it again, pull out various drawers, always the same drawers, of the chest, pull out bills, notes, toss them all in a heap, pick up one or the other, read through them, drop them again, move the chair from the window to the door, the one near the door over to the window, turn out the light, turn on the light, follow a line, two lines, several lines, on a wall map. It did no good to go into the kitchen, to carry the logs from the kitchen into his own room, to get the ashes out of the fireplace, empty the pail, none of it was any use. To remind oneself of one thing or another was no use. It did not help him to speak aloud what he was thinking, or feeling, or to utter sentences, as he is supposed to have said to Fro, sentences he had just made up, totally meaningless sentences, or possibly sentences already used as material for the Urbanchich method. He would wander around, Konrad said to Fro, all over the lime works without getting anywhere near calming himself, everywhere, that is, except one place, his wife’s room, because he did not want to aggravate his wife’s depression by his own restlessness, considering that she was already in a state of deepest depression, constantly, in fact, he said to Fro; like him she would delude herself into thinking that times of unrest would alternate with times of inner peace, but in reality neither one of them ever came inwardly to rest, and so they both lived a permanent lie, not only did they lie to each other but each lied, side by side with the other, to him- and herself, while she lied to him and he to her and then simultaneously they lied to each other, in any case they lied that they were having a bearable life in the lime works, lied incessantly, although they were both trapped in an unbearable life, but if they did not simulate bearability, its unbearableness could simply not be borne, Konrad is supposed to have told
Fro, an unwavering simulation of leading a bearable life while actually and incessantly enduring the unendurable is simply the only way to get on with it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, he also said something like it to Wieser, he even spoke to me about the bearability of the unbearable being made possible by the pretense of bearability, in the same words, with the same invisible gestures, as I recall, that time in the timber forest; but to get back to what he was saying to Fro, he said that he would wander all over the lime works which on days of that particular kind indeed seemed boundless to him, and try to come to the end of them, but could not get to the end of the lime works because one could walk and run and crawl through the lime works and never get to the end of them, he is supposed to have said, and finally, reaching a sort of climax in the utter shamefulness of his situation, he was often reduced to putting his hands on the walls, those ice-cold rough masonry walls, the ice-cold doorframes, the ice-cold trapdoors to the attic, the icy window glass, the ice-cold wood of the few remaining pieces of furniture, saying to himself, with his eyes shut, over and over, steady now, steady, steady, man. The lime works is not exactly an idyll, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, though it is all too easy to regard the lime works as an idyllic place because one happens to have gotten stuck in one’s superficial prior judgment of the lime works; that the lime works is idyllic is only the judgment of people who judge the place on sadistic grounds, or on masochistic grounds, while in fact the lime works, as distinguished from its environs, is quite the opposite of an idyll. Visitors, for instance, tended to expect an idyll when coming to the lime works, even if they merely came to the vicinity, summer visitors as much as winter visitors, starting
with their decision to visit the lime works, were expecting to enter an idyll, when in fact they had unknowingly decided to enter the very opposite of an idyll, had in effect quite unconsciously fallen victim to a total error at the very moment of their decision to go to the lime works. An idyll, they think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, as they step through the thicket, an idyll, as they brace themselves to knock on the front door. All the signs, before entering the thicket, when stepping out of the thicket, point to an idyll. But when they have actually stepped free of the thicket, they are horrified and turn back, if they set foot inside the lime works they are horrified and escape, some turn back as soon as they have stepped free of the thicket, and escape, the others turn and run as soon as they have set foot in the lime works, a minimal few get as far as entering the rooms inside and in no time at all they can’t bear it. People don’t instinctualize any longer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, mankind no longer instinctualizes. Aha, so that’s the idyll the Konrad couple have moved into, they may think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but in reality the Konrad couple, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, moved into quite the opposite of an idyll when they moved into the lime works. The return to an idyll, they think. Compared with the lime works, everything else is idyllic, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, London is an idyll compared with the lime works, Wuppertal is an idyll; the ugliest, the loudest, the most malodorous place is an idyll in comparison. But even the surroundings of the lime works have been deliberately falsified into an idyll. An intelligent person arriving in the area, of course, will realize at once that the place is no idyll, but most human beings, Konrad said to Wieser, are not possessed
of intelligence, you know, though they may look intelligent; people appear to know, appear to understand, when in fact they know nothing and understand nothing. A dimwit is likely to be unobservant and notice nothing even after he has stepped forward out of the thicket. Konrad himself now knew without a doubt that to have gone into the lime works was to have gone into a trap. To Wieser: Last fall his wife had still been able to dress, get herself ready, unaided, but when winter came she could no longer do any of it without his help, which meant that Konrad had not only to do his room, making the fire and so on, but then had to make the fire in her room, dress her, make the bed and so on, with the inevitable catastrophic effect on his work; while for her, of course, nothing could be more depressing than being suddenly unable to dress herself any longer. How long would it be, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, before she could no longer feed herself without help, not even the smallest bite? So far she had managed to feed herself, if he cut up her meat for her, broke her bread in pieces and so on, anything further she refused to let him do for her, but the time was coming when she would no longer refuse to let him feed her, and then he would have to stick the meat and the bread in her mouth bit by bit, he would have to spoonfeed her the porridge, dribble the milk behind her teeth spoonful by spoonful. Merely to pull on her stockings had become an effort unutterably dreary to make and to watch, he could see that she could no longer bend over, nor could she any longer stretch out at full length. When she stood up, she could not stand straight, when she walked, she could not walk straight, and when she lay down, she could not lie straight, her posture was about as crooked as it could possibly get, her head hung down like an awkward