The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) (9 page)

head in every detail, carrying it around with him in the constant and continually increasing anxiety that it would fall apart and dissipate itself from one moment to the next, dissolve into nothing, and all because he was constantly missing the right moment for capturing it all on paper. I spent two whole years preparing for the first section of my book, and in the following eighteen years I was able to develop and complete my preparations for the rest, a feat that was enough in itself to make a man suspect, as he had unfortunately found out for himself, enough to bring him under suspicion and into disrepute as a total madman, frankly and obviously a clinical case. Of all those nine parts the fifth was the hardest, in fact he still had no title for it. Nothing could be easier, of course, than to go really insane, Konrad is supposed to have said, but my task is too important to let myself be deterred by the fear of insanity. Nothing would be easier than to go crazy from one minute to the next and thereby be relieved of so monstrous a burden. To be suddenly totally psychotic, without any preceding craziness, a sudden full-fledged psychosis. But as long as he had not gotten it all down on paper it was wasted, and he said so every day to his wife, that all his work was wasted as long as it remained in his head without being set down on paper, and she would say, then why didn’t he get it down on paper, she’d been saying this for years in the same tone of voice, Konrad is supposed to have said, because she still had not caught on to the fact that it was possible to carry a book like this around in one’s head for years and even for decades without ever being able to get it written down. Women were all alike in this respect, they were simply incapable of understanding peculiarities of this sort, they will not accept them and they can go on refusing to accept them
for decades on end. A book a man has in his head but not on paper has no real existence, after all, Konrad said to the works inspector, according to Wieser. I must write it down, simply write it down, he kept thinking, that’s all there is to it, to get it written down, sit down and write it, this was the thought that had begun to dominate his every waking moment, not the thought of the book as such, but the thought of writing it, of getting it written down from one moment to the next; but the more obsessed he was by this idea, the more impossible it became for him to write his book down. The problem was not so much that he had something in his head, everybody had the most monstrous things in his head, where they went on without a break to the very end of the man’s life, the problem was to get all this monstrousness out of one’s head and on to paper. It was possible to have anything in your head, and in fact everybody did have everything in his head, but on paper almost nobody had anything, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, according to Wieser. While the heads of all mankind were crammed with every kind of monstrousness, what they had on paper amounted to only the most lamentable, ridiculous, pitiful stuff. If his book did not turn out to be the most sensitive distillate of the subject conceivable, Konrad is supposed to have said, a sensitive distillate by a hypersensitive brain overstrained to that end for decades … It was in the lime works, in the total seclusion of the lime works, that he had always believed he would be able to get it all written down, all at once. A head that was totally secluded, isolated from the outside world, would be able to write this book more easily than one involved with the outside world, with society. But think what an extra effort of concentration it takes, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, to
work up such a book for the first time in such a head as his and hold it there, when this head was not completely sequestered from the world, from society, let us say, because it is linked with a person who is not completely sequestered from society. Head and person, as you know, Konrad said to the inspector, according to Wieser, are inescapably linked together. Body and head are hopelessly interlinked, or, as he often thought, most gruesomely interwedged. Well, who could even begin to describe nature and its machinations, anyway. In the lime works, at any rate, Konrad is supposed to have said, lay the best imaginable chance for his work. But nothing could be accomplished without ruthlessness, you can ask my wife, Konrad is supposed to have said, I know that everyone is saying that she, my wife, is the most considerate person, while I, her husband, am the most ruthless, I am fully aware of it, nor does it upset me, because if it did all these opinions would long since have upset me to death, Konrad is supposed to have said to the inspector, nobody’s opinion upsets me any longer, on the contrary, all these opinions, and all of them are against me as a matter of course, take me progressively a step further. To reach one’s goal one simply has to accept an enormity, or even a crime against all of so-called mankind or against an individual, as part of the deal. In my case it happens to be a book for the sake of which I am prepared to do anything and everything, and I mean prepared to sacrifice everything, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Nothing can be accomplished without a measure of ruthlessness, Konrad said, because once you let yourself in for such a piece of work as this, you are letting yourself in for doing it with extreme ruthlessness, usually against the person with whom you are living, sharing your
life, and who becomes your chief victim; looking at it this way, my wife is Victim Number One, but I cannot allow myself to be in the least concerned about that. This victim is defenseless, we know that. This horrifying thought is what alone enables a man to make the horrifying mental effort he believes he has to make. Of course he knows that he will be regarded as a madman from beginning to end, precisely because he is the exact opposite of a madman, and he can expect to be incessantly jeered at. He goes through the mill of being incessantly derided. No one goes with him, unless he forces someone to go with him, a woman, for instance, whom he simply forces to come with him, because no one will, otherwise. But even if someone does come with him, Konrad is supposed to have said, he still walks alone, he walks alone into an intensifying solitude. He walks into an intensifying darkness, alone, because the thinking man always moves alone into an intensifying darkness. But back to my work! he said to himself, and: No excuses! Yet even in the lime works, nearly empty as it is, there is continual distraction. No friends, actually, Konrad is supposed to have said, actually no real friends at all, only curiosity seekers, trouble sniffers, enemies only, in fact, and one’s bitterest enemy was oneself, of course. Nevertheless progress was being made, despite all the constant impediments of one kind and another, including being negatively impeded, by omission; omission, in fact, is more decisive than its opposite. To do something by not doing it, he is supposed to have said. For example, not to do something that could be done and about which they say (on all sides!) that it must be done, was a kind of progress. It’s maddening, he is supposed to have said, but I do not permit myself to go insane. Then: my book is, at first, simply a lone decision,
which later turned into being the loneliest of tasks. Virtually nothing coming from the outside. Fragility itself. A man like himself in constant fear that this ultimate in fragility would break up his head, and vice versa. Fear that everything would break in his hands. A man like himself frequently looked around for a way to defend himself, but couldn’t find anything, because defenselessness was all there was. Incessantly he was faced with the absolute threatening to destroy him. Whatever point a man like himself reached, arrived at, all he ever reached or arrived at was irritation, further irritation. But all of it is ultimately so comical, it’s all more comical than anything, which is why, he is supposed to have said, it is all quite bearable after all, because it is comical. All we have in this world is the very essence of comedy, and do what we will, we can’t escape from this comedy, for thousands of years men have tried to turn this comedy into tragedy, but their effort had to fail, in the nature of things. This whole business with the lime works here, Konrad is supposed to have said to the works inspector, as Wieser says, is of course nothing but comedy, too. But to endure this comedy one has to empty one’s brain from time to time, sort of like emptying one’s bladder, that’s all it is, my dear inspector, micturation of the brain, to relieve the brain as one relieves the bladder, very simply, my dear inspector. Or else, think of the brain as a spiritual lung. He poured another glassful for the works inspector, who by this time was completely drunk, saying: probably it’s the interruptions that do my book the most good. To Fro: That everything he, Konrad, said, was nonsense; to me: nonsense, all nonsense; to Wieser: it’s all nonsense, naturally, Wieser, what else. Fro says that Konrad would open a window and hear the branches of the pine trees, when he opened the
window overlooking the water he heard the water. He could hear the pine branches and the water even when there wasn’t a breeze stirring, even though the eye perceived no movement at all in the branches, on the water, Konrad heard the trees and the water. He could hear the incessant motion of the air. He could hear the surface of the water moving even when no such motion was perceptible to the eye, or: he could hear the movement in the deeps, the sounds of movements in the depths. He heard movement in the deepest places, he said so over and over, not only to Fro but to Wieser also, under my window the lake is at its deepest, you know, just under my window, it is as though I had always known that the deepest point is just under my window. Naturally only an ear trained to hear movement in the deepest places actually does hear what goes on in the deepest places, no other ear can hear anything coming up from those depths, none of my human guinea pigs ever hear anything there, I can take whoever I want to the window, he is supposed to have said to Fro, and ask him, do you hear anything coming up from the water? and get
no
for an answer, invariably,
no, nothing
. While I myself naturally hear not just one sound, I hear thousands of different sounds and I can distinguish these thousands of sounds from each other; why, I have filled several dozen notebooks solely on the subject of my perceptions of these thousands of sounds coming up from the deepest point in the water right under my window, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro; Fro is deeply interested in those notebooks, in fact, and hopes one day to get hold of them, if only one knew where they were, and if Konrad would let Fro borrow these notebooks, for his, Fro’s own scientific work, of course, said Fro, because it was precisely such observations
of Konrad’s as these, on the sounds rising from the depths of water beneath his window, that interested Fro, so much so that he had decided against waiting until after Konrad’s trial at the Wels district court, against waiting until Konrad was convicted, because Fro could have no doubt that it was important for him to see those notebooks of Konrad’s as soon as possible, and so he, Fro, was submitting a petition to the district court at Wels to give him access to Konrad’s notebooks containing observations on the sounds at the deepest point in the lake right under Konrad’s window. Konrad will probably agree at once to let me have the notebooks, says Fro, but I am interested not only in these particular notebooks but actually in all of Konrad’s notes as well, but most of all in his manuscript, but then, Konrad has not written his manuscript to this day, says Fro, and as far as anyone can judge Konrad was not likely to be able to write it, ever, because whether he is transferred to the prison in Garsten, or to the mental institution at Niedernhardt, probably for life, he would be unable to write it in either place because he couldn’t begin to write it down without his heaps of notes accumulated in several decades of research; the writing of his book had, ultimately, become impossible for Konrad, who had short-circuited himself, so to speak, by committing the horrifying murder of his wife. This very day Fro intended to send off a letter to Konrad asking for the notebooks on sounds from the depths of the water under his window, he said. Even a man as intelligent as the late forestry commissioner, a man who was always taking a positive interest in my experiments, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, when asked whether he could hear anything from the depths while standing with Konrad at the open window overlooking the
water, could hear nothing. A completely untutored person could not even hear any sounds from the surface of the water, not to mention the depths, Konrad had said to Fro as recently as the end of October. My experimental subjects hear nothing, Konrad said. Exactly the same result was obtained when he stationed himself with an experimental subject at the window overlooking the trees. The subject admitted that he saw nothing and therefore heard nothing, either. However, it was not quite that simple, even though it was also impossible to explain the process that made a person observant, on the other hand. And why bother to try explaining it? Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. He wondered, even though he marveled at the patience of his experimental subjects, the forestry commissioner, the works inspector, Hoeller, Wieser, Fro, the baker, Stoerschneider and the rest, he nevertheless asked himself why he bothered at all, considering how they always ended up by leaving him depressed over their boundless incapacity. His wife and chief experimental subject, as Konrad said himself, Fro reports, had always shown extraordinary patience with him and his researches, his efforts, his experiments and, as Konrad told Fro as recently as late October, she went on performing ever greater miracles of patience in the course of his incredibly radicalized experimentation; by using her he had developed the so-called Urbanchich method to its utmost perfection, in fact his radicalization of the method was such that he would be justified in no longer referring to it as the Urbanchich method at all, but his wife had allowed herself to be driven to a state of total exhaustion by his use of the Urbanchich method on her. Toward evening, if we happened to have started early that morning, or after midnight, if we started in the afternoon, she would be done in. Among
other things, for instance, he recited to her a series of sentences with the short