The Lime Works

of what he is reading. When she fails to understand her beloved Novalis though she listens with might and main, there’s no pretense about that. Now at the Laska, where I sold another of our new policies today, they say that there’s a cripple living in the lime works, the Konrad woman, that’s whom they mean in the hostelries hereabouts when they refer, as usual, to “the woman,” and this cripple, they say, is cared for, according to some, or shamefully used, according to others, by her husband, the owner of the lime works, and a mad despot to his wife. According to the gossip he is terrible, devoted, sadistic, attentive, all at the same time. They praise him for fetching her meals from the tavern, but say he is destroying his wife by using her ruthlessly as a guinea pig for his scientific experiments, his so-called Urbanchich method, of which they have no conception except what they get from Hoeller’s weird descriptions after years of watching Konrad’s practices with his wife. They say that Konrad torments his wife by saying, shouting, whispering, either very quickly or with excruciating slowness, all sorts of incomprehensible things into her agonizingly inflamed ears and then forcing her to comment on each and every one of his utterances until she comes close to fainting. Even after Mrs. Konrad has reached a point of exhaustion when she can’t react at all any more, her husband will keep at her for hours after she has collapsed into total apathy, they say at Laska’s, sometimes until four in the morning, etc. He started out being fabulously rich, they say, but it’s all gone because he’s an idiot with money, and anyway his obsession with his so-called scientific work, something to do with the sense of hearing, has left them in straits, not that you could consider him actually impoverished, but there were rumors about an impending forced auction sale of the lime works. Nevertheless, they seem to think of him as a rich man still, but you have to remember that to a common working man, anyone who has one good suit and doesn’t have to go to work in overalls at six o’clock in the morning like himself is a rich man. Konrad himself, says Wieser, would probably never have called himself a rich man, though he might reluctantly have admitted to being well-to-do, back in Zurich or even as late as his Mannheim period, even though at that time he could still be considered a rich man by even the most exacting standards, yet Konrad himself said to Fro about two years ago: I am actually poorer than any of the people who call me a rich man, but how am I to make people understand that I am telling the truth? Talking with the woodcutters and other workmen who hang around the various taverns far into the night, toward the end of winter, was Konrad’s favorite recreation, he enjoyed their conversation more than anyone’s, he is supposed to have told Wieser. But he had not gone to any of the taverns for months now, what with the way things were getting worse for them at the lime works, he even missed his tavern-going habits less as time went on. For months on end he had not talked with the workmen, woodcutters, gamekeepers, etc., nor gone even once to the woods, he had not seen the village for six months, in fact, though he did go there, but only to the bank where he would cash a check and go straight back to the lime works, having drawn out a negligible amount of money, not enough to keep one alive, but too much to let a man croak. He had not even spoken to Hoeller for weeks, unless you counted telling Hoeller to chop some wood, or not to chop wood, or taking the food hamper he brought from the tavern and handing back the empty hamper. This year Hoeller had become a changed man, Konrad did not know why he seemed to have lost the confidence of this man of extraordinary integrity, he could only guess that it might be for the same reason he had lost confidence in himself to a degree. A simple question had in the past always elicited a simple answer from Hoeller, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but nowadays all he ever got were ambiguous answers to the same simple questions. These days there was only mistrust between them, which made them uncertain with each other, full of unspoken reservations that entailed a daily circling around and around the unacknowledged source of their trouble. It was Hoeller’s cousin, the one with the seven or eight convictions for sexual offenses, who had taken to living with Hoeller in the annex, secretly, behind Konrad’s back, without his or Hoeller’s asking Konrad’s permission; ever since the cousin’s arrival Hoeller had ceased to come near Konrad except when he brought the food hamper or asked if he should chop some fire wood. According to Wieser, this means that Konrad has had to do without his conversations with Hoeller, an important source for his book; in fact, Konrad has also been deprived of the talk he valued so much with all the simple men of the region around the lime works. The Konrads preferred to spend their mornings mulling over what they would have to eat, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, instead of Konrad simply going down to the kitchen to fix something, anything, when Hoeller was not going to the tavern for their lunch, whether because he was sick or had to chop wood or the like, so that Konrad was prevented from working on his book, what the Konrads would do was to sit and talk for hours, endlessly, about sauerkraut, cauliflower, meat, egg dishes, soups and sauces, salads and cooked fruit, unable to decide in favor of any specific kind of meal. To waste the entire morning like this on planning what to eat, thinking about what to eat, was absolutely disgusting. Encounter III: at about two A.M. Konrad said, he had heard a shot nearby, it had to have been fired quite close to the lime works, he thought, but he could see nothing, even after opening the window and looking outside, nothing. But somebody had just fired a shot, he said to himself, and there’s a second shot, and a third, after the third it was quiet again … before the Konrads moved into the lime works the annex had been a meeting place for the hunting men of the area; Konrad despised hunters as much as he did the hunt, all of his ancestors had been hunters, woodsmen, all their lives their heads were full of hunting to the exclusion of everything else, a hunter was invariably a stupid man, a hunter was always and every time a congenital dimwit, a hunting moron. Konrad had never been interested in hunting. The moment he moved into the lime works he abolished all the hunting privileges associated with the lime works; no more hunting meets in the annex, he declared, and ever since then the hunters naturally hated him and he was always terrified when he walked through the woods, even just setting foot outside the lime works, afraid of being shot at or shot down by a hunter, a hunter could always feel free to gun down any man he hated, Konrad said, though he would be brought to court, but the courts would let a hunter go scot-free, or else, if a hunter was convicted of murder, they would sentence him to a ridiculous suspended sentence, hunters could kill people to their hearts’ content in this country and go scot-free. Konrad hated hunters, he said, but he loved guns, especially hunting rifles, it was a paradox but he could explain it. Then: he greased his boots with concentrated beef fat, using the ball of his thumb. Greasing his boots was already beginning to cost him a tremendous effort, it had to be done with the ball of the thumb, as he learned before he was four years old from his father, he could still remember his father teaching him how to grease his boots with the ball of his thumb, never with a rag, only the ball of the thumb, no brushes; rags were a poor substitute for the ball of the thumb, which left the leather beautifully supple, if you worked it always from the inside out and with growing intensity; Konrad always liked the smell of boot grease, Polish or Slovakian, he loved the smell of his room after greasing his boots there in the wintertime, the only time he greased his boots in his room, the rest of the year he did it out in front of the house, but he particularly remembered the wintertime greasing of his boots indoors as a pleasant chore associated with a pleasant smell. But in recent years he found himself totally exhausted after greasing his boots, on such a day he could hardly do the Urbanchich exercises, not even to mention the writing, merely to think of the book on such a day was an effort to be shunned, even if an idea for his book should occur to him after greasing his boots, it could only be an insignificant idea. After such a chore as greasing his boots or any such physical effort, these days, Konrad said, he would have to lie down on his bed, made up for the day as it was, in an indescribable state of collapse, and take several deep breaths, with his eyes on the ceiling which seemed to be in constant motion up there, he said, trying to clarify his conception of the book, divided as it was into nine parts, but in his weakened state after greasing his boots or some such effort as that, he found it impossible to think, all he could muster was a hazy outline of the book which had nothing in common with the real book except for his fear of the hard work involved, which drove him in desperation to try to think of other things, anything else rather than the book, but when he succeeded in driving the book from his mind it made him even more desperate, because to find himself thinking of anything else than the book naturally drove him to despair at once. Relax and breathe deeply, he would say to himself then, inhale, exhale, calmly now, he would say, in constant anxiety that he would be torn away from this by the sudden ringing of his wife’s bell, her so-called signal that she needed help, afraid of having to go up to her room and witness one of her bouts of helplessness, always some new form of helplessness, infirmity, incapacity. Sometimes a good idea for his book would come to him precisely during such a state of weakness in consequence of having greased his boots, etc., on occasion some of his best ideas would occur to him then, ideas of a kind that never came in the beginning, twenty years ago, because they happened to be typical of old age, the very best ideas in fact, but they usually deserted him as quickly as they had come, which reduced their value for him to nil, and viewed from this perspective they were of course the most worthless, actually the most terribly worthless ideas one could have or imagine, ideas of a worthlessness a young man could not even conceive of, because a young man could not have such ideas, could not remotely understand such ideas. All that was left was the recollection of having had a good idea, a recurrent experience of having had a good, an excellent, a most important idea, a truly fundamental idea, but one never remembered the idea itself from one moment to the next, memory was something you simply couldn’t depend on, a man’s memory set him traps he’d walk into and find himself hopelessly lost in, Konrad said, a man’s memory lured him into a trap and then deserted him, it happened over and over again that a man’s memory lured him into a trap, or several traps, thousands of traps, and then deserted him, left him all alone, alone in limitless despair because he felt drained of all thought; Konrad had come to observe this geriatric phenomenon and had begun to be more and more terrified of it, he was in fact prepared to state that a man’s youthful memory was capable of turning into an old man’s memory from one moment to the next, with no warning whatsoever, suddenly you found yourself with an old man’s memory, unprepared by such warning signals as a failure, from time to time, in trifling matters, brief lapses or omissions, the way a mental footbridge or gangplank might give a bit as one passed over it; no, old age set in from one moment to the next, many a man made this abrupt passage from youth to age quite early in life, a sudden shift from being the youngest to the oldest of men, a characteristic of so-called brain workers who tended, basically, not to have a so-called extended youth, no gradual transitions from youth to age, with them the change occurred momentarily, without warning, suddenly, mortally, you found yourself in old age. A thinking man with an old man’s memory instantly lost all his ideas, the most important, the best, unless he noted them down at once, so the thinking aged man had to carry paper and pencil with him at all times, without paper and pencil he was totally lost, while a thinking young man needed no paper and pencil, he remembered everything that occurred to him, he could do anything he wanted with his brain and with his memory, effortlessly store whatever occurred to him in his brain and therefore in his memory, hold on to the most extraordinary ideas as long as he needed to and almost without effort until, suddenly, from one moment to the next, he was old. An old man needs a crutch, he needs crutches, every old man carries invisible crutches, Konrad said, all those millions and billions of old people on crutches, millions, billions, trillions of invisible crutches, my friend, no one else may see them but I see them, I am one of those who cannot help seeing these invisible billions, trillions of crutches, there’s not a moment, Konrad said, in which I do not see those billions, those trillions of crutches. Those millions of ideas, he said, that I had and lost, that I forgot from one moment to the next. Why I could populate a vast metropolis of thought with all those lost ideas of mine, I could keep it afloat, a whole world, a whole history of mankind could have lived on all the ideas that I lost. How untrustworthy my memory has become! he said; I get up and note down an idea I have just had (in bed), my best ideas all come to me in bed, and as I start to note it down, shivering with cold at my desk because I couldn’t take the time to wrap myself in a blanket, the idea is dissipated, it’s gone, no use asking myself what became of it, it’s irrecoverable, gone, I know I had an idea, a good idea, a prime, extraordinary idea, but it’s lost now. It happened to him over and over again: he would have an idea, unquestionably a good idea, perhaps not an epoch-making idea, but those are best discarded at once, because in fact there is no such thing, those so-called epoch-making ideas are all phony, he said, what he had was a useful idea, but in the very act of noting down this useful, practical idea, it gets lost. You could call this whole thing a farce, of course; everything is farcical, if you like, to call it a farce is a way of keeping oneself on the move, getting on with this whole evolutionary farce and one’s role in it, why not, but it did of course keep getting harder to do, after one’s sixtieth year it required an enormous effort to catapult oneself through this farce day by day, moment by moment, the effort became a torment, because it was the most insincere, most unnatural effort-against-the-grain, he said: While losing the idea in the midst of noting it down, I say to myself, I’ll just throw this bescribbled slip of paper away, into the waste basket with it. At his age he had begun to regret all those feeble ideas, he did not scruple to call them feebleminded ideas he had lost in the act of trying to note them down, and that had vanished in their thousands as so-called incipient but lost ideas in his waste basket.