Toblach had surfaced in his wife’s head during their first years in Sicking, this childhood notion of hers would spook around in her head for hours and then in her room and finally in the entire lime works, but as time went on it came up less often, Konrad is said to have told Fro. At the so-called Cold Food Market only a year ago Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser that it seemed to him as though Toblach was no longer surfacing, suddenly the idea of Toblach had ceased to matter, his wife had given it up, in giving up Toblach it was as though she had given herself up, he noticed. She had always opposed Sicking, Konrad said to Fro, always opposed the lime works, always pitted herself against him, Konrad, against his work, which meant of course against herself as well. She had brought Toblach into the debate against Sicking from the first moment the question of Sicking arose. In the end her opposition to the lime works, to his work, had become a habit, so that her struggle against his research for his definitive book on the sense of hearing, had become instinctive, as it were. Suddenly Toblach had ceased to exist, Konrad is supposed to have said, and: you must understand that my wife has never had anything apart from Toblach, even now she has nothing in the world apart from Toblach. Sicking was of course a dungeon, Konrad said to Fro, even at first glance it gave the impression of being just that, a workhouse, a penal institution, a prison; an impression disguised for centuries, according to Konrad, concealed behind a veneer of bad taste, he alone had ruthlessly stripped away this cheap mask to let the underlying reality emerge into the light again. This reality was made manifest, to begin with, by the barred windows he had installed in those thick walls immediately after acquiring ownership; functional iron bars, as Konrad put it, I ripped out the ornamental ironwork and installed functional iron bars, he has been quoted as saying, those thick walls and the iron bars sunk into them instantly show that this is a prison. The ornamental wrought iron with which the lime works had been decorated before Konrad’s time, relics of two centuries of poor taste, were removed at Konrad’s orders, he said to Wieser, they all had to go at once, he had torn most of them out of and off the walls with his own hands, he broke them off, knocked them off, broke them down, knocked them down, tore them down, ripped them out, and never replaced a single one of these knocked down and broken up and ripped off squiggles with any new squiggles. The lime works were now totally bare of ornamentation, Konrad is reported to have told Fro, even the paths leading up to the lime works, though in fact there was only a single stony path leading up to the lime works as anyone could see at once, had been loosely paved with coarse gravel. Everything was simplified. He aimed to restore the lime works to their original condition, regardless of what anyone thought. Tall hedges, yes, but no ornamental bushes whatsoever. To Wieser: he, Konrad, had never been a so-called nature freak, after all; he was no nature fanatic, no nature masochist, absolutely no wilderness freak of any kind, in fact; external nature tended to inspire Konrad with horror at his own nature, never with joyful amazement; the so-called sense of wonder in contemplating nature was a mere perversion, he said. Nor did he love mankind, and if not mankind, then certainly not animals, he did not love animals even though he was incessantly, even exclusively preoccupied with nature, you might say, he was nevertheless no friend of nature, quite the contrary, particularly