The Lime Works

ce you let me into your room, I tell him, but I do hope I am not disturbing you, I think I have disturbed you often enough already, Konrad said to the professor, but if I have to be alone one more moment, he said, I always feel ready to suffocate … and then I hear you … What a lovely miniature you have here, on your wall, I tell him, I’ve never noticed these lovely miniatures before … and then I hear you unlocking your apartment door, and locking it again, and I hear you lying down on your bed and sitting down at your desk and getting up again from your desk … and then I pace the floor in my room a hundred times, back and forth, again and again, and I say to myself: now you can go down to the professor’s, at last, and then: no, not yet, not yet! no, not yet! then again, go ahead now, go down, quickly now, this minute … the indecision drives me nearly crazy, this incessant do-I-go-or-don’t-I, might I, but perhaps not … then I think: now! now I can! and in this way an hour has gone by, and I say to myself, but what if the professor is busy with his morphology … you were, in fact, busy with your morphology just now, I tell him, says Konrad, but you were too tired to work, too … you are too tired, I say to him … yet how busy! I say, and I walk over to his desk and I see that the professor has been busy working on his morphology … while I spent an hour wondering whether or not to go down to see him … Well, if I am disturbing you … do tell me if I am disturbing you … you must say that I am disturbing you, if I am disturbing you … that of course I am disturbing you, that I have been disturbing you for some time; I tell him, Konrad says: All these years I have been disturbing you … all these years I have been living in the same house with you … of course I am a harassment to you! … but you see, I tell him, says Konrad, I have been waiting for two hours, four hours, six hours, eight hours … and still I don’t go down to see you … here you are, I say to myself, waiting all this time, and still not going down to see him! … and then of course I do go down and knock on your door, I go on interminably knocking on your door until you open it and let me in … and let me pace the floor in your room, so that I can gradually begin to relax … and I do relax, and I say: Possibly tonight I shall finally make a bit of headway with my book, even if it’s only the least bit … possibly, I say, but I do say this to myself day after day, every day, I say to myself that today, when the professor gets home, you will go down to him and pace the floor in his room and then you will go back to your own room and get going on writing your book … it is exactly what I still say to myself, as you know, Fro, to this day, that now, I always say to myself, now, this time, I shall begin at last to write my book down … and to the professor I say, Konrad reported, if only I’m not disturbing you … if only I didn’t know how easily people are disturbed, a man who needs his peace, a man like yourself, professor, a man like myself, professor, … whom people disturb when he is longing only to be left alone … but unlike myself, who can no longer stand being alone, I say to the professor, you do want to be alone, and what’s so strange about this is that you have become so old being the way you are, but you do want to be alone, because of course you have to be alone … and you always do tell me when I come in to see you that you want to be alone, I say to him, says Konrad, you tell me that you must be alone, and even when you do not say it, even when it is not you who says it, even when you say nothing at all, I can hear it, I hear you saying that you want to be alone … my dear professor, I tell him, I shall leave you now, I am quite relaxed, it is altogether thanks to you that I have been able to calm myself like this … though probably even you will soon be unable to help me relax, just as my wife can no longer help me to relax, nobody, nothing can help me, I tell him … thank you, thank you, I say, walking to the door, the professor opens it for me, and I tell him that I did not intend, certainly did not mean to disturb you and I turn around and I hear the professor going back inside his room … how quickly I got back to my own room, I think, it’s astonishing, and I sit down at my desk and get ready to write, but I can’t begin to write … I must be able to write, I think, but I can’t write … and I get up and pace the floor in my room, on and on, just as I do here at the lime works … an unfortunate natural predisposition is what makes me pace the floor in my room all night long, all night and in the morning, when the professor has long since left the house, I keep on pacing back and forth, and I feel afraid of this pacing back and forth, as I still feel afraid of it today, just as I felt afraid of it all that time ago in Brussels, I still fear this pacing back and forth today in the lime works and I pace back and forth and I walk and wait and think, I wait and walk and walk and walk … and walk … To Fro: Konrad said that he and his wife preferred to spend the entire morning, in that unsurpassable, deadly togetherness of theirs, deadly from the moment it began, in mulling over the menu, viz., what Hoeller should bring them to eat from the tavern, Konrad being either too busy with his stepped-up experimental work to go, or too exhausted physically by his work: should they have a meat course or a pasta; or perhaps neither meat nor pasta but fish, instead? and what about soup and a salad as well, both of them prized a salad beyond anything, and he would rather, said Konrad to Fro, do without meat or fish and even without soup, in fact, but, if at all possible, he did not wish to do without a salad, so they went on for hours mulling over such questions as whether Hoeller would be taking twenty or thirty or even forty minutes to bring the food from the tavern to the lime works, and it was heartbreaking (Fro) how much time and energy they would give to guessing at the possibility that Hoeller might be unusually late, impermissibly late, that is, as a result of running into someone on the way and dawdling over a conversation, instead of Konrad concentrating, as he should, all his available forces upon getting his book written; he would welcome any distraction at all, nothing was too absurd or too trivial or too insignificant to serve as a distraction from his work, his writing, even though he would awaken in the mornings smothered in a horrible miasma of conscience trouble that positively tasted like brain rot and pressed painfully against the back of his head, at the mere thought of writing his book, in fact, he no longer thought of his writing, he is supposed to have told Fro, because as time went on this thought had become the most excruciating torture to him, though he was nevertheless in any case confronted with the problem of how to go about writing his book, regardless of what he was thinking or doing or considering, anything whatever was inescapably connected with his book, with getting it written, darkening his defenseless head with shame (he never explained to Fro in what way shame entered into it). Shall we have sauerkraut or potatoes, or will they have meringues today or even those fluffy beef roulades they both loved so much, and what about apple crumb cake or apple strudel or possibly pot strudel? or bacon-dumplings or pickled meat or spleen soup if not baked-noodle soup, or boiled beef with horseradish, perhaps? on the other hand, there might be a well-aged venison with cranberry sauce; they wondered at length whether Hoeller might bring them news, political or farming or social news from the tavern, news of a death or a wedding, a baptism, a crime, and how, where, and when something might have happened that even two well-traveled people like themselves might regard as sensational, something that had been kept secret for a long time but could no longer be kept secret, and to what extent the work on the roads had progressed, as well as the so-called shore improvements and the damming of the mountain streams, how cold the lake was, how dark the woods, how dangerous the precipice, whether people were talking about Mrs. Konrad and what they were saying, at the tavern, at the sawmill, in the village, whether the rumors about themselves were still making the rounds (works inspector), just how much people really knew about the Konrads’ affairs, or really did not know, how they felt about Konrad’s not having set foot in the village in such a long time, about his not being seen in the woods for such a long time, or in the sawmill, the tavern, at the bank; whether the market had drawn a good crowd last market-day or not, what people were saying about the new church bells, whether the cost of funerals had gone up, whether the new members of the government had taken hold, whether the deer and the chamois were fewer this year, whether things represented as true were indeed true, whether things that had seemed to be true for years had turned out to be untrue, whether things that had seemed to be in doubt had cleared up, all this and more they wondered about, says Fro, and they kept thinking up more questions, more things worth looking into, for hours on end, distracting themselves with all this nonsense (Fro) so that he could forget about his book, and she about her disease, her crippled condition. It is alleged that they put it to a vote as to which of their favorite two books he should be reading to her as a reward for subjecting herself to his experimentation with the Urbanchich method, for decades now they had always filled the breaks between exercises by his reading aloud to her, either the Kropotkin memoirs, that is, his book, as in recent weeks, or the Novalis novel, her book; of course he read to her from her book if she wished it, incidentally the book that had been her declared favorite all her life, and he did read it to her for weeks on end, again and again, but he also read her his admired Kropotkin, against her will and despite her resistance, she had at first refused to listen when he read the Kropotkin aloud, but he paid no attention to her obstructionist tactics vis-a-vis Kropotkin, and by ruthlessly persisting in reading the Kropotkin to her in a loud voice week after week and then day after day he had prevailed against her, although she insisted to the very end on her instinctive dislike for this Russian book, not that she still hated it as in the beginning but she never ceased to feel mistrustful toward it. Actually Konrad believed that despite her constant grumbling he had converted her to the Kropotkin long ago, by persuasion so artfully and tirelessly applied that she hardly noticed it. They spent whole days bargaining, Wieser says, trading an hour of Kropotkin for an hour of Novalis, two hours of Kropotkin for one and a half of Novalis, or no Novalis for no Kropotkin, or a chapter of Kropotkin for one or two chapters of Novalis, etc., in which bargaining process Mrs. Konrad was naturally always at a disadvantage, according to Wieser. Basically it was always Konrad who decided what was to be read aloud. Every reading ended with a discussion of the text he had just read, conducted of course by Konrad, says Wieser, never by his wife. Now and then they would, for instance, try to relate Kropotkin to Novalis, on the basis of the passage just read, in a purely scholarly way, nothing bellettristic, an analysis that would lead them to touch on all sorts of related matters, as Konrad is supposed to have expressed it to Wieser. The most interesting kind of reading to him was the kind that opened out in every direction, he did not say in every direction of the compass, exactly, but his special preference had always been for scientific books, thoughtful twentieth century nonfiction, or books like his Kropotkin, future-oriented books, in short, while her preference was always for the humane letters of the second half of the nineteenth century, naturally, said Wieser. He, Konrad, had always despised a reading not followed by discussion or debate, at least an effort to analyze the subject, or some such immediate commentary. Of course it had taken years of the most strenuous effort on his part to make his wife at least passably familiar with this attitude of his. But if a man had the necessary patience, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, he could in the end win over the most refractory opponent to the most refractory cause, by the sheer forcefulness of his honest, fanatically precise logic; ultimately even a person like his wife could be won over by this means. A man possesses from birth what a woman has to be taught, Konrad maintained, often by the most grueling, even desperate pedagogical methods, by the use of reason as a surgical instrument to save an otherwise helplessly dissolving, hopelessly crumbling corpus of history and nature. It was decidedly possible to take a hollow head, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, or a head crammed with intellectual garbage, and transform it into a thinking or at least a rational head, if one had the courage to try. There would be no dolts in the world if intelligent people refused to tolerate doltishness. On the other hand, Konrad is supposed to have said immediately afterwards, in the end it was really quite senseless and useless to try, though one might think of something, still it would be useless, one might do something, but it would be done in vain, whether it was done or left undone, it was no use, whatever one thought or did was no use, so a rational man tended to leave things alone to develop however they would. The intelligence itself, the man himself, was oppositional by nature, Konrad said. One came to be a man by consciously taking the opposition, by daring to act in conscious opposition. A woman did not follow suit, because this was not her way, she tended to confront the man’s, or more precisely, her husband’s solitariness without comprehension or respect, mostly, even though to have respect required no special knowledge or cultivation of the mind, bogged down as she was in her stultified world of a vulgar subculture. Konrad’s wife, as he himself said to Wieser, at least deeply respected him, though with certain reservations, in every phase of their shared life, despite the inborn resistance she shared with all others of her sex against the so-called masculine element, i.e., specifically against her own husband. Wieser and Fro both describe the last afternoon they saw Konrad, each in his own way, their statements confirming each other, though from time to time Wieser will be contradicting Fro, Fro contradicting Wieser, yet they nevertheless end by confirming one another. Fro claims to have been with Konrad, about a week and a half before the sad end of Mrs. Konrad, in the so-called wood-paneled room, oddly enough there was a fire laid on in the so-called wood-paneled room that afternoon, Konrad was expecting a visit from the so-called forestry commissioner, for a consultation about the damming of the mountain streams behind the rock spur, the forestry commissioner was due at eleven A.M., but had not yet put in an appearance at the lime works at twelve nor even at one P.M., until finally a woodcutter from the sawmill had shown up with a message that the commissioner was unable to make it, and proposed another appointment for next week, to which Konrad agreed. He poured the woodcutter out a glass of brandy and sent him back with regards to the forestry commissioner. It was shortly after this that Fro arrived at the lime works where Konrad led him straight into the wood-paneled room which was warm because he had been heating it for two days straight in anticipation of the, forestry commissioner’s visit. But now the forestry commissioner is not coming, but you are here, what a rare opportunity for a chat, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, when this room is heated one notices for the first time what a good room it is for conversation, even though it is furnished with nothing better than these dreadful, tasteless few pieces, though they are comfortable, you will have to admit; Konrad and Fro then sat down together, Fro said, in the wood-paneled room, Konrad saying that for two days now he had made no effort to think about his book, which he had not yet begun to write, because of his expectation that the forestry commissioner would be arriving to talk about damming up the mountain streams behind the rock spur, so I was concentrating on that, Konrad said, I was concentrated on that one hundr