The Lime Works

certainly, oh yes, or: no, oh no no, in reply to every remark of hers on the subject of Kropotkin’s memoirs, in unwavering agreement with whatever she was saying, Fro feels that the presence of Mrs. Konrad during his visits to the lime works always activated, made operational, the good manners he had been taught, his proper upbringing which meant knowing always when to insert a yes, indeed or a oh no, certainly not in all the right places, a knack that would see anyone through hours of polite conversation. The Konrad woman had seemed remarkably relaxed that afternoon, when she somehow kept in check the chronic restlessness of every part of her body, so apparent at all other times, concealing it on this occasion by an unparalleled mental and emotional effort (Fro, verbatim). She ended by saying, Do come again, my dear Fro, we are always so glad to see you, after which Fro went back to the wood-paneled room on the ground floor with Konrad. Going down the stairs, Konrad continued pouring out civilities in the style originally meant for the forestry commissioner. My dear Fro, Konrad is supposed to have said on the stairs from the second to the first floor, to see a man like yourself at the lime works is always a pleasure, and, he added, on the way from the first to the ground floor, when a man like you arrives, somehow it clarifies things, all the pieces fall into place. Once seated inside the wood-paneled room they chatted about everything, on and on for three hours, sipping schnapps, nibbling ham. You see, Konrad said (as reported by Fro), her family blames me for our gradual deterioration, as they have the insolence to put it, and as they have the unquestionable right to put it, too, they say that my wife’s life and mine together are turning into a catastrophe. On the other hand, my family, excepting myself that is, Konrad said to Fro, all the other members of my family, which has sunk from the heights of a so-called classic traditional family of means to the level of a negligible family, a family of no significance, they all blame her. My side blames everything on her sickness, on her being a cripple, while her side blames me for it all, they blame it on the way my head works, on my book. In the end both sides may come to agree, Konrad said to Fro, that all of our misery can be laid to the book, so that ultimately it’s the sense of hearing that bears the whole responsibility. People are always looking for a simple basic cause behind a lot of chaotic circumstances, or strange circumstances, or in any case extraordinary circumstances, it’s natural to look for a basic cause, and it’s equally natural to grasp at the most obvious, the most superficial factor involved, the one that is easily recognizable as the most superficial factor even to an inferior intelligence, and so in our case, my dear Fro, they have seized on my book as the basic cause of what everybody agrees to consider the catastrophe leading to the inevitable complete disintegration of my wife. One’s fellow men, including of course one’s neighbors, one’s nearest and dearest, etc., tend to overestimate precisely that which is least estimable, or deserves to be regarded with the most disdain such as, for instance, the members of one’s own family, etc., even those held in the lowest esteem are still rated too highly, one tends to overestimate persons to whom one has happened to give authority over oneself, though in fact one is most likely to have delivered oneself into the hands of the lowest human element there is. In fact, every time you take your fate into your own hands you have handed yourself over to the lowest kind of human being, but this is a kind of truth no one can face up to day after day, as he should, because if he did, he would simply have to give up, give in, fall into total despair, shamefully fall to pieces, dissolve into nothing. There are plenty of people who think they can save themselves by filling up their heads with fantasies, Konrad said to Fro, but no one can be saved, which means that no head can be saved, because where there is a head, it is already irredeemably lost, there are in fact none but lost heads on none but lost bodies populating none but lost continents, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. But to tell this kind of truth to my wife is exactly like talking to a rock that has taken millions of years to go deaf. I grant you that to be unable to put your finger on the real cause of all our troubles is a torment even to a man with a complete idiot of a wife around his neck, a lifelong torment if you like, but the real cause can never be found, whatever cause you think you can spot will turn out to be a fake, all of our contemporary so-called scientific research into what causes what, all of it misapplied because it is misunderstood, inevitably comes up with nothing but fake causes, because it is in fact possible to understand the whole world, or what we believe to be the whole world, or what we think we recognize as the world on a day-to-day basis, as the result of nothing but fake causes arrived at by fake research. You could waste decades of your life trying to get the better of this self-perpetuating duplicity, but all you would get out of that was to grow old, that was all, to go under, that was all. Suppose you make a statement, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, only one sentence, say, no matter what it is, and suppose this sentence is a quotation from one of our major writers, or even one of our greatest writers, all you would succeed in doing is to besmirch, to pollute that sentence, simply by failing to exercise the self-control it would take not to pronounce that sentence at all, to say nothing at all, you would be polluting it, and once you start polluting things, the chances are you will see everywhere you look, everywhere you go, nothing but other polluters, a whole world of polluters going into the millions, or, more precisely, into the billions, is at work everywhere, it is enough to shock a man out of his mind, if he will let himself be shocked, but people no longer let themselves be shocked, this is in fact precisely what characterizes the man of today, that he refuses to be shocked by anything at all. Distress has become transformed into hypocrisy, distress is hypocrisy, the great movers and shakers of mankind, for instance, were merely even greater hypocrites than most people. Since we have nothing but polluters in the world, the world is polluted through and through. The vulgar will always remain the vulgar, and so forth. Konrad went on to say that people no longer took risks, they were cowards, every one of them, and so forth. Facing consequences was a thing of the past, nobody and nothing was consistent any more, which made everyone extremely vulnerable, and so forth. An animal was mistrustful in advance, which is how you distinguished an animal from a man, and so forth. Konrad himself, he said to Fro, had with his wife withdrawn altogether from society, which had become long since only a so-called society, one fine day they had simply withdrawn themselves from society by an act of philosophical-metaphysical violence, and so forth. A constant lack of human company, however, was as deadening as a constant immersion in company, and so forth. But what if you sat down to dinner, suddenly, with the family of a bricklayer, for instance, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, like me sitting down to dinner with Hoeller, say, Konrad is supposed to have said, forcing him (and myself) to think, merely to think, that it was natural, that it was where I belonged; and what if I perpetrated this swindle in full awareness of what I was doing, and so forth? His wife was, in fact, still keeping in touch, decades after her sickness had forced her to withdraw from society, with that same society, despite the fact that she has been parted from society for decades by the lime works, by Konrad himself, by his concentration on his book, and on her own part by her crippled condition, her invalid chair, all because the doctors are incompetent, she nevertheless keeps in touch with people, most devotedly and intimately in touch, to a degree that more than approaches perversity but actually uses perversity as a ruthless means to the end of keeping in touch, of clinging to society body and soul, Konrad said to Fro, at the same time that I keep telling myself, in every way I can, that society is nothing, that my work is everything, my wife insists that my work is nothing and society is everything. While he based his very existence on the fact that society was nothing, while his work was everything, she quite instinctively drew her being from the fact that his work was nothing, society was everything, and so forth. Given his being of sound mind and in possession of the necessary means, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, he would first of all and instantly open all the prison gates and so forth. Furthermore: religion was a clumsy attempt to subject humanity, a mass of pure chaos, to one’s will, and: when the Church spoke, it spoke as a salesman; listening to a cardinal we seem to be listening to a traveling salesman’s pitch, and so forth. On the other hand we all had a tendency to think we had already heard everything, seen everything, done everything already, come to terms with everything already, but in fact it was a process that repeated itself on and on into the future, which future was a lie, and so forth. The greatest crime of all was to invent something, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. To resume: the future belonged to no one and to nothing. People kept coming around to weep on your shoulder, about their children, about their scruples, about this that and the other thing they were suffering though they had done nothing to deserve it and so forth. Maybe so, but the trouble was that for having children, for having scruples, for suffering, they expected to be compensated, and so forth. Society might pay compensation, but nature did not pay compensation. Society was setting itself up as a sort of surrogate nature, and so forth. Then: he read in the paper that Hager, the butcher, had died. Only a week ago Hager had personally brought the Konrads fresh sausages all the way to the lime works, in an old carryall of a kind it was a pity they were no longer making; it was so immensely practical. When Konrad finished reading the item about the butcher’s death he went up to his wife’s room, knocked on her door, waited for her