Nihilist! and Konrad instantly realized that the word Nihilist! could have been aimed only at the tobacconist. The tobacconist had done his wife in by slowly strangling her, until he finally strangled her to death, Konrad is supposed to have told his wife, who said: Mutual dependence drives people apart, one way or the other. For the longest time Konrad and his wife had exchanged only the most laconic remarks, Fro says, they barely spoke except to say the absolutely necessary, in the fewest possible words, as Konrad is supposed to have told Fro once, for ages there had been no so-called exchange of ideas between them at all, only words, and now, after all that has happened, Fro says, the chances are that in communicating only by way of the limited range of daily commonplaces and formulas of daily necessity they were communicating nothing except their mutual hatred. Fro says that certainly in the final weeks, but possibly in the final months of their life together, verbal exchanges between Konrad and his wife had dwindled down to an absurd minimum; for instance, according to Konrad, his wife had for a long time spoken to him about a pair of mittens she was making for Konrad, she had been working on this one pair of mittens for six months, because she unraveled each mitten just before she had finished knitting it, or she might finish it completely and then suddenly insist that it was the wrong color, that she must have wool of another color for his mittens, and when she had gotten him to agree would unravel the finished mitten and start knitting a brand new one, in a new color or shade and so forth, every few days or weeks, depending upon how much of her time or his time or the time of both was taken up with the Urbanchich exercises, there she’d be, knitting a new mitten in a new color, each choice of color in worse taste than the preceding choice, her preference running to every possible shade of ugly green, until Konrad came to loathe those mittens, in fact he came to loathe her knitting as such, her constant preoccupation with her knitting, but he never let on how much he hated it, according to Fro: hypocrite that I had to become because of her endless knitting and her incessant preoccupation with her knitting, he is supposed to have told Fro, I pretended that I was pleased with her knitting and that I was pleased with the mittens, consequently, no matter what color the wool was, I like these mittens, Konrad is supposed to have said over and over to his wife, nevertheless his wife would suddenly say, every time she had finished one of those mittens, she would declare suddenly that she must unravel it, it was the wrong color, she must have new wool in the right shade, after all she had the time, and while she was saying all this she had already begun to unravel the finished mitten, the mere thought of her these days brought on a vision of her unraveling a mitten, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, that unpleasant smell of unraveled wool was permanently in his nose by now, even in his sleep, Konrad told Fro, in the kind of nervous waking-sleep characteristic of his last weeks in the lime works, he would hallucinate his wife unraveling mittens, imagine what it’s like, he said to Fro, considering that there is nothing in the world I hate more than I hate mittens. All his life long he had hated mittens, beginning with his earliest childhood when they had hung his mittens on a yard-long cord around his neck, oh how he hated them, it’s always mittens mittens mittens with her, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, no matter that I am concentrating on the Urbanchich method, concentrating on my book, on making a little headway with the method and the writing, she has nothing in her head but mittens, mittens she is knitting for me, even though I loathe mittens, imagine, my dear Fro, Konrad said, except for my earliest childhood I have never worn mittens in my life, I have tried telling her, I often said, but I never wear mittens, why do you have this mania about knitting mittens for me, I shall never wear them and yet here you are knitting away at them, he is supposed to have told her, just as she had formerly spent decades sewing nightgowns for the poor and for orphans, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, these last few years she had taken to knitting mittens, not, that is, hundreds of pairs of mittens but only the one pair of mittens, always the same pair, for her own husband, she knits them and unravels them and re-knits them and unravels them, she knits dark green mittens and bright green mittens, a pair of white mittens, a pair of black mittens, knits them and then unravels them again, Konrad said to Fro. She made him try on the same mitten hundreds of times, that terrible business of having to slip into the mitten, every time, he is supposed to have said, with her knitting needles dangling from her half-finished mitten, as he tried it on. This was not the only tic she had, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, there were also the Toblach sugar tongs she always kept asking for, an heirloom she had from her maternal grandmother, not a minute would go by but she would ask for them, give me the Toblach sugar tongs, she would say, without any visible reason, Konrad always got the tongs for her out of the table drawer, she asked for them several times a day but not, as one might suppose, only at such times when it seemed reasonable to ask for them, as for breakfast, perhaps, or when needed during meals, but at any time, suddenly when he was reading to her, for instance, especially when he was reading a favorite passage of Kropotkin to her, Konrad told Fro, that was the kind of time she chose to ask for the Toblach sugar tongs, when he handed them to her she placed them in front of her on the table, then after a while, when she hadn’t even touched her so-called Toblach sugar tongs, she is supposed to have told Konrad that he could put them back in the drawer. Konrad could have recounted a whole series of such peculiarities, he said, but he didn’t care to, such a recapitulation of his wife’s most extraordinary peculiarities would in all probability, and quite superfluously, he felt, lead to the most terrible misunderstandings; apart from which, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, he, Konrad, was himself afflicted with such peculiarities, little oddities of his own, I am quite conscious of these peculiarities of mine, Konrad is supposed to have said, I can assure you of that, my dear Fro, I might even say that I am hyperconscious, Konrad is supposed to have said. But after all, even you (Fro that is), Konrad is supposed to have said, freshening Fro’s schnapps, are not free of such peculiarities, oddities, even absurdities, we observe such things in every person we have anything at all to do with, in fact, but they trouble us only when the person involved is one with whom we live in close intimacy, so that we are forced to notice their tics repeatedly, so that these peculiarities become most unpleasant, terrible, nerve-wracking, even though the same peculiarity we find so unpleasant, so terrible, so catastrophically nerve-wracking and nerve-destroying in a person we live with we might find quite attractive, not at all terrible, not in the least irritating and so forth, in another person, someone outside our lives, a person we encounter not constantly but rarely. Actually, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, if it isn’t the mittens or the Toblach sugar tongs, then it is her pronunciation of the word