The Lime Works

no distractions at all, by comparison the rest of the world was nothing but distractions (from his work on the book). But whatever he may have thought about the lime works and about the book it had all been a mistake, every bit of it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. In the last analysis a man tended to yield instinctively to a form of indirect blackmail exerted on him by his own personality. Though of course he had carefully gone over every pro and contra having to do with their moving into the lime works, as had his wife whom, however, he did not really consult as a person who would have a deciding vote in the matter; he merely took her into consideration. What was so fascinating about their move was that it was an abandoned lime works they were going into. Besides, after decades of extensive but ultimately aimless traveling, the Konrads had finally had enough of traveling. At least as far as he was concerned. Traveling ultimately wore you out, the new experiences came to lose their newness all too soon, the great varieties of people came to look all alike, the circumstances and connections in which they turned up came to have a sameness, as did the looks of the landscapes, always the same as one moved toward them and away from them, the conditions, climatic, social, hostile, political, natural, medical, etc. etc. had a sameness that tired one out. In time the world tended to use itself up simply, and what was most depressing of all in traveling around, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, you kept being increasingly confronted with the world’s increasingly evident shabbiness, until this was what you were facing incessantly and on to the end, so to speak. To try to escape from all this by moving oneself into some remote shelter was also an error, of course, as he fully realized by now, but so would any other solution they might have hit upon have been an error. The lime works had offered itself as a turning point, though not as a radical about-face, there was no such thing, but at least as a quarter-turn in every degree, as Konrad is supposed to have expressed himself to Wieser, and Konrad had assumed that it would be possible for him to make one more such turn later, even if by no more than a few degrees. They could foresee that they would soon be suffocating in their Paris apartment, Konrad said to Wieser, and they had to face it, to suffocate in the thick of a human mass, for instance on the Boulevard Haussmann, Konrad said, was unquestionably the most terrible way to go. But, don’t you see, Konrad is supposed to have exclaimed, to Wieser, there are so many ways to be ruined, to founder! in which connection several books, by a writer whose name he had forgotten, came to mind, an Austrian writer, and anyway the name didn’t matter, the person didn’t matter, no writer’s person or biography ever mattered, his work was everything, the writer himself was nothing, despite the despicable vulgarity of all those who insisted upon confusing the writer’s person with his work, the general public had been corrupted by certain historical and literary processes of the first half of the nineteenth century into daring, with the shameless impertinence characteristic of them, to confuse the written work with the writer’s personal concerns, using the writer’s person to effect a vicious crippling of the writer’s work, always shuttling back and forth between the writer’s private person and his product, and so forth, more and more confusing the producer and the product, all of which led to a monstrous distortion of the entire culture, bringing into being a culture which was a monstrosity, and so forth, but to get back to the man’s writings, reading him was like reading a madman, a writing madman, but he was in fact quite the opposite of a madman, and Konrad recommended to Wieser some titles, fragments in which certain goings-on were described that were highly relevant to what was going on in his life, although the proceedings in the books were metaphysical in nature, while his own original undertaking was anything but metaphysical, in fact Konrad did not hesitate to describe his entire development as organic from first to last, and though it had a decidedly speculative bond with the metaphysical it did not in any sense derive its being from metaphysics, Wieser says. Basically Konrad’s own development could not in any respect be regarded as a so-called thing of the imagination, absolutely not, it was strictly a physical process, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, at bottom it was nothing more than an infinitely sad story of a marriage, astounding, shocking if you chose, and yet it could just as well be regarded as almost laughably commonplace, even though it might seem strange, extraordinary, crazy, to the superficial observer. But there was no use talking about it. The mitten: while watching her knit his mitten he asks himself: Why is she knitting that mitten, always the same one? but he also asks himself why, instead of continually working on that mitten, doesn’t she take time out to mend his socks, patch his shirts, his torn vest, all my clothes have big holes in them, everywhere, he said to himself, but she sits here knitting that mitten. Her own cap needs mending, so does her blouse, too, but no, she keeps working away at that mitten. The lime works have been the finish of her, he thought, watching her at work on that mitten. A person like his wife could hardly be considered a living human being any longer, even if you made every conceivable kind of allowance, emotional, rational, anything you pleased, not in the condition she was in after nearly five years at the lime works, he would think as he looked on while she kept at her knitting. There had been nothing between them for a long time now, nothing more than what he could only call mutual ignoration. But on the other hand, whatever had been between them previously, all their traveling together and so forth, had ultimately predestined them for this very life of theirs at the lime works. The lime works were our destination, our destination was to be done to death by the lime works. Before we moved into the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, we were constantly and to the greatest extent in the company of other people, but after we moved into the lime works we were totally deprived of human companionship, totally out of human society, which was bound to lead, first, to despair, then to spiritual and emotional desolation, then to sickness and death. Absolutely nothing at all happens here! Konrad exclaimed, according to Wieser. But even to consider the kind of senselessness it was to move into the lime works as a form of heroism was suicidal. Although even his wife had persuaded herself, during their first two years at the lime works, that their complete withdrawal from the world into the lime works would be his salvation, Konrad himself, though he had at first naturally regarded the move as his (my) salvation, Konrad said to Wieser, after only six months he said to himself that this would possibly be his (my) salvation, then, after a year or so, he thought this would probably be his (my) salvation, but after two years he said to himself that of course this cannot be his (my) salvation, and after three years at the lime works she, Mrs. Konrad, faced up to the fact that, to the contrary, the lime works meant Konrad’s total destruction, although he himself was not yet aware of it, still kept suppressing his awareness of it while clinging to the hope that it might still be possible for him to get his book written here. In the end the two of them had taken to assuring each other that, as Wieser says, at least it cost next to nothing to live at the lime works. This was true enough, as everyone knows you could live at an absurdly low cost, by comparison with costs elsewhere, especially the big cities, in such remote country places as the Sicking area, but to let this fact come up as a reason for moving to the lime works, even if it came up only inside their own heads, had seemed to them extraordinarily humiliating. But at times they would actually settle for this as an acceptable reason, i.e., the thought that the lime works could actually be credited with having cut down on their living expenses necessarily seemed to be a saving thought for a few hours or days, as Konrad explained to Wieser. Considering, after all, that they had hardly any money left, Konrad confided to Wieser; hardly any money left at all, by then. Which reminds me of Wieser’s description of Konrad’s description of Konrad’s last trip to the bank: This morning I went to the bank, Konrad told Wieser, they let me have another ten thousand, these will be the last ten thousand, of course, they said to me. The young teller at the counter wouldn’t give me anything at all, you understand, but I went straight to the manager. The manager received me at once, most politely, of course. You know the manager’s office, of course, that little cubbyhole where the air is always so bad because they never open the window, but it’s only fair to remember, in this connection, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, that if they opened the manager’s office window the air coming in from outside would be even worse, the window being right above the parking space, you know. Well, in I went, to see the manager, those dark green metal filing cabinets, you know, Konrad said. The first thing to meet the eye, unavoidably, as you enter the manager’s cubbyhole of an office, is the portrait of the bank’s founder, Derflinger, hanging on the wall. Mustache with uptwisted ends, peasant face and so forth. The manager and I shake hands, says Konrad, I am invited to sit down, I sit down. On the desk in front of him the manager has my entire file, as I see immediately. Which means that the manager and I are about to have a final, the final, serious talk, I thought, and I was right; the manager started to leaf through my file, then he got on the phone, talking to somebody about the contents of my file, then he sent for the clerk, and another clerk, and a third, a fourth, a fifth, all having to do with my file, accounts, statements, etc., then he phones again, then he ponders the file, phones again, ponders over my papers again, etc. Actually the manager has all the papers relating to my account at hand, meaning all the papers accumulated through all the years I have had dealings with the bank. As the manager leafs through these papers I keep thinking that he may not let me draw any money at all, there is no telling by the look on his face: will he give me the money, won’t he give me the money, any money, he will, he won’t, I keep thinking, unable to decide one way or the other. Still more papers are brought in from time to time, men and women clerks wear themselves out bringing in all sorts of documents connected with my account. Finally one of the clerks is even ordered to fetch a ladder, and to climb up the ladder in order to pull out and bring down some papers from a drawer high up under the ceiling of the little office. The manager urges the clerk to get on with it, but the clerk argues that he can’t climb up the ladder any faster than he is climbing already, and later that he can’t climb down any faster than he is climbing down already, without getting hurt, he says he doesn’t want to break his neck, to which the manager finds nothing to say, probably restraining himself because the clerk is a good clerk, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. Then the manager noticed that through all this I had kept my coat on, so he leaped from his chair to help me out of my coat and hang it up on a coathook on his door, but I forestalled him by leaping up myself, took off the coat, and hung it on the coathook myself. It is warmer than usual in here, the manager said, and Konrad agreed, yes, it is rather warm. It was undoubtedly because of this that the manager was wearing only a lightweight summer suit, as Konrad had noticed at once, finding it odd that the manager was wearing this lightweight summer suit in the bank in the winter time, but, as the manager said to Konrad, according to Wieser, here in this room (he did not call it a cubbyhole, which it was) one cannot function in winter clothes, if you dress too warmly you catch a chill, all because of the central heating, one is always sitting in this overheated room (not “cubbyhole”) and worries about catching cold because one is feeling much too warm. Furthermore, it was impossible to regulate the circulation of fresh air inside the whole building. Meanwhile the documents kept piling higher on the manager’s desk, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, until it seemed I would lose sight of the manager altogether behind the mountain range of documents and files between us on his desk. At the end I could not see the manager at all, but I could still hear what he was saying. His face was hidden from me, Konrad told Wieser, but I could still hear his voice. Earlier Konrad had been struck by the fact, he said, that some of the clerks did not greet him when they entered the manager’s office, among them three out of the four women clerks who had come in, and Konrad attributed their conduct to his being so deeply indebted to the bank, still he felt that it was outrageous of them to snub so conspicuously a man like himself, a client of the bank who had kept up such excellent business relations with the bank for such a long time. Thinking it over, however, he decided that it might not have been a deliberate snub but only carelessness, that it was unintentional, and so forth. Meanwhile the manager was telephoning, over and over again, with the teller at the counter in the outer office, with the clerks in the offices upstairs, in the so-called credit division. At long last a number of promissory notes Konrad had signed during the past year and that had come due long since, were brought into the manager’s office. Konrad now understood that he was not going to get any money from the bank this time, but rather that he would be asked to pay his debts instead, beginning with these notes. Konrad was certain that his wife knew nothing about all this, according to Wieser, because he always kept their financial situation to himself, he had in fact developed a highly skilled technique for keeping secret anything relating to their so-called financial affairs. Now he feared that the catastrophic state of their financial condition would come to light and everything would come crashing down about their ears with shocking effect, Konrad told Wieser. He was thinking about this while the manager kept busying himself with Konrad’s financial papers and kept the clerks running back and forth on errands connected with these papers so that Konrad began to think that it was the haste with which they were kept moving that had prevented them from greeting him in the first place. While Konrad was sitting there in the bank everything that was going on combined to give him the impression that he was its sole center and focus, everything the bank did seemed concentrated entirely on him. The manager was still telephoning for yet another document relating to my account, Konrad told Wieser, there was no end to the papers the bank held concerning me. Bank clerks all have the same faces, Konrad said, banking people’s heads were stuffed with nothing but paper money and their faces were made of nothing but paper money. By staring hard at the founder’s, Derflinger’s, portrait, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, by gluing my eyes to the founder’s peasant face for considerable stretches of time, I managed to keep my naturally increasing perturbation under control. Again I thought I might after all be given some money, but this hope soon turned out to be baseless, and I resigned myself to the expectation that the manager would never again give me any money, in fact I heard him say so, although he had actually said nothing at all about money, what he did say was: How hot it is in here! and I understood him to mean that he would not give me any more money, which would have meant, Konrad said to Wieser, no, I cannot actually tell you what this would have meant, because it would have meant something too terrible to be imagined. What I suddenly heard the manager saying, actually, was that you (that is, myself) owe something above two million, most of it is owed to our bank, and if we subtract the value of your property, that still leaves a debt of at least one and a half million, the manager said. Your property is far from adequate coverage for your debts! the manager said repeatedly, Konrad claimed; he thought he heard the mana