The Lime Works

brooks no delay was another that Konrad simply could not get out of his head, it kept running through his head for days and weeks on end until the day he committed the murder. For years Konrad had gone to the bank and asked for money and the bank had simply handed over the money, for years this had been a bi-weekly occurrence, a habit, Konrad would simply spend a morning going from the lime works to Sicking, to enter the bank and withdraw a lesser or larger sum, as the manager phrased it, actually the bank always let him withdraw whatever sum he asked for without the least difficulty, whether it was five thousand or ten thousand or two thousand or one thousand or five hundred, or twenty thousand and so forth. It had never occurred to the bank to refuse to let Konrad draw any sum whatsoever, the bank had always met every one of Konrad’s claims on it with good grace, in fact, as the manager found he must say, rather handsomely. But the time had come when this had to end. In the circumstances, Konrad said to Wieser, I naturally decided to get up and leave instantly, to go, to get clean out of there was what I was thinking, and I did actually rise and take my coat from the hook on the door, Konrad said to Wieser, I held out my hand to the manager, and the manager, who had of course leaped up from his chair as soon as I had gotten up from mine, gave me his hand and said: Very well, you can withdraw ten thousand, we will of course let you have another ten thousand. The manager actually said “of course,” Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, of course of course of course I keep hearing him saying it even now, he was saying of course, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, it was grotesque, he did it from sheer habit, according to Konrad, of course, when it would have been so much more a matter of course, Konrad said, to have given me nothing more. The manager also used the expression “oblige,” “to oblige you” just like that. As I had used to withdraw the round sum of ten thousand at the beginning of the month, Konrad said to Wieser, I went, after shaking the manager’s hand and saying goodbye to him, and withdrew the round sum of ten thousand, as was my habit. I slipped the money in my pocket and left the bank for the last time, I left the bank once and for all, Konrad said to Wieser. I did a little shopping, I bought shoelaces, tallow, bond paper, shirt buttons, fresh mitten wool for my wife, and went back to the lime works. The bank certainly had behaved handsomely once again, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. On the way home I naturally realized the utter hopelessness of our situation. Actually, if we spend the absolute minimum, I was thinking, while I walked as far as the rock spur and back to the tavern and from the tavern to the sawmill and from the sawmill to the rock spur and behind the annex and past the annex to the lime works, we have a few weeks more, and if we spend less than that, even, we might eke out a few months on these ten thousand. If we can reduce our requirements from the minimal to something even more minimal in expenditures, it’s no problem, because we are, Wieser reports Konrad saying, the most unassuming two people in the world. Of course I must get my book written in this period of grace, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but once my book is written nothing else matters, and it is just possible that the most hopeless situation is the most favorable to the writing of the book. Insofar as I was able to let this idea gain ground until it became my dominant idea, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, I no longer felt any uneasiness, quite the contrary, I walked whistling into my room. That evening, as I recall, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, she suddenly said, interrupting my reading from Kropotkin, dance, following it up immediately with the word carnival dance. She pronounces the words carnival dance several times in a row, I heard the words carnival dance several times in a row. Then she says: Do you remember? and then she pronounces the words Venice, Parma, Florence, Nice, Paris, Deggendorf, Landshut, Schönbrunn, Mannheim, Sighartsein, she says, and Henndorf. But it all goes back at least thirty years, she says. Dances, dances, she cries, again and again: You put up a lot of resistance, but I never gave up, I simply would not give up. In Paris, in Rome, remember? Let’s go dancing, dancing! I said, and we went dancing, we went to all the dances. My insistence was more ruthless than your resistance. You dressed me, in Rome you put on my red dress, in Florence my blue dress, in Venice the blue dress, in Parma the white dress, the dress with the long train in Madrid, she says. Suddenly she says: the dress with the train, yes, the dress with the long train, I want to wear it, put it on me now, yes, do put it on me, put it on me! and so I put on her the dress with the train. Come, the mirror, she demands, and then: come on, my face powder compact. And she powders her face and looks in the mirror, she alternates between powdering her face and looking in the mirror. Suddenly she says: I don’t see anything, I can’t see a thing. Actually, Konrad said to Wieser, she couldn’t see the mirror for the cloud of loose face powder she had generated. It could be a good thing that I can’t see myself, she says, and then goes on covering herself with more powder. Her whole dress is covered with powder, by this time, Konrad told Wieser, and meanwhile she keeps on saying: I must put more powder on, I must cover myself with powder, from top to bottom, she says, and when the powder in the compact is all used up she says: don’t we have more face powder somewhere? there’s got to be more face powder! find it, find it, she says, and sure enough I find a second compact and she goes on covering her face with more powder, Konrad said to Wieser, until suddenly I can no longer see her face at all, she has completely covered her face with powder. I’m all powdered up! all powdered up! she says: all powdered up! she cries, Konrad said, and suddenly she is laughing and crying: all covered with powder, all powdered over, I’ve covered myself all up with powder! and she laughs and cries and laughs and cries, the same thing over and over. Then she suddenly falls silent and straightens up a bit and says: that’s good. And again: that’s good. And then: The play is finished. Broken off. The play is broken off, finished. Here’s a scandal! Imagine, she cries out, Konrad told Wieser, we’ve got a scandal here, a scandal in our house, a scandal! Then, after a brief silence: that’s good, she says, that’s good. She is utterly exhausted, and I take off her dress, the dress with the train. You must give this dress a good shaking, she says, Konrad told Wieser, the whole dress is covered with face powder, go out into the hall and give it a good shaking out! and I do as she tells me, and shake out the dress in the hall. At eleven I tell her Good Night and go to my room, Konrad said, but in my room I find that I have left the Kropotkin in her room, so I go back to her room to fetch my Kropotkin. To my surprise I find her already fast asleep, probably from exhaustion. I feel my way to the table in the dark, and pick up the Kropotkin and go back to my own room. Reading Kropotkin relaxes me. About two A.M., the time I usually fall asleep, Konrad told Wieser, I fell asleep. To Fro: It wasn’t the first time we sat together in total darkness. We’d eaten nothing for supper. I can’t lift a finger to do the least thing, cut my fingernails, cut my toenails, nothing, Konrad said. Absolute passivity. I tell her: I shall now read to you from the Kropotkin, but I can’t do it, or I say, I shall read the Novalis, but I can’t do it. There’s the depressing awareness, too, of sitting forever opposite my totally exhausted wife. Buck up, I say to myself, and read her the Kropotkin again, try; or, come on now, try the Novalis again, but I can’t begin, I can’t even muster the strength to pick myself up and walk to my own room. Sitting opposite her, I become more clearly cognizant of my wife’s run-down, shabby state, of my own run-down, shabby state. Looking out of the window, though I can’t see anything in the darkness, I know nevertheless that the weather is the cause of all this. The weather alone can drive a person like myself and a person like her crazy, on top of all our basic reasons for despair. Both of us immobile in our chairs. Till dawn we sit without a word, utterly exhausted, utterly worn out and utterly exhausted in our chairs, half awake, clutching at each other from time to time, in silence, so as not to go out of our minds from one moment to the next. The funeral of the sawmill owner: Hoeller comes to fetch me to the funeral, Konrad says to Fro, we walk together under the rock spur to the sawmill. I’d managed to dig up some black articles of clothing and to put them on, Konrad says to Fro. A pair of warm woolen socks I once bought in Mannheim for the funeral of my cousin Albert, my youngest cousin. And the warm black vest I picked up in Hamburg, and I have my black Borsalino on my head. The black woolen muffler around my neck, of course. Black shoes, bought in Venice. A man has to be careful, Hoeller is supposed to have said to Konrad, he goes to a funeral and is liable to catch his death. I’ve seen it many times, myself, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro; a man attends a funeral, catches a chill, and the next thing you know it’s his own funeral. On our way to the rock spur, I muse about the sawmill owner and myself, and it seems to me we always got along quite well, he and I. A man who owns black clothes wears his black clothes to a funeral, I am thinking, while on the way to the sawmill. The moment you reach the house of mourning you go straight to the room where the corpse lies in state. You press the widow’s or the widower’s hand. You say something about what a good, dear person the departed was. Walking in procession behind the coffin everyone walks slowly, not speaking, only murmuring. Not a word is understood. Special funerals attract hundreds of people. The sawmill owner’s funeral is a special funeral. Following a special funeral attended by special kinds of people and with a special kind of clergyman officiating, everyone enters a special kind of restaurant and eats a special kind of meal, I am thinking, Konrad said. A special kind of vehicle, specially decorated and drawn by specially groomed, specially decorated horses, rolls along, followed by specially concerned persons. The funeral cortege is a special arrangement, a special liturgy is pronounced at the graveside, all of it involving naturally a special expense. The day of such a funeral is a special day, I am thinking, Konrad says to Fro, as I walk toward the sawmill, toward which hundreds of people are walking now, all of them in black, Konrad says to Fro, and sometimes Hoeller is in front of me, sometimes he is behind me, because my walk is irregular, but in the end Hoeller is walking beside me again and I am thinking: the fire chief is going to make a special speech. As we reach the sawmill I can actually see that everybody is dressed specially for the occasion. Especially fine wreaths, especially white, clean clothes on the children, the especially costly-looking coffin. Finally, at the open grave, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I wonder whether to keep my hat on, or not, if I take the hat off I shall catch my death of cold, if I keep it on, people will talk, so I keep my hat on. The fire chief makes an especially short speech, which at first takes me aback, Konrad says to Fro, until I remember that the fire chief and the sawmill owner were enemies, which explains the shortness of the fire chief’s speech. The priest’s sermon is all the longer. The depth of an open grave always shocks me afresh, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, we do our best to be brave and put up a bold front, but the depth of those open graves frightens us every time. Did I have no differences with the sawmill owner, I am thinking, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, and No, I had no differences of any kind with the sawmill owner, Konrad is supposed to have decided on the way home from the funeral. Actually, Konrad says, the sawmill owner was a decent fellow, as he told Hoeller on their way back to the lime works, though afterwards he brooded for a long time over why he said this, and most of all about why he said it to Hoeller on the way home, why he said that the sawmill owner was a decent fellow, he could just as well have said a good fellow, or at least a fellow you couldn’t find fault with, unobjectionable and so forth. The Konrads had planned to spend the rest of that day reading, he reading aloud to her alternately from the Kropotkin and the Novalis, as I was reading I kept on thinking about the funeral, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, and these thoughts were affecting my voice so that it sounded strange. Fro: a dream of Konrad’s: in a sudden, not readily classifiable fit of insanity (catatonia?) Konrad had taken to painting the whole interior of the lime works black, from all the way up under the roof to all the way downward, gradually, to the ground, using a mat black varnish, several pailfuls of which he had found in the attic. He would not leave the lime works, he said to himself, until he had finished painting the entire interior with this mat black varnish, it was of the greatest importance to him to get it all painted black, everything inside the lime works, with this paint he had found in the attic. Ceilings, walls, whatever was left of the furniture, all of it was painted black inside and out, and he even painted his wife’s room, then everything inside his wife’s room, and finally he painted his wife black inside and out, imagine it if you can, everything in her room including her French invalid chair, simply everything as I said, and finally everything in his own room, he needed exactly seven days, Fro says, to paint the whole lime works and the whole interior and everything inside the interior black inside and out. The instant he finished, Fro says, he locked up the lime works and ran past the annex and up the rock spur, from the top of which he hurled himself down. Fro, today: Konrad lives in constant fear that the man from the bank might come knocking on his door, which is why he doesn’t open the door. A man from the bank, or one of the policemen might be standing outside his front door, and so Konrad no longer leaves his room, even when his wife is ringing or knocking for help. Fro himself was admitted to the lime works only at a moment of abysmal despair. Konrad heard a knock at the front door quite often, someone knocking with intrepid stubbornness, but Konrad did not believe it was Hoeller, because Hoeller would not do such a thing. The knocking gave the impression of someone wanting to smash up the lime works. Konrad is supposed to have said: sitting in my chair I hear this knocking, and I wait from one knock to the next, the irregular intervals between knocks made it impossible for him to guess who it might be. Is it someone from the bank? someone from the police? he wonders. He stays immobile in his chair. He won’t open the door. He practices self-restraint. He listens to his wife’s ringing for hours, but he thinks: there’s no sense in going up there. Nothing makes any sense, he thinks. To Wieser, with whom I was able to close the deal on his life insurance policy today, Konrad is supposed to have said that the immense amount of material he had collected in his head for his book was in itself enough to destroy this kind of book; the probability that such a work might be destroyed by the sheer immensity of the material, the constantly increasi