’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 increasing immensity of the material, was a probability that kept increasing in direct ratio to the increase in the quantity of the material. Ultimately the quantity of conceptual material was likely to crush a man altogether. At first he had believed that the book was a decided possibility for him, then he believed it was decidedly impossible, and went on alternating between its possibility and its impossibility, but the intervals in which he thought it would be possible for him to write the book were growing shorter, while the intervals in which the book seemed to be a lost cause were growing longer. But he had never quite lost the sense of the possibility of starting to write it, of being able to get started, actually he believed even now (only six months ago, that is!) that he would suddenly feel able to sit down and write it all in one sitting, as he is supposed to have expressed himself to Wieser. After all it was a simple matter of sitting down and starting to write the book, only a question of a favorable constellation of circumstances that would suddenly enable him to get it all down on paper once he got started, which he could not believe would fail to come along sooner or later. Every such constellation of circumstances occurs some time at the right moment, Konrad is supposed to have said, favorable or unfavorable, it was only a question of recognizing the one right moment of such a favorable or unfavorable constellation when it came along. Basically it was simply a matter of sitting down and writing whatever it was you had to write. Once the right moment presents itself, it must be utilized, and he had merely lacked the chance, hitherto, to seize and utilize the right moment, though undoubtedly the right moment had presented itself to him quite often already, he had only to think of the favorable time in Brussels or in Mannheim or the even more favorable time in Merano or Deggendorf or Landshut, it was only that he had been unable to utilize any of them, at the right moment everything was always ready, but one failed to utilize it, most people never managed to utilize the uniquely favorable moments in life, though this was not much of a consolation to him, Konrad hoped he would not turn out to be one of their number, especially considering how important his book was, but inside every man, every brain, every head there was, he always said, the possibility of everything coming together just once, and it was this