The Lime Works

The Sense of Hearing. That the Konrads lived where they did (Konrad to Wieser) was of course the result of a calculated move for the benefit of his work on Hearing. All of it, everything having to do with the lime works, my dear Wieser, is calculated, Konrad is supposed to have said. It’s all been carefully thought through beforehand, though much of it may seem to be pure chance, even pure nonsense, nevertheless it was all thought out well ahead of time. Sensitivity in a state of immunity to surprise was sensitivity perfected, deadly in fact, Konrad is supposed to have said. Fro reports Konrad saying to him as follows: when he, Konrad, was in his room working on his book, he could hear his wife breathing upstairs in her room, believe it or not, it was a fact. Of course his wife’s breathing in her room, one flight up from his, was not normally audible in his room; he had tested it out time and again; nevertheless he did in fact hear his wife breathing in her room while he was in his room. But of course he, Konrad, was chronically in a state of the greatest possible attentiveness. He could even hear human voices across the lake, even though it was normally impossible to hear human voices across the lake from the lime works. Those people on the opposite shore would be heard by him, Konrad, not when they broke into a loud laugh or anything like that, all they had to do was talk normally to each other, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. How often I hear a sound, an actual sound, and the person I have been talking with will not have heard it, though I did. I hear people talking across the lake, and I get up and walk to the window where I can hear them even better although I can’t see them, he said, but my test cases hear and see nothing, Konrad is said to have told Fro, the problem of living with other people had always consisted in the fact that he was always hearing and seeing things while the others heard and saw nothing, and it was impossible to train them, no matter who they were, in hearing and seeing. A person either hears and sees, or else a person hears, or a person sees, or else he doesn’t hear or see and you cannot teach a person to hear and to see, but a person who hears and sees can perfect his hearing and his seeing, above all perfect his hearing, because it is more important for a person to hear than to see. But as for my wife, Konrad is supposed to have said, his efforts to perfect her hearing and seeing had failed midway: suddenly, as long as ten or fifteen years ago, he had been forced to realize that it was pointless to continue to teach her to hear and to see any better, he soon gave up trying, it was in a woman’s nature to give up a disciplined mental effort, a mental effort of the will, midway, in fact she would do it every time at the moment of highest concentration and also always at the moment when success seemed assured. The Urbanchich method he had been using, especially since they moved into the lime works, in the ruthless training of his wife, he was now keeping up for his own purposes only, he had dropped it from her program altogether. As regards my hearing of conversations between all sorts of people on the opposite shore, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I could often hear words, even difficult words, and sometimes the most complicated sentences, too, with truly exciting clarity, inside the lime works. Suddenly he said: my test cases, my wife for instance, Hoeller for instance, Wieser for instance, have never yet heard what I was hearing with the utmost clarity from the opposite shore, while I hear everything too clearly, Konrad is supposed to have said, though the others never hear a thing, and in fact you yourself never hear anything from the opposite shore, Konrad said. It was a triumph, after all, to hear absolutely everything, in consequence of his rigorous training in the course of decades of study, but at the same time it was terrible. Still, there was nothing like perfect, or nearly perfect hearing, for the greatest possible clarification. To revert to the subject of the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro that everyone seeing it for the first time was instantly dumbfounded by it. Every decade saw a new addition, a superstructure tacked on, some part of it torn down, and think of the vast number of subcellars, I always say to the public works inspector, Konrad said to Fro. Here, where the water is deepest, actually the deepest spot in the lake, he, Konrad, was looking out of the window. But anyone stepping suddenly from behind the surrounding thicket to confront the lime works could not possibly have any conception of its vastness, such as was reserved only for the man who lived inside, inhabited the place head and soul, as he phrased it, and therefore able to sense all of its true extent. Not grasp it, exactly, but get the measure of it, Konrad is supposed to have said. An onlooker would be irritated, a visitor offended; while the onlooker would be both attracted and repelled by the lime works, a visitor was bound to suffer immediately every kind of disappointment. Whoever sees the place will turn around and take to his heels, whoever enters or visits will leave it and take to his heels. How often Konrad had observed a man come out from behind the thicket, look alarmed and turn back, it was always the same reaction, Konrad is supposed to have said; people step out of the thicket and instantly turn back, or else they step inside the lime works and immediately come running out again. They always have a feeling of being watched, approaching a structure like the lime works one always has a feeling of being watched, watched from all sides, soon one feels unnerved, Konrad is supposed to have said; starting out with an exceptional alertness, a high tension of all the senses, there is a gradual ebbing away of strength, everyone entering the environs of the lime works tends to succumb suddenly to deep exhaustion. One could hardly help being struck by the way one look at the lime works would make people turn back, as if suddenly deserted by the courage to knock on the door and enter. If the mere sight of the lime works does not frighten them, Konrad is supposed to have said, then they give a start when they knock at the door, though very few go so far as to knock, knocking makes a terrible noise. Every architectural detail of the lime works is the result of a thousand years of calculations. For instance, stepping through the thicket, at first glance one would assume that inside the lime works one would have very little freedom to move around, very little elbow room, but in fact there was lots of elbow room inside the lime works. But then, every preconception, as well as every preconception of a preconception, was likely to be wrong, humiliatingly so, every time. Anybody who thought at all was bound to know that. The actuality always turned out to be, actually, something else, quite the opposite, always, of the given actuality, in fact. That our very existence is pure self-deception and nothing else cannot be stated unconditionally. In the lime works, Konrad said to Wieser, as in no other building I know of, and I know the largest and the handsomest and in general every possible kind of building, stone or brickwork structures of all kinds, you can walk forward and backward and on and on in every direction as much as you want without having to go the same way twice, you can progress in the most progressive way there. The construction as a whole aimed at total deceptiveness, so that the superficial onlooker would fall into the trap every time. The moment you enter the vestibule, Konrad said to Wieser, you see at once that you have been made a fool of, because the vestibule alone is three times the size of the annex, to take only one example, and of course the upstairs and the downstairs vestibules are the same size; the lime works, designed as a lordly manor, had for Konrad all the advantages of a kind of voluntary self-imprisonment at hard labor. (The vestibule leads through to the courtyard, which is paved with cobblestones, they tell me at Laska’s. Inside the lime works Konrad could walk about for hours without going crazy, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, even though the same kind of pacing the floor he did here, back and forth, this way and that, in buildings as large or even larger, possibly, would drive him crazy in a matter of minutes. His head, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, felt at home in just such a building as the lime works, he believed; his body, too. While his wife, oriented toward Toblach as she was, felt uneasy in such a building as the lime works, found herself constantly depressed by it, Konrad himself breathed freely and existed fully only in such buildings as the lime works that were naturally responsive to the highest claims of absolute originality, what he needed were rooms where you could take at least fifteen or twenty steps forward or backward without running into any obstacles, Konrad said to Wieser, by which I mean, you realize, long steps, the kind of strides I take when concentrating on my work, brain work, while, as you know, most of the rooms you enter, most of the rooms we have to live in, time and time again, to spend the night or simply to exist in, you can barely take eight or nine steps without running your head against a wall; it has always mattered enormously to me to be able to take those fifteen steps back and forth freely, Konrad said to Wieser, the moment he entered a house, he said to Wieser, he tried it out, to see whether he could take those fifteen or twenty steps in one direction. I immediately take my first steps in one direction without regard to anything else, and I count those steps; let’s see now, I ask myself, can I take fifteen or twenty steps this way and fifteen or twenty steps back again, and I check out the situation only to discover, more often than not, that, as I told you, I cannot even take eight or nine steps in a straight line, whereas here at the lime works, Konrad said, I can easily take my twenty or thirty steps right off, in every room, wherever I want to, without running my head into a wall. In large rooms like these I can breathe again, of course, Konrad said. But his wife found large rooms oppressive. I feel depressed in small rooms, she feels depressed in large rooms. My wife is of course conditioned by the cramped rooms in Toblach, she grew up in those small, cramped Toblach rooms, in the general constrictedness of Toblach, everything in Toblach is uptight, everywhere in Toblach one always has the feeling that one is suffocating, Konrad said, and anyway in small rooms he always feels he is suffocating, the same feeling he has in mountain glens and so he has it in Toblach every time, while his sister, who is accustomed to Toblach, feels crushed by the size of a large room, in a vast landscape she feels crushed by the vastness of the landscape, under an enormous sky she feels crushed by the enormousness of the sky, with a man of stature she feels crushed by the man’s stature. By the same token Konrad always felt he was about to suffocate when he was inside the annex, which is why he so seldom visited Hoeller who lives in the annex, Konrad went to see Hoeller in the annex only as a last resort, after a few minutes inside the annex he felt as if he were running out of oxygen and rapidly suffocating: some people simply preferred small cramped rooms and others preferred big spacious rooms, Konrad is supposed to have said, a conversation of any extent with Hoeller in the annex had gradually come to be impossible, even though Hoeller was a man toward whom Konrad felt the most protective love of which he, Konrad, was capable, but the cramped space in the annex and his own violent reactions to the constricted feeling of the annex the moment he entered it, made it impossible to visit Hoeller in the annex except for the briefest possible time, Konrad is said to have told Wieser. When they moved into the lime works it was immediately obvious that his wife would move into the smallest of the rooms. But even in her room, which actually is the smallest room in the lime works, Konrad was still able, as he said to Wieser, to take easily fifteen steps forward and fifteen steps back. From the first it had been clear that his wife would move straight up to the second floor, they had both decided on this as far back as Mannheim where they were staying just before they moved to the lime works, because the second floor was the most salubrious, a judgment confirmed every time by the expert opinions of every kind of specialist, they never gave a moment’s consideration to putting her on the first floor or on the ground floor or on the third floor, Konrad said. Strange as it seems, people are always saying that the second floor is the best for a person’s health, everybody chooses the second floor if possible, they all prefer it. Myself, I moved straight into my room here on the first floor, Konrad is supposed to have said. From the first they had agreed upon this, here is where I go, into this room on the first floor, and this is where she goes, into this second-floor room. Here in the lime works he had almost all the right conditions, conditions that could not be bettered, for getting on with his work, he said, and at first he did not ask himself what it meant for his wife to be moved suddenly into the lime works, even though he knew what it meant to her, he did not keep thinking about it, one simply can’t keep thinking about a lot of things that one is aware of. That he had a window overlooking the lake where the water was deepest was an additional advantage for his work, even if he could not or would not say what kind of an advantage. It was also advantageous that his wife, too, had a window overlooking the water, though not the deepest part as in his case, because, as he said to Wieser, she must on no account have her window where the water was deepest. At first his wife had wanted a window facing on the courtyard (her usual preference for that enclosed feeling!) or even a window giving onto the rockface, but she had let him talk her into realizing the advantageousness of having a window overlooking the water instead, and in time she did in fact come to spend hours, what was he saying? whole days on end, staring into the water, Konrad said. As for himself, Konrad said, a room facing the courtyard would have been bad for his work; a room looking out at the rockface would have been impossible, out of the question. To move into a room facing the courtyard or the rockface would have been a deliberate invitation to total despair, something he was prone to fall into anyway. When it came to furnishing the house, as Konrad once explained to Fro: though we did our own rooms completely the first day, once and for all, putting in only the most indispensable things, the bare necessities, you understand, we did nothing at all about the rest of the building. Since we moved in during the winter, we had to use the barge, it took two trips by barge across the lake, Konrad said to Fro, two full loads of those hundreds of thousands of household effects we still owned even after all our travels all over the world during all those decades, Fro; it was incredible how much furniture and household stuff we still had when we moved into the lime works, despite two world wars and all those catastrophic unheavals! it was fantastic, Fro, considering that we never lifted a finger to hold on to all these furnishings and household goods, quite the contrary, neither my wife nor I ever gave a moment’s thought to the stuff, and of course all these hundreds upon thousands of furnishings and household goods represent only a fraction of what we used to have, because my wife, after all, brought a great deal of property into the marriage and I also contributed a good deal, and what with a few deaths in the family, war casualties you know, we acquired quite a bit more, though we lost much of it in