Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

i with her that day, and so little was accomplished by that time, it was quite impossible for me to turn around and walk off to my own room. Suddenly he hit upon the idea of asking her whether he should bring her something to eat from the kitchen. But he got no response at all to this. Was she in pain? Even this question brought no response of any kind. If she was in pain, something had to be done about it, would she take a pill? he asked her; no answer. He had just decided to read some Novalis to her after all, but as he was about to start she finally signaled that she wanted to get up and walk a few steps, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, and she actually let him help her up and walk her to the window and back, and again, and a third time, to the window and back to her chair, at which point she was so exhausted that he barely managed to get her back into the chair where she ended in total collapse. If only I had the patience, she is supposed to have said, if only I had the patience, but I have no patience, when he quoted her Konrad even tried to imitate her voice, according to Fro, who says that Konrad repeatedly said to him, to Fro, that is, if only I had patience, if only I had patience. But I have simply run out of all patience, she is supposed to have said. Afterward he read her a long passage of the Novalis, taking care to read in a level tone of voice, with an even distribution of emphasis, his style of delivery could certainly be described as monotonous, he is supposed to have said to Fro, an absolutely monotonous delivery was the most effective, he felt. One hour of reading aloud to her like this, and he was at last able to continue the Urbanchich exercises with her until far into the night. While reading the Novalis to her he held both her hands firmly, thus gradually calming her down. This situation recurred at intervals of a week or a week and a half, but it naturally had begun to recur at ever-decreasing intervals. As his experiments went on, she naturally did not hear him equally well at all times, as for instance if he pronounced the words all the same, power , or powerlessness loudly, she might not understand, no matter how clearly he said these words, she would fail to understand them, and yet he might pronounce the same words, all the same, power , or powerlessness in the merest whisper, and as indistinctly as possible, and she would nevertheless understand. It was a complete mystery to him how her hearing could be so absolutely unpredictable. He would say, for instance, what an effort, to walk , say it loudly and clearly, and she did not understand, whereupon he would whisper the same words almost inaudibly, what an effort, to walk , and she instantly understood him, etc. He realized, of course, that a mere change in the weather, a pain that resulted from such a change in the weather, was enough to make a different woman of her at times. But by and large he was continuing to achieve remarkable results with her using the Urbanchich method, which he was constantly expanding even as he applied it. For some time now he had been experimenting with consonants, until it became impossible to experiment further with consonants, whereupon he switched to vowels, then suddenly back to consonants, and so forth. If she suddenly showed signs of being unable to go on, a glance out of the window would invariably reveal the reason, he could see by the look of the air outside that the weather was changing, etc. From disconnected words, words that formed no sentences, he would shift to whole sentences and vice versa, from sentences to disconnected words. The ear, and her ear in particular, was so extremely sensitive to even the most inconspicuous changes in the weather, which go on incessantly, as you know, Konrad said to Wieser. There’s a change in the weather every instant, another kind of weather every instant, he said. To me: even just looking at the trees, I can see a change in the weather, looking at a rock spur, at a body of water, at the walls, there it is, a change in the weather. Fro reports: Konrad had turned abruptly from using vowels to using whole sentences in the exercises, he would pronounce the following sentence: Justice, when someone kills another , and she would hear this sentence even though he had spoken it quite indistinctly, she indisputably heard it when he mumbled it into her left ear; her comment: the i in kills stayed in her ear for about eight seconds; naturally, he thought. There were times when, merely looking out of the window in the morning, he instantly knew that the exercises of that day should involve only vowels, or only consonants, or only sentences with u s or only sentences with e s, or only rather long sentences with o s, or only short sentences. Looking out the window, for instance, and taking a deep breath, he knew what today’s experiment should be. Or else, standing by the window, he would decide momentarily: now, up to her room and say to her quickly: swarms of birds, more and more swarms make the park swarthy , and demand her instant comment on this. On Christmas Eve, exactly a year before her violent death, he had gone to her room at about five o’clock and repeated to her the sentence: Mingling with men and women one only messes oneself up the more , saying it alternately into her right and her left ear. He said that he murmured this sentence into her ears eighty or ninety times, and exacted a comment on it every time, until she collapsed in a coma, it never occurred to him until nearly eleven P.M. that it was, after all, Christmas Eve. She had forgotten all about it on account of being so intensely preoccupied with the Urbanchich exercises, and he had failed to remind her, and so they both went to bed that night at about one A.M. without his remembering to mention it to her, next day he is supposed to have said to her: Tonight is Christmas Eve, actually it was yesterday but for us it is Christmas Eve today, of course I knew it was Christmas Eve yesterday but I didn’t draw it to your attention because we were in the midst of our experiments, so it will have to be Christmas Eve for us today, he is supposed to have said, and then she said: You terrible man! this “Terrible man!” Wieser says Konrad mimicked, using exactly her tone of voice. She often believed that there were times when he was not experimenting with her, Konrad, is supposed to have told Wieser, though in fact he was experimenting incessantly, even when he was merely saying Good Morning, or Good Night, when he asked her whether she wanted to change, or needed him to comb her hair, or was interested in eating something, he was always experimenting with her. He might ask her: Shall I read Novalis to you? but he was actually experimenting. Whether he was standing up or sitting down, pacing the floor, keeping silence, he was always consciously experimenting. His whole relationship with her was nothing else than one continuous experiment, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. To the works inspector: “Using the Urbanchich method, I am experimenting her (his wife) to death.” Of course her earache grew worse, it went without saying that the pain in her ear would gradually spread to her whole head, since he was intensifying his experimentation, moving on to ever harder, ever more strenuous exercises, he is supposed to have told Fro. What worked the most in his favor was that all the people with whom he experimented, meaning everybody he had anything to do with, had no inkling of the fact that he was experimenting with them whenever he was with them, and not only then. For a whole year he studied only the effects on the hearing of scratching sounds, slaps, drilling, drops, sounds of a rushing, whirring, humming sort, he is supposed to have told Fro. Blowing sounds. He had tried out hundreds of thousands of scraping noises. Her receptivity for twelve-tone music, he is supposed to have told Fro, had played the most important part in his experiments, including the orchestral works of Webern, Schoenberg’sЧитать дальше