Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

Moses and Aaron , the string quartets of Béla Bartok, all kinds of music. But it was all done with a view to the book as a whole; how easy it would be for a dilettante to fritter himself away, lose himself in a sea of details, Konrad is supposed to have said. To keep everything relating to the sense of hearing under surveillance simultaneously required a nearly superhuman effort. Why, his researches into the auditory sense of various kinds of animals alone had taken him not less than two years, supposedly. Konrad might often let a whole hour go by without letting his wife know that he was experimenting, only to say suddenly: Hearing Experiment I, get ready to go, and then the words lust, lost, least , followed by a so-called auditory sound-color control quiz: Is the u a somber sound? Is the o somber? Is the e somber? He often followed this up with the word streamlet , the purest word of all. He had experimented with the word streamlet for ten years, he is supposed to have told Wieser. Fro: the following procedure was repeated every day: Konrad went into his wife’s room and said something, on which she had to comment. He would accept no so-called excuses. Sometimes she dared to ask him a question, such as: Is this an experiment or not? and he would answer Yes , or No , because she believed that there were times when he was not experimenting, not knowing that he was experimenting incessantly, that to him everything was an experiment. Even though he had the whole book quite finished in his head, as he believed, he never ceased experimenting, so as to complete his work even further, to perfect it, even though it was quite complete in his head already, and although he might at any moment sit down and write it all up without fear that he did not have it fully worked out in his head, if the possibility of suddenly writing it all down should arise. He was simply filling up the time with experiments until the moment arrived, as he confidently and unwaveringly believed it would, when he would finally write it down. Once such a piece of work had been embarked upon, it was possible to do all that could be done with the Urbanchich method, he is supposed to have told Fro. His kind of experimentation, pursued for such a long time, could not suddenly be dropped without ruining everything. Without his wife, who had sacrificed herself to him entirely, he would never have the entire book worked out in his head as firmly as he did. Every day, every moment, it was she alone who made it all possible. Demonstrations of fact, again and yet again, were what made the book possible. The experimenter, he felt, had to go on experimenting, that was his job, until he ceased asking himself why he was experimenting, a question it was not his province to ask himself, he was supposed to experiment himself to death if necessary. It was simpler to experiment with short sentences, he is supposed to have said, even simpler than that to use single words, simplest of all to use vowels only. It was more complicated, more strenuous, especially, of course, for his wife, to work with long composite sentences, the longest, most intricately complex sentences, the kind it admittedly gave him the greatest pleasure to experiment with, or such sentences as this, for example: The connections which, as you know, are quite independent of the interconnection of the whole, but are nevertheless connected, in the most delicate ways, with the connections of the connection which is independent of the interconnection , and so forth. You could say, of course, that the whole thing was crazy, but then you would have to say that everything was crazy, which is the simple truth, that everything is in fact crazy, still, nobody would dare say such a thing because, if he did, everyone would say he was crazy, which could only lead to everything coming to an end, everything gradually coming to a stop of its own accord, Konrad is supposed to have said. Human beings (all mankind) owed their very existence, after all, to inconsistency (the utmost). As for himself, Konrad, there was nothing left that meant anything to him except experimental sentences, he is supposed to have said, experimentation was all there was, all he cared about, the whole world was an experiment, everything was; and then he is supposed to have said: It’s not so much the length of the sentences that matters, nor the brevity of sentences (or words) that is decisive, not just, for instance, the a and o and i and u sounds, but all of it together, always. Suddenly, he once told Fro, he was standing at the window, he could not see a thing, he could hear but he could not see, not a thing. His eyes must be failing him, he thought; they had been getting worse all the time. At such times he would have to stand at the window with his eyes shut for a long time before he could open his eyes and see again. He is also reported to have complained about the problems he had heating the place in winter; he could not let Hoeller do it because Hoeller made so much noise and such a mess doing it, so that if Hoeller does it (gets the furnace going) I lose two or three valuable hours of experimental time. But if Konrad undertook to do it himself, it cost him an enormous effort just to overcome his inner resistance to doing it. Our chimneys don’t draw, and so our stoves don’t draw, he is supposed to have said. He had to go around endlessly checking up on the stoves and stoking them. It was a good thing that the lime works stoves could be stoked from the hallways. It had taken him years to learn how to stoke the stoves in the lime works. Every single stove had to be tended differently from every other, it was a regular science! he is supposed to have said, actually a science! The temporary failure of his eyesight lasted a little longer each time, he should have seen a doctor about it long since, but he wouldn’t see a doctor. Only a year ago his eyes failed him only every three to four weeks, but by now he was stricken every day, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser. Of course it was connected with his work. Anyone who used his eyes as intensively as he did was bound to damage his eyesight, it was to be expected. His wife did not have this kind of eye trouble, although she had always suffered from poor vision, but her poor vision had not deteriorated any further in the course of time. But Konrad himself had been naturally endowed with the keenest eyesight, which he had, however, been subjecting to the severest strain, he is supposed to have told Wieser. He also had an extraordinarily good ear. His kind of eye trouble not infrequently led to total blindness, Konrad is supposed to have said; he happened to know that a close relative of his had suffered the same kind of eye trouble and then suddenly went completely blind; Konrad was afraid of this happening to him, too. One tended to think that this eye trouble would clear up, but it didn’t clear up, and one found oneself suddenly blind, from one minute to the next, no matter what one did to prevent it, nothing was any use. To Fro, Konrad is supposed to have said two days before the murder: When we moved in, we put in mostly new flooring, I think, and here I sit in a chair opposite my wife’s chair, looking to her as though I were reading my Kropotkin, but in fact I am not reading Kropotkin at all, I can’t seem to concentrate on it, and even though I have the Kropotkin open and though I am reading in it line by line and word for word, my mind is on something entirely different, what I am thinking is that when we moved in we put in new floors, larch wood floors; larch wood darkens with time, I ordered the widest planks obtainable, irregular planks but laid by one of the best flooring men anywhere, a man who had moved from Toblach, my wife’s home town, to Sicking. Plank by plank, tongue in groove, groove to tongue, I keep thinking, and in the second story, I am thinking, I had all the window sills redone, on the third floor it was the window jambs, all the door frames on the first floor, the ground floor. On the first floor it was also necessary to install a new ceiling, I am thinking, sitting opposite my wife and pretending to be reading my Kropotkin, I turn the pages in the Kropotkin as if I had just finished reading a page. At first I did not intend to do any repairs or restorations in the lime works, but I ended by doing so much. This area is famous for its good but unreliable craftsmen, I keep thinking, but all the work I had done here in the lime works was beautifully finished, in the shortest possible time. If it’s to be done at all, I thought, then I might as well let them restore all the stucco work on the ceiling of the ground floor reception hall, and no sooner had I thought this than I ordered it all done. But no one looking at it must suspect, I said to the plasterer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, that any of this stucco work has been restored, and the plasterer understood perfectly, in fact there is not the slightest suggestion anywhere that a restoration of the stucco work on the ground floor reception hall ceiling has been effected. An excellent man, it seems to me, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I was thinking while pretending to read Kropotkin, the kind of work he did on that ceiling had to be totally inobtrusive, and he did in fact patch up and restore the stucco ornamentations on the ceilings in the most inobtrusive fashion. Wherever you look these days you can see stucco ornamentation ruined by amateurish restorations and patching, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. And we put new stoves in almost every room, in all the places that were never heated before we came, he said. He had gone into the lime works and exclaimed: Why, everything is in wrack and ruin here, the place has been totally neglected, it’s hopelessly run down! and he thought of how shocked he had been by all that neglect and deterioration, while his wife believed he was reading his Kropotkin, he is supposed to have said to Fro. Still, it turned out that the neglect had done only superficial damage, the dilapidation was only superficial, he is supposed to have told Fro. Basically the lime works were an incredibly solid piece of construction work! The lime works, in fact, represented an excellent historical record of the past four or five centuries, architecturally, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, anyone who had the time and felt like it could find here a record of every historical detail of all those centuries. Finally the senselessness of pretending to read Kropotkin all along while thinking about something quite different, in fact the opposite of Kropotkin, made me shut the book. All that continuous reading, said my wife just as I was shutting the book, weakens your eyes, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, it’s because you are incessantly reading your Kropotkin that you have all that eye trouble more and more often. Note that she doesn’t say it is my reading that does it, but that it is my reading of Kropotkin that aggravates my eye trouble. He then gets up, he says, and goes to look out the window, where he sees Hoeller passing by down there, Hoeller always passes by at this time, Konrad thinks, wearing his blue coat and swinging his ax; funny how talking with Hoeller always is so relaxing. Whenever he starts talking with Hoeller, about hunting and the weather, right away he feels more relaxed. Konrad felt he had an intimate understanding of Hoeller’s ways, and there could be nothing mysterious to Hoeller, either, about Konrad and about the way Konrad and his crippled wife had been living in the lime works for several years now, Konrad thought, as he said to Fro. The first time Konrad and I met (in the timber forest) Konrad said that although he ought to be expressing himself, if at all, with the greatest circumspection, because of his eleven or twelve previous convictions for so-called libel in this country, he nevertheless did express himself, or, as you might say, he daily committed the error of expressing himself, of expressing opinions, of telling facts that always fitted the definition of a so-called libel of somebody; no matter what he said, he always turned out to have said something libelous, but strictly speaking, you might say that everything he could say about this weird country, with its extremes of inhumanity and irresponsibility all on the increase as they were, could be considered a so-called libel, entailing the highest probability of his being hailed, in consequence, before an invariably prejudiced, biased court; such a possibility faced him at all times, especially considering his many previous convictions for libel and simple or aggravated assault, he was in perpetual danger of being denounced, slandered, charged, and convicted, no matter what he might say, or come out with, in the ears of the people around here it always registered as a so-called libelous statement, and it was only by chance that charges were not preferred against him every day of his life, because he did go out every day and saw people and inevitably expressed the opinions he held to them, because he knew the truth and so he expressed the truth, and although the opinions and truths he expressed were decidedly worth expressing and hearing, still, those involved, part and parcel as they were of this degenerate country, full of mistrustfulness as it was, his facts and opinions were invariably legally actionable and punishable. Life was not easy for a man of character, his kind of character, to endure life the way he was made, to get through it somehow, demanded the most strenuous intellectual and physical self-discipline, the utmost spiritual and physical tension, all of which indescribable inner pressures forced out and conditioned, as it were, all the things he had to say, so that he had to be resigned to being a man expressly made, designed, and bound to give offense, always, a problem he intended to solve but which he apparently did not succeed in solving. A world, he said, in which one could be hailed before a court for defamation of character, so called, and which maintained that it had such a thing as character, when obviously character was precisely what had disappeared from this world, if character had ever existed in it; not only was it a terrible, a horrifying world, but it was also a ridiculous world, but unfortunately each one of us had to resign himself to existing in a world that was not only terrible and horrifying but also ridiculous, each and every one of us had to come to terms with this fact; how many hundreds of thousands, how many millions of people had already come to terms with it, even in his own unquestionably terrible, horrifying, and ridiculous country, our own country, the most ridiculous and most terrible of them all. Speaking of his country, his own homeland, a man could not exist in it, get along in it for a single day, except by never once telling the truth, to anyone, about anything, because the lie alone kept things moving in this country, the lie with its seven veils and embroideries and masquerades and intimidations. In this country the lie is valued above all, the truth only gets one prosecuted, condemned, and ridiculed. Which is why Konrad did not conceal the fact that his entire nation had taken refuge in the lie. To tell the truth was to make yourself culpable and ridiculous, the mob or the courts decided whether a man had made himself culpable or ridiculous or culpableЧитать дальше