Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

What an idea! he had thought, and What a miserable blank was what he noted down. Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words were bringing everything down, Konrad said. Depression derives from words, nothing else. To Fro, three years ago: I looked up at the ceiling, and lo and behold, the quiet that suddenly filled the whole lime works had momentarily ceased to be the sinister quiet I had become accustomed to through the years; suddenly it was a comforting quiet: not a person, not a sound, how blissful! instead of: not a person, not a sound, how terrible! It was comforting, one of those rare times when one feels that suddenly everything is possible again, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. Suddenly everything was evolving out of me, and I was evolving everything, I was the possessor of possibility, capacity. Of course I did my best to hang on to this state of mind for as long as possible, but it didn’t last, the unquestioning assurance of earlier times; just now recaptured, was gone as suddenly as it came, the ideal constellation, ideal construction of the mechanism of revulsion had turned into its opposite. How easy it was once for my brain to enter into a thought, my brain was fearless then, while nowadays my brain is afraid of every thought, it enters a thought only when relentlessly bullied into it, whereupon it instantly conks out, in self-defense. First: a natural marshaling of all one’s forces, possible in youth, Konrad is supposed to have said, then, in old age, which is suddenly all there is, the unnatural marshaling of all impossible forces. While I was not defenseless when entering into my thoughts, in earlier times, nowadays I enter into my thoughts defenselessly, unprotected though heavily armed, whereas in earlier times I entered into my thoughts totally unarmed and yet not defenseless. These days his brain and his head were preoccupied and timid compared with former times when they were neither preoccupied nor at all timid, now they were timid in every respect, every possible or impossible manifestation, and so timid a brain must unquestionably withdraw from so timid a head as his, so timid a brain and so timid a head had to withdraw from the world, and yet it was a fact that head and brain, or rather brain and head could withdraw from the world only into the world, and so forth. You could, in fact, withdraw everything from everything and again into everything, meaning that you could not withdraw at all, and so forth. This resulted in a constant state of moral despair. You could try to circumvent nature by every conceivable means, every trick you could think of, only to find yourself in the end face to face with nature. There was no escape, but on the other hand, there was no real mystery in this, either, because the head, meaning the brain inside the head, no matter how high it holds itself, is only the height of incompetence, inseparable from the piece of nature it heads up, so to speak, which it cannot really control, and so forth. Some people whom the world dares to call philosophers — a classification that constitutes a public menace — even try bribery, Konrad said to Fro, who bought the new life policy from me yesterday. Nothing is ever mastered, everything is misused. And so: this quiet that suddenly reigned again in the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro at one time, this quiet, a false quiet as I explained to you before, because it cannot be real, so that there can be no real quiet in the lime works, and therefore no real quiet in him, Konrad; in any case, this false quiet, for which he had no actual explanation, did make it possible for him even in his old age to approach ideas, from time to time, ideas no longer rightfully his, because they were the ideas of youth, so that in his case they could not be real ideas, as he allegedly expressed it. At such times he would be lying on his bed, listening, but hearing not a person, not a sound, nothing. At such moments he would believe that it was now possible for him to sit down at his desk and begin to write his book, and so he would sit down at his desk, but even while he felt he could now begin, he could not begin. It set him back whole decades, because what he experienced was a total setback in every respect in one single moment. This book of his would not be a long one, he is supposed to have said to Fro, not at all, it might even be the shortest book ever written, but it was the hardest of all to write. It might be only a question of the beginning, what words to begin with, and so forth. Perhaps it was a question of the right moment when to begin, as everything is a question of the right moment. He had been waiting for the right moment for months, for years, for decades, in fact; but because he was waiting for it, watching for it, the moment would not come. Although he understood this quite clearly, he nevertheless kept waiting for his moment, because even when I am not waiting for this moment, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, I nevertheless am waiting for this moment, still waiting for it, even now, regardless of whether I am waiting for it or not, I keep wearing myself out waiting, which is probably my real trouble. While waiting, he kept refining his points, he said, incessantly altering details, and by his endless alterations, refinements, unyielding preoccupation, unyielding experiments in preparation for writing, he made the writing impossible. A book one had completely in one’s head was probably the kind one couldn’t write down, he is supposed to have said to Fro, just as one cannot write down a symphony one has entirely in one’s head, and he did have his book entirely in his head. But he was not going to give up, he said, the book probably has to fall apart in my head before I can suddenly write it all down, he is supposed to have said to Fro, it has to be all gone, so that it can suddenly be back in its entirety, from one moment to the next. Encounter IV: With regard to his stay in Brussels of about twenty-two years ago, at which time he had briefly placed his wife in a clinic in Leeuwen, Konrad said the following, not quite but almost word for word: When I can no longer stand it in my room, because I can neither think nor write nor read nor sleep and because I can no longer do anything, not even pace the floor in my room, I mean that I am afraid that if I suddenly resume pacing the floor in my room, after having already paced the floor in my room for such a long time, even this resumption of pacing the floor will be made impossible for me because someone will knock, and because of this fear, it actually does become impossible for me to pace the floor. They knock because I am disturbing them, because my pacing the floor is disturbing someone, they knock or they shout, which I find unbearable because I am afraid that they will soon knock again or shout again or knock and shout together … then I leave my room, because I can’t stand it there any longer, and go down to the third floor and knock at the professor’s door … I knock and wait for the professor to answer the door, I stand there and wait for the professor to invite me in … and as I stand there waiting I think how cold it is, I am freezing, I don’t know whether it is eleven or twelve or one o’clock in the morning … my incessant pacing of the floor in my room has left me in a state of near unconsciousness, I keep waiting, thinking all this, every time I am standing at the professorial door, waiting to hear the professor say “Come in!” or: “The door isn’t locked!” and then I open the door and go in, I see the professor sitting at his desk … and so I wait, but I hear nothing. Nothing. I knock again. Nothing. I go on waiting and knocking until at last I decide that I ought to turn around and go back to my room, because the professor will not open his door, not today … he opened it yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that, too, he opened his door to me every day last week, every time I knocked he opened the door … but today, I start to worry, the professor won’t open up … I knock, and knock again, and listen, and hear nothing. Is the professor out? Or is he in, but out of earshot, perhaps? Could he have gone to the country again? How often the professor takes a ride out into the country, I say to myself, off he goes, unexpectedly, to the country. To all those hundreds of relatives, I guess. Suppose I were to knock a little louder? I think. Louder still? But I’ve already knocked twice or three times as loudly as before … Knock again! I say to myself. Knock again! By this time I am knocking as loudly as possible, everyone in the house must have been able to hear me, because I keep knocking more loudly than ever, and still more loudly! Someone must have heard me by now … these people all have sensitive ears, the most sensitive hearing of all … but I knock just once more, the loudest ever, and I listen, and I hear the professor, he is walking toward the door and opening it, though he opens it only half way, and I say: I hope I’m not disturbing you, though I know it’s late, but I do hope I am not disturbing you … I see now that the professor has been immersed in his work … My morphology! he says, according to Konrad, My morphology! and I say to him, Konrad says, if I am disturbing you I shall go back to my room immediately. But! I say, and the professor says: My morphology! and meanwhile I am wondering, says Konrad, why the professor has opened the door only halfway? only wide enough, in fact, so that he can stick his head out to talk to me, but not to let me inside … But listen to me, I said to him, says Konrad, if I am disturbing you I shall go back to my room at once. If I am disturbing you … at this point I see, says Konrad, that the professor is already undressed, quite naked, in fact, under his dressing gown, I can see it, and I say: You’re already undressed for the night, I see! then I must be disturbing you, and if so I shall instantly go back to my room! you need only say the word, that you do not wish to be disturbed this late … but if you wouldn’t mind, if I may just once more, I would like to come in to see you for just a few moments, I say to him, I shall leave right away, I don’t even have any idea what time it is, I tell him, I’ve been pacing the floor in my room all this time, with this problem of mine, I’m afraid I’m going crazy … as you know, my dear professor, I haven’t been working for days now, I can’t write at all, not a line, not an idea, nothing … again and again it seems to me, stop, here’s an idea, but no, in reality there’s nothing, I tell him … and so I go about all day long, obsessed with the thought that I can’t think, as I walk back and forth in my room, actually thinking the whole time that I haven’t an idea, not one single idea … because in fact I haven’t had an idea for the longest time, I say … and I wait, and pace the floor, but what I am waiting for is only you, all day long I wait for you to come home … Today you came home two hours later than usual, I tell him, yesterday it was one and a half hours later than usual, actually it was two and a half hours later than usual today … I hear you because my hearing gets keener from one day to the next, I can hear you when you are still out on the street, when you turn the key in the lock of the front door, and when you lock the door on the inside, then I hear you entering the vestibule, all day long I wait for you to enter the vestibule … Today you must have done your shopping, your errands, you probably paid your bills, went to the post office … once you are inside the vestibule, I anticipate your unlocking the door to your apartment, and when you have unlocked your door, I imagine you entering your room, taking off your coat, your shoes, then you sit down at your desk, perhaps … then you take a bite to eat, begin to write a letter perhaps, a letter to your daughter who lives in France, to your son who lives in Rattenberg … or a business letter … or else you are working on your morphology, perhaps … I seem to hear with increasing keenness how you turn the key in the lock — lately you have been unlocking the door much faster than formerly, in the beginning — then you walk quickly into your room, you pull off your coat … then I imagine you considering whether to lie down on the bed or not, whether to lie down in your clothes or not, lie on the bed without taking off your shoes, perhaps, or else not to lie down on your bed before you go back to your work on your morphology, to lie down … then, when you lie down on your bed, when you have lain down on your bed, you realize the senselessness of your work and the senselessness of your existence … I imagine that this realization of the senselessness of everything must come to you … that you have to earn your living so miserably, to continue your research so miserably, that everyone must earn his living so miserably, must continue his research so miserably … in such growing misery, you are thinking … and that you have no one in the world, after all, Konrad is supposed to have said to the professor … that, whether you sit down at your desk or not, lie down on the bed or not, you are bound to realize the whole extent of your misfortune in life, a misfortune that seems greater every time you think about it … At this point the professor admits Konrad into the room … and, says Konrad, I go straight to his bed and I say to him, I see that your bed is already made, you have made your bed already, you evidently intended to go to bed already, or perhaps you have already been to bed? and I say to him, please don’t let me get in the way, do lie down if you feel like it, all I want is to pace the floor a bit in your room; as you know, I can no longer do it in my own room … when I pace the floor in my room, I tell him, it seems to me that everyone in the house can hear me doing it, just as you know, I am sure, when I am reading in my room, that I am reading in my room, and when I am thinking in my room, you know that I am thinking in my room, you know that I am writing when I am writing in my room, you know that I am in bed when I am in bed … I believe that all the people in the house know what I am doing … because, you know, these people know it when I am thinking, when I am thinking about my book in my room … which makes it impossible for me to do any thinking in my room, impossible to think about my book in my room, which is why I have been such a mental blank for such a long time now … and if it is impossible for me to think in my room, imagine how terrible it is for me to have to formulate a letter in my room … as a result of all this I have been unable to read for the longest time now, unable to think at all … but in your room, I said, I can still pace the floor … I can walk back and forth in your room, and relax … little by little, and after a while I can relax more deeply, I tell him, and then I can go back to my room … you see, I tell him, I am relaxing already, my whole body is relaxed now, and this relaxation slowly goes to my brain as well; when I relax in your room it is a simultaneous relaxation of body and brain … actually, I tell him, I need merely enter your room and I feel relaxed already … Isn’t it strange? considering that it has become quite impossible for me to look up anybody, ever … but I set foot in your room, and instantly I feel relaxed … Today, I tell him, you came home so late, those silly errands of yours … all those silly letters you get day after day and have to answer day after day, all your silly people … I get no letters and I answer no letters … and those repulsive colleagues of ours that you have to put up with at your university, that you have had to put up with all these years … all the annoyances that prevent you from coming home earlier … then, as you are turning the key in the lock, I tell him, each time you do it I feel you are saving me from this frightful situation, I tell him, because you know, I always feel as if I were going to suffocate, I tell him … as if I am bound to end my life by suffocating, to suffocate in the end, how grotesque to have to end in suffocation … simply because you had a few extra errands this day, and came home too late … and by the time you got to your room, I would have long since suffocated, Konrad said to the professor, actually I expect every day at the same time that I will suffocate, here I am, suffocating, I tell myself, choking on an absurdity, because you are out, as it might be, as it certainly could turn out, on one of your errands, perhaps taking the long way home, or paying an unusually extended visit to your aunt or something … but then I hear your step outside, I hear you turning the key in the lock … and I say to myself, now I can relax; you can see for yourself how much more relaxed I am since you let me into your room, I tell him, but I do hope I am not disturbing you, I think I have disturbed you often enough already, Konrad said to the professor, but if I have to be alone one more moment, he said, I always feel ready to suffocate … and then I hear you … What a lovely miniature you have here, on your wall, I tell him, I’ve never noticed these lovely miniatures before … and then I hear you unlocking your apartment door, and locking it again, and I hear you lying down on your bed and sitting down at your desk and getting up again from your desk … and then I pace the floor in my room a hundred times, back and forth, again and again, and I say to myself: now you can go down to the professor’s, at last, and then: no, not yet, not yet! no, not yet! then again, go ahead now, go down, quickly now, this minute … the indecision drives me nearly crazy, this incessant do-I-go-or-don’t-I, might I, but perhaps not … then I think: now! now I can! and in this way an hour has gone by, and I say to myself, but what if the professor is busy with his morphology … you were, in fact, busy with your morphology just now, I tell him, says Konrad, but you were too tired to work, too … you are too tired, I say to him … yet how busy! I say, and I walk over to his desk and I see that the professor has been busy working on his morphology … while I spent an hour wondering whether or not to go down to see him … Well, if I am disturbing you … do tell me if I am disturbing you … you must say that I am disturbing you, if I am disturbing you … that of course I am disturbing you, that I have been disturbing you for some time; I tell him, Konrad says: All these years I have been disturbing you … all these years I have been living in the same house with you … of course I am a harassment to you! … but you see, I tell him, says Konrad, I have been waiting for two hours, four hours, six hours, eight hours … and still I don’t go down to see you … here you are, I say to myself, waiting all this time, and still not going down to see him! … and then of course I do go down and knock on your door, I go on interminably knocking on your door until you open it and let me in … and let me pace the floor in your room, so that I can gradually begin to relax … and I do relax, and I say: Possibly tonight I shall finally make a bit of headway with my book, even if it’s only the least bit … possibly, I say, but I do say this to myself day after day, every day, I say to myself that today, when the professor gets home, you will go down to him and pace the floor in his room and then you will go back to your own room and get going on writing your book … it is exactly what I still say to myself, as you know, Fro, to this day, that now, I always say to myself, now, this time, I shall begin at last to write my book down … and to the professor I say, Konrad reported, if only I’m not disturbing you … if only I didn’t know how easily people are disturbed, a man who needs his peace, a man like yourself, professor, a man like myself, professor, … whom people disturb when he is longing only to be left alone … but unlike myself, who can no longer stand being alone, I say to the professor, you do want to be alone, and what’s so strange about this is that you have become so old being the way you are, but you do want to be alone, because of course you have to be alone … and you always do tell me when I come in to see you that you want to be alone, I say to him, says Konrad, you tell me that you must be alone, and even when you do not say it, even when it is not you who says it, even when you say nothing at all, I can hear it, I hear you saying that you want to be alone … my dear professor, I tell him, I shall leave you now, I am quite relaxed, it is altogether thanks to you that I have been able to calm myself like this … though probably even you will soon be unable to help me relax, just as my wife can no longer help me to relax, nobody, nothing can help me, I tell him … thank you, thank you, I say, walking to the door, the professor opens it for me, and I tell him that I did not intend, certainly did not mean to disturb you and I turn around and I hear the professor going back inside his room … how quickly I got back to my own room, I think, it’s astonishing, and I sit down at my desk and get ready to write, but I can’t begin to write … I must be able to write, I think, but I can’t write … and I get up and pace the floor in my room, on and on, just as I do here at the lime works … an unfortunate natural predisposition is what makes me pace the floor in my room all night long, all night and in the morning, when the professor has long since left the house, I keep on pacing back and forth, and I feel afraid of this pacing back and forth, as I still feel afraid of it today, just as I felt afraid of it all that time ago in Brussels, I still fear this pacing back and forth today in the lime works and I pace back and forth and I walk and wait and think, I wait and walk and walk and walk … and walk … To Fro: Konrad said that he and his wife preferred to spend the entire morning, in that unsurpassable, deadly togetherness of theirs, deadly from the moment it began, in mulling over the menu, viz., what Hoeller should bring them to eat from the tavern, Konrad being either too busy with his stepped-up experimental work to go, or too exhausted physically by his work: should they have a meat course or a pasta; or perhaps neither meat nor pasta but fish, instead? and what about soup and a salad as well, both of them prized a salad beyond anything, and he would rather, said Konrad to Fro, do without meat or fish and even without soup, in fact, but, if at all possible, he did not wish to do without a salad, so they went on for hours mulling over such questions as whether Hoeller would be taking twenty or thirty or even forty minutes to bring the food from the tavern to the lime works, and it was heartbreaking (Fro) how much time and energy they would give to guessing at the possibility that Hoeller might be unusually late, impermissibly late, that is, as a result of running into someone on the way and dawdling over a conversation, instead of Konrad concentrating, as he should, all his available forces upon getting his book written; he would welcome any distraction at all, nothing was too absurd or too trivial or too insignificant to serve as a distraction from his work, his writing, even though he would awaken in the mornings smothered in a horrible miasma of conscience trouble that positively tasted like brain rot and pressed painfully against the back of his head, at the mere thought of writing his book, in fact, he no longer thought of his writing, he is supposed to have told Fro, because as time went on this thought had become the most excruciating torture to him, though he was nevertheless in any case confronted with the problem of how to go about writing his book, regardless of what he was thinking or doing or considering, anything whatever was inescapably connected with his book, with getting it written, darkening his defenseless head with shame (he never explained to Fro in what way shame entered into it). Shall we have sauerkraut or potatoes, or will they have meringues today or even those fluffy beef roulades they both loved so much, and what about apple crumb cake or apple strudel or possibly pot strudel? or bacon-dumplings or pickled meat or spleen soup if not baked-noodle soup, or boiled beef with horseradish, perhaps? on the other hand, there might be a well-aged venison with cranberry sauce; they wondered at length whether Hoeller might bring them news, political or farming or social news from the tavern, news of a death or a wedding, a baptism, a crime, and how, where, and when something might have happened that even two well-traveled people like themselves might regard as sensational, something that had been kept secret for a long time but could no longer be kept secret, and to what extent the work on the roads had progressed, as well as the so-called shore improvements and the damming of the mountain streams, how cold the lake was, how dark the woods, how dangerous the precipice, whether people were talking about Mrs. Konrad and what they were saying, at the tavern, at the sawmill, in the village, whether the rumors about themselves were still making the rounds (works inspector), just how much people really knew about the Konrads’ affairs, or really did not know, how they felt about Konrad’s not having set foot in the village in such a long time, about his not being seen in the woods for such a long time, or in the sawmill, the tavern, at the bank; whether the market had drawn a good crowd last market-day or not, what people were saying about the new church bells, whether the cost of funerals had gone up, whether the new members of the government had taken hold, whether the deer and the chamois were fewer this year, whether things represented as true were indeed true, whether things that had seemed to be true for years had turned out to be untrue, whether things that had seemed to be in doubt had cleared up, all this and more they wondered about, says Fro, and they kept thinking up more questions, more things worth looking into, for hours on end, distracting themselves with all this nonsense (Fro) so that he could forget about his book, and she about her disease, her crippled condition. It is alleged that they put it to a vote as to which of their favorite two books he should be reading to her as a reward for subjecting herself to his experimentation with the Urbanchich method, for decades now they had always filled the breaks between exercises by his reading aloud to her, either the Kropotkin memoirs, that is, his book, as in recent weeks, or the Novalis novel, her book; of course he read to her from her book if she wished it, incidentally the book that had been her declared favorite all her life, and he did read it to her for weeks on end, again and again, but he also read her his admired Kropotkin, against her will and despite her resistance, she had at first refused to listen when he read the Kropotkin aloud, but he paid no attention to her obstructionist tactics vis-a-vis Kropotkin, and by ruthlessly persisting in reading the Kropotkin to her in a loud voice week after week and then day after day he had prevailed against her, although she insisted to the very end on her instinctive dislike for this Russian book, not that she still hated it as in the beginning but she never ceased to feel mistrustful toward it. Actually Konrad believed that despite her constant grumbling he had converted her to the Kropotkin long ago, by persuasion so artfully and tirelessly applied that she hardly noticed it. They spent whole days bargaining, Wieser says, trading an hour of Kropotkin for an hour of Novalis, two hours of Kropotkin for one and a half of Novalis, or no Novalis for no Kropotkin, or a chapter of Kropotkin for one or two chapters of Novalis, etc., in which bargaining process Mrs. Konrad was naturally always at a disadvantage, according to Wieser. Basically it was always Konrad who decided what was to be read aloud. Every reading ended with a discussion of the text he had just read, conducted of course by Konrad, says Wieser, never by his wife. Now and then they would, for instance, try to relate Kropotkin to Novalis, on the basis of the passage just read, in a purely scholarly way, nothing bellettristic, an analysis that would lead them to touch on all sorts of related matters, as Konrad is supposed to have expressed it to Wieser. The most interesting kind of reading to him was the kind that opened out in every direction, he did not say in every direction of the compass, exactly, but his special preference had always been for scientific books, thoughtful twentieth century nonfiction, or books like his Kropotkin, future-oriented books, in short, while her preference was always for the humane letters of the second half of the nineteenth century, naturally, said Wieser. He, Konrad, had always despised a reading not followed by discussion or debate, at least an effort to analyze the subject, or some such immediate commentary. Of course it had taken years of the most strenuous effort on his part to make his wife at least passably familiar with this attitude of his. But if a man had the necessary patience, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, he could in the end win over the most refractory opponent to the most refractory cause, by the sheer forcefulness of his honest, fanatically precise logic; ultimately even a person like his wife could be won over by this means. A man possesses from birth what a woman has to be taught, Konrad maintained, often by the most grueling, even desperate pedagogical methods, by the use of reason as a surgical instrument to save an otherwise helplessly dissolving, hopelessly crumbling corpus of history and nature. It was decidedly possible to take a hollow head, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, or a head crammed with intellectual garbage, and transform it into a thinking or at least a rational head, if one had the courage to try. There would be no dolts in the world if intelligent people refused to tolerate doltishness. On the other hand, Konrad is supposed to have said immediately afterwards, in the end it was really quite senseless and useless to try, though one might think of something, still it would be useless, one might do something, but it would be done in vain, whether it was done or left undone, it was no use, whatever one thought or did was no use, so a rational man tended to leave things alone to develop however they would. The intelligence itself, the man himself, was oppositional by nature, Konrad said. One came to be a man by consciously taking the opposition, by daring to act in conscious opposition. A woman did not follow suit, because this was not her way, she tended to confront the man’s, or more precisely, her husband’s solitariness without comprehension or respect, mostly, even though to have respect required no special knowledge or cultivation of the mind, bogged down as she was in her stultified world of a vulgar subculture. Konrad’s wife, as he himself said to Wieser, at least deeply respected him, though with certain reservations, in every phase of their shared life, despite the inborn resistance she shared with all others of her sex against the so-called masculine element, i.e., specifically against her own husband. Wieser and Fro both describe the last afternoon they saw Konrad, each in his own way, their statements confirming each other, though from time to time Wieser will be contradicting Fro, Fro contradicting Wieser, yet they nevertheless end by confirming one another. Fro claims to have been with Konrad, about a week and a half before the sad end of Mrs. Konrad, in the so-called wood-paneled room, oddly enough there was a fire laid on in the so-called wood-paneled room that afternoon, Konrad was expecting a visit from the so-called forestry commissioner, for a consultation about the damming of the mountain streams behind the rock spur, the forestry commissioner was due at eleven A.M., but had not yet put in an appearance at the lime works at twelve nor even at one P.M., until finally a woodcutter from the sawmill had shown up with a message that the commissioner was unable to make it, and proposed another appointment for next week, to which Konrad agreed. He poured the woodcutter out a glass of brandy and sent him back with regards to the forestry commissioner. It was shortly after this that Fro arrived at the lime works where Konrad led him straight into the wood-paneled room which was warm because he had been heating it for two days straight in anticipation of the, forestry commissioner’s visit. But now the forestry commissioner is not coming, but you are here, what a rare opportunity for a chat, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, when this room is heated one notices for the first time what a good room it is for conversation, even though it is furnished with nothing better than these dreadful, tasteless few pieces, though they are comfortable, you will have to admit; Konrad and Fro then sat down together, Fro said, in the wood-paneled room, Konrad saying that for two days now he had made no effort to think about his book, which he had not yet begun to write, because of his expectation that the forestry commissioner would be arriving to talk about damming up the mountain streams behind the rock spur, so I was concentrating on that, Konrad said, I was concentrated on that one hundred percent and totally neglected my book, he said, knowing that he simply could not afford to neglect his book at all, but it was unavoidable, the forestry commissioner had insisted on seeing him, to refuse was impossible, a man like the forestry commissioner was after all a state official with so-called high authority and could simply enforce his will, he could command admission to the lime works, demand a consultation, etc. When their expectation of the forestry commissioner had been at its height, Konrad’s wife had also been wholly concentrated on the impending visit and had instructed Konrad on the reception to be accorded the forestry commissioner, viz., to have ready sliced ham, brandy, cider, etc., and she had put on a new dress, had gotten Konrad to comb her hair quite early in the day instead of as usual starting the day with their experiments using the Urbanchich method, she asked for a manicure, ordered a new tablecloth; in short, everything on them and in them had been intent upon the promised visit, but at the height of their expectation a woodcutter had arrived, bringing the forestry commissioner’s regrets, Konrad told Fro. Now that Fro was here, sitting in the wood-paneled room, the heating of the room and the other preparations of the forestry commissioner’s visit had not been wholly in vain, since Fro could now profit by the forestry commissioner’s failure to show up, and enjoy these excellent slices of ham and the rowanberry wine which Konrad kept in reserve for only special guests such as the forestry commissioner or the district supervisor or the chief of police, and, most of all, enjoy his visit with Konrad who, in expectation of his distinguished visitor, had banished all thought of his pressing work from his mind, and even Mrs. Konrad was in an unusually sociable frame of mind, almost cheerful, Fro says, because the forestry commissioner’s cancellation had apparently taken the two of them so much by surprise that there simply was no time for their disappointment to surface, indeed it had seemed to Fro that their inability to shift quickly enough from expectancy to disappointment had caused them simply to transfer their attentions to Fro, who had as unexpectedly appeared at the right moment, so that they simply received and treated Fro as though he were the forestry commissioner, as it were, Fro said, it was the first time in all these years that I was ever received by them so graciously, their cordiality untroubled by any shadow, in fact I was received and treated as the forestry commissioner was always received and treated in the Konrads’ home, said Fro. For years Fro was accustomed to being regarded as a so-called familiar visitor to the lime works, everything pointed to this being the case, and everyone knows how so-called familiar visitors are treated everywhere, but on that day, the last day he visited the lime works, the Konrads outdid themselves in graciousness, cordiality, even noblesse, as compared with previous visits. Fro recalled that Konrad had offered him the more comfortable of the two chairs in the wood-paneled room and not, as usual, the less comfortable one, that Konrad slipped the deerskin rug under his guest’s feet, a courtesy that quite stunned Fro, and that a glass of rowanberry brandy was offered him the moment he had set foot in the room, but before the two of them sat down in the wood-paneled room together, Konrad most politely escorted Fro upstairs to visit Mrs. Konrad on the second floor, making polite conversation all the way up the stairs, such as: My dear Fro, what a long time since you’ve been here, and how are your children? My dear Fro, have you rented your fishpond yet, and you know, my dear Fro, I don’t even know whether your daughter is married or not? and: My dear Fro, your visits to us here at the lime works are growing so rare, and: My dear Fro, if ever you should want to borrow a book from my library, consider it at your disposal, I do have an excellent library as you know, it contains the most beautiful editions of the best, the most famous, and most important books, first editions only, of course, and: My dear Fro, my wife is looking forward most particularly to seeing you, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you have come to see us, my wife still remembers with such gratitude your excellent advice regarding the bushes we imported from Switzerland, my wife’s home country, as you know, my dear fellow. Exactly as if I were the forestry commissioner, Fro reminisces, that’s how Mrs. Konrad received me, in a new dress and really putting herself out to be charming. She chatted with him for half an hour about Novalis and questioned him about Kropotkin, she actually wanted him to express adverse criticisms on Kropotkin, but Fro doesn’t know Kropotkin at all, though he was careful not to admit it to Mrs. Konrad, so he wisely confined himself to responding only with certainly, oh yes , or: no, oh no no , in reply to every remark of hers on the subject of Kropotkin’s memoirs, in unwavering agreement with whatever she was saying, Fro feels that the presence of Mrs. Konrad during his visits to the lime works always activated, made operational, the good manners he had been taught, his proper upbringing which meant knowing always when to insert a yes, indeed or a oh no, certainly not in all the right places, a knack that would see anyone through hours of polite conversation. The Konrad woman had seemed remarkably relaxed that afternoon, when she somehow kept in check the chronic restlessness of every part of her body, so apparent at all other times, concealing it on this occasion by an unparalleled mental and emotional effort (Fro, verbatim). She ended by saying, Do come again, my dear Fro, we are always so glad to see you, after which Fro went back to the wood-paneled room on the ground floor with Konrad. Going down the stairs, Konrad continued pouring out civilities in the style originally meant for the forestry commissioner. My dear Fro, Konrad is supposed to have said on the stairs from the second to the first floor, to see a man like yourself at the lime works is always a pleasure, and, he added, on the way from the first to the ground floor, when a man like you arrives, somehow it clarifies things, all the pieces fall into place. Once seated inside the wood-paneled room they chatted about everything, on and on for three hours, sipping schnapps, nibbling ham. You see, Konrad said (as reported by Fro), her family blames me for our gradual deterioration, as they have the insolence to put it, and as they have the unquestionable right to put it, too, they say that my wife’s life and mine together are turning into a catastrophe. On the other hand, my family, excepting myself that is, Konrad said to Fro, all the other members of my family, which has sunk from the heights of a so-called classic traditional family of means to the level of a negligible family, a family of no significance, they all blame her. My side blames everything on her sickness, on her being a cripple, while her side blames me for it all, they blame it on the way my head works, on my book. In the end both sides may come to agree, Konrad said to Fro, that all of our misery can be laid to the book, so that ultimately it’s the sense of hearing that bears the whole responsibility. People are always looking for a simple basic cause behind a lot of chaotic circumstances, or strange circumstances, or in any case extraordinary circumstances, it’s natural to look for a basic cause, and it’s equally natural to grasp at the most obvious, the most superficial factor involved, the one that is easily recognizable as the most superficial factor even to an inferior intelligence, and so in our case, my dear Fro, they have seized on my book as the basic cause of what everybody agrees to consider the catastrophe leading to the inevitable complete disintegration of my wife. One’s fellow men, including of course one’s neighbors, one’s nearest and dearest, etc., tend to overestimate precisely that which is least estimable, or deserves to be regarded with the most disdain such as, for instance, the members of one’s own family, etc., even those held in the lowest esteem are still rated too highly, one tends to overestimate persons to whom one has happened to give authority over oneself, though in fact one is most likely to have delivered oneself into the hands of the lowest human element there is. In fact, every time you take your fate into your own hands you have handed yourself over to the lowest kind of human being, but this is a kind of truth no one can face up to day after day, as he should, because if he did, he would simply have to give up, give in, fall into total despair, shamefully fall to pieces, dissolve into nothing. There are plenty of people who think they can save themselves by filling up their heads with fantasies, Konrad said to Fro, but no one can be saved, which means that no head can be saved, because where there is a head, it is already irredeemably lost, there are in fact none but lost heads on none but lost bodies populating none but lost continents, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. But to tell this kind of truth to my wife is exactly like talking to a rock that has taken millions of years to go deaf. I grant you that to be unable to put your finger on the real cause of all our troubles is a torment even to a man with a complete idiot of a wife around his neck, a lifelong torment if you like, but the real cause can never be found, whatever cause you think you can spot will turn out to be a fake, all of our contemporary so-called scientific research into what causes what, all of it misapplied because it is misunderstood, inevitably comes up with nothing but fake causes, because it is in fact possible to understand the whole world, or what we believe to be the whole world, or what we think we recognize as the world on a day-to-day basis, as the result of nothing but fake causes arrived at by fake research. You could waste decades of your life trying to get the better of this self-perpetuating duplicity, but all you would get out of that was to grow old, that was all, to go under, that was all. Suppose you make a statement, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, only one sentence, say, no matter what it is, and suppose this sentence is a quotation from one of our major writers, or even one of our greatest writers, all you would succeed in doing is to besmirch, to pollute that sentence, simply by failing to exercise the self-control it would take not to pronounce that sentence at all, to say nothing at all, you would be polluting it, and once you start polluting things, the chances are you will see everywhere you look, everywhere you go, nothing but other polluters, a whole world of polluters going into the millions, or, more precisely, into the billions, is at work everywhere, it is enough to shock a man out of his mind, if he will let himself be shocked, but people no longer let themselves be shocked, this is in fact precisely what characterizes the man of today, that he refuses to be shocked by anything at all. Distress has become transformed into hypocrisy, distress is hypocrisy, the great movers and shakers of mankind, for instance, were merely even greater hypocrites than most people. Since we have nothing but polluters in the world, the world is polluted through and through. The vulgar will always remain the vulgar, and so forth. Konrad went on to say that people no longer took risks, they were cowards, every one of them, and so forth. Facing consequences was a thing of the past, nobody and nothing was consistent any more, which made everyone extremely vulnerable, and so forth. An animal was mistrustful in advance, which is how you distinguished an animal from a man, and so forth. Konrad himself, he said to Fro, had with his wife withdrawn altogether from society, which had become long since only a so-called society, one fine day they had simply withdrawn themselves from society by an act of philosophical-metaphysical violence, and so forth. A constant lack of human company, however, was as deadening as a constant immersion in company, and so forth. But what if you sat down to dinner, suddenly, with the family of a bricklayer, for instance, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, like me sitting down to dinner with Hoeller, say, Konrad is supposed to have said, forcing him (and myself) to think, merely to think, that it was natural, that it was where I belonged; and what if I perpetrated this swindle in full awareness of what I was doing, and so forth? His wife was, in fact, still keeping in touch, decades after her sickness had forced her to withdraw from society, with that same society, despite the fact that she has been parted from society for decades by the lime works, by Konrad himself, by his concentration on his book, and on her own part by her crippled condition, her invalid chair, all because the doctors are incompetent, she nevertheless keeps in touch with people, most devotedly and intimately in touch, to a degree that more than approaches perversity but actually uses perversity as a ruthless means to the end of keeping in touch, of clinging to society body and soul, Konrad said to Fro, at the same time that I keep telling myself, in every way I can, that society is nothing, that my work is everything, my wife insists that my work is nothing and society is everything. While he based his very existence on the fact that society was nothing, while his work was everything, she quite instinctively drew her being from the fact that his work was nothing, society was everything, and so forth. Given his being of sound mind and in possession of the necessary means, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, he would first of all and instantly open all the prison gates and so forth. Furthermore: religion was a clumsy attempt to subject humanity, a mass of pure chaos, to one’s will, and: when the Church spoke, it spoke as a salesman; listening to a cardinal we seem to be listening to a traveling salesman’s pitch, and so forth. On the other hand we all had a tendency to think we had already heard everything, seen everything, done everything already, come to terms with everything already, but in fact it was a process that repeated itself on and on into the future, which future was a lie, and so forth. The greatest crime of all was to invent something, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. To resume: the future belonged to no one and to nothing. People kept coming around to weep on your shoulder, about their children, about their scruples, about this that and the other thing they were suffering though they had done nothing to deserve it and so forth. Maybe so, but the trouble was that for having children, for having scruples, for suffering, they expected to be compensated, and so forth. Society might pay compensation, but nature did not pay compensation. Society was setting itself up as a sort of surrogate nature, and so forth. Then: he read in the paper that Hager, the butcher, had died. Only a week ago Hager had personally brought the Konrads fresh sausages all the way to the lime works, in an old carryall of a kind it was a pity they were no longer making; it was so immensely practical. When Konrad finished reading the item about the butcher’s death he went up to his wife’s room, knocked on her door, waited for her Yes ? then he walked in and told her: Hager, the butcher, is dead. Then she said: Well, so Hager, the butcher, died after all! a statement on her part that Konrad is supposed to have told Fro was deeper than met the eye, it was well worth a scientific study in depth. Two days later Konrad went up again to tell her that he had just read in the paper about the tobacconist, who had doused himself in gasoline, struck a match, and so incinerated himself, whereupon Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have said: Aha, so the tobacconist doused himself in gasoline, did he? and again Konrad felt that her comment was highly interesting, it was not the death of the tobacconist that was of scientific interest but Mrs. Konrad’s statement in response to the information that the tobacconist had doused himself in gasoline, struck a match, and so incinerated himself. Prior to doing it he had willed everything he owned, cash, merchandise, including not only the tobacconist’s specialties but stationery, piles of pencil boxes, carnival masks, etc., to his, the tobacconist’s, wife. Mrs. Konrad commented that naturally the tobacconist willed everything to his wife; again, material for investigation, you see, Konrad said to Fro in the wood-paneled room, Fro says. It took the fire brigade an hour to put out the fire, Konrad is supposed to have said to his wife, by which time there was nothing left of the tobacconist but ashes, and those firemen really made a shambles of the whole shop, whereupon Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have said: Those firemen make a shambles of the tobacco shop and ruin more than they save. About this remark of his wife’s Konrad said he would like to write a book. Don’t you see, Fro, he said, women are always saying this kind of thing, and if I were not so concentrated on my study of the auditory sense, I would not scruple to write a book about “Noteworthy Statements By My Wife In Response To Domestic Trivia Of Conversation.” The Konrads had loved the good-natured butcher and they had hated the malicious tobacconist, as Konrad allegedly reminded his wife, whereupon Mrs. Konrad said: Nihilist! and Konrad instantly realized that the word Nihilist! could have been aimed only at the tobacconist. The tobacconist had done his wife in by slowly strangling her, until he finally strangled her to death, Konrad is supposed to have told his wife, who said: Mutual dependence drives people apart, one way or the other. For the longest time Konrad and his wife had exchanged only the most laconic remarks, Fro says, they barely spoke except to say the absolutely necessary, in the fewest possible words, as Konrad is supposed to have told Fro once, for ages there had been no so-called exchange of ideas between them at all, only words, and now, after all that has happened, Fro says, the chances are that in communicating only by way of the limited range of daily commonplaces and formulas of daily necessity they were communicating nothing except their mutual hatred. Fro says that certainly in the final weeks, but possibly in the final months of their life together, verbal exchanges between Konrad and his wife had dwindled down to an absurd minimum; for instance, according to Konrad, his wife had for a long time spoken to him about a pair of mittens she was making for Konrad, she had been working on this one pair of mittens for six months, because she unraveled each mitten just before she had finished knitting it, or she might finish it completely and then suddenly insist that it was the wrong color, that she must have wool of another color for his mittens, and when she had gotten him to agree would unravel the finished mitten and start knitting a brand new one, in a new color or shade and so forth, every few days or weeks, depending upon how much of her time or his time or the time of both was taken up with the Urbanchich exercises, there she’d be, knitting a new mitten in a new color, each choice of color in worse taste than the preceding choice, her preference running to every possible shade of ugly green, until Konrad came to loathe those mittens, in fact he came to loathe her knitting as such, her constant preoccupation with her knitting, but he never let on how much he hated it, according to Fro: hypocrite that I had to become because of her endless knitting and her incessant preoccupation with her knitting, he is supposed to have told Fro, I pretended that I was pleased with her knitting and that I was pleased with the mittens, consequently, no matter what color the wool was, I like these mittens, Konrad is supposed to have said over and over to his wife, nevertheless his wife would suddenly say, every time she had finished one of those mittens, she would declare suddenly that she must unravel it, it was the wrong color, she must have new wool in the right shade, after all she had the time, and while she was saying all this she had already begun to unravel the finished mitten, the mere thought of her these days brought on a vision of her unraveling a mitten, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, that unpleasant smell of unraveled wool was permanently in his nose by now, even in his sleep, Konrad told Fro, in the kind of nervous waking-sleep characteristic of his last weeks in the lime works, he would hallucinate his wife unraveling mittens, imagine what it’s like, he said to Fro, considering that there is nothing in the world I hate more than I hate mittens. All his life long he had hated mittens, beginning with his earliest childhood when they had hung his mittens on a yard-long cord around his neck, oh how he hated them, it’s always mittens mittens mittens with her, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, no matter that I am concentrating on the Urbanchich method, concentrating on my book, on making a little headway with the method and the writing, she has nothing in her head but mittens, mittens she is knitting for me, even though I loathe mittens, imagine, my dear Fro, Konrad said, except for my earliest childhood I have never worn mittens in my life, I have tried telling her, I often said, but I never wear mittens, why do you have this mania about knitting mittens for me, I shall never wear them and yet here you are knitting away at them, he is supposed to have told her, just as she had formerly spent decades sewing nightgowns for the poor and for orphans, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, these last few years she had taken to knitting mittens, not, that is, hundreds of pairs of mittens but only the one pair of mittens, always the same pair, for her own husband, she knits them and unravels them and re-knits them and unravels them, she knits dark green mittens and bright green mittens, a pair of white mittens, a pair of black mittens, knits them and then unravels them again, Konrad said to Fro. She made him try on the same mitten hundreds of times, that terrible business of having to slip into the mitten, every time, he is supposed to have said, with her knitting needles dangling from her half-finished mitten, as he tried it on. This was not the only tic she had, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, there were also the Toblach sugar tongs she always kept asking for, an heirloom she had from her maternal grandmother, not a minute would go by but she would ask for them, give me the Toblach sugar tongs, she would say, without any visible reason, Konrad always got the tongs for her out of the table drawer, she asked for them several times a day but not, as one might suppose, only at such times when it seemed reasonable to ask for them, as for breakfast, perhaps, or when needed during meals, but at any time, suddenly when he was reading to her, for instance, especially when he was reading a favorite passage of Kropotkin to her, Konrad told Fro, that was the kind of time she chose to ask for the Toblach sugar tongs, when he handed them to her she placed them in front of her on the table, then after a while, when she hadn’t even touched her so-called Toblach sugar tongs, she is supposed to have told Konrad that he could put them back in the drawer. Konrad could have recounted a whole series of such peculiarities, he said, but he didn’t care to, such a recapitulation of his wife’s most extraordinary peculiarities would in all probability, and quite superfluously, he felt, lead to the most terrible misunderstandings; apart from which, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, he, Konrad, was himself afflicted with such peculiarities, little oddities of his own, I am quite conscious of these peculiarities of mine, Konrad is supposed to have said, I can assure you of that, my dear Fro, I might even say that I am hyperconscious , Konrad is supposed to have said. But after all, even you (Fro that is), Konrad is supposed to have said, freshening Fro’s schnapps, are not free of such peculiarities, oddities, even absurdities, we observe such things in every person we have anything at all to do with, in fact, but they trouble us only when the person involved is one with whom we live in close intimacy, so that we are forced to notice their tics repeatedly, so that these peculiarities become most unpleasant, terrible, nerve-wracking, even though the same peculiarity we find so unpleasant, so terrible, so catastrophically nerve-wracking and nerve-destroying in a person we live with we might find quite attractive, not at all terrible, not in the least irritating and so forth, in another person, someone outside our lives, a person we encounter not constantly but rarely. Actually, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, if it isn’t the mittens or the Toblach sugar tongs, then it is her pronunciation of the word unbridled or comical , a whole series of words my wife enunciates in the oddest way, she exploits the words as a way of exploiting the people around her. As for myself, Konrad is supposed to have said, I may feel suddenly compelled to walk over to the so-called chest we picked up in Southern India, open it, take out the Gorosabel rifle, slip off its safety catch and aim through the window at the extreme outcroppings of the rock spur; after holding my aim for two or three seconds I stop, put the rifle back into the chest we picked up in the South of India (a place near Moon Lake!) and lock up the chest, then I take a deep breath and my wife says behind my back: Did you take aim again at the extreme outcroppings of the rock spur? and I tell her, yes, I did take aim at the outermost point of the rock spur. Come, she says, sit down here with me, I think I have earned a chapter of my Novalis, and I actually do sit down and read her a chapter of her Novalis. When that is done, I say: and now, of course, a chapter of the Kropotkin. Right, she says. This has been our routine for years now, and not a movement, not a word more, not a movement, not a word less, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. One could say, of course, that this sort of thing puts us right next door to madness. His wife, too, was always reaching for her gun, the Mannlicher carbine fastened to the back of her chair, she had done it a hundred thousand times, Konrad told Fro, for no reason at all, pure habit, absolutely unnecessary, not even a safety exercise, or automatic reflex of any kind, that made her reach for her Mannlicher carbine, a weapon, incidentally, designed to be effective at short range only, at no more than fifteen or twenty yards, Konrad told Fro, as Fro remembered instantly when the so-called bloody deed became public knowledge. Mrs. Konrad is also alleged to have nagged her husband incessantly about his criminal record, while he countered with criticisms of her family, her family history being singularly rich, as Konrad told Fro, in every kind of morbidity and rottenness. Konrad’s previous convictions, says Fro, are so overshadowed by the enormities of his latest crime, unless you’d call it his unquestionably monstrous act of madness, that they no longer count. Basically, Mrs. Konrad is supposed to have said repeatedly to her husband, she was married not so much to a madman as to a criminal, Konrad told Fro in the wood-paneled room. Later Konrad is supposed to have said: My wife and I both know that we are done for, but we keep pretending, day after day, that we are not done for yet. They had in fact come to take a certain satisfaction in feeling that they were done for, there being nothing else left to take satisfaction in. We tell each other from time to time that we have reached the end, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, actually we do so several times a day, but even more often during our increasingly, even totally sleepless nights, relaxed in the knowledge that we say what we think, regardless of concern for a future we simply no longer have, we have at last stopped pretending, we can relax now, knowing the worst as we do, horrible as it unquestionably has been, my dear Fro, though others might see it differently, therefore act differently, therefore be treated differently, because they have always been treated differently, dear Fro, but for us the horror it has been will soon have ended, and we find it relaxing, to think that we shall soon have put it all behind us. Their coexistence (to Wieser: life together) had been all wrong from the beginning and yet, speaking man to man, which couple’s life is not all wrong, which marriage is not totally perverse, is not revealed, once it has come into being, as insincere and hateful, when even friendship is always based on a fallacy; where will you find two people living together who can honestly consider themselves happy or even intact? No, my dear Fro, the so-called shared life, regardless of who is involved, regardless of the persons, of their social position, origins, profession, turn and twist it as you like, remains as long as it lasts a forcible imposition, always painful by nature and yet, as we know, the most understandable, the most gruesome test-case of nature’s ways. But even the worst of torments can become a habit, Konrad said, and so those who live together, vegetate together, gradually become accustomed to living together, vegetating together, to their shared torment which they have brought upon themselves as nature’s way of subjecting her creatures to nature’s torments, and in the end they become accustomed to being accustomed to it. The so-called ideal life together is a lie, because there is no such thing, nor does anyone have a right to any such thing, whether one enters upon a marriage or upon a friendship, one is simply taking upon oneself, quite consciously, a condition of double despair, double exile, it is to move from the purgatory of loneliness into the hell of togetherness. Not even to mention their particular kind of togetherness. Because the double despair and double exile of two intelligent persons, two people capable of reasoning their way to a clear awareness of everything involved, is, if not always, at least temporarily, from time to time, a redoubled double despair and a redoubled double exile. She could not rise from her chair, so he had to help her up, she could not walk by herself, so he had to help her to walk, she could not do her own reading so he had to read to her, she could not relieve herself unaided, so he had to assist her with that, he had to help her to eat, and so forth. But if he, for his part, tried to tell her how overwhelmingly great the Kropotkin was, for instance, she did not understand, or how much his own book meant to him, she did not understand, or what he was thinking about, she did not understand. When he said: natural science is all there is, nothing else matters, she did not understand. When he said: politics is what counts, politics is the thing, she did not understand. If he said Pascal or Montaigne or Descartes or Dostoyevsky or Gregor Mendel or Wittgenstein or Francis Bacon, no matter who, she did not understand. When he spoke of his scientific research she would say, with her usual abruptness: You could certainly have become a distinguished scientist; or, when he talked about politics, she would say, you could certainly have become a leading political figure; when he tried to explain the importance of Francis Bacon, she would say: You could certainly have become a great artist. What she did not say, though he could read it in her face, was that he had become, instead of all that, nothing at all, a mere madman. But then, what is a madman? She simply did not believe what he tried to prove to her day after day, though he knew it could not be proved, namely, that he had perfected in his head a scientific work of fundamental importance. Of late he had become so desperate about this deadlock that he boldly called it an absolutely epoch-making scientific work. But she only laughed and said: Whatever it is that you have in your head, I’d rather not see it; if your head could be tipped over to empty out its contents, what is likely to fall out is some ghastly mess or other, some indefinable, horrifying, utterly worthless kind of dung or rot. Your so-called book — this is how the Konrad woman dared to refer to her husband’s work-in-progress toward the end, knowing how weak he had grown — is really nothing more than a delusion. He had come to fear the very word delusion as a weapon she brandished several times a day, Konrad told Fro; she has the effrontery to say it right out, always waiting for the right moment to throw the word delusion at my head, the deadly moment whenever she thinks I have reached the point of utter defenselessness. To think that for twenty years I have believed in that delusion of yours! she is supposed to have said more than once on the very eve of the bloody deed, as they refer to it at Laska’s. It could have been the word delusion alone, Fro thinks, that brought Konrad to the point of pulling that trigger. But at Lanner’s there are some who maintain, quite to the contrary, that on the eve of the murder Konrad treated his wife more tenderly than he had in ages. At The Inglenook they say that Konrad had been planning the murder for a long time, while at the Stiegler they call it a sudden, unpremeditated, so-called impulse killing, but what if it is a case of common, premeditated murder, an opinion also represented at the Lanner, or, as they say at The Inglenook, the act of a madman, while at Laska’s there’s some speculation that Konrad had no intention at all of shooting his wife, that he had merely tried to clean the gun, which had not been cleaned for a long time, nor had it been fired for a long time, most probably, after months of disuse a gun is likely to get dusty, especially when kept in the open in a dusty room where all the wood is infested with hundreds of deathwatch beetles, and the carbine went off while he was cleaning the barrel; still, the fact that the bullet happened to enter the back of her head, or the nape of the neck, whichever, had to be more than a coincidence, they say at Laska’s, especially since at least two, maybe more, shots had been fired from the Mannlicher carbine, which was something to think about. At Lanner’s they even talk of five shots, while at the Stiegler they talk about four shots in all, two in the back of the head and two into the temples; Konrad himself has not uttered a word about it to this day to shed any further light on it, the word is that he is squatting in his cell at the Wels district jail, a completely broken man, and answers none of the hundreds of thousands of questions being put to him. Fro says that he ordered some shoes to be sent to Konrad in prison, at the same time that he actually wrote Konrad a letter expressing his hope that Konrad would let Fro have Konrad’s notes for the book, he offered to put back in order the stacks of notes that had been left scattered all over Konrad’s room after the police had searched the scene of the murder for days on end, leaving the place a shambles. Fro explained in his letter that he was the best man for the job of putting the notes in order because he was the only man — apart from Wieser, who was too overburdened with his work at the Trattner estate to concern himself with Konrad’s notes — the only man Konrad had taken into his confidence respecting the notes, more so than he had Wieser, toward whom Konrad felt a certain reserve, while Fro and Konrad had always been on the closest of terms (Fro!) and so Fro explained that he was sending shoes to Konrad with this request to authorize Fro to pick up Konrad’s notes for his book in the lime works, since the authorities had permitted access to Konrad’s room as long as eight days ago, even though the room of the murdered woman was still officially sealed, along with the whole second floor, unlike the first floor where Konrad’s room was situated, of course, and where Konrad’s notes for his book should be. Fro said that he believed these note slips, crazy or not, were of great interest, if not for the science of otology, as Fro puts it, then certainly they were of interest from a psychiatric point of view, says Fro (who speaks only of his own interest in the book itself when writing to Konrad in prison, emphasizing his respect for Konrad’s scientific work which he pretends to take very seriously indeed; but whenever he talks to me about it he always calls it the so-called book, a way of stabbing Konrad in the back, it seems to me), and this batch of notes for the so-called book, says Fro, is of the greatest interest to a lot of people, not for what it purports to be, but in another way, says Fro, and eventually they could turn out to be of quite serious consequence and of the greatest significance, depending entirely on which heads, which people, when and where. As soon as he could get his hands on these note slips he would put them in order and then pass them on to a psychologist friend of his in Gugging (Fro, verbatim), a native of Linz, though he, Fro, would keep it a secret from Konrad, of course, he knew he could trust me not to say anything about it to anyone; if the psychiatrist who was a friend of Fro’s found Konrad’s notes to be of genuine interest, then Fro could have them photocopied and put the originals back in Konrad’s room. For the moment he was still waiting, Fro said, for Konrad’s answer, he was prepared to wait because to get a letter from the district prison would certainly take at least ten times as long as from anywhere else, Fro says. Fro claims he is confident that Konrad will agree to allow him to pick up the notes for Konrad’s so-called book, because Konrad believes that Fro takes him quite seriously and is bound to feel that his notes could not be in better hands than Fro’s, and so forth. Incidentally Fro, to whom I explained his new life policy today in the last detail, though I do not have the impression that he will close the deal, he is much too cautious a man — Fro incidentally confirms Wieser’s story that Konrad dreamed about the murder a long time before he actually did it, it was about a year ago that Konrad told the following dream: Konrad dreamed that he had gotten up in the middle of the night, because of an idea that came to him for his book, and that he sat down at his desk and actually began to write it down, and by the time he had written about half of the book down he felt that he would succeed in getting down all of it, this time, that he would get it all down on paper in one sitting, so he kept at it and wrote on and on until it actually was all down on paper, all complete, finished; instantly his head dropped down on his desk in total exhaustion, as if he had fainted, but as his head lay there in near-coma on his completed manuscript on the desk, he was nevertheless observing himself in his unconscious state and observing everything else in the room, to sum up the situation: Konrad has actually been able to get his work down on paper, as he had so often imagined it, for decades on end, he had written it all in one sitting, suddenly, from one moment to the next, as he had always dreamed he would, but now that he has set down the final word on paper he has fainted dead away, fallen where he is, but observing himself in this unconscious state from every angle of his work room; it is the ideal moment, the ideal situation of his life, as for hours on end Konrad sees himself lying there unconscious in the full possession of his completed manuscript, having just finished the complete text and ended by writing on the title page, in his old-fashioned large calligraphic hand, The Sense of Hearing , his last act before his head dropped like a stone onto the title page he had just written, afterward seeing himself in this state from every possible angle, seeing the whole scene which he later described as the happiest of his life, though in fact it is unquestionably the unhappiest, basically, of his life, and then suddenly, abruptly, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, the door opened and Konrad’s wife walked in, this crippled woman chained to her invalid chair all those decades and who in reality could not have managed to take one single step unaided, in fact she could not even have pulled herself upright in her chair unaided, suddenly is standing there in Konrad’s room and comes over to the unconscious Konrad, her husband, who is watching closely the whole time, and bangs her fist down on the manuscript under his head, and says: So, behind my back you have written down your book, have you, behind my back, a fine thing, she says over and over again, behind my back, she says, while Konrad watches and hears everything all the time he is lying there in his coma with his head on the completed manuscript, even the shock of his wife’s fist banging down on the manuscript right next to his ear hasn’t torn him out of his coma, and here comes her fist banging down on the manuscript a second time, can you imagine, a woman whose energy has been totally drained away long since, after decades of huddling as a paralyzed cripple in her invalid chair, brutally bangs her fist on his manuscript, saying: That’s what you think, that you can sit down here in secret, you sneak, and get your book down on paper, just like that, all in one sitting, think again! and with that she grabs up the whole pack of manuscript and flings it in one powerful motion into the flaming stove. Konrad wants to leap to his feet and stop her, but he can’t budge, he can’t. So, she says, the Konrad woman says, now your book is up the chimney, your whole work gone up in flames, and: now you can start all over, wracking your brains about getting it written, for the next twenty or thirty years, it’s all gone, your book is gone, every scrap of it! At which point he suddenly wakes up, finds he can move, and realizes: a dream. I was incapable of leaving my room, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, beginning with feeling incapable of getting out of bed, incapable of doing anything at all. For two days after that dream I did not leave my room at all, of course my wife rang for me, she rang incessantly, because of course she needed my help as always, but I could not and did not give her a sign, for two whole days I stayed in my room. I went on brooding about this dream for months afterward, as you can imagine, but I never told my wife about it, I never even hinted at it, though there were times when I came close to telling her what I had dreamt, but again and again I refrained from doing so, you mustn’t tell her this dream, I kept saying to myself, every time I was tempted as I often was to tell it to her, in fact, tempted to tell it to her in all its utter ghastliness, as I often planned to do. I still see it all, vividly, how my wife enters the room and bangs her fist down on my manuscript, the first time and then again, a second time, bang, on the manuscript, and I unable to move a finger, unable to prevent her from tossing it into the fire, flinging the whole, complete finished manuscript into the fire! Even in my dream I felt it was spooky, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, what with me lying there in a dead faint, her sudden outburst of monstrous energies while I lay paralyzed, her lightning-like movements while I was totally motionless, powerless, my absolute physical passivity, though I noticed everything with surrealistic keenness as against her decisiveness in action, her horrible decisiveness, if you can imagine it, Fro, her utter ruthlessness in action! There are times when I am sorely tempted to tell her my dream, Konrad said to Fro, the whole dream, every last particle of it, and without sparing her my comments on every detail, either, but of course I don’t do it, I’m too sure it would kill her. To tell a person who figured like this in such a nightmare, to tell her in every remorseless detail, is to destroy that person, Fro, Konrad said. Wieser’s account of this dream is in complete accord with Fro’s account of it, but while Fro tells it in a highly dramatic, emotional way, as befits his own character and the degree to which he is influenced by Konrad and by Konrad’s narrative style, Wieser’s manner in retelling the dream is perfectly cool. Consequently, Wieser’s version is incomparably more effective than Fro’s rendition of the same story. Fro adds: for the first time in three or even four decades, Konrad saw his wife in that dream as she once really was, tall, stately, beautiful, even though she behaved abominably. She was always sending Konrad to the cellar to bring her up some cider, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, Fetch me some cider! she is supposed to have said practically every five minutes, Go on, get the cider! and he went down every time she asked for fresh cider, all the way down to the cellar. A jugful? Konrad is supposed to have asked her again and again, so that he would not have to go down cellar so often, but: No, a glassful will do, she is supposed to have answered every time, be sure to fetch only a glassful, I want fresh cider every time, and so he would get her a glassful at a time, never a jugful of cider, although he always offered to bring a jugful, but she refused every time, and so he had to go down cellar several times a day to fetch her a glassful of cider, Konrad told Fro, although it obviously would have made sense to bring up a large jugful of cider from the cellar so that she could drink her fresh cider all day long without his having to make his way to the cellar and up again every single time, because if you kept your large jug of cider in the cold lime works kitchen and kept it covered with a wooden board, you could freshen your glass of cider all day long just as much as if you had to go down specially for every mouthful of cider, Konrad explained, she drove him nearly crazy all day long with her orders to go down to the cellar and come up from the cellar, he wouldn’t be surprised if she took a special, malicious pleasure in watching me every time going down to the cellar or climbing up from the cellar, or even merely knowing that now he is going down to the cellar, now he is climbing up the cellar stairs, it takes a more grueling effort every time, you know, my dear Fro, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro (he said the same thing to Wieser, too) verbatim. That last time they talked, in the wood-paneled room, Konrad drew Fro into a lengthy and detailed consideration of the cider-pressing and cider-storing processes: how the casks had to be cleaned beforehand, was one of the things Konrad explained to Fro, scraped and cleaned and aired and stored while airing, which kind of pears made the right mix for a strong cider and which combination of fruit-varieties would make for a sweet cider, and that all-in-all it did not depend so much on the combinations of the varieties of pears, nor even on the method of pressing them and preparing the cider in general, what it really depended on was the kind of cellar, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro; the lime works boasted the best cellar in the country, which is why in fact they did have the best cider anywhere at the lime works. Ask whomever and wherever you would, the lime works cider was the best there was. His cousin Hoerhager, Konrad is supposed to have said, had still taken a hand personally in pressing the cider along with Hoeller and the other lime works men under Hoeller, but Konrad left the work to Hoeller and two or three of the sawmill workers recruited by him, the cider press had always been Hoeller’s affair, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. Four barrels for the Konrads (which in fact they are supposed to have polished off together in the course of each year), two barrels for Hoeller, who had always managed to drink up his two barrels in a single year, visitors at the annex, including Hoeller’s cousin who was known to be a hard drinker, didn’t count one way or the other, considering that a barrel held over two hundred liters. But Konrad had brought up his story about the cider — which incidentally was losing ground in this country, known to be the foremost pear cider country in Europe, because the people nowadays preferred drinking inferior beer to the best cider, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, it wasn’t for nothing that the natives were called cider-heads — but the reason Konrad had brought it up was only to give Fro some idea of his wife’s sadistic attitude toward Konrad, her husband, whom she certainly did not keep sending down cellar because she could not live without drinking cider, and certainly not because she had to have fresh cider every five minutes, but simply because she meant to humiliate him, Konrad, as constantly as possible; as for the cider she made him bring up, most of it she never drank at all but poured it away, into the pail, out the window, Konrad told Fro, but she kept making him go down cellar for her cider every five minutes just the same, especially at such times when he had started to read aloud to her from his Kropotkin, or to talk about the book, or when he began to talk about Francis Bacon or Wittgenstein, whom he loved to cite, his quoting from Wittgenstein’s Traktatus had in fact become a habit of his that was guaranteed to drive a woman up the wall, his wife had hated it from the first, so inevitably when he started on Wittgenstein she would send him down cellar for a glassful of cider; and Fro is supposed to have said to Konrad that this slavish obedience of his, Konrad’s, to his wife’s commands, an obedience Fro was forced to describe as doglike, nevertheless did not really exclude its opposite, as reflected in Konrad’s general conduct, his character, the fact that he always prevailed in any difference he had with his wife, to which Konrad is supposed to have replied that of course he knew quite well why he permitted himself to be sent to the cellar every five minutes to fetch cider, etc., why he let himself be made a fool of by his wife, from time to time, Konrad said to Fro, because there is nothing more ridiculous than a man being sent again and again to the cellar for some cider and who actually goes, submissively, cider jug in hand, a man who would have to feel his way down the dark cellar stairs with an empty cider jug in one hand, then again, in the pitchdark of the lime works cellar, the brimful cider jug in his hands, blindly feeling his way up those stairs again and again, making a grotesque appearance besides, because in order to avoid catching cold in those icy cellars he was wrapped in a stinking old horse blanket or the like; all his wife was aiming at was to make him ridiculous, it was the one idea left in her head, to make a fool of him, to cut him down to size because he still considered himself a man of science, and in fact he did, he saw himself, to be quite candid, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, as a scientific philosopher. Basically, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, my wife has been able to make a fool of me, make me her house buffoon, as it were, but only because for a long time now I have let her do it, without letting her realize the part I actually play; by deliberately making her think that I am a fool and that she prevails against me, I keep the upper hand, he said. A quite transparent strategy if you saw it, too intricate to be fully explainable if not. He knew exactly why he let his wife get away with sending him on those fool’s errands to the cellar every minute, with letting him make himself ridiculous by throwing on whatever wrap was handy (horse blankets, etc.), letting her victimize him with her practical joke of nonchalantly knitting the same mitten for him year after year, and why he submitted without a murmur to trying on incessantly if not the identical mitten, then nevertheless the same mitten, again and again. Despite all that, he said to Fro, regardless of all of her sadistic tricks on him, all her endless nonsense, women were so inventive in resorting to ridiculous nonsense, absurdities, etc., he was all right, he was making headway with the Urbanchich method, the book was firmly established in his head, etc., and even though he had not been able to write any of it down to this day, it was far from a hopeless case, because, as he suddenly said to Fro, the actual writing down of an important intellectual undertaking can hardly ever be postponed too long! and, he quickly added: Admittedly, a postponement can also be ruinous to such an undertaking as this book of mine, yet in almost every case this kind of intellectual task stands to gain by a so-called conscious or unconscious postponement. Suddenly she would say: How much cider do we actually have in the cellar? and send him down to test the casks for their exact content by rapping his knuckles on them, or else she would ask: Do we have any garlic in the house? or: What time is it on your bedroom clock? so that he had to get up and go downstairs to his room to look at his wall clock there and then climb back upstairs to tell her the time on his wall clock, she could never trust either of their clocks, hers or his, only both of them together, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, but, he added, there is no depending on both of those clocks either, ultimately (according to Mrs. Konrad). Is it dark outside? she would ask over and over, or: Is it snowing outside? always just when he had begun to read her the Kropotkin. Not that he always took orders with such alacrity, Konrad said to Fro, that would be unwise, so he very often pretended not to hear what she was asking. When she said: Is it snowing outside? meaning of course: get up immediately and look out the window and tell me whether it is snowing or not, he would start reading the Kropotkin with the utmost coolness as though he had heard nothing. She might often ask six or seven times whether it is snowing outside, Konrad said to Fro, but I react not at all, I merely read and go on reading until she gives up and stops asking. Most of the time he obeyed her so-called orders only when there might be an advantage in it for him, or when he really had nothing better to do, because actually an order from her when he was, for instance, reading Kropotkin to her or reporting on his progress with the book or the like, did not necessarily annoy him every time, unfortunately his own concentration on the Kropotkin or the book or some other intellectual concern was not always wholehearted, quite the contrary, occasionally it was a relief to be sent down cellar for cider, to go to the kitchen, to go to his room, whatever. Even during his morning or evening piano playing, literally playing because he was not, of course, performing seriously on the piano (Konrad said so himself), she is alleged to have taken the liberty of ringing for him, no sooner had he sat down at the piano when she rang, whereupon he got up, put down the cover over the keyboard, waited, then sat down again to play, at which point she rang again, they often went on like that by the hour. But it was some time now since he had ceased to play the piano at all, suddenly playing the piano no longer relaxed him, somehow, Fro reports Konrad saying pathetically: it no longer worked for him! In the early years at the lime works he had played the piano day after day, starting at four A.M. usually, improving amateurishly on the piano, Wieser calls it, and specifically trying his hand at the various classical piano pieces, strangely enough, though on the other hand it was not so strange, it was quite characteristic of a dilettante like him to insist on tackling the most difficult pieces again and again and so, as I was saying, he strangely enough tackled the most complicated sonatas and concertos, etc., but had hardly touched the piano at all in the last two years, as he is supposed to have said to Fro, the cover stays on the keyboard, at first I needed the piano to relax my nerves, but nowadays I need and have something far more effective to do the job (to Wieser) and his wife too, who had for decades loved her record player, one that Konrad had given her for Christmas long ago, an HMV from London, but for years she had not asked him to play anything for her on the record player, it too had outlived its usefulness for her, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, the piano doesn’t work for me any longer just as the record player doesn’t work for her any longer, music has simply ceased to be effective for us. He used, for instance, to have to play her the Haffner symphony, conducted by Fritz Busch, for months on end, Konrad said to Fro, an excellent recording, but playing it day after day for so long he came to hate it more than any other, these days he could not even pronounce the word Haffner in his wife’s presence, merely thinking of the Haffner symphony turned his stomach, they had even thrown out all the recordings that listed Fritz Busch as conductor, they had become altogether unable to listen to Fritz Busch, one of the most outstanding conductors, orchestra leaders, as Konrad is supposed to have put it. Music had gradually become totally played out at the lime works, Konrad told Fro, to think of the trouble I took to move the piano into the lime works, and now the piano just stands there, I never play on it. However, he had not sold the piano, either, understandably, since after all he might one day begin to play the piano again, etc. Still, I do not believe that I shall ever have to depend on the piano again, Konrad said, I hope my wife will not revert to wanting a record played for her every minute. Of course I could sell the piano, actually convert the piano to cash, I hadn’t thought of that! but: No, it won’t come to that, I shall never sell the piano, I shall never sell the Francis Bacon, the Francis Bacon and the piano will not be sold. No, no more music at the lime works, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. To Fro: after breakfast, he had stayed in his wife’s room in order to proceed with the Urbanchich exercises right after breakfast. He planned to practice words with st and ts . However, his wife had first made him try on the mitten, then she needed help with combing her hair, quickly combing through her hair, he noticed it was dirty, but washing her hair was the ghastliest chore of all so he did not tell her that her hair needed washing, instead he answered her question: Is my hair dirty? with a simple No and then she asked for a new dress and he did, in fact, put another dress on her, not a new one, just another one. The dress was one he had ordered made for her by a tailor once in Mannheim, it had a stiff silk stand-up collar and was made of light gray satin that reached down to her ankles; it had long ceased to be fashionable, Konrad said to Fro. Finally he was beginning to get impatient to cut all that short and get on with the Urbanchich exercises, saying: Now then, let’s get started, but she only laughed and said he could do as he pleased, she for her part had no intention of doing a thing today, no Urbanchich exercises or anything, today she was going to make a holiday of it, she suddenly felt like making a holiday of it, which is after all why she had decided to put on a new dress, have her hair well combed, let him cut her nails, etc. Every two weeks or so, Konrad said to Fro, his wife would suddenly, on an ordinary weekday, announce that she felt like making a holiday of it, and refused to work, saying to Konrad: I will not work today on the Urbanchich method, not even for half an hour, though he would have settled for a half-hour’s work that day, using words with st and ts . When, out of the blue, she proclaimed a holiday, she would subject Konrad to what he described to Fro as exquisite torture by making him put on the table one or several cartons filled with ancient snapshots, which she proceeded to pile on the table and look over, hundreds of thousands of faded snapshots, one after the other, commenting on each one, her comments were always the same, Konrad said, look at that one, look at that one, she would say, picking up one snapshot at a time from the heaps on the table, staring at it, and saying, look at that one, now look at this one, after which she dropped the snapshot on another heap which thus became the one on the increase, dragging out this game which Konrad thought gave her the greatest pleasure, possibly the only pleasure she had left, for hours on end until the whole day had become a total loss as far as doing anything else was concerned. When she had finished with her heaps of snapshots and her incessant: Look at this one, look at that one, she forced Konrad to haul in several cartons full of old letters, all addressed to her five or six, but mostly ten or twenty or thirty years ago, and forcing him to read them to her aloud, incessantly breaking in, with her: Listen to that, listen to that, as her habit was, a habit that drove him up the wall though it did not drive him so far as to make him throw the whole heap of old letters at her head, although, as he said to Fro, he could barely restrain himself from doing just that. On one of these so-called holidays of hers he always knew right away that the day would end as a total loss to him, all its momentum lost to his experimental work; these so-called holidays made him feel disgusted with his wife, disgusted with himself as well, all in all a deep disgust for the revolting condition they both were in. Then there was a knock at the front door; Hoeller had brought their dinner. She is having one of her holidays, Konrad is supposed to have said on this occasion at the front door downstairs as he took the food hamper containing the dinner from Hoeller’s hand, and Hoeller instantly knew what Konrad meant, the food was still warm, so it seemed on that particular day Hoeller had not fallen in with anyone to gossip with on the way over from the tavern to the lime works, the chances were that he had not run into anyone at all, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, small wonder, what with that snowstorm we were having, and I immediately went back to my wife’s room, after all no stopover in the kitchen to warm the food was necessary. When Mrs. Konrad saw what was in the hamper she said: Isn’t it just as if the tavern people knew we were having a holiday? she was referring to the generous pieces of well-done baked liver, the beef soup with ribbon noodles, lots of so-called bird salad, and a pastry that turned out to be, after Konrad had lifted it out of the hamper and set it on a large platter, a pot cheese strudel. That kind of a day, of course, Konrad said to Fro, with a snowstorm outside, possibly can’t be spent in a better way than in eating well, drinking well, all that kind of nonsense. Anyway he couldn’t care less, nor could they both care less, he is supposed to have said to Fro, what, basically, Hoeller might bring them to eat from the tavern, they were both totally indifferent to what there was to eat, though there was a time when they had set a high value on good eating, but that was a long time ago, Konrad said, twenty years or so. These remarks about eating reminded him of the dead sawmill owner, he is supposed to have said to Fro, three weeks ago, just as I was trying to slice some boiled salt pork into very fine (they had just slaughtered a pig at the tavern not too long ago), extra thin slices, that’s how my wife likes it, but I like it that way too, trying to cut those slices finer every time, there was a knock at the front door downstairs. At first I thought, suppose I ignore that knocking? nevertheless I did go down at once and there was Hoeller at the door, surprisingly, because I thought Hoeller would be in town that day, but there he stood, suddenly, and I asked him what he was doing here. What’s up? I asked him, I was just slicing the pork, we’re having lunch, I said, and Hoeller says, the sawmill owner is dead, this is the way it happened, says Hoeller, at five o’clock this morning the sawmill owner climbed on his tractor just after calling out to his wife to get the chains out of the barn, he needed the chains for lashing on the load of tree trunks he was picking up in the wood, his wife ran to the barn for the chains, it didn’t take her more than two or three minutes to get back with the chains from the barn, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, but there was her husband hanging dead from the tractor seat, head first, he had plummeted from the driver’s seat but was still hanging from it by the seat of his pants, it was lucky the motor was turned off; his wife had thought at first he was alive, just trying to lean down from the driver’s seat to the hub of the wheel to repair some