Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

no for an answer, invariably, no, nothing . While I myself naturally hear not just one sound, I hear thousands of different sounds and I can distinguish these thousands of sounds from each other; why, I have filled several dozen notebooks solely on the subject of my perceptions of these thousands of sounds coming up from the deepest point in the water right under my window, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro; Fro is deeply interested in those notebooks, in fact, and hopes one day to get hold of them, if only one knew where they were, and if Konrad would let Fro borrow these notebooks, for his, Fro’s own scientific work, of course, said Fro, because it was precisely such observations of Konrad’s as these, on the sounds rising from the depths of water beneath his window, that interested Fro, so much so that he had decided against waiting until after Konrad’s trial at the Wels district court, against waiting until Konrad was convicted, because Fro could have no doubt that it was important for him to see those notebooks of Konrad’s as soon as possible, and so he, Fro, was submitting a petition to the district court at Wels to give him access to Konrad’s notebooks containing observations on the sounds at the deepest point in the lake right under Konrad’s window. Konrad will probably agree at once to let me have the notebooks, says Fro, but I am interested not only in these particular notebooks but actually in all of Konrad’s notes as well, but most of all in his manuscript, but then, Konrad has not written his manuscript to this day, says Fro, and as far as anyone can judge Konrad was not likely to be able to write it, ever, because whether he is transferred to the prison in Garsten, or to the mental institution at Niedernhardt, probably for life, he would be unable to write it in either place because he couldn’t begin to write it down without his heaps of notes accumulated in several decades of research; the writing of his book had, ultimately, become impossible for Konrad, who had short-circuited himself, so to speak, by committing the horrifying murder of his wife. This very day Fro intended to send off a letter to Konrad asking for the notebooks on sounds from the depths of the water under his window, he said. Even a man as intelligent as the late forestry commissioner, a man who was always taking a positive interest in my experiments, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, when asked whether he could hear anything from the depths while standing with Konrad at the open window overlooking the water, could hear nothing. A completely untutored person could not even hear any sounds from the surface of the water, not to mention the depths, Konrad had said to Fro as recently as the end of October. My experimental subjects hear nothing, Konrad said. Exactly the same result was obtained when he stationed himself with an experimental subject at the window overlooking the trees. The subject admitted that he saw nothing and therefore heard nothing, either. However, it was not quite that simple, even though it was also impossible to explain the process that made a person observant, on the other hand. And why bother to try explaining it? Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. He wondered, even though he marveled at the patience of his experimental subjects, the forestry commissioner, the works inspector, Hoeller, Wieser, Fro, the baker, Stoerschneider and the rest, he nevertheless asked himself why he bothered at all, considering how they always ended up by leaving him depressed over their boundless incapacity. His wife and chief experimental subject, as Konrad said himself, Fro reports, had always shown extraordinary patience with him and his researches, his efforts, his experiments and, as Konrad told Fro as recently as late October, she went on performing ever greater miracles of patience in the course of his incredibly radicalized experimentation; by using her he had developed the so-called Urbanchich method to its utmost perfection, in fact his radicalization of the method was such that he would be justified in no longer referring to it as the Urbanchich method at all, but his wife had allowed herself to be driven to a state of total exhaustion by his use of the Urbanchich method on her. Toward evening, if we happened to have started early that morning, or after midnight, if we started in the afternoon, she would be done in. Among other things, for instance, he recited to her a series of sentences with the short i sound, such as, “In the Inn district it is still dim,” a hundred times slowly, then a hundred times rapidly, and finally about two hundred times as fast as possible in a choppy manner. When he was done he demanded an immediate description of the effect his spoken sentences had on her ear and her brain, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. Then he commenced his analysis. But after only about two hours of such experimentation she would ask him how much longer it would take, Konrad told Fro, and start complaining about her earache which was steadily worsening, especially in winter; he would tell her, then, how long the experiment would take that day, whether it was to be only a brief three or four hours, or a longer six or seven hours, in any case his experiments in accordance with the Urbanchich method were important to him and he had let not a day pass without experimentation. He might say, for instance, how long is it now since I’ve experimented with the short i sound, or, how long since we’ve worked on the short o ? or the short a , or the short u ? He would alternate, for instance, between reciting the sentence, “In the Inn district it is still dim” into her left ear, then into her right ear, then moving from one ear to the other and back again. In one hour of such work he might produce about two pages of notes, but usually he destroyed those notes right away, so that no one could deduce his method from his notes. In the midst of an exercise he might, for instance, suddenly say to his wife, you must distinguish between the hard and the soft i . She understood perfectly, and yet she did it all wrong, time and again. So the effort had to be redoubled, which meant that the discouragement, some days, was also redoubled. If she did not follow the rules, he would tell her, the exercise was a waste of time. Sometimes it took as long as half an hour for her to catch on (to the simplest point). Naturally it was all far too demanding, especially everything connected with the Urbanchich method, far beyond her strength, he would think, but nevertheless he went on repeating the exercises prescribed for each experiment without a pause until she actually collapsed. Most of the time she sat in her chair quite motionless, with her eyes shut more often than not. Still, in the many years in which he had subjected her to the Urbanchich method, she had gotten accustomed to his kind of experimentation. The sentence “In the Inn district etc.” for instance, she had listened to for weeks on end, hundreds of times a day, every day, until he raised his hand to signal: exercise completed. The sentence, “In the Inn district etc.” was after all a basic sentence in his experiment, says Fro. He would say it and she would instantly comment on it. He recited it faster and faster, she commented on it faster and faster, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. After hearing her complain a thousand times that he took too long with his experiments, he finally turned a deaf ear to it, until in time he got into the habit of turning a deaf ear to her. There was no way to avoid using the Urbanchich method on her, for the sake of the book it simply had to be done. He claimed that he always finished by saying, now we can permit ourselves to stop working, and then followed it up immediately by asking: would you like me to play your record? then she would ask him to play her favorite recording, Mozart’sЧитать дальше