Thomas Bernhard - The Lime Works

Haffner symphony it was, it always relaxed her. Always the same record, the same record year after year, he thought, but as long as the Haffner is what she wants, she shall have it, he said to himself time and again. Most of the time, Konrad said to Fro, he was so exhausted by the time he played the Haffner for her that he nodded off to sleep while it was still on. Probably they both were aging more rapidly in the lime works. If only he could get his book written before he grew too old, absolutely too old and unfit to write it, he is supposed to have said to Fro and to Wieser. The minute he got to his room he went to bed. But the inner restlessness into which he was driven by the outward quiet would not let him sleep even when mortally exhausted, and so he wandered all over the lime works, several times all over the lime works, and spent the rest of the night lying on his bed quite unable to fall asleep. Once you have passed that boundary line between fatigue and exhaustion, it is absurd to believe that you can fall asleep, absurd to try to sleep, to force yourself to sleep; you weren’t going to fall asleep. Instead, he got the opposite of the hoped-for relaxation, the serenity he meant when he dreamed of finding a quiet place to work; instead of being able to relax, he only grew increasingly restless, so restless that he inevitably broke his own rest by doing something or other that brought unrest into it. Here he was at last, actually at the lime works he had taken such infinite pains to get into because it was such a quiet place, the outward quiet which was of its essence and which he had always believed would give him the inward quiet he needed for his work, but he soon found out what a fundamental mistake that was! Though he realized his mistake soon enough, it was too late just the same. A terrible self-deception, a terrible disappointment. But he had worked out for himself a mechanism, he said to Fro, by means of which he could control the outward quiet, in fact the extreme outward quiet so characteristic of the lime works and its environs, gradually to gain control of it and ultimately to exploit it wholly for his own purposes, i.e., for his work. This mechanism enabled him at all times to induce inward quiet by means of the outward quiet, not by nature but by using his brain, using the mechanism itself without any special manipulation of the mechanism. To exploit and transform the outward quiet, even the extreme outward quiet, for the sake of and into inward quiet was a high art, beyond comparison with any other art not only of self-control, control of one’s nerves, that is, he thought, and even though he had reached a high degree of mastery in it he did not claim to have mastered this art at all times. Instead of concentration (on his work), he is supposed to have said, nonconcentration (on his work) suddenly manifested itself. In a word: you had to be able to break away from your outward quiet at the moment when it had ceased to induce inward quiet; in the long run outward quiet never did induce inward quiet, it did so only briefly, much too briefly for intellectual purposes. The weather played a most important part in this, as in every other respect. For instance, when the foehn, that maddening mountain wind, suddenly started to blow: the longer he walked back and forth, this way and that, in the lime works, the greater grew his inward unrest, because he then had no control over the mechanism for inducing inner quiet. He then would try various expedients, substitutes for the mechanism which wouldn’t function, such as reading his Kropotkin, or the Novalis, a book that was basically hers, but even the Novalis did not help him to calm himself, he would try sitting down, standing up, sitting down again, standing up again; alternate between opening the Kropotkin and the Novalis, pace the floor in his room, first in one direction then in another, try putting his papers in order, mix them up again, open the chest, close it again, pull out various drawers, always the same drawers, of the chest, pull out bills, notes, toss them all in a heap, pick up one or the other, read through them, drop them again, move the chair from the window to the door, the one near the door over to the window, turn out the light, turn on the light, follow a line, two lines, several lines, on a wall map. It did no good to go into the kitchen, to carry the logs from the kitchen into his own room, to get the ashes out of the fireplace, empty the pail, none of it was any use. To remind oneself of one thing or another was no use. It did not help him to speak aloud what he was thinking, or feeling, or to utter sentences, as he is supposed to have said to Fro, sentences he had just made up, totally meaningless sentences, or possibly sentences already used as material for the Urbanchich method. He would wander around, Konrad said to Fro, all over the lime works without getting anywhere near calming himself, everywhere, that is, except one place, his wife’s room, because he did not want to aggravate his wife’s depression by his own restlessness, considering that she was already in a state of deepest depression, constantly, in fact, he said to Fro; like him she would delude herself into thinking that times of unrest would alternate with times of inner peace, but in reality neither one of them ever came inwardly to rest, and so they both lived a permanent lie, not only did they lie to each other but each lied, side by side with the other, to him- and herself, while she lied to him and he to her and then simultaneously they lied to each other, in any case they lied that they were having a bearable life in the lime works, lied incessantly, although they were both trapped in an unbearable life, but if they did not simulate bearability, its unbearableness could simply not be borne, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro, an unwavering simulation of leading a bearable life while actually and incessantly enduring the unendurable is simply the only way to get on with it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, he also said something like it to Wieser, he even spoke to me about the bearability of the unbearable being made possible by the pretense of bearability, in the same words, with the same invisible gestures, as I recall, that time in the timber forest; but to get back to what he was saying to Fro, he said that he would wander all over the lime works which on days of that particular kind indeed seemed boundless to him, and try to come to the end of them, but could not get to the end of the lime works because one could walk and run and crawl through the lime works and never get to the end of them, he is supposed to have said, and finally, reaching a sort of climax in the utter shamefulness of his situation, he was often reduced to putting his hands on the walls, those ice-cold rough masonry walls, the ice-cold doorframes, the ice-cold trapdoors to the attic, the icy window glass, the ice-cold wood of the few remaining pieces of furniture, saying to himself, with his eyes shut, over and over, steady now, steady, steady, man. The lime works is not exactly an idyll, he is supposed to have said to Wieser, though it is all too easy to regard the lime works as an idyllic place because one happens to have gotten stuck in one’s superficial prior judgment of the lime works; that the lime works is idyllic is only the judgment of people who judge the place on sadistic grounds, or on masochistic grounds, while in fact the lime works, as distinguished from its environs, is quite the opposite of an idyll. Visitors, for instance, tended to expect an idyll when coming to the lime works, even if they merely came to the vicinity, summer visitors as much as winter visitors, starting with their decision to visit the lime works, were expecting to enter an idyll, when in fact they had unknowingly decided to enter the very opposite of an idyll, had in effect quite unconsciously fallen victim to a total error at the very moment of their decision to go to the lime works. An idyll, they think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, as they step through the thicket, an idyll, as they brace themselves to knock on the front door. All the signs, before entering the thicket, when stepping out of the thicket, point to an idyll. But when they have actually stepped free of the thicket, they are horrified and turn back, if they set foot inside the lime works they are horrified and escape, some turn back as soon as they have stepped free of the thicket, and escape, the others turn and run as soon as they have set foot in the lime works, a minimal few get as far as entering the rooms inside and in no time at all they can’t bear it. People don’t instinctualize any longer, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, mankind no longer instinctualizes. Aha, so that’s the idyll the Konrad couple have moved into, they may think, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, but in reality the Konrad couple, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, moved into quite the opposite of an idyll when they moved into the lime works. The return to an idyll, they think. Compared with the lime works, everything else is idyllic, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, London is an idyll compared with the lime works, Wuppertal is an idyll; the ugliest, the loudest, the most malodorous place is an idyll in comparison. But even the surroundings of the lime works have been deliberately falsified into an idyll. An intelligent person arriving in the area, of course, will realize at once that the place is no idyll, but most human beings, Konrad said to Wieser, are not possessed of intelligence, you know, though they may look intelligent; people appear to know, appear to understand, when in fact they know nothing and understand nothing. A dimwit is likely to be unobservant and notice nothing even after he has stepped forward out of the thicket. Konrad himself now knew without a doubt that to have gone into the lime works was to have gone into a trap. To Wieser: Last fall his wife had still been able to dress, get herself ready, unaided, but when winter came she could no longer do any of it without his help, which meant that Konrad had not only to do his room, making the fire and so on, but then had to make the fire in her room, dress her, make the bed and so on, with the inevitable catastrophic effect on his work; while for her, of course, nothing could be more depressing than being suddenly unable to dress herself any longer. How long would it be, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, before she could no longer feed herself without help, not even the smallest bite? So far she had managed to feed herself, if he cut up her meat for her, broke her bread in pieces and so on, anything further she refused to let him do for her, but the time was coming when she would no longer refuse to let him feed her, and then he would have to stick the meat and the bread in her mouth bit by bit, he would have to spoonfeed her the porridge, dribble the milk behind her teeth spoonful by spoonful. Merely to pull on her stockings had become an effort unutterably dreary to make and to watch, he could see that she could no longer bend over, nor could she any longer stretch out at full length. When she stood up, she could not stand straight, when she walked, she could not walk straight, and when she lay down, she could not lie straight, her posture was about as crooked as it could possibly get, her head hung down like an awkward weight. Everything hurt her. Frequently she could no longer say where she was hurting the most, in the body or in the head, she didn’t know whether to treat herself for bodily pains or for headache, head and body had for a long time now been one continuous pain, a pain that had become the best proof she had of her existence. All of her body and all of her head were now nothing other than one single pain, she is supposed to have said to Konrad four weeks before Christmas, that is, four weeks before her violent death. He simply couldn’t stand this any longer, he is supposed to have said when he was arrested; apart from this he is supposed to have said nothing at all. But there is no telling what our courts will do, Wieser says, depending entirely on the way a court happens to be constituted, how the jury happens to be constituted, Konrad might get the minimum sentence, or the maximum, or else he could be declared insane. As daily experience teaches, it was all anybody’s guess until the very last moment of every court trial, every time. In the last analysis there was nothing more spineless and more subject to whims and weather, sympathies and antipathies than the courts and especially juries, who could be swayed by the most unpredictable circumstances. Speaking to the public works inspector, too, the Konrad woman once said that her pains were by now all the proof she had that she was still here (alive). Konrad saw how she wanted to get over to the window and couldn’t, wanted to stand up and couldn’t, wanted to take a few steps and couldn’t, that she was cold but couldn’t pull up her blanket; and so he went and pulled up her blanket. She no longer noticed that he was wearing a dirty jacket, torn pants; that, after months of neglect, he had come to look like a derelict. The whole lime works is filthy from top to bottom, and she doesn’t see it, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser. That above all the bed linen was filthy dirty because it hadn’t been changed in months was something she did not see, and he couldn’t possibly clean the bed linen, he no longer had the strength to do it, because he simply didn’t have the time; as recently as six months ago she had still taken care of such things as the bed linen etc. from her invalid chair, she had swamped Hoeller with orders to clean things, but she could do this no longer, she had lost her grip on the situation, what with having to concentrate on enduring her pains, Konrad is supposed to have told Wieser, and how he would see that she wanted to get out of her room, but couldn’t, that she wanted to go to the woods and couldn’t, to the village, and couldn’t. That she thought about traveling, but couldn’t travel. That she needed to see people, but couldn’t see people, couldn’t have company, Konrad said. For years she had enjoyed no kind of social contact with others, meaning social contact with people congenial to both of them. However, there was really no such thing as congenial company, because in the whole world there was no person really congenial to another — an observation typical of Konrad, Wieser said. Such people as did come to see them, not recently but until about the end of October, these so-called congenial people, had not been at all congenial, they were all mere curiosity seekers, legacy hunters, swindlers, Konrad is supposed to have said. Compared with them, the works inspector, the chimney sweep, Hoeller, and he, Wieser, and Fro, were far more congenial than those so-called congenial visitors, but seeing people socially was, as far as the Konrads were concerned, anachronistic in principle. Nevertheless one could not live entirely without seeing other people, Konrad is supposed to have said, adding that it did not embarrass him to say over and over again what everybody tended to say over and over again, no matter how ridiculous, simplistic, trite it was, except that he said it in full awareness of what he was doing, unlike most people; that was the difference, as Wieser undoubtedly knew, since it did after all always make a difference who said what and how he said it, and a serious person, or, more precisely, a person who was to be taken seriously, could just go ahead and say whatever he pleased without needing to worry whether he was uttering something banal or trite, a so-called truism, because if the person who said something banal or trite or platitudinous was a serious person, a person to be taken seriously, what he said ceased to be any of these things. For the longest time they had not been seeing people at all, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, because all of the people they had to see, such as the baker, Hoeller, Stoerschneider and the rest were people they had to see on business, not at all the same thing as people one saw socially. He could see that his wife was constantly thinking of people she was longing to see, friends, relatives, it was no use at all to try talking her out of wanting to see them, no use trying to explain to her that there was no such thing as friends, and that kinfolk were basically anything but kin, that kinship was a deception, a self-deception; a mistake, in fact. At the beginning all these kinfolk and friends had still come visiting to the lime works from the Tirol and Carinthia, from Switzerland, all the Zryds from the other side of the mountains and her other kin from the north, her East Friesian relations for instance, all of them people with a lifelong conspiratorial passion of curiosity, said Konrad to Wieser, but none of them came any longer, the lime works had gradually purged itself of this kinfolk garbage. We don’t need any of these people, Konrad is supposed to have told his wife over and over again until they all finally stayed away and no longer even dared to write. He had begun, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser, by talking her out of being interested in seeing these people, and ended by showing her how impossible they were. That they would have to make do with just each other and no one else in the lime works is something he made clear to her soon enough after they moved in, but it took years for the resulting total lack of contact with her relatives to become final, not even to mention his own relatives whom he had dropped decades ago. She ultimately became resigned to this state of affairs. At first he had sacrificed himself to her, Konrad said to Fro at one time, for decades he had sacrificed himself to her and her crippled state, but now his work demanded that she sacrifice herself to him, body and soul; his conscience on this point was clear. After all, they, the Konrads, had been on the go, traveling incessantly for two decades, in every imaginable country, in every part of the globe, and always under the most tortuous circumstances; as anyone could imagine, after all, he is supposed to have told Fro, to take a totally crippled woman traveling all over the world for years is no picnic, think of what it means to drag a totally crippled woman from city to city, from one museum to another, one tourist attraction to another, one celebrity to another, what it means to put up with a minimum of existential elbowroom, freedom of action, to please a crippled woman who, like all cripples, had to indulge an insatiable craving for novelty all over the world, insatiable for everything conceivable and inconceivable, in addition to being at that time so demanding (!) in every respect that it actually overtaxed his strength to have to be with her at all times. Subsequently, of course, once he had begun the work on his book, she had to curtail her demands, gradually impose limitations on herself, subject herself to him and his conception of their life together, and this abrupt and unnerving reversal, namely that henceforth all the demands to be satisfied would be his and no longer hers, perturbed her at first, in fact he might say that she had lived for years in a state of self-destructive shock more beside him and under him than with him, until in the end she had resigned herself to living for his sake. From a person who had actually seen everything worth seeing and had met so many people worth meeting, and who owed all this to the sincere and supreme self-sacrifice of a man whose free surrender of his most productive years, indeed the most important two decades of his life, those between his thirtieth and fiftieth year, was certainly not to be expected, certainly not to be demanded as a right, such a person must naturally expect to make a commensurate sacrifice in return, without anyone’s having to appeal to her gratitude or some gratitude-connected principle involving guilt feelings. Konrad would after all have gotten his book written long since if his wife had not forced him to take her traveling all over the world. The book would have been completely written ten years ago at the latest, in London, in Paris, in Aschaffenburg, at the very latest in Basel, he is supposed to have said to Wieser. To Fro: every day she would ask him whether he had a clean shirt on, and he would answer that he did have a clean shirt on, though in reality he had been wearing the same shirt for a week or even two weeks; she no longer noticed anything, no longer saw the dirt, etc., nothing at all. When she wanted him to read to her, she of course wanted him to read her favorite novel, the one about the medieval knight-troubadour, the Minnesinger Heinrich von Ofterdingen, by her favorite Romantic poet, Novalis. So of course he deliberately read to her from his favorite, whom she couldn’t stand, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, just to annoy her, to punish her for her inattentiveness, her inattention; there was simply no more effective way to punish her for insubordination; he always punished her by reading to her from the Kropotkin. But of course I do read her the Novalis, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro, when she asks me for it. I can never refuse to read Novalis to her when she insists on it. Of course she hated everything in Kropotkin, and on the other hand, she loved her Novalis. The right thing to do was to read to her alternately from the Novalis and from the Kropotkin, not only the Novalis, he is supposed to have said to Fro. After reading her a passage from the Kropotkin he usually asked her to tell him what he had just read to her, and she would not know the answer, proving that she had not listened attentively when he had read the Kropotkin to her even though she was all attention when he read her the Novalis. What was that I just read to you, my dear? he would ask abruptly, and of course she hadn’t listened to the Kropotkin and floundered pitifully in trying to make up a plausible answer. Toward the end she no longer dared to let her attention wander off when he was reading Kropotkin to her, she had learned to fear that he would make good his threats — as he did more and more often, in fact — threats to withhold food, to prolong the exercises, not to air her room. Or else he might suddenly, without warning, air the room by letting an ice-cold draft she had no way of escaping hit her directly from the window; suddenly, he read her twice as much from the Kropotkin as usual, etc. Not knowing, often, whether her failure to hear the Kropotkin was intentional or not, he often punished her unjustly, which he regretted, he said, so that to make up for it he read her the Novalis at greater length than usual, though it was exquisite self-torture for him to read the Novalis. Still, reading her the Kropotkin, he always suspected her of turning a deaf ear deliberately, because she was always able to recount flawlessly everything he read to her from Novalis, but if he asked her to repeat a Kropotkin passage she couldn’t remember a thing. Konrad also complained that she always wanted a fresh clean dress, every day, and he told Fro that he refused to give in to this, a change of dress once a week seemed quite enough to him, especially as he had to help her put it on and take it off, after all a woman could certainly wear the same dress for a week, especially when it was so much trouble to get dressed, Konrad said. He would get a bit impatient when he had to dress her, there were times when he hurt her while changing her clothes, or so the baker says who is reputed to have been present often when Mrs. Konrad was changing. Nor did Konrad leave the choice of dress always to his wife; sometimes he insisted on a dress of his own choice, and sometimes they had unrepeatable arguments (works inspector) whether he would put on her the dress he preferred or the one she wanted, but nearly always his will prevailed; Konrad is reported to have taken advantage of his wife’s extreme exhaustion to win the argument. On the one hand he would ask himself why she had to change her dress at all, after all he had long ago ceased to change his clothes, but on the other hand he would think that she couldn’t really sit in that chair for years in the same dress, so he is supposed to have told Fro. And she did still have heaps of dresses, while he still had heaps of shoes, but for a long time now he had been putting on the same pair of shoes every day, so why couldn’t she wear the same dress every day? he asked himself, he said. He was constantly kept busy airing out her room, she had to have fresh air, and there he was all day opening and closing her windows and fretting that he was not getting his writing done, feeling totally at his wife’s mercy, with no will of his own, while she did with him as she pleased and had her revenge, as for instance when she insisted that he comb her hair, and so he combed her hair for hours with neither of them uttering a syllable the whole time (Fro). Actually there was often a terrible smell in her room when left unaired for longer than usual because he was irritated with her. But sometimes she said she wanted the room aired when he had just finished airing it, she would ask him to open the window when he had just shut it, as her special way of tormenting him. Several times a day, whenever he was most likely to feel irritated by it, she would announce that she felt a draft from the door; there’s a draft, she would say, to let him know how angry she was, even though there was no discernible draft in the room, certainly not with all the doors and windows shut as they were, but she made a habit of resorting to this kind of thing as a weapon against him, until one day he told her that if she spoke to him of a draft just once more he would make a point of opening all the doors and windows, and go away, and stay away all night, and then he might come back next morning to see what had become of her. To this she is supposed to have retorted: Why don’t you, why don’t you open all the doors and windows and leave them open all night and give me a chance to freeze to death! But she knew only too well he would never carry out his ridiculous threat, she said. Still, he had to admit that she did obey him sometimes, and then again he would obey her, but she naturally ought to obey him more often than he her, he is supposed to have said to Wieser; actually it was incorrect to say that he obeyed her, he merely acceded to her wishes. All day long I submit to her entirely, he said. Then suddenly he would rebel and that would be the beginning of a new phase when she had to obey him implicitly, and when no wish of hers was granted at all. His work required absolute obedience not only from him but from her as well. Most of the time they were both concentrating intensely on the Urbanchich exercises, which meant weeks of uninterrupted self-discipline, without a moment’s unruliness from her to be tolerated. But at times she could no longer bear to go on sitting in that chair of hers, and she would come close to losing her self-control. It happened every two or three weeks, especially on weekends, he couldn’t say why. Suddenly she would fail to answer when he asked her a question. He would ask it a second time, a third time, a fourth time — no answer. To elicit an answer from her was of the utmost importance for his book, yet she would not give him an answer. He then walked over to the window and let in some fresh air, as the air in the room actually did turn foul after those hour-long sessions of Urbanchich exercises. But even the fresh air would bring no response from her, not even when the room had become completely cooled off. He would then close the window again and begin to read the Kropotkin aloud to her, believing as he did so that this was an infallible prod to make her talk, and while he was not surprised by resistance, protests, etc., on this occasion he would find that even a lengthy reading from Kropotkin got no reaction from her at all, except to deepen her silence, Konrad is supposed to have said. When that happens he shuts the book, stands up, walks back and forth in the room, says Wieser, faster and faster, more and more noisily, tries to say something but doesn’t really know what to say, sits down, gets up again. He could of course read some Novalis to her, he thinks, but he doesn’t read the Novalis; it would mean surrender, he is supposed to have said to Wieser. To Fro: But inasmuch as I simply had to go through the exercises onЧитать дальше