The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) Read Online Free Page A

other side of it, Konrad is supposed to have said over and over, but if he was to be frank about it, Konrad conceded, sawmill noises bothered him not at all, they never had bothered him, no more than his own breathing bothered him, because like his own breathing they had always been there; he had never thought: there, that’s a noise from the sawmill, I can’t hear myself think because of it! because he had always lived and done his thinking next door to sawmills, no matter where he had lived it had somehow always been in the vicinity of one or even several sawmills, his family, all his people, even all their relatives, had always owned at least one sawmill. As to the tavern, Wieser reports Konrad saying, it stood far enough from the lime works so that Konrad never heard anything from there. Just as the rock spur keeps the sawmill noises out, no sounds come from the tavern either, even at itsnoisiest, here at the lime works he heard none of it. Sometimes you could hear an avalanche, Konrad is supposed to have said, or a rock slide, ice, water, birds, the sound of wild animals, wind, all that, yes. Because one heard hardly any sounds at the lime works, one’s hearing tended to grow remarkably acute here, especially with as hypersensitive an ear as he had. This gave him a natural advantage in the research, for his book dealing, not quite coincidentally, with the sense of hearing, after all it would bear the title
The Sense of Hearing
. That the Konrads lived where they did (Konrad to Wieser) was of course the result of a calculated move for the benefit of his work on
Hearing
. All of it, everything having to do with the lime works, my dear Wieser, is calculated, Konrad is supposed to have said. It’s all been carefully thought through beforehand, though much of it may seem to be pure chance, even pure nonsense, nevertheless it was all thought out well ahead of time. Sensitivity in a state of immunity to surprise was sensitivity perfected, deadly in fact, Konrad is supposed to have said. Fro reports Konrad saying to him as follows: when he, Konrad, was in his room working on his book, he could hear his wife breathing upstairs in her room, believe it or not, it was a fact. Of course his wife’s breathing in her room, one flight up from his, was not normally audible in his room; he had tested it out time and again; nevertheless
he
did in fact hear his wife breathing in her room while he was in his room. But of course he, Konrad, was chronically in a state of the greatest possible attentiveness. He could even hear human voices across the lake, even though it was normally impossible to hear human voices across the lake from the lime works. Those people on the opposite shore would be heard by him, Konrad, not when they broke into aloud laugh or anything like that, all they had to do was talk normally to each other, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. How often I hear a sound, an actual sound, and the person I have been talking with will not have heard it, though I did. I hear people talking across the lake, and I get up and walk to the window where I can hear them even better although I can’t see them, he said, but my test cases hear and see nothing, Konrad is said to have told Fro, the problem of living with other people had always consisted in the fact that he was always hearing and seeing things while the others heard and saw nothing, and it was impossible to train them, no matter who they were, in hearing and seeing. A person either hears and sees, or else a person hears, or a person sees, or else he doesn’t hear or see and you cannot teach a person to hear and to see, but a person who hears and sees can perfect his hearing and his seeing, above all perfect his hearing, because it is more important for a person to hear than to see. But as for my wife, Konrad is supposed to have said, his efforts to perfect her hearing and seeing had failed midway: suddenly, as long as ten or fifteen years ago, he had been forced to