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

looking out at the rockface would have been impossible, out of the question. To move into a room facing the courtyard or the rockface would have been a deliberate invitation to total despair, something he was prone to fall into anyway. When it came to furnishing the house, as Konrad once explained to Fro: though we did our own rooms completely the first day, once and for all, putting in only the most indispensable things, the bare necessities, you understand, we did nothing at all about the rest of the building. Since we moved in during the winter, we had to use the barge, it took two trips by barge across the lake, Konrad said to Fro, two full loads of those hundreds of thousands of household effects we still owned even after all our travels all over the world during all those decades, Fro; it was incredible how much furniture and household stuff we still had when we moved into the lime works, despite two world wars and all those catastrophic unheavals! it was fantastic, Fro, considering that we never lifted a finger to hold on to all these furnishings and household goods, quite the contrary, neither my wife nor I ever gave a moment’s thought to the stuff, and of course all these hundreds upon thousands of furnishings and household goods represent only a fraction of what we used to have, because my wife, after all, brought a great deal of property into the marriage and I also contributed a good deal, and what with a few deaths in the family, war casualties you know, we acquired quite a bit more, though we lost much of it in the cities, we never lost anything in the country, most of it was stored in the country. Imagine, two huge barges loaded to the limit with furnitureand household effects! Luckily the lake was not frozen over, though it freezes over every winter, in January it is usually frozen hard, but the year we moved into the lime works the lake had not frozen over. No one would dare to cross the frozen lake by car or truck ever again, not after that wedding party, several Konrads among them, Konrad is supposed to have said, broke through the crust about twenty years ago. For centuries people drove over that frozen lake with impunity, and then suddenly that wedding party had to break through; since that date no one would risk it. Three huge barge loads of household stuff, Konrad said to Fro, and you know how much one of these barges will hold. The chances are that barge is no longer fit for use, these days, Konrad said, not a soul has given it any attention in years, such a barge had to be oiled and painted every year at least, but nobody has ever oiled or painted that barge. Eaten up with rust and rot as it is, the barge was doubtless quite unfit for use by now, and Konrad is supposed to have said: the way everything around the lime works is eaten up with rust and rot, when you think how much there is, lying around the lime works and eaten up with rust and rot. As I was saying, he said to Fro, for years nothing at all was done to make the lime works habitable, and when we got here we gave less than an hour to fixing up our two rooms. Of course he and his wife, Konrad said, were the most unassuming people in the world. He had gotten by all his life using only the most indispensable articles of furniture, always the same ones. Nevertheless they had somehow, despite their tendency to concentrate only on what was absolutely necessary, managed to have two full barge loads of movables to bring to the lime works. Mrs. Konrad is alleged to have said repeatedly that she could never havefound enough room for all those furnishings and effects in Toblach. In Toblach not even half of the stuff would have got inside, she said. There was absolutely nothing, Konrad said to Fro, that she couldn’t somehow connect with Toblach, just to drag in Toblach somehow. The problem in moving, Konrad said to Fro, was primarily to begin with the pieces intended for the first or the second or the third floor and to avoid dragging pieces meant