"Lust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jelinek Elfriede)

2

LATER SHE CALLS FOR her son. Though not so long ago she felt replete with the dear image of her child, her one protective casing to guard against the groping Man, who holds her tighter than a customer holds the drink of his choice. He needs no protection for his sex, and his torrent pours down the nearest channel. The child knows a good deal about all this. The boy peeps grinning through the keyholes, spying out the joys of the home. The boy cops a sly, audacious eyeful of Mother's body, having come in from the wilderness out there, the wilderness his comics call the Wonderland of Childhood. Is that smile on Mother's face adrift like a boat? Or has it been carved into her features? The child can't tell when he snuggles into the nest that Father built. They belong to each other, for the meat inspectors who crowd outside the fence. They even seek each other out, undirected as the potpourri of clouds up there in the purple sky. Not knowing why. Though perhaps they do know: the child has a hungry mouthful of dirty talk to be stopped, talk concerning his mother and the blood that frequently stains her panties. The child knows everything. He is white and his face is brown from the sun. In the evening he will be bathed. He will have prayed. He will have done his work. And he will cling to the woman, graze upon her, bite her nipples to punish her for allowing Father to explore her tunnels and piping. Are you listening? This is language itself, wanting to get a word in.

The miracle of travel is that one encounters an unfamiliar place and then flees it with a shudder. But if one has to remain together, a four-colour poor-quality reproduction of Nature, each belonging entirely to the other, a family, then you will find only the Pope, the kitchen and the Austrian People's Party to honour your work and to grant an indulgence for all the sins it has committed. The family, this vulture, keeps itself as a pet. The child never listens. There he sits with his secret playthings, which partly consist of disgusting pictures and partly of the original material for those pictures. Son contemplates his little tail. Often his gun is jammed. There the selfish kid squats with his private collection, almost human in his blabbering greed. The Pope has whole libraries of the stuff. Mealtime. As it enters his insensate maw, the Man praises the food his wife has prepared. Today she did the cooking herself! What happens on the plate reaches his place of residence, his address deep down in his gut, where it is tossed to and fro like an eaglet in the spinning air. This is the responsibility of the woman. Of women. The Man questions his wife with mute glances: time to bang the daylights out of her again? But the boy might hear if Father gets into the woman's yawning emptiness now, she tells him, hoping to get away with this excuse. But no: off she is promptly led, in obeisance to the Man's ludic lust. She clings on tight to the bedroom door, but the boundary line is the bathroom, one door further, where the limits have already been tested and exceeded today.

It all happens very quietly. Today, unusually, the Man has come home for lunch. Man takes his animal food from the pastures out there, and yet he does not recognize his four-legged friends when he finds them in the serving dish. At the last, the woman is required to undress. Now we've got more time. The child has been stuffed; it has to sit still at school. But for the woman to be preserved, she first has to plunge into the Man's foaming waves. The Man sees himself as a Noble Savage. Buying his meat at the woman's counter. The family is like a small business, a snack bar in the station. Quite alone, a manikin on one leg, for you can't rely on the second leg, the woman. The Man's claims to his own territory, the divine mountain paths where only he may go a-wandering, have already been registered with the Austrian Women's Disaster Relief Group. A-frolicking he will go, aloft on the wondrous paths. But every evening at seven on the dot the mountains toss him back down to the eyrie of twigs he collected himself. His wife (he tells Nature with a smile, lying) is waiting. He has to go to lasso her in. He and she together constitute an association for life. A space tiny and bare as memory contains the whole of him. The woman does not die, verily she is created by the sex of the Man. Who has reconstructed a complete original scale model of her lower abdomen in his lab. How the Man loves making his appearances, a body straight from the freezer, thawing as fast as he can!

While his parents, Father burning high as a turned-up flame, Mother a mere breath on a window pane, are at each other, the child is clacking the flap of the letter-box, bored. This winter the school bus occasionally gets stuck in the deep snow. The children, who have cosy homes waiting for them, go hungry. That old knacker Nature forces them to capitulate (marvellous, really, that scourged, purged Nature can still make demands of us). They are put up for the night and read Mickey Mouse comics or other things their fathers haven't approved. They will get sausage in their sleeping bags and feel ill-accommodated. Even cars sometimes crack up in this cold. But we are warm, we are in safety, we are ready for the consecration, at last we are ready to be disillusioned, by our partners. How glad we shall be! Till the manuals on life skills come to offer advice to us, in whom no one can live, telling us not to remain single and peaceful at any cost.

Father falls upon Mother's piggy bank, where she keeps her secrets hidden away from him. All of the hours of the day, and all the hours of the night, he is the only one who pays in. He is beside himself. Already his sex is almost too heavy to lift. His wife can carry it for a while. In the half sleep of the mornings, he's already fumbling at the furrow in her rear while she is still sleeping, from behind he gropes at her soft hillocks, light, where are you, the heart is already wide awake. The tennis match at his club can wait. It's antiseptic there. First, obedient as children, in go two fingers, into the woman, and then the compact firelighter package is stuffed in to follow. The whole music box where our wishes are stored in the memory of the Supreme Being starts playing music into the ethereal realms. All things will be fulfilled. We have a right to expect it will be so. Take a deep breath! We well know what is best, it's back home on the sideboard. The Man takes hold of his wooden ding-a-ling and batters at the woman's astounded rear entry. She can hear the engine of his loins roaring closer from afar. She's beginning to banish all feeling from within her. But there's still room in the boot! And into the boot goes the heavy genital load, don't worry about the smell. The seats can't be kept clean anyway. Blindly the woman cashes in her security from the Man's spitting dispenser. He is milking her breasts. Let us be at home now. The trees have cast down the leafage of the mountains. The evergreen Man, he does not need to seek the woman's protection, he is mantled in goodwill, not a cloud in the sky. How happy property is to dwell with us. There is no better place for it to occupy than our genitals, which gape wide above it like crags above a torrent. In return this woman gets her life paid out in cash, smack on the table every month, for her everyday oven. Tomorrow once more for the child she will open the door from school into life, this too has been purchased by the Man, and he roasts his hefty sausage in her oven, in its flaky pastry case of hair and skin. But the school bus is stuck fast.

The woman suggests that the child has to eat too. Her husband does not hear. He is leafing abstractedly through his pocket dictionary. The house belongs to him. Already his Word has arrived there and will be taken to heart. He opens wide his wife's genitals to see if his signature there is legible. Angrily he drives his tongue in. It is a knack he acquired out of nowhere one day when he returned from the office. Joyous, the Direktor is a god. And soon he will be in the office joking with his secretary. He has to make a good showing! He tries out ever new positions from which to kick his cart down into his wife's quiet waters and start paddling like a maniac. He doesn't need water wings, he'll never pull one of those plastic things over his red head simply to stay in good health. His wife has been healthy for the longest of times anyway. She writhes beneath him and cries out as a whole herd of seeds plunge stampeding from his well-appointed glans. What's the matter. Only someone who need have no worry about a position or income can clink the ice cubes as loud as this.

This Man, who is now holding his pet tight in the clamp of his thighs, to bite the cheeks and pinch the tits, did after all devise a strategy of his own to cut the firm down to the essential core. Yes, you saw right! And you'll see more still when the gates are thrown open in the morning and the bowed backs of the gleaming herd (having drunk enough) – when they've barely had time to register the sun – disappear again into the darkness and hang up their fate to dry. Right. And every so often one of them is still in his dripping wraps. Who will have mercy on us? Rather let an excessive surplus be earned for the company, than that the superfluous ones, true at least to their wretched names, should earn something for their own homes and gardens. Profit for the foreign multi-national that owns the paper mill. So that he can start up from his sleep bawling, wrap all of us in paper, and gobble us up. The child has his workshop where he is housed and shaped up. At Christmas he performed a solo, standing in front of the manger where there was a dear little child such as himself. This year the snow fell early and it's going to be there a long time too. Sorry about that.

Later one of the woman's neighbours comes to visit, unbidden, uncalled for. The complaints simply pour from her. The abiding weakness of the female sex etc. Which has now awoken and, climbing the stairs, can only break loose out of itself as a complaint. This neighbour is as bothersome as an insect. She shines her light upon the people in the meadows. She confides expressly in the Frau Direktor, and expresses her confidence in the Son of God, who created the people hereabouts out of the earth and transformed their trees into paper, and she hopes He will show favour to her daughter who will soon be finishing her business studies course. Her husband no longer meets her, he meets a twenty-year-old waitress in a station restaurant. The Direktor's wife can think of no more words to say to her visitor. She has no refreshments left to offer her. How lightly she wears her wealth. There she sits, surrounded by furniture and pictures that hadn't a moment's peace till they belonged to her.

Essentially the Man is a big creature of pleasure, a bankable piggy, a citizen singing and gaming. So that his wife's body will be in a state to report for its daily duty, he chooses lingerie for her from a mail order catalogue. And lo, his choice has fallen upon naughty items, so that she can try to be like the models in the photos. But the undies are wasted on her. She leaves them in the drawer, forgotten, and says nothing. No red lace to disturb her peace. But, come to think of it, that's just how he likes it: when his people altogether forget themselves when he uses their love against them. Peacefully they pass like Time in their homes, waiting for him. The child, hungrily stalked by sport. The woman, thirstily compared with photos and films. Families with no dependants and no dependencies simply drive up in their large family car, equipment in the boot: the whips, the birch rods, the fetters, the rubber accessories, all for the big babies whose members are always weeping and wailing and whining for someone bigger than them to come and tame them. Some day their wives will be quiet too and the milk will come. The men even give each other* injections, in goes the needle, so they can stay the course longer when they go dropping their coins in the slots of the collecting boxes their wives beseechingly hold out. So that they themselves will be collected again. Calm. Pull themselves together fast. Pull a fast one on their business partners. Women are standing bowed over bowls of salted snacks, laughing, and presently the gentlemen dive onto the sofas, collapse, wag their tails, and then, as fast as they can, flee the ones they have charmed. How deeply the men desire that their shots should go far, far overshoot the mark, the game (what a game)! The women, stretchmarked by their children's sojourn inside them, have to serve themselve up, naked as the day their bundles of joy were born. The weighty wine glasses totter on the trays: their Lords and Masters embrace them from behind, from in front, from anywhere and everywhere, fingers are inserted and withdrawn, mouths suck between thighs. They break their favourite toys. Aha. Now they're resting after their labours of love, the loved ones and the thunderous horsepower that lay with them. The labours of sundry hairdressers have been ruined. There is garbage for charwomen to clear away once again. And then they all go on, and off, in their cars, in the loving arms of their wives. And who, in truth, will be embarrassed before his own car seats? They don't eat chocolate, mind you. The stains, which are all that remains of what we thought the highest of pleasures, tend not to wash out.

The Man can never simply disappear, all of a sudden. He is so settled in his beautiful house. In the evenings, the house is cloaked in the darkness of the forests and mantled in the gloom of the local people: handsomely turned out! Sympathy would be wasted on the woman. The pores of her child are still so small. The woman reels beneath the heavy burden of her happiness. She is under house arrest, but her sentence may be commuted for good behaviour. Round and round she goes in the same old rut; she mustn't deny her circuit judge his rest and recreation, though. His same old rutting. Barely home and his whistle's wet again. Company outings generally end in wetting the whistle, then out it comes, wanting to be blown, wanting to sound off in the open. Life mostly consists of things not wanting to stay where they are. So be it! All change! It all makes for restlessness, unceasing social intercourse, people go calling on each other but have to carry themselves with them wherever they go. Well-ordered servants, there they stand with the sausages of their sex, banging their cutlery on the table, wanting a hole to be served up fast, a hole to hide away in, only to re-emerge greedier than ever, to offer their hospitable services once again to those who have no need of them. Not even secretaries care to admit that the groping that goes on in their blouses is like a denunciation. They laugh. There are so many of them around here, too many for them all to get enough of their improper nourishment.

The Man appears at daybreak. And stands revealed. The naked truth. He knocks the woman over, slaps her on the backside, he who has travelled from afar. The tubes are already rattling on the bathroom shelf, the slip-on cover is trembling on the toilet, the porcelain is gleaming. You can hear the silence that has prevailed in the Man's rod all night. Then he speaks. Nothing can turn him away. On the level floor stands the woman, weary from her long and toilsome journey through the night, and now her socket's due to receive his plug. She has long since seemed as intimate as a rolling mill: even to his business associates he brags of her, and in short and powerful bursts the Direktor's dirty sallies talk their way to the top. And his subordinates maintain an embarrassed silence. The Man forces himself, well be hearing from each other. The Direktor reaches into the pocket of this body, which belongs to him. The loved objects are all there. Nothing missing. The Man is fond of easy talk and the woman is always easy. How could he possibly be expected to contain himself any longer, this silent can opener? Like a plant helplessly seeking the light the moment it's switched off. The child plays very nicely to order. How much better will he perform on his fiddle when one day, like his daddy, he's learnt to work the fiddles of manhood and fatherhood and perform the parts! The long and tedious breast-feeding lies in the child's forgotten past, but he still expects his every wish to be as automatically satisfied. For so long the woman gave of herself to the boy – and what has the trying creature learnt? That you have to try try try again, because heaven is a hill you have to climb, and the climbing has its price.

No, the woman is not mistaken. The boy will long since have put her aside by the time he is a man, and then he will be gone. Now Father drags her into the light, with all his strength, to open her dark tunnel for the express train roaring up. Every day the same. Even landscapes change, be it through sheer boredom, by virtue of the seasons. The woman is passive as a toilet, for the man to do his business in. He shoves her head down into the bathtub and, his hand clawing her hair, threatens that as you make your bed, so you must cry on it, that's love. No, cries the woman. She isn't asking for love. Already the Man is busy with his buttons. Her nightie is hoisted and wrapped around her ears. There is a whimpering in her entrails, like the whimpering of captive animals trying to kick a way out of their cage. The cambric nightdress, bright as a pilot light, is stuffed in the woman's mouth, and the Man appears as Nature made him. His innocent water is passed. Right beside the woman the water splashes from the dark smoke of pubic hair into the tub, past her bowed head. The enamel shines like new. How quickly the Man's tail has grown into a fine upstanding fellow in these friendly surroundings. The woman finds she has to cough while her flanks are being prised open. The can opener is pulled out of the terrifying flannel trousers, and presently a milky fluid appears, in just the time it takes to make a grease stain. His member is hauled out far too early from its drawer into the light. The woman, whose arse has been straddled wide open, a shady lane for the Man to go walking, is left standing. He pulls the helm right round and forces her to look at him. In a rage, he addresses himself to her frontage, forcing her to take hold of his dying willie. There. Already it's starting to twitch again. It wants to dwell within thy hallowed halls! He pushes the woman's hair into his come, what's left of it, let her take a good look, the simpleton. No, they do not rest, the heroes, when their labours are done. The woman is smeared full of sperm. Building her a fine house ensures that a wife will not go missing, and outside stand the paltry terraced houses of the poorest and the unemployed, up for sale, for public auction, or to be torched. And what was once a home is now under the hammer of the local lordsandmasters. What once was work is brutally taken away from these dear hearts. The women/though, can recoup it in small coin. Where else should they go, the women, but to those who splash about in the pool of power? Those who splash out with worthless rubbish that flies from them like foam from teeth? The generators create unnecessary products, the generations create unnecessary problems. This time the Direktor has kept his assets to himself till the right moment. Up front he creams the woman's face with his supersensitive lotion, then she gets an eyeful of his supersensitive parts. To drink in his ichor, truly, is not what she wants, but she must, she must, Love says so, she must groom him and lick him clean and dry him off with her hair. Jesus came first, so to speak, in this. He was wiped dry by a woman. In closing the woman is dealt a slap on the ass, time to close down, a crass lordand-master hand rummages in her slit and probes her orifice, his tongue licks at her nape, her hair hangs down into the tub, he tugs at her clit, and her knees give way and her arse snaps out like a folding chair. And lo, many others are obedient unto his command.

And the boy? What of the boy meanwhile? He's pondering a present he wants bought in return for not having seen any of his plug-and-socket parents' secrets. From every shop he sets eyes on, the child wants another slice of life, cut fresh, only the best, just for him. The child is a devious little rat. The new generation, this. The best is barely good enough. But soon this generation will be passing on as well, moving down the line. How else would we go on?

Father has shot a wad of sperm and now it's up to his wife to clean it up properly. What she doesn't lick up she'll have to wipe up. The Direktor strips off the rest of her clothes and watches her wiping and weaving. One moment her breasts hang forward, the next they bobble about in front of her as she scrubs, making things as new. He pinches her nipples in thumb, index and middle finger, then twists, as if he were trying to screw in a minute light bulb. His raging and weighty entrail slaps out at the window that opens in his trousers and whaps against her thighs from behind. When she bends down she has to spread her legs. Now he can cop hold of her whole fig tree with one hand and set his fingers angrily a-roving. Oh and while she's at it with her legs apart like that she can stand over him and piss in his mouth. What, she can't? Let's see. Up with her knee. There we are (applause, applause!) – the tender lips of her cunt, well part them with a soft smacking sound and we men'll be banging our tankards down on the table with a thump. If she still can't pee we'll drag her privates down by the short and curlies till she bends the knee and splays across the Herr Direktor's chest. By the hairs he holds the lips of her cunt parted like a handbag and slushes it across his face so he can drive his tongue inside, an ox at the salt-lick, the mountain is on fire. The men bear the load. Her waters murmur incomprehensibly. And the women even soak it up with absorbent rags and clean the place with Ajax.

The woman drinks the cold dregs of coffee from her dismal cup. As if preparing to flee, she has pulled on her wispy tights again. There isn't a woman anywhere near who has it anywhere near as good as she does. Her lordandmaster's claw rests upon her head, to make her feel at home in the cage. That evening the Direktor will be smiling at his weary wife again and setting his sights on the target. Later his surging banks of foam will crash against her yet again, his Austrian bank safe against any crash. The woman reaches into nowhere, where the food's spoiling, as if she wanted to shake him off the place of her slumbers. And so they will always be passing each other by on the broad and perilous highway, the terrifying mountain railway of marriage. This woman is envied by the villagers for the fine clothes she wears. The dirt in her house is vacuumed up by a woman hired as a cleaner from the catalogue of villagers, who wanted nothing but to live in brotherhood. The child was born late, but not so late that he hasn't the time to turn into a griping adult. The Man shouts out loud with pleasure, and the woman's voice snuggles against him so that he will wave his magic wand and produce nice expensive things for the home. Such as a three piece suite that can be used at the stations where the two of them go to rub off their blessed sex. But no one can do magic. When the Man sobers up he is obliging towards the woman and good-natured, of course he'll buy her whatever she wants, he bought everything you see here in full colour, ladies and gentlemen. So dry your cheeks! There, now.

In the evening, their plates will offer a refuge to food without a home. Fleetingly the dishes are introduced to each other. Then off they go to mingle. In the bodies. What must things be like beneath some people's roofs! Food is of no consequence in this house, all that matters is that there be a lot to eat, so that the stronger of the two can smile and yield in his largesse. Sausage and cheese of an evening, wine and beer and brandy. And milk for the child, to guarantee his growth. That is how the middle class works: safeguarded below and legally protected above. The protection of Nature is done by the ones underneath. So that the whole class doesn't go plummeting into the bottomless depths.

Early in the morning, the Man has already relieved himself. Big are the heaps he dumps, and he's been busy with his pitchfork heaping up more. And how the urine splashes from him! Everywhere under his roof he can be heard. His articulated penis roaring to a standstill in the lay-by of his wife. Where at last he can relieve himself. Lightened of his product, he goes again to the lowly beings who make their own product under his supervision. The paper they have manufactured is an alien thing to them. Nor will it endure for long. The Direktor yells as he bangs and knocks and thrusts. Competitors are banging and knocking at the door, you have to anticipate their next moves, otherwise one or two more of the blessed poor will have to be sacked, or rather: liberated from their toil. Out he goes, the lordandmaster, into Nature, his back bowed with responsibilities, he-carries them on his back so he has his hands free. Of his wife, to whom he is a lord, by whom he is restored, he expects that she will be naked beneath the gown of her house when he specially lays back the twenty kilometres from the office to the house. The child will be out of the way. Climbing aboard the school bus the boy fell over his sports gear, what a prick!

The woman awakens quickly from the warm pressure bandage of peace where she has sought refuge. She keeps everything that the boy hastily flung at her as he was leaving. The rest will be dealt with by the housekeeper, who has seen a thing or two in this house and picked it up off the floor, too. When the boy was small, Mother sometimes took him along to the supermarket, where the manager would obligingly escort them personally past the gaggle of waiting housewives. The child would be sitting in the shopping trolley, which was not unlike the womb, and how he liked it there! The thing is, cars built for burning up the track generally have holes in all the wrong places, but still eighteen-year-olds love them more than they love their own families, they can't wait to get away from their parents and parental homes, theirs till death. And then, those magic magnetic security tags on new clothing! Oh, if only people had them too! Then they wouldn't promptly go scotching their prospects when they admire the prospects afforded elsewhere. Sex is going to be safeguarded against disease as women are safeguarded against the world, so they don't happen to look out of the window without due care and attention and go for a stroll through Life for a change and end up wanting to change their lives. But it's only clothing that is given this security protection in the stores. There's a shrill alarm signal if anyone who shouldn't takes the articles past the check-out, a wanderer out a-roving in the silent realm of the dead and of different brands of coffee. Better to go on foot and poorly clad to our sexual rendezvous. Better to live amidst waste of our own producing. At any rate, we will not have any other vehicle joining our little fleet. And so we keep life forever moving on, following where the road leads, following a friendly face in which we see the terrible reflection of our own.

Only last week the woman bought herself a trouser suit in a boutique. She smiles, as if she had something to hide. Though all she has is the silent realm of her body. Three new pullovers she's purchased she hides away in the cupboard, so that she offers no purchase to mistrust, no occasion for the suspicion that she's using her bloody groove as a ticket to a month of pleasures. The fact is that all she picks from the tree of her Man is that goodly fruit, money. The umbral leafage quilts the trees no longer. The Man checks the cheques she's written, and lo, thousands of trees tossing their topmost branches in the wind are laid low by the axe. The woman's housekeeping money is paid out to her and more! But he doesn't really believe that he actually has to pay for the comfortable rocking chair where he stretches out like a gratified boy, resting his rod. The woman is under the protection of his sir/surname, his lordandmaster holy-family name, under the shelter of his bank accounts, of which he gives her regular accounts, she has to know what kind of deal she's got, so that as his value appreciates she'll appreciate him the more, and likewise he knows of her garden, ever open, which is ideal for grunting and wallowing. After all, we have to make use of what belongs to us, don't we? Why else would we have it in the first place?

Barely is the woman on her own but she goes out for a walk, escorted by money, securities and depreciation, fine company. Like a shadow she glides through the multitude who make the paper, the sea of paper across which she sails her ship of life, the sea that would bury us all alive, given half a chance! For over there the masses of unemployed fools are lying in wait till someone finally follows their trail. And we? Do we want to fly on, ever on? Smart alecks that we are, first we'll have to climb higher up, to them that shift their arses shall be given.

The woman puts her multi-purpose hand before her eyes. Soon the Man and the child will have to be covered in food again, and what lies ahead tonight? The Man, compact, loaded, fresh from the factory. Waiting to unload. He's been fermenting in his bottle and he wants to uncork the fizz. Tonight, that's right, we almost forgot, how could we, tonight is the legally appointed time for the transaction. And the woman waits with her absorbent cloth to soak up everything the Man has produced during the day. And the rest vanish into the shadows to bury their hopes alive.

The landscape is pretty big, you have to admit. It is a loose fetter upon our fate, which lies shrouded in mist. Two lads out on mopeds promptly come a cropper in the snow. They tumble and go flying. The woman laughs out suddenly. Just for once she would like to go forward decisively. Today her husband showed what he could do in her body, as if there were two of him. Just wait a little. Till evening. When you enter into the circuitry. Now the Man has been drawn off to his office by a steel counterweight about the size of a telephone. Setting the pebbles flying, he has made it to the armchair behind his desk, from where he controls the fates of others, and to a skiing event on a screen. He loves sport as well. The boy got it from his father. People would simply lie abed patiently and undemanding, if it weren't that the TV screen is full of movement, as are their own feet and hearts at times as well. When the Man speeds along the country road the hairs are flattened on the skin, that's how fast he drives. When he calls for someone, he roars as someone wearing traditional costume would roar. Soon an appearance by the choir will be called for.

On Sunday, as an example of the convivial social life in an army, they go to church. In their coops they have books and memorials of their own enslavement. Nor are the doctor and chemist averse to paying a call on the Pope and the Mother of God. They envy no man his labour. The well-groomed custodians of health, fine fruits of further education, they go to the pub to sit awhile and be jolly. The doctor envies the chemist his shop, the profits of which we wouldn't say no to. The chemist gets people straight from the doctor, with all their weight and blood pressure problems. Lavishly he distributes his preparations amongst the unemployed of the area, so that they will be of good cheer again and will sit outside their houses contentedly twiddling their thumbs. Their wives have provided something to eat, and offer them tasty fare in other ways as well. They won't be deleted from the menu. So the men shall lack for nothing, for men there must be something, the foremen of nothing. Some leave, though a moment ago they seemed at home with us.

Like the woman who works at the bank and is obliged to wear a different dress every day, the Frau Direktor is under certain constraints, and several times a day she draws the freshly cleaned net curtains between herself and the longings of the village women. She would be safer dwelling there than in her own living room. The Direktor talks to the boy. Who jumps and stomps so that he can visit a friend later on. The boy is not entitled to choose his friends to his own satisfaction. The other lads' fathers eat HIS bread! The child is a leader on this earth, steering the others as he steers his toy cars. Mother plays a piano accompaniment to everything, and out there the people rest their weary and discouraged heads on each other's breasts. Their eyes were too big for their bellies. They bought everything they saw. And now the village feasts its eyes when they auction off the houses, which stand all too cheekily on the bare earth. There they stand, the would-be people queueing at the bank, where blessed children in white blouses play with other people's money, to pay in their fates and the fates of their homes, pouring the trickle out of their wage packets into the mighty torrent of interest. The bank manager knows the lie of the land, and he's amazed at the lies people tell so they can keep the houses they built themselves. How they have loved their possessions! And still, so close to home, he has to take everything' from them. In his mind's eye the bank manager has fore-suffered all when, no monster he, he looks in at their windows. In this wintry place the poor squabble among themselves. The bolt guns and the hunting rifles crack. Nooses twine about the neck of life. The savings banks are happy as clams, simply messing about with money. For the farming cooperatives it's one long village fete, they don't want to know about the individual, they simply pile high their poisonous cheeses and rotten dairy products on him. And from the very humblest they still take the apple of his eye, and even his nuts as well. Till one day he goes crazy. Flips. Flaps above the nest where he has butchered his dead brood, screaming. How could he have hoped to cope? And in the tabloid papers, for a schilling or so from our pigeon-chested purse, you can read all about the lives of people visited by horror.

What you see from the window is pretty fine: that comely, shapely, strapping lass, Nature. The Man, still the bureaucrat even in his desire, is pursuing a human need, which is not to be confused with the unpleasant need for another human being! There lies the Direktor, like a landscape. But restless. He has smeared on his cheese spread, and what is it he sees in the face of his wife? The human visage of his dictatorship? It is as if the woman had been erased, wiped out, away, wearing her new naughty lingerie. At his request. As if the spatial contours of her life had been redefined. Money plays games with people. From time to time, in his lucid moments, a fit of remorse overcomes the Direktor, and he buries his great big face in the woman's apron. But then it's back to the bathroom to bang her head against the dirty tub again and see if the path that's been cleared goes all the way to her dark doorway. Behind which, there she is, sitting in her own lap, dandled, fondled, spoilt, waiting to have her pages turned to the very last. And how indeed are the unemployed to live in this world if there are not cheap novels to supply examples?

The Direktor, who speaks softly to his staff and has songs sung to him in return, prefers using his tackle on the woman by day, in the bright light. He likes watching his own health increasing. The woman begs him at least to be a little cautious with the child around; the feral creature might leap forth unexpectedly from his corner of the ring at the very last moment. Bang on schedule, the fruit of her womb puts in an appearance, idly looks on for a while as his parents sample the goodies (clutching their plates at the spotless and heavily laden buffet) and vanishes once again, to plague the neighbourhood kids who must grow up without artistic, artificial paradises with his sporting tackle and sporting talk. The boy has ripened in the sun like fruit. Father, depending on your point of view, takes a healthy head-dive into Mother. Words cannot describe it, we want action not words, we have to pay at the entrance to the convenience, and do our duty, which rushes constantly like water.

The little houses have to go to sleep now, but in the big ones there is still life, the current is flowing between the sexes, and, speaking of current, the water flow brings their bodies together. Now we are entirely private. Nor need we be embarrassed in public. And, once the lovers have found each other, they relax and sup at the precious drops that bubble from their gold-labelled bottles. And are at home. Resting in each other once their privates have been excited. They are one. The one and only. Delivered from the dust. And, while all about the poor are dying, the superior classes renew their unspoken rights to each other with every day that comes, and they come too. They have saved up their powers in their piggy banks and in their trousers and hearts. So that they can take a good strong bite from the peach that bloomed so beautiful but a short, short while ago. It is all theirs. Even sleep flatters them, the rapid eye movements of greed cannot be seen behind their closed lids. They must never go unobserved by their loved ones, so every day they sally forth anew, to harvest new finery and fortune, and come staggering home with all they've taken from the staggeringly rich – to be transformed, renewed, daily freshened and restored for the dear soul that they are, have and want to keep. But the weak live together. For they are what we do not want to be. And to crown it all, they imagine they wouldn't want to live anywhere else. They know what they like. Of course, they're not offered the option of liking anything else. And they're woken early, too. Work takes toll of not a single one too many. They are sufficient unto themselves. But we want more! Action! Let there be light – for us! We shall walk forth in the light, and even if it were the light of our own pocket torches, just enough to light the way for two, two members of the flock of the refined: we, we must be the ones! Let there be us!