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

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JUICILY, CALMLY, THE MAN inserts the image of his wife into the slit of the viewer. With a shudder the woods reach out for the house, where the video images, a herd of creatures capable of reproduction, are moving across the screen in front of eye witnesses. The women are dragged into the picture by their fetters. Only their daily routine is more merciless. The woman scans the plain as far as the horizon, the vast plain that lies before her every day to be crossed with her husband, then she lies before him on her cross. The Direktor is unbowed by the responsibilities of his job, his sap is rising, he sucks at her tits and slits and bellows for the night to come, for the late show to begin. So too, on mountain slopes, the images grow green, and climbers tread them underfoot in their stout boots.

The unanticipated appearance of the boy is almost as great a tragedy as the weather here. Like a carrier rocket the son, little sunbeam, shoots straight into the room, where the screen is raining its images, pouring its waters. His simple eyes are just in time to register the suffering bodies. Bodies gaping wide like sore and wounded chasms. Bodies visiting, to keep up social intercourse. And the men keeping it up, toiling with the heavy tools of their trade, labouring at their desire. Dying away inside the women. Only their bodies and heads remain outside, and devise new wombs made of glass, to look into. Instantly Father climbs off Mother, letting fly a gusty fart from his gutsy motor, shifting into reverse, and doing a U-turn on the carpet. The boy pretends to have understood nothing. He himself, after all, is a consumer now, scrimmaging and scrummaging: his needs and wishes are like pages in his memory, his taste has been spoilt by the immortal pictures in the sporting goods catalogues, sport is good for the healthy citizen! Everything belongs to him and his dear parents, to whom in turn the child belongs. Mother covers herself hurriedly. As if with hay. The boy has already grasped that evil has a name: Father. But Papa does still buy the baskets of goodies, the sackfuls fat with bulging fun, and binds his son with strings of gold. The child affects not to have noticed the bonds that bind his mother, there on the sofa; instead he reads his parents a list of conflicting wishes. You can drive it on sand, gravel, stone, water, ice and snow! Or a Persian carpet. It has to be bought. So that one can look back from far off in the landscape, back at home. The woman is having fun in her handcuffs, she thrashes her legs, her eyes fixed on the uncertainty that is her child: whatever will become of him? An eaglet gnawing at a sportscar? Beak hacking into the flesh of a human breast? Will he accept defeat in the slalom, which is staked out behind the house and is meant for fun and to accustom humankind to detours? Everything this Man and his manchild wish for is dangerous in one way or another. With her teeth Mother tries to pull a blanket over her bare nipples, into which Father has just sunk his teeth. Abruptly the images on the screen are lulled asleep. The child is there. The child wants a motorized sleigh, but in these parts motorized sleighs are officially banned. Customers are entitled to have their demands met; the woman has to look the part.

The Direktor expects to be able to phone home at any time at all, including office hours, to check that he is being thought of. He is as inevitable as death. Always to be at the ready. To tear her heart out. To lay her heart on her tongue like the host, and to show that the rest of her body is in readiness for the Lord, as he expects of his wife. To this end he keeps the bridle on his bride. He keeps her under his watchful eye. He sees everything, he has a right to examine whatever he wishes. For his prick it bloometh in its prickly bed, and on his lips the kisses bud and blow. But first he has to take a good look at everything, to work up an appetite. For you eat with your eyes too. And nothing remains concealed, excepting heaven unto the eyes of the dead, who placed their hope in it at the last. Which is why the Man wants to make a heaven on earth for his wife, and she sometimes makes the food. You can get away with requesting it three times a week, her famous Linz gateau. And as for the famous Linz dictator, the Man can voice his regard for him in the back room at the pub, where those assembled take solace in History's merciful ability to repeat itself, and look into a glass, darkly, to see what the government has in store for the country.

The Direktor is so vast that you couldn't get around him in a day. He is open to anything, especially the rain and snow that come from up above. There is no one above him, except the parent company, that is, but there is no protection against it. When it's a matter of his wife's sharp edge, though, it's no problem opening up the tap and letting it spurt out. The woman twitches like a fish. Her hands being bound. While the Man tickles and prickles her a little with pins. He pricks an ear at the store of feelings he's hoarded deep within. Words fall from the video screen like leaves, they fall to the floor, floored by this one-man win in the human race. At a loss, the woman casts a protective glance at a dying plant on the window sill. Now the Man is saying something. Words as meaty as steak. He doesn't mince them. As his blood and juices gather, he talks incessantly of what he will do and what he won't be able to help doing, and he uses his savage claws and tame teeth to gain access to his objective, to add mustard to his sausage. His wife's sex is a wood from which an angry echo returns to him.

Recently he forebade his wife Gerti to wash. For her nmell too belongs to him entirely. He ransacks his little woodland, heaves the weighty heel of his loaf into her bread bin, a nuisance that she is often so swollen, damn it! Ever since his guts failed him and he stopped the small-ad search for strangers desirous of swopping wives, he's preferred it to be the gusts of his own desire that search out his wife. Lifting her skirts. He wants her trailing a banner of sweat, piss and shit scents. "And he checks that the stream is flowing in its own bed where it belongs. A living heap of garbage. Where worms and rats go burrowing. With a bellow he takes the plunge, he gets a move on, quickly reaching the far end where his home is and hell be cosy again and now and then he'll toss one back or simply watch the fishes jump. He reads the papers. He drags the woman from the swamp of her cushion and cracks her open. And there on the sofa yet again he has his nice little toy complete with tits to play with, trembling at what his veins have done with his member.

He likes to have this woman, the best-dressed woman in the village, going about the house in her own dirt. Angrily he hits her about the head. In their transubstan-tiation he has had her body rebuilt to his specifications. It is a vessel designed for copious giving. He too is replenished nightly, his self-service store, his toy grocer's where it's perfectly okay to set a little something aside. The front door key confers the right to today's special, clit served any way you want it, or you can slam the toilet door; the Roman Catholic homeland is flexible, but it allows people to go to pregnancy counselling or the altar. The house has to send out SOS signals while the woman is being utilized. Later a choice bottle of wine will be uncorked and the screen will show other bottles being uncorked, pop! and the choice bodies will examine each other's genitals, rattle at the handle and cast their seed on stony ground. How greedy we are to watch them. But others are watching us. Crunching salted snacks, nibbling the gentlemen's sausages or the ladies' titbits.

The boy will perhaps stay at the neighbours' tomorrow.

They have an exactly identical house, only less of it. The Man wants to drive his savage cart into the woman's dirt. Who practises breath control and has to dive to one side to escape his prick as it crashes into the undergrowth of her panties. His body has had an overpowering effect on all kinds of people, thanks to music and song, they have been packaged up in portions and deep-frozen for later when they will be needed on the job market or to sing in the choir of market forces. The moon is shining, oh look, the stars are shining too, and the Man's machine comes crashing and roaring home from afar, ploughs up the furrow she has cleared with her teeth, sets the cut grass flying like spray, and pumps the woman full to the brim.