Today country policeman Kurt Janisch is once again looking at the photo on which his father, Police-Colonel Janisch, saluted the King, thirty years earlier. Look, his father is still standing there, evidently forced to draw back just an inch from his own enthusiastic motion of standing to attention, but why is there nothing to check him?-there's something soft, indecisive about his shoulders, which then seems to push him forward again. Perhaps it was no more than an involuntary bow before the monarch, more or less as an encore to the frequendy rehearsed salute. There's nothing at all subordinate about the son anymore, standing there in front of the cabinet in his striped track-suit harnessing his body by slowly warming it up before going running. His father had still borne his subordination, with drooping shoulders but capable hands, down the dusty country roads and to smashed up car wrecks. Perhaps the son is more versatile and can also give orders, the way he looks makes me curious: a somewhat angular face, across which the thoughts, which in all people like to spread out, merely seem to shyly slip through. Well. But the will would be there now, what is he going to use it for? The boat has heaved to, the traffic lights are switched on and are permanently at green, the fine distinction between him and other people is growing.
The country policeman is meanwhile completely dominated by a kind of greed, which came unnoticed, but was finally noticeable even to the neighbors (astonishment at plant progeny in the front garden, no one knows where they come from, he can't have bought them!). Occasionally someone looks up the land register, to see what the country policeman tried to camouflage with the book of life. Now he has moored, he has spied out his targets. The oars have been taken in, the line, the nets cast. Perhaps originally there was room for something else, beautiful, decent in the country policeman? A good-looking and seemingly light-hearted man, the country policeman, just the sort we women like. Something to work with. It's not just to keep world peace that men dish out a load of lies to women, to make them dependent, while women indeed have something better to offer, all their thinking and feeling and a lot of things made of brightly colored wools. It's understandable, of course, that we, especially those of us with the older sex organs, who haven't seen much through the little escape hatches of the body, must remain strangers to ourselves nevertheless! We love-hungry ladies, unfortunately we don't know this country policeman (the flower of the country road goes down right in front of his marked car and we're not there) personally. Not to worry, I'll take care of that: So as not to jeopardise your little bit of lover's bliss which depends on deception, like every other kind, I'd better take over the telling of the story myself now. Don't interrupt! At the moment in order to prevent war between the bodies I can't even exactly tell their functions. Not even this determination in the man, which I already sense, properly knows its goal yet, but I know it's been looking for a long time and will find it in what corrupts most easily, the human body. Whoever knows himself will immediately want a bit of the other, but then the others immediately want it, too.
Incidentally they're both dead now, the king and his guide and guard, the father of the country policeman, who that day proudly escorted the prancing black coaches from Graz main station (the state visit came from Vienna by rail over the Semmering Pass) across the foreordained Mur Bridge and then casually flung them into the armory, where already centuries ago rich people had handed over their metal clothes for safekeeping. How can one hate life, the son is just thinking, who was left over from his father's table, and turns his face to the mountain wind. High up there, through the attic window of his house, a small trough for animals can be seen, into which soft muzzles dig, whose owners, male and female, will later be shot, many of them, except for the mothers, which at this time of year are still protected by their motherhood. Others are alone. Even animals, often wrongly, seek out the nearness of the other, and the country policeman also likes to be sociable in the public house and does small deals on the side (with watches and jewelry preferably in the county town! Where not so many people know one's face). Therefore many people regard him as a good mate, who can get you second hand building tools along with building materials more cheaply. Yet if he honestly travels around inside himself, he has to conclude it's so dark in there, one doesn't even know exactly where one is. No wonder that again and again, at intervals of about a month, he has to light himself up a bit through belligerent but not very purposeful indiscriminate drinking. His colleagues don't see this darkness in their chum, perhaps they suspect it sometimes, and they don't want to believe their wives, who sense something like that and are strongly attracted by it until they end up in a heap on heat. Whoever only learns about everything from reading should please do so now.
Am I mistaken, or was something found here years ago that was never cleared up? What am I forced to look at, when I open this old newspaper? A pale face glimmers there beneath the lowest fir twigs, like a little moon, the face has something to tell, but can no longer tell anyone, because a heavy hand was laid on the throat, clothes were pulled down, the features of the face convulsed; tracks which might good-naturedly have given the green light, if only they'd been asked, arched up, broke, as the roots of the body, the legs, were tugged and shaken, until enough was enough, until the crumbly earth was loosened. So, now where's the bag with the humor, which we still had with us when we gave information to the police earlier? Where is the humus for the potting? Jeans into which absolutely nothing seems to fit anymore, come apart at the seams, a skirt flies up, falls down to earth again from heaven, reluctantly, because not cut out for it, becomes a sack, into which goes the woman's face. Well, and now where will we put the stamp, so that this one, originally with such varied interests, will in future only long for sleep, because she has got to know and learned to reject fundamentally, down to the last root fibers of being, the opposite of sleep, extreme activity?
It sometimes makes the country policeman nervous that the villagers don't really know him at all, although the camouflage he originally strove for was kindness and friendliness after all, and then he goes on drinking far too long, alone if need be. The ground beneath and between his feet has already been caressed by women until it got too hot for him, women on whose grounds he has cast an eye. Such a forceful, big man, who is capable of unleashing almost any kind of event. A chosen woman, who previously had been lying a little too long in the shop window, until too many had seen her and not taken her away, meanwhile knows only the square yard in front of the telephone, and it, too, has by now been burnt right through from all the running back and forth, and then the way from the door and the nice bed, which, together with new satin bed linen has been specially bought for two in the county town. What does one need the rest for?
It's not good to hate, but only if you tell me who, can I really say, if it's good or bad. It gives some people the energy they need, like a Mars bar, which comes straight from the god of war and plunges into a human figure, until the latter has melted away. The pilot can no longer save himself even with his ejector seat. But with hating one can grow nice and old. It passes the time, which in any case runs off as soon as it sees us. Of course, everyone thinks they must be among friends, if they happen to run across someone outwardly tranquil, who holds public office and takes it out of women, they're always really finished afterwards. So why hate, except in a war, which is being of once again at present, which makes everything inside us, and that's a great deal, depending on the anger of the other side, shoot out and could only be dammed up once more by the utmost love of life and a home-sewn iron curtain. But we don't have anything like that in stock in our store, we've only got two very soft down duvets there, in case someone happens to drop by. Instead we have reciprocal campaigns on offer, until the field between us is trampled down. Now it's been softened up as well by the rain and our desires for our neighbor's property. It's no longer good even as a field of slaughter. But the neighbor has to give way anyway, we've threatened to get the police onto him, if he doesn't take down the wall with the ugly fence on top, because it's spoiling our view. Frankness, diligence, and cheerfulness, which the country policeman likes to feign for others, is intended to give rise to the love of others towards him, but there is little of this commodity in stock. The flames are already shooting up in the Game Boy, in which our own life is simulated, but what frightful face is looking back at us from it? No face looks back from us at the country policeman, who is fast asleep with sweet dreams of power and greatness, because, wrongly, this man doesn't interest us yet. That could soon change once he has got hold of the building plan of our circuits and our little house and the apartments we own. I hope I'll manage it so that you too experience one of his happy moments! But I doubt it, I already don't like him. It's a frequent reproach, that I stand around looking stupid and drop my characters before I even have them, because to be honest I pretty quickly find them dull. Perhaps at this very moment, as the servant of the state is bending over someone else's building plan, which he has stolen, perhaps now he is happier than we are? And we're supposed to be interested in that?
Yet I fear, only if he were addressed in the Name of the Republic would it be a matter of concern to our community of the living, and that can take a long time. I am filling the time in between with my unproductive song. There is a limit, but it just isn't given to some people to be happy wanderers, although the snowdrops, that's right, it's spring now and that makes us happy, are stretching out their little digger claws towards the soil, as if they wanted to pick up the soil instead of your shoe sole doing it sooner or later. Even Kurt Janisch sometimes asks himself where this dark side comes from (for which he has a certain warrant because of his profession, and which, whenever one thinks, now the lightbulb's gone, grows even darker still. Who on earth lets down the blinds in the middle of the night? Only someone who's going to shun the light of day come the morning!). He can't work it out. His parents didn't really ignore him, they didn't encourage him either, in any respect, not even to keep going with that smart appearance of his, which was already there quite early on, someone was bound to come and hitch a ride with him, a nice girl perhaps. Someone is sure to be able to make use of it, this ghostly, pale, curly-haired and yet nevertheless robust figure, which a person can't help, but the country policeman can, because he's constantly exercising it. God has given it to him along with the commandments, so that a man forgets obedience again, because he's so busy with his appearance. Women in particular do a great deal for their appearance, so obeying an industry prepared to go to any lengths, whose products constantly contradict one another, otherwise why would there be so many? The country policeman only rarely thinks about his actions, with which we shall have to concern ourselves, prefers to stay on the surface of things, where he passes his comb through, drawing furrows in his dark-blond hair like hammers in a rock. The comb has been moistened first, on his head then it looks as if there's rain, from which one should have protected oneself. Now the country policeman has himself risen to quite a high rank, and even his grown-up son already has a good post, even if not at the station, where he would unfortunately collide with his father's position. Yes, and something else I wanted to say: His son already has a little house, too, great, even if it doesn't properly belong to him yet, it's been acquired on a life annuity. But the life, which at this point is still owner of the house, has subsequently, unfortunately and unexpectedly, with varying success, but by and large rather vigorously, gone on living, although originally it seemed no more than a ruin: an old woman who now only rarely gets a breath of fresh air, although it really should be the duty of the country policeman's daughter-in-law to take her for walkies every day, but one can't do everything oneself. Nor can one yet kill her, e.g., with lily of the valley leaves, it would be too soon, there would be talk in this tightly defined community, and the clusters of people would grow together into an almost impenetrable hedge (though loaded with good fruit!), which like a net first protects the wrongdoer from himself and then, if he has not harmed himself, hands him over to justice. The country policeman's son has a wife, who belongs to God and the Virgin and every Sunday morning and every evening bloodlessly sacrifices herself in church in front of the tabernacle. That's how she was brought up, and she has arranged with her will to go on in the same way voluntarily, even without the coercion of the nuns, who fine-ground her so that some day she will fit through heaven's gate. Ten years ago she gave birth to a child, a son, which is the sole meaning and purpose of marriage. A daughter, a few more kids even would have been welcome, too. God said nothing about having to change the diapers of an old woman. That's why the young woman is so pig-headed, there's nothing more solid than the views of the Church, so the old dear can just lie there in her own shit until evening, or until she rusts, we're going to evening mass now, she has to stand firm until it's time to go to bed, the old dear, not the Church, it has already stood firm for much longer and doesn't need any diapers either. Because it takes and takes and never parts with what it has. Perhaps that's where we learned it, no, we could do it already. And the son, let's just say what his name is, his name is Ernst Janisch, and he in his turn has a son, Patrick, but the wife belongs half to God and the ancient woman three quarters. Every day she swallows two liters no problem, she has to be given that, otherwise she throws a fit; that results in a lot of excreta, if one's not allowed to go to the john because it's one floor down, built-in to the present home of the country policeman's children, where it's used much more often. That's not how the old woman imagined it, when she indirectly put her fate in the hands of an official. But what I'm writing here is not intended to be an investigation. The diagnosis "initial stages of liver cirrhosis" is anyway certain, I think. If God still manages the last drops of the old dear, he will himself be so far gone that he won't be paying attention to anything anymore and overlook many sinners. Never mind. This house will then at last belong entirely to the country policeman's son, he'll never share a thing again, not even with this God, we can collect the money ourselves. God will get our sins, he'll have to make do with that.
None of all the promising properties of which there are expectations, there are considerably more than I was able to enumerate here, is at the moment completely paid off or has paid off or is even really in prospect, with the exception of the old woman's share, who, if nothing out of the ordinary occurs and the Lord works a miracle, seems to be declining into eternity and otherwise. The country policeman's daughter-in-law has anyhow made a nice down payment on this eternal bliss, in the shape of a son, who is still a child, especially pleasing to God. God scrubs his soul in confession, the priest scrutinizes it for dirty thoughts and tells the son, after he himself has had a good wank in the darkness of his soul, his favorite place, to join the line of little children at the back, where it's easy to get at him; the line, which the priest receives for children's mass once a week, snakes round there, hissing and scuffling and, making use of the flat of his hand, if someone chatters or passes on unpleasant truths, he sends them home again. Are these personal belongings not perhaps burdens on the development of a still young man, who would urgently need a few mortgages in order to unburden himself a little? To him even curtains are already a revolutionary decision, he's always saying he only needs the bare minimum, and that's the ownership of house and real estate. Otherwise he's stingy, the mechanic, the engineer, and his father even more so. His wife has to embellish the front garden with cuttings which, as if something like that were not constantly happening in the world on a grand scale and as a warning to us, she secretly plucks out from the pots at the nursery. Does this son of man perhaps want to keep the little house but get rid of wife and child? Can all his faithfulness so quickly be over and done with? He hasn't had the family so very long yet! Perhaps there'll be more children! We shall find out or again maybe not, depending on whether I can express myself intelligibly or not and don't mix up the dramatis personae all the time, at the moment it doesn't look as if that's going to happen. Why on earth did I start off with three generations, in fact there are even four? Oh well, they're not all present at the same time after all, and anyway they're all the same. Are we all going to get into the same boat, what do you think? Who wouldn't like to have at least one little house for themselves alone? He could drive under the bridges or drive along the motorways up above, but the house would stay patiently at home and wait for him.
The son of the present country policeman is employed by the Post Office as a telephone maintenance man and mender of faults, he attended a technical secondary school, whose graduates call themselves engineers and are everywhere much sought after, in particular by the telephone companies, shooting up everywhere, soon there'll be just one, hot for our voices. In order to consolidate and shield his permanent job, the son goes every week without fail to his bank on the main square, as if his determination would bring in somewhat more than his securities justify, horns lowered in anticipation of contradiction, inflexible, immovable, his hands, however, pleading, raised almost hesitantly, off he goes to the bank, which gives him credit, until he will have lost every security and finally will only be able to dumbly, imploringly hold out his hands, they stay where they are. To be rich depends on a precise knowledge of what one has and what one could still get. Why does the Church do so little for its own, who fill its buildings so assiduously with flesh? The church doesn't care whether people come or not, it's nearly always locked up anyway, except during mass, when the holy Eucharist listlessly does its duty in its cubbyhole. It should be possible, for example, that pious vergeresses like the young daughter-in-law of the country policeman, in the course of selfless activity in the service of the parish, could spy out little houses becoming vacant more quickly than others, why not, and why then don't they inherit? Why then does a nephew from Linz inherit, who has never even seen a church or his aunt's little house from inside for years? And why are we not all wealthy film stars, who go home and wipe off our desires with our make-up, in order to have bigger, more beautiful ones the next day and particularly in order to have a good night's sleep, so that you can't tell our lives by looking at us and we can all candidly display ourselves in the magazine? Luckily crimes of violence only rarely occur around here. You won't believe just how few people there are who have no relatives at all anymore! Then there are others again, who disguise themselves as widows with perms, and who turn out to have a faraway son after all, who slunk off in good time, but who, at the crucial moment, changes the course of events, which most of the time were themselves slinking along. What a bore! There comes this son, from Linz or what do I know, from Recklinghausen, Germany, or Canada, where he had been thought to have gone missing in the smelting house of a steelworks or underneath a gigantic stack of wood, and the fatted calf together with the house are already waiting for him, without him having done a thing for it. The will is now challenged with a heavy sword, just wait a moment, thwack, and the air's out of it. Perhaps the Church only exists to knock reason into the old folks who have to die soon anyway, to ensure they step into its marquee in good time and to prettily illustrate the dark abyss of hell. Heaven is always other people, when they benevolently take our property off our hands. Hell is in us. The Church itself prefers to inherit, instead of its half-witted employees getting anything.
The son of the country policeman remains sitting immobile in the customer's easy chair of the branch manager, afraid of inadvertently betraying through the language of his body, which even he doesn't quite understand, anything, even the tiniest bit about his true and presumptive properties which the bank doesn't absolutely have to know about. What do you need this scrap of paper for? What's on this bit of paper doesn't interest me in the least. Only the signature counts, and what's printed above it. Only then is the truth also legally binding. Today the bank is to be informed of the prospective salary rise, which was notified in an informal letter. Of course all this is merely a provisional state of affairs for this employee, because soon his properties will be more numerous than the grains of sand on the vegetables freshly pulled from the garden, with which you can save money shopping. The wife pulls it right out of her heart, in which no one lives anymore, because her husband moved out years ago. Yes, this house is yours to hold, says God, and means the body of a human being, even several houses together wouldn't make a knight out of me, thinks the country policeman, who knows about such a tin man from a book of tales from this area. His son is already as zealously greedy as his father and he would stop at nothing, if people didn't voluntarily die beforehand, sometimes admittedly pretty late in the day. If the dear lord knew to whom they raise up houses, instead of him having to steal them as his children do, who even have to take care of that themselves.
The rage, which is sometimes hidden behind a cheerful smile, may then suddenly but all the more powerfully shoot out, if the old body, which goes along with every pension, shows itself unasked in the hall next to the toilet door, where it doesn't belong, it belongs once and for all up in the attic. This old woman has a pretty thick skull, but a plastic screwdriver handle, which has many smaller, interchangeable heads, its changelings so to speak, is after all not made of cotton wool. It's good and hard, even if not fatal. Saints sometimes yield and concede something, but not this head. If you please, here however we have a corresponding bruise on the temple. Why does the old dear have to keep on falling down! Gome a bit closer again, you old heap of shit, then we'll show you how wretchedly you can bleed behind the bright and cheerful geraniums on the window sill, which are on the outside so that no one can see in. The people in the bank yesterday irritated this man impermissibly with their glances, and he has a very violent temper, aha, he's got another appointment with the branch manager, he must be short again this month! He must've taken on too much with all those mortgages and bills of exchange and foreign exchange credits! Janisch Jr. feels their looks like branches prodding the wild beast of prey inside him. But if it really came out, they would be the first to run away screaming. He says to the branch manager: It'll break my wife's heart, if it's not possible for her to open a knitted goods boutique downstairs in the basement. For this purpose the cellar requires large-scale reconstruction, damp coursing and internal and external fittings, all depending on the available cash, which you and your bank will hand over to me today, otherwise I'll be even less successful with my repayments than before, and then you can forget about the total amount, because then you'll get nothing. Yes, Frau Eichholzer is still alive and we hope for a long time to come, my wife's looking after her and the Church isn't going to come to my wife and take a look because of an incontinent old woman. My wife sees the inside of the church every day anyway. Smile, smile, my wife would be like an open book for the Dear Lord, if he needed to read it, but he wrote the Book of Books, so from one eternity to the next he doesn't need another one. But he knows everything anyway. Smirk! And: No need to worry, for all that, we've already got an eye on the house after the next one, although we will already have taken on too much with the last one and its renovation. The land it's on will provide enough security for the mortgages on the first. We can acquire a whole string of houses, one always secures the next (they'll be real castles, when we're finished with them) even if not quite legitimately and if we only knew which. We already know what we'll use for the back-up copy, the money from the bank, your money, a sweet mixed community of several mortgage, discount and other loan providers, yes indeed, we will get houses and homes, and we'll rent or lease shops in them, we'll paint windows, we'll seal floors, we'll agree on built-in cupboards, we'll mislay tiles or trample on them in a rage, because they don't make up the desired pattern, one way or another. The point of these little houses inhabited by organisms will be, that each preceding model can be taken as security for the subsequent one, well, isn't that a good idea to stimulate our economy and remove superfluous living beings? With people with a weak heart it's even possible to use bulbs, e.g,. of the pretty lily of the valley, we already said so, really everyone knows that, and the patient will have such a delighted look on her face, when we mix it with the wild garlic curd and spread it on her slice of bread. Snigger. Snigger. Thank you very much, now I'll go again, to hurry along the building work. You'll see how nice it'll be when it's finished, after all, it'll still belong to you for a while, dear bank, trust is good, supervision can hardly be better. You'll surely understand, once I've laid the foundation stones for the extension of this home right up to the attic! Often things that happen nearby have an effect far away. If you don't believe me, then just place a small coin in the bulb socket and turn the light on!
Sometimes the banks keep watching far too long before they withdraw to their uneven path. Until the branch manager loses his post and the debtor, who has to take the penultimate path, has turned into a whimpering wreck, because now he even had to sell the car, which was still whole, his only friend, who always ran decently alongside him, because there wasn't enough money for gasoline anymore. Now the debtor has to try to be a light in his own darkness in order to offer the bank manager a good picture. All of this with his meager talents, so that the extension under which every joint is already groaning will be stretched once more on this rack. And they all watch as one desperately negotiates, as everyday troubles turn into catastrophes and get into the paper if one doesn't keep quiet. While a whole house floats away. The branch manager will have to chuck money at it again, otherwise the whole lot will be gone; usually the auditor checks up on every peanut, which good children have set down, and which mark an ever broader sloping path, at whose end stands the most beautiful of all houses, the witch's gingerbread house. Where plump little fingers probe helplessly in the air, basically long ready to roast, so why hasn't the witch laid the table yet? Because she wanted one more side-dish! Visit the fairy tale world of Police District Murzzuschlag (Styria): Mon. to Fri. 8-12. That's what they look like, don't they, reality and its dreams? Why don't human beings just explode, except with anger? Surely they should have gone to pieces long before. So that's why the term really can't be extended to the twelfth of never, you can be sure of that Mr. Janisch, even if your father is a respected member of whatever the club is, oh yes, of the Country Policemen's Club and of the Country Policemen's Sports Club and the Country Policemen's Canine Sports Club, every one of whose members ended up hanging on the tap at the inn after a dinghy training exercise, I mean, who ended the exercise correctly. When it comes to emergency operations we recently also had the real thing, when that big blaze was raging, as a result of which in the town center of K. a whole number of roof timbers and furnishings with a total loss of more than nearly three million dollars went up the creek, so that's when these men had to carry out their perilous duties, apart from the Country Police more than 29 fire brigades from the whole region, well, is that not something? And all the farms set alight by children and little more than children, well, is that not something, too? Children are stubbornness personified, after all. So that's why, for the sake of your father, we're giving you one last extension, Mr. Janisch Jr., who knows if some day the roof over our own heads won't be burning, we've read that the Fire Investigations Officer of the precinct where your father is stationed finally established that a rusty little stove door was the cause of the fire. Man walks, who counts his steps? No one, there would be no point, whomsoever God wishes to show favor, he drops down a detached house from heaven and makes sure that the new owner is standing right below it. The debts will eat us all up, if we don't turn into beasts beforehand.
And we don't even want to start on about the clearing-up operations after the mudslide last autumn, we really must draw a line under this chapter, although we're still so stuck to it. Even the police cadets spent five days helping out then, to say nothing of the tons of hair in the ground, which no one has yet been able to explain. For that we had to bring in units of the Federal Army, didn't we? After last year's fire the plots of land are once again firmly in the hands of our bank. Those are no grounds to be against the banks or the Jews, although that's a fine tradition hereabouts, there's simply no ground that belongs to anyone else, that's it. Small cause, big effect, as NATO always said about the Kosovo War. Just imagine, there are even people who want to open a DIY superstore in the darkest and most inaccessible hills of the Bucklige Welt in Lower Austria, you wouldn't believe it, while huge loads whizz past them with a whistling slipstream and straight over the southern or eastern border where there are people living whom one despises, whose language one doesn't speak, whose laws one doesn't know, but where everything costs exactly half, which usefully one had already saved up. For dessert one can eat and booze really well and go to the hairdresser for the same money you pay for a couple of rolls here. The people on the other side of the border, who were rotting alive for too long in a gloomy state, don't yet know how one has to do business and our light will take a couple of light years yet until it has reached them. So they do their own business, which is also already quite effective and even fills up gas tanks until they burst. Our bank however already knows it all in advance, it inspects the new house which reminds it of every other one which already exists, except that it's already falling apart while people are still living, and even takes our folks' furniture off the floor. It has to watch out too, that it keeps its feet on the carpet, which the debtor also has to pawn. A pity that it allowed that final loan, that penultimate support, but there's nothing to be done. Now all that good money has been spent and for what? Not for us! We're certainly being spoiled! Nothing's going on here, for which I would even stroke a person's head, to get it.
Well and bad: Son Janisch, himself a father, with a son of his own who already cheerfully changes into his uniform, with banners flying it's time to go to battle on the football field, has already removed a small, but important part of the bank's riches, dropping by with a couple of cases of wine and a couple of nice plump lies for the branch manager, lies which have to be washed down with even more alcohol, we'll see each other at our table in the pub. Together with our sons and heirs, no, our house will never die out, we've founded a party for it and wish everyone else all the worst, while we, gossiping, play our own jokes. All of this is my final argument, which is far too impatient to settle down here and now. They're all sneering at this by now veteran party, but they all vote for it. Now are we sitting comfortably? Kurt Janisch (at present senior director of the company House-grab and Son) is already working himself half to death and has taken on two part time jobs as factory security guard in the small town. His father found them for him in his day. Here, where the generations still properly follow one another, tradition still counts for something. And son Ernst, too, the crown prince, has brought the bank, which anyway has a tendency to ampleness, because it so much likes to clear up and then eat the default interest from other people's Christmas trees, which deceptively were only lit up for a week, something as a chaser: The bank can swallow it or not. Ernst doesn't care. This money, too, was finally drunk up, we're not going back to the house, first we have to have the house to go to-and now the money's gone. And the house is not yet really there, that is, it would be, but it looks so far away as if it was about to disappear and take a coffee break before the interest has properly begun to work. A screaming old dear in a hole under the roof means that one's not exactly acclaimed by public opinion, that has to change. Word must not get round. Otherwise payday would come around after all, the parking lot lit up, where it's all supposed to happen and where the other wrecks are already waiting to be towed away. She mustn't go into an old people's home, she must stay here and show a return, until she's nothing more than a transparent rustling mommy, swinging bags of flour to kill rats dancing at night on the hot plate, because the rats want to attack her and she's got nothing else to hand except this white powder, which she secretly stirs into dough, yesyes, the wine's good.
So the agricultural credit bank is sticking out its hand too, no, both hands, and our throat between them. No wonder, when this patient institution is constantly and again and again being told more and more gloomy stories, fortunately all made up, at the same time as more and more riches, which were never there, are depicted. There's someone who's in debt to us, but he doesn't make himself available for the repayment, what can we do? We like to sit in the comfortable colorful easy chairs in the appropriate branch, have fun and look cheerfully at the glace cherries on the frothy abundance (achieved through folding in of quite ordinary air!) of our demands. And then we look out of the window and straight into the window of the cafe, and there they are, the real cakes. Afterwards, full of cholesterol, in our grave, we'll feel better. But we already have to spread optimism around now, while the bank still has to learn how to deal with adolescents, when they have debts the size of future annual salaries with four different telephone companies. We're sticking to more solid assets, says Kurt Janisch and says his son Ernst. One of those bronze turrets on the detached house, that would be tiptop! that would be really smart, would really add something to the house, why don't we just cap it? Exactly: We'll put on a tower as well. We won't put on the matching Spanish boots. The long and the short of it is: The bank wants something every month. The funds are always only in prospect, and there's never a telescope there, so that they finally come closer and look bigger than they are. But that's going to change! There are quite different times coming for the hard-working, the decent, and the able, who want to take power one day, too, they've waited long enough for it and have gathered in a movement which, congealed as a cold fried egg, would at last like to add us, yes indeed, just US! as a toy or a greasy side-dish to an even greasier roast. I wouldn't vote for us, we would be too lazy for everything, war would always follow us, because we possessed no sense of judgement. At some point perhaps it will also acquire manners, this party, but it's not really necessary, because the big money, which sets great store that something like that will board this train anyway, even if still hesitantly, no matter who's driving and where to, but capital always keeps one foot on the ground so it can jump off in time and look for another engine driver. But that's where capital doesn't know our Janischs! Going along with them would have worked out all right the first time. Marx, too, would have written something a bit different, better even, if he had known about them. Admittedly Janisch amp; Co. didn't set up housing mortgage companies for long enough, although people like them in this party certainly did, and fell on their faces with all of them. The companies had to be wound up again, a pity really. Now Messrs. Janisch are trying something else! They want to make their own mistakes, but always ones which others would make too, if they had the chance. Indeed all human qualities are tied up in this community of the like-minded, and this bundle will then fall heavily on all our heads, I can see that already. Well, soon they're going to collect people, they already have the houses. You'll see!
So the funds: But first these have to be snatched from greedy arms and passed on to other greedy arms. The son of the country policeman, however, absolutely must have them right now, so that in association with his father (it's the Association of Austrian Building Society Investors, which has reproduced in full color in its house journal pictures of British country seats or at least of doctors' houses in the Austrian provinces, converted peasant cottages made of beautiful old wood, grown honorably gray without a lick of paint. We'll surely provide our building society investors with this nice little magazine after having taken their billions! Then the Austrians, men and women, will save even more. Interest at less than one percent! We'll move over to shares but still can't sleep anymore. If God created men in his image, why should man not be allowed to design his little house as a likeness of Buckingham Palace?) he can pursue his hobby of collecting houses and plots of land. The branch manager also has a hobby: speculation. The coming bad times have encouraged him to take it up. He is a brave and clever person. But that's a nice hobby, which you've been given there! Other people have to go to play tennis or go to die or go jogging, and indeed the rightful owners of the adjoining properties must die, owners, for whom their property had likewise once been a heartfelt concern, and which lay together like two peaceful villages before finally being gathered together in a cozy residential landscape, large enough to be entered by a country policeman and his son, but not by their families, whom they are also meanwhile fed up to the back teeth with. First they would have died if they hadn't been able to get them, the families, women, and children. And now they no longer fit, because their own demands have grown bigger, and the children too, unfortunately. Now they suddenly need much more! People grow out of their demands and are so stupid as to tend towards violence when they have new ones. We're still there too, unfortunately, a kind of elite, who put garden chairs on their balconies. Please be patient for a moment. One thing at a time, one house at a time, one woman at a time, one setback at a time, in order finally after all to grab the opportunities by the somewhat gray short and curlies. Ouch. The skin comes away, too. I call that the art of war! People die one way or the other, no fear, but their houses remain, unless we were in Kosovo, there it would be the other way round, but no, nothing at all is left there. Nothing of anyone. Whoever can do so wants to leave. Yes, something has to be done with the people, so that they don't rest and rust. They must have enough time, so that they can get their possessions to safety beforehand, before the war starts, which dreamy people have long longed for. They foresaw it, after all! Where is the truck, the tractor, the little horse, now it's time to go over the mountains. Before the properties crumble away, if you please, we'll just take them, if no one else does it. Abandoned property cannot bear the emptiness in itself, it wants to belong to someone again. Up there a horse is lying under the tractor, because they didn't want to take the pass road in proper order one behind the other. Some possessions are too big for any means of transport. If one doesn't take the wheel oneself and steers everything down to the smallest detail, even if it's down to the bottom of the roadside ditch, then someone else will take what belongs to one.
Sometimes it'll be the duties, sometimes a distant relative whom one could not have reckoned with, because one's never heard of him. These two men, Janisch father and son, altogether making the best impression, I can't say any more than that, the first as a country policeman, the other as tamer of telephone lines, to which one has to tap up to the top of tall poles, have discovered a fine method of living, so that property lies down sighing at their feet like a tired dog. Except no one is allowed to visit otherwise it jumps up and bites, as a sign, that the property belongs to us alone.
They pay court to women. Both of them actually. But mainly Janisch senior, the country policeman. That's so easily said, but he has already made so many people in this town and in this part of the country unhappy. Well, would you have guessed it? Preferably women who own houses or apartments in the nearby small town. These female proceedings have to be conducted and intimately handled, even if what the Janischs do is not described like that. They combine the pleasing with the useful. Well.
It's a good thing if one gets around in one's job and the hours are a bit flexible, so that one can go for a wee drive in between. The husbands of these wives should be deceased if possible or never have existed in the first place. There should never have been children present either. Who knows something like that (that a lady has to make an exit at a given moment, otherwise there's one too many around for her property), if not a policeman, priest, neighbor, telephone engineer, or the appropriate grocer, who himself, however, has cast an eye over this emptiness, which in his mind is becoming populated with ever more bricks, until one's heart grows heavy? However, only the margins in retail trade are worth talking about, not actions. This box of tropical fruit must not be knocked over, the ease and naturalness with which the venomous red leaping spider, but no, it's called a crested spider, will hop out, could produce expressions, which would become sights worth seeing. The grocer will never get back the eye he risked. That's the way women are, always the same type for the love command and for the most global project of all, against which environmental pollution and world peace are nothing: marriage. They all want it. Women and marriage, that's the perfect combination, especially in the country, where there aren't many distractions and you soon get enough of them. Marriage follows. It's not possible for a woman to say "thanks, but no thanks." The grocer will have to buy his bananas somewhere else and deliver them somewhere else, the door is shut to him. He hasn't got the faintest idea to whom this door is opened, but it must be to someone. He hasn't seen the woman behind it for weeks now. In the end the niece in Krems will get something she hadn't been expecting, and she'll get it after the aunt's end. It won't have paid off, that the grocer so decently delivered food to the old woman in his car. Others were quicker and there already. The neighbors, too, like to munch along, leftovers, too. They stare at the garbage. The things she throws away, they can still be used! People steal from one another, first out of conviction, then out of love. First they introduce themselves as neighbors and immediately transform themselves into friends, that is, greedy beasts, just as in our dear Balkans, which we meanwhile know better than our own living room, where the place appears on our screens at least four times a day, where neighbors were still neighbors but didn't stay that way. Our own neighbors spur on their apocalyptic steeds, so that this shoving, splashing, dripping flood of old men and women is directed into the bed, which stands in the bedroom, where often the TV doesn't come in. If one doesn't proceed carefully, it may be that one goes under and pleasantly anaesthetized by Anafranil suffocates in one's own shit. Stealing isn't so easy, often it's hard work, otherwise we'd all be doing it.
The two Janischs, we're agreed on that, want to get either immediately or a little later a whole house or several houses for nothing, that's all they've got: nothing. In fact the desired pieces of real estate are to be added to the ones the Janischs already own. They'll first have to change the gears of a number of women, I'm afraid. One starts up in first gear, one comes to a stop with the last. That must have been another serious tailgate crash. Just a moment, the police are coming right now! And it will always have been our own fault. The officer of the Country Police takes it all down in his notebook and takes photographs at regular intervals. To save costs the rural police posts are not fully staffed. Often officers have to be borrowed, who are easily distracted. You ask, how quickly this or another woman can be swept off her feet? You do have to sleep with her, and then you have to skim off her cream. In the country there are still some who feel guilty about extramarital intercourse, so then one just promises them marital intercourse, there are just a few obstacles of flesh, blood, and bones to be cleared out of the way. Just you don't be getting on your high horse, there are a couple more in front of you! They also have to get a cock inserted, how many times a day do you think one can manage that, we're not so young ourselves anymore. The lady has to be on probation for at least a year and in that time only gets to hold and look at it, after all we need to hold onto the contents, so that another doesn't get suspicious. A brisk confession in between, and everything's all right again.
It all depends a little on the fullness of the hair, on the character and whatever else there is under the hood or in the wallet, not just on the properties. Until the little sweetie's horse power, poor thing, is exhausted. Women are sometimes already grateful for the fact that they still have their gearbox at all, when life's bustle, laughter, shouts slowly begin to ebb away. So, for a while at least, one simply has to attend to their equipment, when on duty one always has to drop by briefly in the car as if by chance on routes and detours one has thought up, everything all right, madam? Earlier I had a very bad feeling, but at least it was one. I haven't had one for a long time. Well, someone rang the bell earlier. We'll track him down, if you'll just let me in now, I'm a public servant and can safely be used at any time like a paper napkin! Don't be embarrassed, you can eat with your fingers if you like. Careful, my cock jumps out just at the sight of you, look how it's dripping, perhaps I'd go away from your carpet, but your vinyl flooring is damned hard, but I know something harder, do you see it here and now? Of course things would go better if we would proceed to the bedroom right away. In the outer room I only put in a brief appearance, but in the bedroom I pull the whole thing out, don't worry, it won't stand around looking puzzled or get a piston rub at the wrong moment, just because you're too dry inside, it'll always do the business, no matter where, I know it. It'll get going just as soon as it sees you, it'll stand up in the room just like a man in a uniform and pull down every little thing, what was I going to say before? Now we'll just pull down the panties (oh yes, please, do keep going!) What, you want to get on top of me? The public makes demands on us, but not as much as you! Well, do as you please, I'll stay cool, but I would like to be on the mattress, doesn't matter if you haven't tidied up, I'll tidy up inside you! In any case, now you're going to get the absolute, which you've been longing for all this time, it's pretty long, but would go in your handbag if need be, if it could go at all. Yes, women are often modest, because they had a hard life. But you've never seen something as smart as me, have you? And it's fun with me, too, I'm no child of sorrow, I'm a child of jokes and laughter. I don't mind if you already undress in the outer room, in public we'd better not be on first name terms, I'll just close the door and prepare myself for the sight of you without your underwear, that can take a while, what you will have bought them just for me? Well, I'm honored! Then leave them on, for all I care, it doesn't matter, anyway I understand you as well as I understand my hunger and thirst or my desire for houses, yours above all, at whose door I still have to knock, if I want to come in. Didn't you report a hungry marten with a sweet tooth in your hallway to us yesterday, madam, oh, it wasn't you, then it must be a mistake or the badger from next door in among your blackcurrants. Such a big smelly beast! Take a look at my little fellow, he's been waiting all this time for you, I'm holding him very firmly now, so that you can stroke him, otherwise he'll run away from you again. You can look at this nice magazine first, that I've brought with me, you can choose the position you'd like. No it's not a garden center catalog. Whatever you like, he'll do it for you. I won't stop him, the little lad. You can bet your life on that, whatever's left of it. Really I'm due a decent pension, for all the stuff I stick into a woman. You hammer and plane away, and then what comes out is always the same. It only looks different, smaller somehow, it seems to me.
And all the stupid excuses, so that the colleague on patrol doesn't notice what's going on. Both their hearts, his and Janisch's, beat. They roll along slow or fast. Attention is paid to the younger officer, for a short time they are a pair. One arm brushes the other, while people cheerfully drive off, because this one time their misdemeanors have been disregarded. The hairs on his colleague's arm briefly stand up on end, then flatten again, please don't brush against me again Kurt, or if you do, then unintentionally. But now the patrol is already driving somewhere else. The colleague, a young family man, supposes nothing and of course supposes something and first of all he has to be wearisomely bound into the Sport and Skittles Club of the Country Police to shut his mouth, but not by placing one's mouth on his. Then the mouth would really wake up. Yes, all that is on earth, I love you and more or something like it, then when your mouth kisses me, it's not so difficult…
Well. Let me tell you. Unfortunately one has to talk to women a lot, but quite differently, so that they become erotically inflamed. Naturally desires must not remain secret (nothing at all will ever remain secret!), because then they cannot be fulfilled as secret desires later on. It's talking that makes a person independent, so he can ask other people the way and then go off in another direction after all. Talking is also the hobby of many women. Odd, when they sit down, they surely don't do it to be quiet. So let's give them a reason to cry out! Wonderful, how it tears the words from their mouths! But it's better if one manages to put it in beforehand, into this mouth, which otherwise always goes on talking. No one needs to give it a leg up, it has a permit, it can make demands, and it does so at length. Well and good, let's just get started and stick the cock in where her tongue is.
Like a lollipop to suck, then at least they're quiet, women, because with all their social worker standards, which they're so keen on, they don't want to hurt a man. Wait a minute, I can still hear moaning, it's passing across a contorted face like clouds across a storm-lashed landscape. Sadly a country policeman doesn't earn much and still has a wife at home, from whom he has wearisomely drifted apart. At any rate they've still got the talking in front of them, while their hand reaches out to a trouser fly. Women can describe places of interest, torture themselves for weeks just for the sake of a moment, wait for years for the next one, be consoled and put off; when at last a brash erection stands ready for the both desired and heedless, headless performance, then all that waiting was in vain, because a human being flowers like a poplar and goes out like a cigarette stub: is forgotten. One simply has to understand women, everything depends on that, everything is dependent on that. Politicians have to do it, too, of course, if only with words, as men we'll perhaps manage it better with actions, something new for once, and all our actions are now really the last thing. A true act of love, if one meanwhile had more and better things to do. Sometimes even jogging has to be dropped. Then the country policeman takes his own car, it's for a good cause, this lady in the side street next to the local kindergarten has got the itch again today, I have a gut feeling about it, what, it's three weeks since she got it the last time? I would never have thought that it's already so long ago, time to give her a good going over again. What she wants is for her stomach to be pushed down onto the mattress and to be opened up fast, intended for immediate use, because she has long been open to everything, but only rarely has the opportunity to get well oiled when she does open up. So that the creaking of the hinges (the secret drawer isn't pulled out so often!) doesn't sound so loud. There are little children next door, a whole crowd of them!
Basically everything can be done with women, it's as if they had done something wrong and wanted to be punished. And whatever has never been done with them, that's what they want to do more than anything else. That goes as much against the grain with men as sitting down at a piano and not being able to play. But it has to be, the pleasant comes with the useful, cheek comes with a certain behavior, a rebuke never comes because one doesn't even wait for it. One simply does it first. Afterwards it's done, and one isn't prepared to discuss it with the next woman, although she will likewise want to know all about it, whatever. With women, not even the obvious comes of its own accord, it first has to be explained and shown to them, once they've been surprised by a firm grip of breasts and sex organs. Oh, but that wouldn't have been necessary! I'm obedient, even without you bringing me these pralines, you can get them here in the Merkur Super Market, to which people hurry from afar with winged feet, I'm sure for less than what you paid for them. But after a while they already know in advance what to expect and open up already wearing the transparent dressing gown they got by mail order, or without it. With a little training even the age doesn't matter, even if one would prefer to train something younger. But the commonplace ones are at least modest in their requirements.
All of this costs men like Kurt Janisch time and money, in return they can deposit their worn-out furniture and exchange it for a three-piece suit, if they're lucky; please, there's still plenty of room inside me, the children are outside or have already left home, I'm happy to hold the little back room open for you so that it's not too much trouble. I'll also make a little room out of myself, if that's what's wanted, just for you, well, what do you say to that? I'm enthusiastic, because your spare room, in fact the whole apartment, is exactly what I've wanted for a long time. Now let's give it all a good scrub, agreed?
Those actions, however, to which one turns, when one has nothing to say, and a woman doesn't want to sign something precipitately without having read it, bring in even more time (when the woman is finally dead) and money, a good investment. It doesn't happen without an effort on the part of the policeman and his son, who, although still young, is already infinitely versatile. A man of many faces, a multi-Janus head, pumped up with synthetic vitamins, so that one doesn't see his features all that clearly anymore, yes, that's the sort of head the young man has on his shoulders. Just take a look at him, if anyone is capable of finding favor, then he is. The son is also very good with his hands and can do any amount of other work, apart from installing wiring. His father, however, comes first for him, and his father goes over dead bodies, which when they were alive had been a side-dish for his meat. Why then do the policeman and his son have nothing but debts? Why have they lost everything that they already had? I don't know. The father can advise us, the father can judge us and save us, so that we can always keep an eye on what's ours. I don't actually believe that it's the first time in the history of the Country Police force that one of its representatives will have done such good business with kind-hearted death, who only fetches his own, never strangers. Death fetches those he has already marked. In that he is like the forester. Normally these public servants trained in the use of firearms only shoot their families, and even then only when it is necessary, because the latter wanted to run away. Afterwards at any rate they're left with the houses and the ground. But then they only have their little upper story to themselves, and that's precisely what they take a shot at. If they survive it and haven't put themselves away at the same time, then later on they shoot themselves in the head.
Nonono, that's it, these two men have specialized in death. And the assets of death are a department store's worth of things that no longer need to be bought because they're part of the inheritance. And something like that happens right in front of our eyes, in the countryside, not far from a small town buzzing with excitement and risk and possibilities for sport and play, where everyone knows everyone else from the tennis court or the law court, if after a game, as so often, an argument has started, coarse, and with lots of words of abuse, where one belongs with one's acquaintances. Until one finds better ones. The district is bounded by its abrupt end. After that there's only the highway left and the highway right. The small town is like a pond, with water flowing in at one end and out at the other again. To leave this district behind is an achievement like crossing a river without horsepower. Curtains are lit up punctually, glances are exchanged, one gets worse glances for better ones or the other way round, that's business too, and no one does anything about it. The locals can certainly take, but only rarely do they take it any further.
Sooner or later all human beings are dead, that is their common fate. On the other hand it's not like in the city, where sometimes one doesn't notice right away when someone has died. More often than you would think, the doctor writing out the certificate is the only one still to get a look at you, so why make yourself pretty?, and in a city apartment block who would tell you what's happened to a traveling salesman, whose post is piled up to the top of the letter box? What has happened to a gentleman like that, where is his keeper and where on earth is there a keeper, who would protect one? Policemen always know where something's become vacant, their jobs didn't fall into their laps, they had a talent for it and like to set themselves down in a ready-made nest from which like the cuckoo they expel others whoosh, now we're all tied together and have to loosen a bond again and undo a knot. Death is man's fate, sadly there are all too many men before that. You can always rely on the police! But who really knows something about these barking keepers of the law, whose behavior amounts to impudence and at whom one is nevertheless not allowed to laugh out loud, otherwise one's in for it, and can reckon on a clip round the ears at least? One only has to step in as overbearingly as possible with one's inquiries, the Country Police Force, which knows everything, knows that; and in almost every second house there's a woman all alone, longing to let in anyone at all, if he only did come at last, then there would be two of us at least, and death perhaps comes along later, too. Then it gets really cozy. Before one can even promise the woman something (inspection of wiring, unblocking the drain, looking for the missing pet, etc.), something nestles youdidntseeathing into the hollow of one's hand, a head with soft hair, and you shoot out with, whether she would like to be taken from the front or back. The chatting rushes down the wires, it's not called foreplay yet, but that's still to come, and it's irksome because the neighborhood might hear. Then one looks at the woman, candidate for intercourse, everything all right? Is the hole closing up again or is it still wide open like a screaming mouth, because it's no longer used to being nailed, thrown down carelessly and not even decently stopped up? The head only learns to think to whom the apartment and the furniture actually belong when it's been almost cracked open. You belong to me now, says the country policeman in an ear, not quite in his right mind when he said it, but only one person hears it, you can always deny it. Do you have any objection? No heart is heartfelt when it has broken into a guarded house, and then one wishes for another body part that can stand up to more. Women are so ruled by their physical urges, you can't believe it. The things that occur to them and all the places they want to do it, you would have to have a map in your head like a cruise missile to have ideas like that; in the bath tub or on the kitchen table, that's still OK, but on the floor in the crucifix corner, good Lord, but it's cramped and dusty, God didn't want us to fuck around at his feet like worms, which he formed, like all of us, out of the dust, and he can't even get a good look, because he's nailed so tight up there! And how you get rid of it all again, that's a problem, too. Paper towel is the solution, but there's some who use sponges stiff with dirt or scraps of cloth from the kitchen sink. Sometimes, as soon as one comes in, the cleaning things are already looking invitingly at one from the place where the woman would like to be forced open, doctors sometimes cover up the instruments, women always display them brazenly and without embarrassment. Everything. They've got. Death succeeds in making us dumbfounded. That's only where the women start, because their mounting is unlimited, best of all they would like a golden ring. Love allows them to take in so much. But for the time being death is still stronger. Let's wait and see how things turn out.
Hair everywhere, even sticking to the palm of the dead woman's hand with traces of blood, I would say, these are the remains, steeped in synthetic hair dyes and permanent waves, of a human being of the female gender, and this female was allowed to see and experience a great deal before she died. Perhaps the telephone expert and his policeman father have a built-in war vent, well, I think they both like to get into fights but have to restrain themselves a bit in public, one as a servant of the state, the other as a salaried employee. But it has to come out somewhere, the beast, and in a woman it usually has too little space to run around. Afterwards one puts in an extra run. There are some with whom one is even hungrier afterwards, you embrace, you give each other a good licking, but the pupils are already flickering restlessly over a head, which is practicing inexcusable behavior and is perhaps even a little embarrassed about what it's doing, glances after all precede a human being. They're already wagging their tail before anyone can pull out the appropriate white stick. By the way. Am I looking too serious now? Oh no, that's the last thing I wanted! Good and hard into the woolly hair every time, which can't really check the blows. Take a look, quick, at the past, there you could see a serious man, likewise the head of a family, bellowing without any inhibition at living people who would now have been almost dead, had their way of driving had consequences, because they did something wrong in traffic, wellwell, car drivers in the days when they were still somebody and films were made about them, always the car drivers! Sometimes the cyclists, too, who, however, are already kicked enough by merely existing. Lonely women, well-groomed, but no longer young, they snatch at everything that moves and wears trousers, which after all they do themselves. But that's not enough for them, and they sometimes get given an extra titbit, meat, which they had given up reckoning on, and which now draws them into its reckoning. Hmm, is the apartment completely paid off? A very well groomed woman is already going to the hairdresser for the second time this week and having her nails painted fine as silk, something like that gets noticed; better than a poet could say it, her body says with these signs, that it is full of longing and at last knows, who for.
There next follows an imperious knocking during the round around the junction by the savings bank, that's where the pharmacist is, and we live right above it, and the next moment the door has to be opened naked, although there's hardly been time to dress, in order to provocatively cover all the curves, which are required nowadays. If need be oil has to be applied to their form after bathing or they have to be remolded in the event of an accident. It doesn't really matter, when even engines get tweaked and whole chassis are lowered. Today the cheerful colors again glow from face, hands and toenails, it's quite a sight. We, too, are someone, we always said that at the top of our voices, until we were nothing and no one anymore and no one was thinking of us anymore.
A country policeman observes himself, how and whom he hits with his ball-point and his block. He has a feeling for how one could get this woman to proclaim her satisfaction with loud panting and groaning. With a woman with whom he's clicked, he first of all steps aside a little and permits himself expressions which are unambiguous, and only two days later the lady, although the situation was so unambiguous and the telephone number unambiguously changed owners, is walking restlessly back and forward between the windows, smelling under her arm pit to make sure it still smells of scent and rubbing herself with lotions. He must come today, otherwise at this time we would already be sitting on the train to Vienna, to visit an old friend! It's on her mind from one moment to the next, she can't help thinking her life might not yet be at an end, because someone still wants into her end, whoever it is. Death comes soon enough. An address is taken down, where the country policeman also takes down the car numbers and their fines, we'll take time to look at that in the next few days. Wherever there is a small chamber, it can be opened up. Above all the single, disappointed ladies in their middle years immediately give the key to themselves to anyone, without looking at him closely, they know: If someone opens them up, there's not much going on inside anymore, but through determined sweeping out, something, which the woman herself does not even know yet, could be whirled up inside her and turned into something magnificent. This gentleman is experienced and is in practice, even if not in household matters, but if one could get a house for it, then one gladly does it. Then one even embraces a wooden shed and rubs oneself against it until it weeps resinous tears. What does he see in me, when he's so attractive, that he could see even more of in younger, more beautiful women? Why not in fact? Why not in fact me? Come right in with the inquiry, here's the waste paper basket in the hall along with the little bunch of herbs and the little clipboard where we can make a note of our shopping!
In other cases, since the car driver wants to please the police, one only has to hold out one's hand, and already the notes come flying in one after the other. In return the driving license is allowed to stay at home. Signal discs can be raised and people directed by merely pointing, almost like a murderer. Simply unique on earth. It's the best job in the world. Let's adopt an inquisitive expression and put on spectacles as well! Take a look: The grandfather is still saluting in the photograph, which he'll probably never get out of now, just as he never got out of this area when he was alive, look how well he does it in the photo, yes, the gentleman on the left, not the one on the right, that's the king, well, does time stand still? No. No one keeps still. But now, let's get away, into the open air! As if grandad had known that his picture is being taken, but of course he will have known that, we can see it now, we see him in the ice cream chill of the moment, the concentrated gaze of obedience, sweetened, enhanced!, that's him, grandad, look, here, in front of the king, he's standing to attention in front of the monarch, whom he'll never get to know any better, as we know today, although it might have been interesting, who knows which person would have something to say to which other, unfortunately often in a foreign language? No one knows. I believe that this sentence, although I wrote it myself, is not right. I for example have nothing to say faced with the figures I create, bring on the stock phrases and some more, and another and another, until they squirm beneath me with pain or perhaps also because they've too little space. They should never have pulled out this language nerve without an anaesthetic! The king doesn't look like anyone one knows. A king is always somone one will not get to know. He may be kindhearted, conscientious, whereas others don't even need a conscience. They can't afford it, and we can't afford anything cheaper either. A slim man in a dark suit, the king, always stays properly in the picture, no he doesn't need that, he's already in too many pictures!, and in his day, in the 1970s, was often and with pleasure pictured beside his slim Latin-looking wife in the magazines of the ladies' hairdressing salon of the village. A good place in which to make an impression on the fancies of women, who like to fancy themselves, especially when they sit on these white upholstered chairs and think it makes them more beautiful, and to implant longings in rose-pink or petunia pink. Those that fancy themselves are even easier to get, who quietly fancy themselves and look down on others, but secretly, when they're all alone, then they tolerate no moderation, and their bodies run immoderately out of control if someone caps one of their thin little stalks with which they desperately cling to their property. And which puts them into the horizontal position for life, which they can lose at any time. But by then they will have lost themselves long ago and no longer know who they are and how much they still have in the bank. Not as much as before.
In a ladies' hairdressing salon a country policeman would be even more conspicuous than a king, unless a customer had parked her car wrongly, then all eyes are on her and her hairstyle, a semi-finished product. The country policeman would be generous but just. He arranges a meeting and prepares to obscure the evidence, so that behind the blinds he can fulfil all secret desires, including those which are not kept secret at all. Instead they force themselves upon him like inquisitive dogs, which are immediately sent away again without the stiff retriever stick they're panting for, chased away because they are so wet and unappetizing that one hardly wants to lie down beside them. But there is a stately home to be given away and one says very softly: come! And then he comes. If the women don't get a king for the bedside table, where the magazines with all the color pictures lie, perhaps they'll get the servant of the state, who has to be there for the king at all times. Paper: doesn't blush. In the photograph the king is altogether relaxed and casual and friendly. I would say, this woman is freshly permed but unrelaxed, if I would dare say so and had not forbidden myself to constantly look down from my high horse at what I've made up. The father of the country policeman could still be alive today, the way he looked then. Here lives always come along twice or even many times over. They stand next to one another like houses, one the same as the other, but that doesn't affect me. The lives match one another like clothes, but often they don't match the person to whom they were handed out. They are mostly uneventful, as if too much life had to be distributed among too few people, of whom each receives more than enough of one and the same fate, of which we now carefully pick up the pieces, having had a smashing time. The mother of the present country policeman, for example, it's as if there was another one of her and then another, as if most of the women here were like her, I still know at least one or other of them and can offer them to you to make your choice. But I already know you'll choose something else, but then at least the side-dish will be right. How enthusiastically she used to look at these pictures, Frau Janisch, as if inwardly elevated, incidentally at exactly the same hairdresser on the main square, but then the chairs were green and harder. Later Frau Janisch even bought the magazine, so that she, too, would have something to leave her family. That was when she could still walk upright. Let's act as if it were today: So she looks and looks again, as if the king along with her husband could vanish into thin air before she can even show them off, and all that while her hair is being wrapped around thin rods, oiled and then heated up, the very fine roast, smelled long before it's ready (and again every time one's hair is washed! All of life is chemistry and smells accordingly…), and she tries to jut out of her dress, the country policeman's wife, as if it were made of exactly the same dotted silk as that of the queen and not for example done in an anonymous workshop under the backcombed hair, which please must look exactly the same as her majesty's in the photo. Unfortunately that's not possible. Not even we poets can do that. Instead of which the person looking for advice is handed a wire hair net for her head and something completely imperishable and incomparable in Trevira, nylon and other artificial fibers. Not bad either, made for all eternity, unless one sets fire to it, but that's just it: different! Eternity doesn't want it and gives it back cheap, since already used. There's nothing to be done. This queen was a model for many women of the time and unleashed imitative impulses precisely because she was not beautiful, just as we are all not beautiful. But, she too, a very well-groomed and smart woman, there's nothing you can say to that. No criticism on our side is necessary here. Anyone who hasn't got beauty in their account needs clothes and hairdresser all the more badly, in order to be able to imitate beauty as successfully as possible, before one hits the street in this new dress and there immediately shrinks again with all one's shortcomings. On the contrary, often one even has to add something, house and property. No grounds to take in guests as well, whom one then has to feed one's own flesh, because there's nothing else in the house. I personally know one, two widows and single women approaching retirement, who succeeded in going much further in their public appearance than had ever been foreseen for them. And then they were still overtaken by younger women. At the last moment. I strike the gong. Boing. Time's up. Every time is up some time. I've often said it and I'll often say it again, because it's so unjust that time passes, but I always have to stay here. It lasts just as long as one lives, because one's own life is the measure of time. Here comes the next one that is no longer one's own. So already in the course of one's own life it must be taken hold of determinedly. That's as clear and transparent as the soup, which people have dished up once again today behind their freshly cleaned windows. Who's going to eat it all?
Today there's once again something lurking behind the responsibilities and reports of the country policeman-I can't quite see what yet-when he pulls the drunks from the pub tables, hits them, examines his victims briefly and superficially, because you don't see the internal bleeding, and then calls the ambulance, because of course the victim bashed himself and his not very full head. The victim says nothing, because he is unconscious, and doesn't have much to say anyway when he is conscious. You're just not allowed to kill anyone, that would be the condition that's agreed verbally, one's only allowed to put his head together with his ears and the vital nose and the absolutely essential mouth in a plastic bag, in which breathing is impossible. That is its nature. A smoked sausage is also allowed to stop its breath, we've got nothing against that, I assure you, that's its business entirely No one else's. Talk about the miscellaneous brutalities of this country police district has got as far as the county town, where it's mentioned with a laugh and a particular, knowing expression. Nothing can ever be proved. Although killing involves a profound emotion, an inner importance which allows one utterly to forget oneself, because one has thrown oneself entirely upon another human being. Just ask a murderer, he won't tell you! That one was allowed to kill, above all: one could do it, for that women think you unique, because otherwise they don't know anyone up to it. They like to crowd around the violent criminals, the country policeman knows that, he once arrested one, they didn't even let him put on his shoes after he had shot his wife with a revolver and seriously wounded his adolescent son. But something like that, to get someone like that, is like a win in the lottery, even if not the big prize, because in the country people enjoy killing, they practice on animals after all, but quietly, there are houses, you find five bodies early in the morning and don't know why. These people don't get much variety (the examining magistrate, when informed, that the culprit has a firearm and was able to make use of it, immediately passed on this infernal information, he already knew his man's number from other cases, the latter was never just a number and had among other things also fired on the Kobra special duty unit of the Country Police force. It's not healthy). Mostly the murderer does end up in prison and is defused, his family is disconnected, the murderer however has not been devalued as a result, along with his tormented heart, which he now displays openly. Indeed, I see: Some women are already writing him beautiful love letters. The country policeman has had them weeping and wailing in front of his duty desk two or three times, the women, while he, nervous, because he's got too few fingers had typed up a report. Some perpetrators do nothing but cry, the whole time, but they never ever express regret. Perhaps this house provider, in whose little home this perpetrator will soon, in about fifteen years, be sitting at table on parole, will give him a helping hand. He will pitch in, he promises her, he will crush his conscience in his bare hands till the juice runs out. The only silly thing is that he was caught. Then at the trial, with his final words, the murderer apologized as kindly, as good-naturedly as possible to his victim, but by then the victim was long buried and no longer heard anything. That was an interesting man, one should try to learn from him. From others one can only learn that there are no longer any hidden Nazi printing plates in Lake Toplitz and one can drown if one looks for them nevertheless. Yet the area around the lake is to be cordoned off as a prohibited area. The Country Police can do that. Using an underwater TV camera, it's possible, with a bit of luck, to find another corpse after three or four years. Like the eighteen-year-old schoolgirl, unfortunately as a skeleton, in the forest, or the apprentice who wasn't even sixteen yet, unfortunately in shallow water and hence still intact, in the lake, in the lake. We're sure to come back to it.
The country policeman would never apologize, why does one make something of oneself? The slim ones, who have worked hard for their figure, go a step further and climb up the mountains every day or climb the walls at home, because one man, one man in particular, hasn't called them. The country policeman only has to take advantage of the opportunity, because in their own car everyone makes a mistake once; anyone who believes no one has seen him is making a mistake. Women like to be conquered by the country policeman. For a long time they've been regretfully gazing after their disappearing good looks, which now, without having asked beforehand, another, younger woman has taken, wearing them quite without inhibition, as if they belonged to her. Something has just appeared to me, I think it was the Virgin Mary, but unfortunately I was someone quite different. Oh dear, now because of it I've run over this stop sign, which has been planted here for twenty years. Because I turned round to look at my rival. Every woman forgets herself sometimes. Besides there isn't much, of which one should take note. One should never let a man, even a murderer, off the leash once one has caught him, and one has to hold the end of the leash very tightly. That's why in general women like murderers of women so much. Because they have specialized in women. They look at the walls in prison and during this time can't be looking at other women. But there are certainly other reasons. For the time being at any rate they're harmless, the murderers. After someone has unscrewed their fuse and they're in custody. Now they have all the time and leisure in the world to look for cozy women pen pals, who will soon turn up to see them in person, because they think they've been invited. The conduct of the detained culprit, who cannot practice his profession at present, will then be pure fun, the way a lamb likes to have fun with a wolf. Thank God I'm not responsible for these women. They in turn are responsible for their children, whom the murderer can kill at any time, if he wants to and has the opportunity, because he will have got that fatal parole. It would have been better if he hadn't got it. But it was so nice, nicer than anything! I and this woman, we swear, the next time he wouldn't have done it anymore. As it is, he has unfortunately won a free game with the knife again, it's your fault, Mr. Prison Chaplain and Mrs. Prison Governor and Mr. Prison Psychiatrist. I would never have expected it of this completely cured murderer! The man has always been an exception. Women don't much like to see the murderer out of doors. The temptations would be too great there. Good thing that the man is inside here now. A thirteen-year-old has just reached out for the light switch, a long smeared trail of blood leads directly to the floor, where he will be stabbed more than twenty times. But the mother would rather weep for the killer than her boy, that way the weeping makes her happier. After all, she has more children, all exactly like this one, if in different age groups. One hardly notices if one is missing. The murderer is shot trying to escape because he wanted to kill a nun in a chapel as well. They got the wrong man, the woman who loved him now weeps inconsolably. I could still have children, but I'll never ever have such a man again. There are so few like him, and that's exactly why I liked him so much. There's a popular belief that someone has to be imprisoned so that at least he pays attention from inside his cage. He has nothing else to give, so we'd better just forgive him. But we digress to these touch-me-not flowers who absolutely want to be broken, and fate alone would not have managed it for fifty years. I ask you, what did the man actually do? Seventeen years ago he chopped up a young woman teacher with a knife, nothing more, there are more women teachers than there are murderers, who are a rare timid kind of wild beast, and still really wild. Not something that eats from the trough and shyly rolls its eyes, where the other troughs stand in the forest, beside the pool, or in the cellar next to the fitness equipment. To demonstrate his long-standing non-aggressive gentle nature, in prison the man preferred to wear pantyhose, perhaps so that in future he is better able to put himself in the position of women, this gentleman who is dead now. If he has relatives who believe in him and who are fond of him, then unfortunately it's my turn.
The women stick out in their fragrant soft-rinsed wool, as if they were the main thing and had nothing but success with men, when they, nicely garnished with pullovers, T-shirts and scarf, success guaranteed, serve themselves up free of charge. In fact they are at best the dessert, if there's still room for it in the gentleman's stomach. That's something they don't know. Why do they feed the murderers like that? In their place at table I wouldn't have done it, I would rather have bought myself a dog, given how grateful animals are, more grateful than a man we know. I don't understand any of it. I imagine: Murderers exert a gentle hypnosis, some investigate and analyze their future victim for months. They take the trouble to attach concrete rings to them, and sink ring and victim in the nearest river. A human being is only absorbant cotton, a vacuum. If he's lucky the murderer gets a new notion of the essence of human beings, an advantage for him, which we writers will find difficult to catch up with. They are sand, human beings, there are as many as there are grains of sand on the shore. Well, I don't know… Hardly has he killed someone than new victims come running up, they even come shooting over from neighboring countries. (There are whores in Vienna, Lower Austria, Burgenland, the Czech Republic, and California, and everywhere they are throttled in a singular way with their own underwear. Mr. U., a man with whom I personally have corresponded on human and political questions, prompted it and, when he saw that he was the only man within a considerable radius and women were nothing but dirt, well then he took care of them himself, affronted by their glances because they weren't aristocrats, who would have made a better match for him. How could I have known that? Nevertheless, he didn't charm my soul, in contrast to the souls of others.) Here comes another one, I can hardly follow her, she's twenty years older than young Mr. L., a quite different case, an envious type who's a bodybuilder today and in this way has at last created an entirely new body for himself, has become another in the truest sense of the word, so Mr. L., exactly, he shot his cousin, girlfriend and her mommy full in the face with his pump-action gun, but they didn't need their faces after that anyway. Mr. L. couldn't build himself a new face, he's only grown older, as we all have. Where will it end? And now here comes a woman from Germany, who could be a substitute mother for the culprit, but would rather be his only lover, because there aren't so many places where there are no possibilities of comparison, and here she has found just such a place. It's the prison, it's the special penitentiary for almost broken lawbreakers. That's how the women imagine it: for once a man whom it's worth lifting up to themselves! And then careful you don't drop him! I fear you'll rupture yourself like that. First of all, however, thoroughly martyred by the culprit's ability to stay cool. How one longs for the rare tender moments when the core mantle melts and the sweet center of marzipan and nougat is revealed: highly explosive, I can tell you! Try a Mozartkugel, you'll soon see the difference. At least this motherly woman, with whom truth to tell the young man finds it a bit dull sometimes, is still alive. A close shave, he's still inside, safe inside. Basically this woman never talks about anything except herself, and the one listening to her can for his part talk to no one else, apart from ninety-five other women pen pals, about whom, however, the woman knows nothing. The murderer only wants to get out, which surprises no one, who knows the culprit a bit and the women who are always visiting him. Outside he would be safe from them. Only this woman, still talking about herself, wants to go in the opposite direction, pushing against the crowds at the desk, and even here inside, behind bars which mean the world, be seen by this wild young man, a figure who is at stake and goes on risking his stake and perhaps if possible be touched by his hands and admired as someone, whom one has never even seen before and yet has always known. What does that mean? That means the woman will become the outside. A place for which she is not destined, unless she were really presentable. She's from Bottrop, in the Ruhr, and has taken up residence in Austria for the time being, in order to trump younger women, abandoning everything, even her home town, where she was an executive secretary, that was just a town, which never made free with her hot glances. That was her last trick, now she hasn't got anymore. I swear I'm never going to mention the woman again! She was an example of nothing at all. So, now I've taken my revenge on her, only I don't know what for. The prisoner pockets all the profit. They all like to get close to him, the dear ladies of the Lord, whom they have chosen all on their own (whereas God was already there before, always already there, from the beginning). Even if the lord and master is twenty, thirty years younger, then they really storm the prisons. They literally board them with their freshly painted talons, which would break like glass if firmly gripped. Not in order to resolve to be better people and likewise to improve the culprit, but to be for him, who hasn't got a choice, first mother, then lover and then: everything else as well. After getting to know him better. Of course. Mother is altogether the best thing of all (women don't seem to know that, because they obstinately don't want to be mothers). At least not until their head is cut off and displayed in the window of their little lingerie boutique. As long as there are inquisitive people in the world, they'll stop in front of shop windows and believe in love, which would be even more beautiful in this pretty lace combination, I could imagine. And then that! A decapitated head right in the middle! Incidentally do you have any idea why matricides so often cut off their mothers' heads afterwards? They could also cut open the stomachs and pull out the wombs from which they, the sons, came, and give them a close inspection for once, couldn't they? I don't understand it. They could be content with the killing itself, but they go to the trouble of sawing off the head like Salome, who didn't, however, have to get her own fingers dirty. Sometimes they even stick the Gorgon in the blender, if they have one, which only demonstrates their lack of technical talent. They've never had the opportunity to study, otherwise they would have known that. But wait, back to the beginning, this one has studied at university, economics (but didn't have a clue about solid-state physics!), now he's doing it again, I've heard, studying. Fortunately he's quite healthy again, it's been at least a year since the murder. But I feel so happy for him, that he's out again and now he can until further notice (until he has a girlfriend who looks like his mama) be built up again and find out how far he can get with boldness. Into the newspaper! Oh, that would be nice, to get as far as that!
Yes. They will take murderers home, where after only a few days the latter will kill the woman's children, one at least, as we already said, unfortunately we've always said everything already and made no bones about it, we had no bone to pick. They do something like that, the murderers, because they don't want to start a new life and if they do, then alone or with someone else. But never with those whom they already have. Perhaps their souls want to become human beings, but reason wants something else, it wants what we all want but don't dare do. We should all hate corporeal life, but only this country policeman, among others whom I do not know, really does hate it. One just doesn't notice at first, because he sometimes jokes and laughs and sings songs to the accordion.
Since it never comes, one will always think love is somewhere else, chase after it oneself and soon turn from hunter to hunted. Well, go on, you too can bring a murderer into your own home, or you can at least correspond with him beforehand, so that the anticipation is all the greater, e.g. this knife-killer, who likes to wear ladies' tights so much, you'll have plenty of them in your wardrobe! No, not him, he's already dead! Later on the thirteen-year-old son would only have masturbated onto the tights anyway, thinks the country policeman who has followed the case in the newspapers and on TV; he himself has certainly heard of such sensational cases, but he has hardly ever experienced any himself. He fills a post, which fits him very well. Not bad, the cap, and the revolver in its holster. Great. Looks really smart. The culprit would hardly be out again, thinks the country policeman gloatingly, before he would smack this woman in the face again, who's standing there whimpering in front of his typewriter because of some petty pub brawler, who put her in hospital for three weeks, and is begging for a permit to visit him. But her tormenter will never let her write the novel of his life! Well yes, at any rate not on my typewriter. No way! There will soon be PCs purchased, which can store even more in their memory, about which women can then be reminded if need be, when they stand in front of one again with a smashed face.
Yet there was no right of return. The perpetrator will write the novel of his life, in which he would rely more on reality than on dreams himself. In order to become famous. Women are worse, without having been really bad, they age early and like to neglect themselves, unless they get attention. Then they blossom and smile dreamily. For that (to get attention!) they would do anything, they would even kneel in front of the American president and take his penis with all its secret characteristics, which haven't even been shown on television, in their mouths. We won't need a bed for that, although we will unfortunately need a judge, and the judge is the whole nation. That would be something, everyone looking at me! I would be able to put up with that, no problem! Something that every murderer is, really every one: ambitious and attention-seeking. If they were allowed to go home, they would immediately sit down at a piano, even if they couldn't play at all, just so that people would listen to them.
One really would have to arrest men and lock them up in order to be able to protect them from women, thinks the country policeman, who knows it all or at least has heard of it recently or seen it somewhere. He will draw his conclusions from that. We catch them, the women, act as if we worshipped them, thinks the country policeman. Why not the other way round? Why should they not adore us, in this particular case me? It can't be so hard. What does that mean? I could manage it, couldn't I? So, now life is for once really being challenged, it's no game anymore, and one declares oneself the victor. One would have to intercept the eligible women before they get murdered, thinks the country policeman. First of all we'll send tact off on a long journey, basically women don't like anything like that, they want to be taken hard and anyway we've got enough juice to score in the big road battles between pedestrian precinct, sports center and shopping center or get us to the industrial suburbs where the formerly flourishing nationalized industries are on their knees and trying to crawl away but are stopped by a ball and chain held tight by the trade unions from undertaking a flight of capital abroad. The unemployed will then just have to see how they can market themselves day after day. Lack of tact but not lack of talent is all that a murderer needs. And we've certainly got that, if we look at ourselves in the right light in the mirror! The curious may stand around at the scene of the accident, the country policeman climbs over the ribbon and is at last free free free. The lake is still. There's already a woman who's involved in the accident, she owns her home, and she is likewise free, even if not in sexual matters. A freedom, however, which she doesn't appreciate, she would much rather be in the custody of a man and not be responsible for it. And that one over there, she even has a whole detached house to herself, although she's only a single person. She's screaming, screaming, screaming at present, as only such citizens scream who haven't had an interlocutor for a long time now. Aha. She has the nerve just to roar away like that. In the past she's always behaved with restraint, but now she's straining to let it out. Now she's letting go. This heart demands precision, is it really just her that's meant, her alone, the woman, the only one, or are there rivals? Anyone who wants to get to the country policeman must knock first, but is often sent away again by his colleagues. We are none of us poor, and we don't like to be shown the door.
One has to know the secret of how to get a good grip on women. One doesn't absolutely have to be a doctor in order to slit people open, but it would be better if one were, if one wants to find the serpent in the stomach, which once led us astray, the evil one, where else should it be: as a man one would like to be doctor, psychiatrist, surgeon and anaesthetist all at once. Even if one had nothing else to do it with but this fairly long, powerful organ, the scalpel, which doesn't have to take time twisting and scraping when it wants to get in, it's not a spiral drill after all. The drill imposes itself without even glancing once or twice up an empty dead end in case anyone is coming down it at the wrong moment. Courage grows with appetite. The screaming woman beside her car which has got a dent in its tin roof suddenly falls silent and stares at the man in a uniform, as if she were looking at a live man for the first time. The mascara is running down her more than fifty-year-old face, it doesn't really matter. The face shouldn't stand for so much food, because it looks a little puffy, but that doesn't matter either. Down below, on the valley side of the lake shore, beside the woman and the country policeman, the landscape spreads out alongside the highway. The landslide has finally been cleared away, also the hair, which strangely enough they found in it, these thick tufts of hair, no one could work out what they were doing there. Ultimately it makes no difference, who or what one embraces, the important thing is that one can grab hold of it when the time comes.
There are lights on in some houses where widows and other single persons are living. Their faces are like unentered rooms, which are waiting for someone to switch on the light so that they don't have to do it themselves anymore. Their organs roar. If need be, they would even commit a murder themselves, if only someone would at last come to them. Some unfortunately are shaken by the tree of life before their time. To ensure that their passionate feelings don't perish unused, they get into their cars and drive off in order to get to know someone. To be finally brought in as harvest, by the traffic or its guardians. Don't get killed and don't drive too fast. Just don't make a mistake now! Fifty years with a clean record are soon used up! Someone simply has to make this country policeman rich, otherwise the needle will stick. No sooner does one lay one's hand on a woman's neck or throat as gently as a hypnotist than they throw back their heads like horses, bare their teeth and get so wet that foam squirts from every hole. No one sees them fantasizing about vanished love. Everyone sees them longing for a new one, and here it comes. What a good thing that I got into my car. Oh you pale-colored Japanese mid-range car, which was seen at the scene of the crime! The tongue is displayed in the open mouth and wants to be bludgeoned by another tongue, where's the limit? The lips still want to linger at the place it all happened and exchange further caresses, as if it was just like a Mills amp; Boon novel; tin for gold chains and rings and bracelets, just as gold was given for iron, where's the limit? Where does a body have limits anyway? This longing: women who desperately observe their own state, size up a distance, but cannot get back to dry land again unaided, in order to reach a more pleasant state. Marriage later not excluded. As if they couldn't let themselves out, because they're the only thing they have. But why then give it away so greedily? They can hardly wait to thrust themselves forward in the most complete way, to give themselves up to a stranger's hands, without a female assistant animal keeper on TV having tested the fences of the little house, the barred windows of the apartment (so that the animal cannot fall out onto us), in which they, the people are to land, usually not very gently. No matter where they come down, whether a soft or hard landing, the important thing is that we come, have a little slime rubbed into us, have the Kleenex to hand and hold the stalk tight before the bloom of budding affection has shriveled again. Before it even rose properly. Everything as usual. Precaution is better than after-care, e.g., after a cancer operation. A big opportunity, authoritative entrance, the gun, a uniform which announces the master, because it runs ahead of him with a caliber of approx. 9mm like the obedience which one knows how to produce in a woman. Strange, that others have such problems with it! The curtains with their curtain rail-lubricant (unfortunately he always has to leave, pilots always have to come down again, too) are torn aside, the neck is stretched in order to gaze after him, as he disappears down an alley beside the drug store without looking back. And yet one had embellished one's pink and bluish gleaming interior, which can only be reached though a narrow passageway, but that's the way he, the only one, will come, so nicely with folds, in order to give it a new look, but there was no need for that, one discovered. You, you're fantastic, one clearly heard that, it's only three weeks ago, and one heard it from a mouth above a square jaw, and meanwhile a hand leafed around below and sometimes also climbs higher, where it pinched, scratched and practiced slapping the flesh, just great. Was it true, what one felt then? Afterwards they don't rightly know, are already greedy again, the street door only has to slam shut, and so want to have it again and again, in order afterwards to consider everything in peace and quiet. Is ready cash, jewelry, ownership of real estate available? That, in turn, is more important to the man, and a bath tub now would be nice too, muses the country policeman, who has made himself dirty and furthermore would like to get rid of the smell of perfume. His wife isn't waiting at home to get a smell of the man, because she wouldn't dare do that. This man now belongs to me alone, I can do what I like with him, thinks the victim, for as long as she can still think. For as long as she is still all there. Another man is meanwhile already dead, inside him are the drugs Anafranil and Euglucol, they lower the blood sugar level and improve the mood, but it's no use now. The criminal was female and turned to unfair pharmaceuticals. An athlete doesn't need anything like that. The woman is often like someone dead anyway, because she does not know when and how she should move during sex. The murderer gets on top of her and drives around the place as he pleases, a ghost driver, who's never changed direction. A spook. He's driving around with the dead woman in his car, he's even got on top of her, imagine that! He's filled his car with corpses he's picked up for himself, which he'd rather not make a noise about, they're sleeping so wonderfully beneath and behind him, just don't wake the dead! The murderer can awaken a feeling. He himself must be cold. He dare not be modest.
Kurt Janisch (I always find it embarrassing to name names, don't you think so too? It sounds so silly, but how else should one speak to people?), the country policeman, always already feels the juicy colors all around him when he wakes up in the morning, but they don't mean a thing to him. But it immediately drives him out into the front garden, where the flowers bloom and promise something more, that is, a woman whom one can pick up with flowers. The country policeman likes to wander amidst the greenery of the rural hills and mountains, where even people are allowed to live, although there's not much room for them there. The people are enclosed by the mountains, like a child by his cot. Without fail they settle in the valleys, right up to the hills, where vacation homes have to take leave of the world, when the landslide comes, and everyone throws themselves at everyone else, because the holiday makers want to play away. The sleep of the country policeman is like the paths through the mountains. There are many of them.
Why does it occur to me now: Yesterday Kurt Janisch dreamed of a pair of bears who were once young, a yellowed photo shows them in their young days, they had been intended for a nature reserve in the area, quite near, but then installed in a bear-pit instead and nevertheless delighted the tourists for years, even behind bars. Now the two bears have died at a great age following a long serious illness, one right after the other. That's how one knows that time is passing, when the photos curl at the edges and turn yellow. Death pushes itself imperceptibly over life, the photos of the happy young bears are overlaid by the old tired animals with mangy fur. Oh, the soft hair of human beings, why does it move me so? Their trees grow heavenwards, but the country policeman, the squad commander, comes and cuts them down if they threaten to harm his superiors. Yes, sir, we also conduct security operations, and our dogs recently received yellow blankets for their assignments, so that they're seen immediately and they don't cover any strange dog with impunity, the brutes, the good dogs, along with their good noses. The Dobermans are sick too often. The Belgian shepherd dogs can take a bit more. It's only the poor bears which are dead now.