There lies the gravel pit, a stagnant stretch of water which, like every other, spreads before us forever flat beneath the surface pressure exerted by God, dark and yet open, an opaque quantity. Oh, if only the ecological balance of the water in it had not been upset! Hence, sadly, the lake is not a dark jewel encircled by mountains, which sometimes throw off their nerves, the water varicose veins in the rock and cast them down their own besotted slopes, man and his misdeeds are to blame, yes, yes, the landslides-everything slips down the slopes over their hips, the mountain shorts, the earthen covering, this sodden, doused greenery, which can no longer hold on there. Unfortunately it rained so much this spring. Tracks were buried on which cars were parked oh dear. People can no longer leave their vacation destinations and are left sitting in the locals' trap, the latter have to scale the heights of their best manners in order to bear the visitors for so long. In the winter they had already practiced killing by avalanche, the locals and their native snow, that triune son of water. (Meanwhile the water has assumed another form again.) This living play of nature finishes off everything in a trice. And right away here comes a whole concrete wall of snow, this popular, but inconspicuous (once arrived, it simply lies around everywhere) piece of sports equipment that falls down to earth around the clock and no one, apart from the athletes, really pays attention, unless they haven't got winter tires fitted yet. And this snow is suddenly like stone, like concrete, which has a stomach ache and thus must empty itself over everything. We, too, have to watch it on TV, even though we're more interested in the little football. The lake then. One essential detail's missing, that is, there's no life in it. The trout go strolling in the River Miirz, they avoid the storage lake, they already die before that, hooked by an angler or from the power station sludge if the sluice is opened too quickly, I've already mentioned it somewhere else. I still don't entirely understand the mechanism, but whatever it is, the fish die in the hundreds. It happens in a flash. In every kind of rock and in every kind of terrain there are suitable basins or cavities into which water fits, but then again its composition doesn't suit the fishes. They would have said something about problems beforehand, if they could have spoken.
Why is it that just this stretch of water has swallowed so much and what that caused it so to lose its balance? The water really has to be fed a great deal of unhealthy food to get so fat. If we start with a nutrient supply of 10 mg per annum, but then increase the amount by two percent per annum, then the lake has a nervous breakdown because it believes it will have to cope with even more, and has long since lost its appetite. But at the moment I can't see what nutrition it got at all, yes, in fact what is it subsisting on? Who set the cycle in motion, until something sat up, had a good stretch and then got up and left without making its bed? Nowhere do I see food for the lake, this is not at all an area of extensive agriculture, it is an area of extensive leisure use. If anything, then leisure should lose its balance, not this lake.
The afternoon shadows fall very early across the water, crouching in its tub. It has not been formed by tectonics, volcanic action, erosion or accumulation, rather, someone simply blew a very big hole in the ground, so that he could throw the rubble from road-building into it, and then someone else had another idea and preferred to fill the tub with water. You see, other bodies of water are even produced by the wind, this nothing in the air, ice, too, can melt and thereby make water. This water, however, was poured out, but without a food chain, no, that was not added (that is, the consumers and producers within this biocenosis don't come and go, they simply remain, but see for yourself) there are two, three rowing boats lying there, you can pay at the inn on the other side of the highway, where you will also be handed the paddles that go with them. And then look into the water just once, no one will stop you, but the species garnishing underwater doesn't lie next to juicy fish bodies, snails, microorganisms, this sidedish, rather, is never anything but weeds, weeds, weeds, simply green stuff, you can see that with the naked eye, macrophytes, vegetable organisms; your voice will sound as if muffled by a park of living plant creatures, should you take the plunge, the tongues of foliage will caress you like the branches of trees, but if I were you I would think twice before going in there. If you can't swim, have a last photo of yourself taken beforehand! Well, this water does not look like water at all. Just the way it clutches at your throat, if you want to do some water sports nevertheless! This water is simply not as close to nature as you. Even if you avoid it and lean over the side of the boat, the impression you get is of jelly, gelatin, ton upon ton of water plants, nodes, rhizomes, I ask myself, how can they even aspire to photosynthesis if light cannot penetrate the water at all? Look at the snapped off twig floating over there. It is already half submerged, as if it were petrified and too heavy for the water, which treats it severely and swiftly draws it down. These plants, they shouldn't really be here at all, and in healthier water they wouldn't be, at least not in such gigantic quantities. Did the nasty climate do it? Did something rise up which climbed to the surface, odd given the youth of this stretch of water, whose chemical properties suggest something much older? Upper layer not very permeable, eh? Of special significance to the dynamics of the depth ground water due to extended stay below the surface? What, no depth ground water at all? The tasteless juice simply poured in from above and then the hose thrown away?
There's a boat floating on the water at the moment, as love floats around in humans and makes no progress nor gets beyond itself. It's even possible to get out of any village, after all. The boat has sought out its humans and now glides forth without splishing or splashing, it is no longer surprised at anything, for it is used to this water, which just seems to have this special density, a different specific gravity from normal water. It is almost as if it were solid, which would be the opposite of water, a copy from an original water block, but they'll never manage to get the original quite like that again, what did I really mean by that? It doesn't matter, I'd rather not say, because I would need pages for that, which I will certainly miss in my life, that is, the nicer back pages. So it's simply water, but it doesn't look like it and doesn't feel like it. If you want to swim, you're better off driving to Kapellen, which has got a pond for swimming, I'm telling you, it's friendliness personified, with its caravans, its squealing children taking off into the blue sky with their water wings, everywhere the multicolored joys of discovery. OK, it's still too early in the year for swimming, the water is far too cold. I would say the lake can hardly be discovered because it's so hard to get there in order to discover it. It doesn't impose itself, this almost black filling, which was supposed to set a water cycle in motion, yet even precipitation does not visibly appear to strike it. As if there were a brake on its fall, as onto a sponge. It's simply a dark surface next to the highway, just before the bypass, where at last, since a couple of years ago, there's no need to brake anymore. I also brake for animals, says this car, which cannot do anything on its own. They first took the material for the road away from the ground and then gave back cheap water in return. Even you wouldn't put up with that. Imagine you've got a corridor where you could put up cupboards, and instead all of a sudden the full bathtub comes towards you and buries you under its watery hollowness. The bus drives a little way into the village, but the old B road then continues unhurriedly on foot, the bus turns round again, it has to pay attention to the federal highway. Now one can send five-year-olds to the grocer's, they could at most be run over by a baby stroller. And here's the little bus shelter, crudely rustic, as if knocked together from gingerbread, not unlike a feeding rack for game, so that it's not so conspicuous in the landscape, a piece of furniture, yet in the open air, but then again not a piece of garden furniture; I wouldn't go so far as to sit myself down comfortably there, under the inquisitive glances of the neighboring residents, and hold my face to the sun. Doesn't matter, it wouldn't make the face any better. The little house with its little bench is more a piece of working furniture, which takes in people for a limited period, principally student drivers, apprentices, and old people, who have no car and have to go to the surrounding towns, on one side as far as Mariazell, on the other to Murzzuschlag, I haven't been able to free myself of this area for ages which, like myself, is inconspicuousness personified, but yet also a fetter nevertheless. It sticks to me like I would myself to a beloved person, if I had one and a suitable opportunity.
The question is, how is it possible to describe such a water landscape, like that of the lake, without really knowing its language? I am wary of the innocuousness with which this stretch of water appears before the public, but it doesn't do me any good, it acts as if it could not disturb its own surface, and it really doesn't disturb me. This numbly paralyzed water, yielding nothingness, into which the skillful oars dip, yet on touching the surface their skillfulness at once deserts them, they become clumsy, shy away from dipping in again, which nevertheless could take them further, well I don't understand it. As if they would get goose pimples from it, they can hardly move in this aspic, in this gelatin, cannot turn, want to come to a standstill and submit to the always ice cold water cake in which they're stuck like the gateau knife, guided by the clumsy hand of an invisible, noisy peasant bride and groom-the women, chrysalises, sticking out of tons of petticoats beneath which simultaneously clayey, clumping feet emerge and will deal out kicks. Yet even these will be smothered in the thick reed beds of the shore, and the foot in the shoe breaks while green trees try to caress its pain. But the water won't allow that. It won't have anything nicer to tell you than I, that's for sure! Why did they put water of all things in this gravel hollow? Even this water here drowns in itself without a single cry. This stretch of water is not a dynamic member of the environmental movement, it is a piece of water standing there absolutely silent and stupid.
On the other side of the road, as if shielded from every terror by a beautiful pair of hands: the inn, adorned with a geranium dirndl blouse and the garden that goes along with it, so friendly! From here the path to the lake seems further than it is, it is a path from the light into the dark, cold, damp, where it's such an effort to draw breath, as if one had to buy it specially; and children's pleas for a boat trip are almost always refused. I would say, and I'll repeat it again and again, because perhaps then one can imagine something altogether definite: The water is dark green to black, at most green, at least black. The hair of the vegetation moves beneath the surface, dead undergrowth is dragged along, the green drowned weeds yield to an invisible current, the expanse lies open there and yet displays no kind of openness at all. On the side opposite the inn a rocky slope rises up, the young birches, larches, firs, the maple on this steep shore (no setting posts, although it would have been sensible to put them up so that the whole thing doesn't one day slip down into the water without knowing what to expect, stupid and usually unconscious but first of all fundamentally evil, just the way nature is) cannot be reflected. But really, why not? Because that side is simply always in the shade. This lake is not in the sunlight zone, that is its and the tourists' misfortune, yet the trees on the slope really should be able to reflect themselves. Why don't they? Why are they so lazy? Gut into the rock a little path on which hikers are often to be seen. They can't escape us, the song goes like this: forwards or backwards or be forgotten. These people are not walking around in the opaque world of the rich. Often they're families with small children who cannot be accommodated in a hotel, because they would immediately tear it down. But usually they're retirees, the evening of whose life grants them the full TV program, because they don't have to get up early in the morning. The few boarding houses here are really good value, the food is good, too, and is locally grown, yes indeed, this landscape has been vigorously cultivated, more abundant organic joy has been wrung from it, so that the naturally fertilized fruit and veg., the specially produced animal shit is coming out of its ears, does not have to be bought as an extra. The animals themselves are available, too, bred on the farm, and they are killed here, a maximum of six at a time, in the little district abattoir. It's not like in the big slaughterhouses, where ten Poles pitilessly hack at a living thing, break it down, for, measured by their own life, the animals here have a super time, and anyway most of it is all the same to man or beast. The main thing is to eat one's fill once more beforehand, before the knife slips into the hand and out of it again, stick it in, under the skin and into the flesh heave ho! Do you have the talent to be happy? Then on no account waste it here!
Look, there go two people again, no, three, in hiking clothes and climbing boots, equipped with sticks, walking on this narrow little path, on which if need be one could even walk in high heels, because the terrain presents no difficulties at all. But, professionally equipped for the unrefined mountains, it's just more fun and doesn't even cost much more. These are people who would dress appropriately and comfortably even in their coffin (so that they can frequently turn around in it), yet nevertheless economically for heaven, so as to be let in at all. They look down on the lake, which swallows up the sun as if a life-long eclipse prevailed there, and think the dark expanse is like a country road at night on which one encounters someone. Others would prefer not to encounter anyone. I can understand that, I would probably be one of the latter. So, now the people are gone again, because I can't see them anymore. The water is so cold, if one pulled it out of its dripping bed, one would immediately throw it back again, hardly taking a second look at what one had caught hold of. This water would never fall to the surface of the earth as precipitation, it would rather precipitate downright dejection in someone who for at least a week had been hoping for better weather. Coldness pure and simple, in peculiarly amorphous form. If the water had any agility it would clamber out of here of its own accord. The whole thing isn't very deep, but the creepers, the hussies, would simply pull one down to the bottom, a place which I would rather not imagine. It must be indescribably muddy, dark, icy, dreary there, the point, as it were, at which the body of water is unconscious, but nevertheless unceasingly, with a part of its memory, which has not been regulated by the Alpine Convention, which encourages the harmful substances not to be unloaded here, with a part, which is lying in wait, presumably lying in wait for its own terrible awakening. Not even on its surface have I ever seen ducks, it would rip the fat from their rumps, and they would be drawn below the surface quacking wretchedly, that's how I imagine it, because I love animals and wouldn't want them to have unpleasant experiences. Well, obviously they wouldn't like that either. It seems to me that they never alight on this stretch of water, which appears to be stiff with fright, because it has been poured out here and not over there, where it would get the whole sun, on the other side of the road, where the inn is, too, and even there, no matter how sunny it is, it grows cool early because of the mountains all around, and cardigans and jackets are taken out. There the ducks are then on the plates. A little jetty, but what for? If no one walks along it. Well, who could have known that beforehand, when assiduous voices were ordered and oars handed out and perseverance practiced, when losses were made during the early months. Sometimes one sees and hears children here who suddenly fall silent, however, and stare at the water, which is so different from what they had been promised, a face which on closer inspection turns out to be a hideous grimace, a web, in which one will become entangled. Not the place for cheerfully colored bathing suits, beach balls, inflatable animals, rubber dinghies; none of that is granted this lake, there's no change in it and so it doesn't make for a change. It cannot put on any surging robes of foam, because this metal water can neither bestir itself nor be stirred. It seems to me too simple to blame the absence of any of the sun's rays. The tanning studios, at any rate, have any amount of them, but human beings don't get any better as a result. Only such people go there, to lie down in the wonderfully gleaming coffins, who themselves want at least to change the color of their skin. They secretly suspect, after all, that they must always remain the way they are created. Whoever ends up in the water here-no thanks, as Franz Fuchs, the bomb maker and quadruple Gypsy murderer from Gralla, that's forty miles from here, would say loud and clear, so that he can thereby spare himself the well-deserved trial and enjoy the time in peace and quiet in his cell. He can't shout louder than his bombs. I can't hear him anyway, and now he's dead as well. He hanged himself. This water is soaked in itself, that sounds paradoxical, but it's true, so far as anything can be true. It is, so to speak, water twice over and for that reason solid again, no small success for an element that is eager to learn and would like to continue its education, although granted only limited opportunities to do so. With a bit of effort one can always make more of oneself, but at the same time always keep one's feet on the ground, which is nearly always horizontal. The level, which does not want to stand and only measures what's lying down, knows that, too, oh dear, that's not right, one can also measure the perpendicular with it. I think this water has an acid temper (but can also be alkaline), because no one is exactly scrambling to be a suitable partner for it, in play and sport and fun. It's rejected, so it retires offended to its room. Even the mother of this water, a rather low, newly built retaining wall, from where I'm standing it's on my right, on which the usual small plants are not yet growing, wild birch shoots, small willows, grass together with dandelions, any amount of wild fennel and coltsfoot and cow-parsnip (or is that the same thing?), is only allowed after repeated knocking to enter this water, in which terrible things are evidently produced and which in the shape of tough untearable creepers and drifting plants and algae destroy all other life. Only lifeless life is permitted here. Who with his wings parts the heavens for me? And here we have the first candidates for the room, crows, they're just everywhere, but not on the shore of this stretch of water. Hence nothing else is allowed to live here either. An enormous insignificance-and who can bear that? What on earth is to be discovered in something like that? Perhaps there are, after all, three thousand different varieties of aquatic plants in there, but I don't know them, verticillate, indestructible life, therefore, I wouldn't want to have to count them, the species, then I would have to bend over this water or spontaneously, thoughtlessly completely give myself up to it, and I've never done something like that before.
Oh, how nice, the sun is just taking a final brief walk on the steep shore! So brief, that the darkness, with which I am to be punished immediately afterwards, seems even darker to me. Beyond the lake the windows of the inn flare up for a moment, so it must be about five o'clock, the time at which the sun, at this time of year, graceless as a sleeping infant, but it just doesn't know any better, stands up, pays and begins to leave the garden of the inn, a beginning which also already leaves one behind. Most are in any case sitting inside, because after all it is still very cool outside. It's no different for the highway, which is pleased to make the acquaintance, even if only fleetingly, of the vehicle tires; briefly they snuggle up, could be friends, and then they're gone again, next please, so that rubber can rub off and rub out. They always leave just a whiff of themselves behind, the tires, or somebody dead, they get right on top, dead animals, too, cats, snakes, hedgehogs, hares, even deer and stags, which are then hurled to the edge of the road and left lying on the shoulder, left for the ants and worms to eat. Soon the sun will be gone completely. Wind rises. The water in the lake (here I am, as I see, tireless in my urge to describe!) is hardly ruffled, where are they, the graceful waves, they could certainly be a bit more full of themselves. Are they stiff with fear? Fallen silent at the sight of themselves, because they have no tender, sweet face, which they could raise to look at and assess one another? I would so like to know more about the inn, but I would not so much like to see the kitchen before I eat, and still less afterwards. Tourists are always strolling past it, cyclists are flashing signals in the sun with the mysterious, rare metals of which their sports equipment is made, their backsides cannot arouse any desires for assessment, they flash by too quickly and are gone again. What else? Over there's the path to the Alpine springs (fifteen minutes by bike, on foot it all depends), which were enclosed for the Vienna Mountain Spring Water Supply, a sight which would be worth visiting, but which one can no longer see. Before enclosure it was a nice destination for an excursion, now unfortunately the water always stays at home and, in accordance with its demands, the home is built of stone and concrete and what do I know, ceramic pipes?, and like everything that's always sitting at home, no longer interesting to the beholder. One can hear it frothing, one can hear it murmuring or whatever it does, but here, too, one no longer sees any reflection, no bubbling merriness, no little clouds of foam spraying rainbow mist, no cheerful rushing over stones, no roaring gushing forth from the earth, there's no sitting in a concrete home and throwing foam around. The water is located, properly enclosed, inside a pipe, and in the city it ends up in our glasses and pots, why then do I feel that something's not right? I would be the first to complain if instead I had to knock back the ground water from the Mitterndorfer bore with all its nutritious nitrates!
Well. The families are slowly setting out for home. Small children are stuffed into strollers, hands are shaken, parking places found and, to the patter of spattering gravel, abandoned again, whatever's alive, which is anyway only held together with difficulty, is finally pulling away in different directions. Those who are allowed to stay together tie themselves into little bundles of rods, which will soon hit out at one another again, they can hardly wait, the couples, the passers-by, the relatives sort each other out and lie down voluntarily on their jigsaw underlays, where they are to be properly fitted together along with their often quite unusual hobbies. Swimming, tennis, skiing, hiking. They have looked at the area or even live entirely in it and hence only have short distances to go, usually by bike, in order to get back home. But the bikes of the natives, whose customs consist in always being customers for something the vacationers already have, these boneshaker bikes are different. They are plain objects, which don't trumpet any kind of sporting ambitions, they can't keep up anyway. The mountain bikes and their handsome owners in their handsome clothing, they're like the fingers of a hand being moved, one moves and the others join in. They are many and quick, to us whom they leave standing they say farewell even before they've seen us. What should the people here begin, when they began to look for stuff like that in the department store in the county town, at first among the special offers? But the children of the villagers have steadfastly cut imitations of racing bikes out of their parents' living bodies and are beaten for it (more often than the city children), because so much has been spent on them. The bodies on the adults' bikes are wrapped up in exemplary manner, sometimes still even in a dirndl, clean, although ever more frequently one sees shorts and jogging pants on the bodies of mountain folk. Undignified times, to what do you drive your occupants and why do you drive them on when there is no place to which they could drive? But don't be deceived, even if I constantly attempt such deceptions, so as to make things simpler for myself, many also drive to distant lands, to places where I've never been. I, however, have really never been anywhere yet, not because some sins or other could wrap themselves around me there, but because I'd rather sin at home, where God even announces the weather to me in advance on TV, slowly, so that I can write it down in case it's worth the proper guilt. Sinning is enough, there's no need for surprises as well.
So the children are decked out with spoils, which their relatives have forced on them or which they have cadged for themselves. If someone has lost his self-control with them, then their bawling can be heard as far away as the lake, but no further, the lake is the limit. It swallows everything. I've already said so, but it's on my mind nevertheless in a curiously insistent way: Usually children like to gather on the shores of bodies of water, they splash about, splash each other, pick up small stones and throw them at one anothers' heads, get onto air mattresses or air mattresses which have disguised themselves as animals and, as if spellbound, they stare into the distance, where such animals sometimes sink without a sound, or where boats have fled as the only way to get away from them, in order to do a few exercises on the waves. They beg to go out in a boat, the children, best of all in a pedal boat, which can never ever capsize, there are three of them here, but they don't look as if they're ever used. Some water is sloshing about in them, cloudy, muddy, sluggish, how did it get there? It's too little for a leak, for the free and easy games of boisterous water fanatics too much. The boats are definitely neglected, I can see that, but why maintain and look after them if no one wants to go in them? Presumably it squeaks, when one, what do you call it, the thing you step on, like when you play the harmonium, it's not a bellows, it'll be a kind of plastic paddlewheel or something like it, so when one operates these things, and the boat moves jerkily and haltingly forward, how about greasing the bearings for once? There's even a steering wheel and one can imagine oneself at the helm of a speedboat in which one could have an accident. That has already happened to world-famous people, spouses, fathers. One can put the fear of death into younger siblings with malicious words if one pretends that the boat is certain to sink now, because it's not going to stay upright much longer, luckily I can swim, but you can't, tough. These are all things one can talk about, but no one talks about them here, it would be superfluous. One doesn't talk about things which normally can only be written, but neither are the people who live here in life's good books. They'd rather pay on credit. The children in the inn's beer garden sometimes walk the few yards over to the slide and the swing, with which at any rate they can catapult themselves straight onto the compost heap-where the hens are scratching and the cucumbers and pumpkins, too, are still only in their infancy-if they're skillful enough and want to drive their parents to commercial TV and then to the washing machine, but they always come back pretty quickly. They've had more than enough of such parents, pressed flat, brightly colored and always cheerful, who are incessantly washing, know them better than their own, who don't have much time for it, but then they don't need any with these washing powders and liquids, it all happens in the twinkling of an eye, just like that. The TV is also nearby, it's in the kitchen-living room. Perhaps the parents have only forbidden their children to cross the main road by themselves because they would have to do that to reach the lake. No, not a chance, I'm sticking to it, there's something that I simply don't understand about this mighty lake, well, it's not really so big, in fact it's rather small compared to Lake Baikal, but it isn't what it was either. The parents could go along, and they would certainly not be so hard-hearted as to refuse the children the boat trip, it's very cheap and in the course of time has even become a little cheaper. There's a solution to everything, though I personally don't know one for the lake, it's a mineral solution, but no one knows the details. Not a nice sight, the lake. At first everyone was pleased that now there's something like that here too, so mysterious and beautiful, so splendid, that'll attract the tourists and does them a constant service and sometimes a last honor-but then its health began to fail, and suddenly no one was pleased anymore. And why does no one pour in the tried and tested good algicides? Conjecture: then the algae would certainly be finished, but the lake would have to swallow the weed killer as well, when it was already unable to hold anything because of its weak stomach: the water would remain deader than dead. Even artificial aeration, if we could afford it, would only produce short-term success, because once the water begins to breathe, then it wants to keep on breathing more and more, until it believes it's a human being. The water is so presumptuous, there's nothing to be done. That's why it's better to leave it to its imbalance, isn't it? If the lake's dead, we can make a new one beside it, exactly, right beside it, no, over there's better. Now what does that look like? Many will be against it. And further upriver there's the big dam for the local electricity plant, nothing's happening there anymore. The water has to work and has no time for fun and games. And we're not going to blast another hole in the world just for fun, are we?
Strange for a piece of water, which induces most people almost involuntarily to come and look, since it could cause one difficulties of every kind, I need only think of the landslides and floods which last week we could keep track of in every detail on our screens and now still on the broken off roadside, after the catastrophes for their part had tracked down whole villages and parking lots and were even successfully after a whole inn, gulp, in which the beds were already waiting patiently, almost unprofitably, like open savings bank books, because the season was about to begin. So one thing follows another. But one could also think of sporting variety, when one sees the water, one could get out, take the surfboard from the roof of the car, and we're already there. We do exactly the same with the roads and the wheels, we make ourselves masters of our sports equipment, and nature is slowly getting nervous as a result, it gets us in its sights, takes careful aim, its finger is already itching on the trigger, but because we move so fast, it's constantly losing us. Lucky for us, but ultimately it is we who always have to be moving on. Well, but now, unfortunately, it has found us after all, nature. Every corner, every patch of this piece of water has left something deep down in the mountain and now cannot find its way back. It's possible that something has been catapulted from the red iron-bearing rock of Styria that did not want to be filled up again, because it would like to enjoy the view itself for once, and if it had to be filled up, then not with water, but with wine or beer please, don't take it so seriously! We'll just bore a completely new hole in a completely different place to tunnel under the whole Semmering, but there, too, the water that was there before, and has older rights, is already coming towards us. It doesn't encourage us to stay, and right away there are some who now no longer want the hole. Water in the rock, next time if you please just leave it out, God! Just put the water in this pan, we can do with it there! The nature conservationists play their jolly comedians' roles, and at some point they, too, will disappear from the surface of the earth, beneath which everything will be churned up again by animals, laboriously, they're so small, they're so small.
So no caressing or scolding voices reach us from this piece of water, I would even prefer the nagging of a father, the complaints of an overworked mother, the whining of a child whose face has been smacked to this eerie soul of the water, these eyes of the water, which stare at me, these lips of the water, which want to devour me, well, they'll be taking on a bit much there! I weigh a hundred thirty-three pounds now.
It's dark now and has grown even colder, the grit left over from winter rises in a cloud when someone drives over it, and it's no longer enough for anyone to be present, he would like to get into the warmth of kitchens and barrooms. People have come out of the open air and fled into the enclosure of their families as if they had no other shelter. Food is dished up, the skates and skateboards and climbing boots have to stay outside or in the cellar. With choice listlessness the fathers cut a piece from the roast, which, a last desperate remedy, is supposed to animate them again, supported by an almighty double glass of wine, a miracle that they don't lose all hope. Nature, which treats us so sternly, also takes a break. That's what we call everything that has to stay outside, and nature has been baked into a block of darkness, cold, mountain wind, mountain stream and regularity (yesyes, the plants in their predetermined vegetation units, one can almost set one's clock by them!) and eaten by us and other animals. That successful sampler nature, what could I not describe now if I reassembled old descriptions, no matter what, it always sounds good, doesn't it? Gome right in, you cute comparison of mountain lake with diamond set among the mountains, how well I know you, just lie down there! no, but not on my toes! The strawberry slopes and the river squadrons of fish, the thicket of the pine plantation, where all the lower branches have unfortunately died off, mutants donated by the tourist board, so that the excursionists are better able to see the mushrooms on the ground, but they aren't there anymore either, because they've been suffocated under eighteen inches of needles like Salome under the shields of the soldiers. Also probably an experience with far-reaching consequences, but not something I would want. By the lake meanwhile, because we are not in it, we do not see the following: the surface level, that is, where the water level runs in its trough, the wood piles, because none were driven into the earth to strengthen the shore, instead this shore is lovelessly made up of boulders, dumped down just as they were blasted out of the rock after the soil flesh had been picked clean; a screen of reeds has at least been placed in front of it, or it has itself taken the trouble to get here, a walking wood and further: the stone's throw, that's just these quarry stones, a ton weight some of them, spilled down and crudely dressed, which the reed bank with its green pencil bodies masks. What lives under the water? Let's take a look. Nothing lives under the water anymore. No need to pour in anything else that's dead!
With a terrified expression, as if in the middle of the darkness he were also seeing the end of the world before him, a single figure (male, 54) stands on the shore. All remaining figures in the area have withdrawn to personally protect the species in front of the program Austria Today or even to maintain the species, no matter, in any case into their little houses. Until now, so it seems to me, the figure has proceeded in a very purposeful manner, unlike nature, which takes what it can get and gives whatever it has. Only giving and taking are one and the same thing with it. This time the figure has set itself the goal of not looking its deeds in the face, I'm telling you that because I already know everything about the figure. That's the nice thing about my job. The man has wrapped his deed, not very carefully, because he was in such a hurry, in a green plastic sheet of the kind that are used to cover the freshly hewn wounds of building sites, so that no water can ruin the damp, expensive concrete, but the things are never quite watertight. And in any case now the opposite of what it is usually supposed to do is being demanded of the tarpaulin: Water, please, come on in! The packet is supposed to get heavy very quickly, not like the earth which is supposed to get very light for one. As far as color and shape are concerned, it is impossible to tell what the packet contains. It doesn't appear to be anything big, but it's not small either. So, now you know exactly as much as I do, that is, everything, but that's entirely thanks to me: because I've attached a couple of pennants, bells, horns and flashing lights to this packet, so that now really everyone knows what's inside. But how else should one say it in a proudly inflated life's work, which one would like to trot ahead of and impetuously toss the feathers in the headdress before the wind does so and there's nothing more one can do about it. At all events one should be able to say it better, much better. The package is heavy. The man has quite a job shoving, pushing, and pulling. The water is at last supposed to do its destructive work on the parcel or it can do whatever it likes, just eat away for all I care, it really makes no difference to this man here either. I think his behavior is so unutterably fearless, as if he wanted, indeed dearly wished: This package should be found again as soon as possible! But then why is he hiding it at all? He could put it down right next to the highway, the effect would be the same. No. Modern tyrants who have long ago won the right of self-determination for themselves and their refuse compete relentlessly to dump rubbish there. So perhaps the effect would have been the opposite, since no one ever clears anything away. The package could still be lying there in three years' time. It wouldn't be down to us. Why is the man not smiling full of anticipation? Inside the plastic sheet there, I'm saying so, although there's no need at all to emphasize it, there's a nice piece of body, belonging to a woman. Just a moment, I'll take another look, that's right, it's not a man, it's exactly what I've thought up. A woman. A man would be heavier. One would need accomplices and a cheeky little river, which, after one was finished with the body, would carry it away. I once knew someone personally who with someone else drowned someone in a real river. The cock of the man, whom you see here, is still erect, it's like that nearly all the time, fantastic!, almost like a skier at the bend, which threatens to carry him off the track, but he counteracts it, so his cock stands up straight to the end and refuses to get any smaller, what else is the man going to do with it? He's already done everything with it that was possible. It was no use. He even tried to build on it, but this foundation might perhaps give way unexpectedly and on the way down to the cellar one might at least once briefly have to look a human being in the face instead of the ass or the breasts or the legs. For which one would first of all have had to find the necessary peace and quiet. No one should be there to observe one scaring oneself to death. The hearts of women are often of a cheerful spaciousness, so that it is also possible to go into reverse in them if one wants to get away again, yet in a car, which is often the most important thing in a relationship, even inserted as obligatory by senior citizens in their Lonely Hearts advertisements, one never quite gets there, it always has to stay outside unfortunately, the car, unless one is in the woods, then one has to park first; but hardly has this man stolen into one of these hearts, which he has been looking for, than he is completely indifferent, even cold again, forever unimpressed by sights or events. Beauty does not touch him because everything he finds beautiful absolutely must be dead. How I could have laughed about him, if only I had wanted to! I could have been afraid. This man rarely laughs. If he ever looks in the mirror, it's as if he can't remember what he looks like, perhaps because he longs for nothing so much as material goods, so that as if as punishment he first of all has to visualize himself. And in his greed for property he then forgets himself, sometimes quite suddenly, but he never forgets what he wants. If asked, he replies, correctly even intelligently, indeed quick-wittedly then again obligingly smiles, the question even stays in his brain for a while, so that he can look at it very carefully or change his mind before giving an answer or evading it. Perhaps he can after all draw some advantage from the ever-repeated question of his wife about eternal values-life or death, kitchen bench or chairs, couch or easy chairs-please, Kurt! Perhaps he'll finally say something, he has already been asked so many times (well, we don't have a digger to clear the old kitchen furniture away, that's expensive, more than new stuff!). So that for once his dark soul, like ours after the cinema, which was the last time it came to life, may rise up and stretch its legs. Even plants feel more than he does, I swear to you, e.g., they respond to music, as it says in this magazine which this man's wife, who grows flowers, brought home yesterday, pure waste of money. There's much that he does quite correctly, some things are also wrong, he sleeps, he gets up, an overgrown child, that has learned nothing yet, not even children's tricks, but he doesn't pick up on stories or songs, at most on instructions for use and building plans and bank statements, which show him that his money unfortunately has been recently withdrawn and the rent for the last three months is still owed. I see something there, it's true, but don't say anything yet for the time being, something about his work, which he does really well, even if always with one foot on the wrong side of the law, which in his job is very practical (you get to know villains and part-time villains) and is actually quite usual. Nothing that went beyond the everyday duties. He is what he is, no, he lacks something. He completely lacks a whole dimension, that is, the dimension that there are other people apart from himself. It's as if you knew what time it is, but not which year, which month, which day, these are units, which even if strange, distasteful, have our life terms in their hands. We request them to be considerate. They are superior units, which can indeed be made a little more refined by the addition of the spice of life, but we can't quite get rid of the bitter taste. The man is completely normal as far as I can see, but he speaks as if with a child's voice roaring out from deep inside, and always only to himself (long ago, as a child, he had still felt something, it had been nice then, everything OK with his scooter, his bike, his ball, the sweets, over a hundred times, such a spoiled, a pretty child, no little Mister Guilty or Mister Ugly, quite the opposite! Golden haired. Good as gold, to get used to the inevitable, that is: gold makes the world go around), whose vocabulary is very limited. It doesn't matter, the man always knows what he wants to say to himself. Or, let's see the picture, where have I put it, oh yes, there it is: as if it were a paper cut-out, onto which one can clip his clothes, uniform, jeans, the good suit for his own funeral, the braided gray Styrian suit for Sundays or the Country Police Carnival Ball, the track-suit for nothing, but no one has ever thought that one can also pin feelings to people or that the sweetheart can carefully pin her eyes, but she's not going to be doing any sewing again, is she? Shouldn't her dear eyes open at all anymore? This man doesn't have room, it doesn't matter what for. He needs space, it doesn't matter where. He wouldn't know on whom he should waste anything. Odd, that people are never suspicious of him and, on the contrary, often immediately expose their innermost secrets to him, perhaps because they suspect that otherwise he would be gone again, before they can even take their clothes off, lie down on the couch and display themselves to him without anything on. I correct myself: He does have dreams, the man, they are, however, nailed to one or more houses or owner-occupied apartments and so not at all times freely disposable. Well, one house, a little house, he already has, his wife brought it into the marriage, that's also why he keeps the wife who belongs to it, despite the cost. Ah yes, I see, other houses have now come more within his reach, his son, e.g., pays a small life annuity for his, smaller than the life of a certain old woman, her body meanwhile almost wasted away because of alcohol. Fortunately the person will die, but the walls within which she hid away will still stand.
But then again there's no doing without bodies, precisely the most decayed and frail cling surprisingly fiercely to life; this man lets nothing rest, he always wants more without letting go of a thing again, now everything has to turn out for the best. There he stands, steady as a mountain rock (sadly he has less and less time for the mountains, they often come last now. Besides there's no building land up there, only wasteland struck by rocks), stands outside the shops which sell only the cheapest lines, outside the inn, where the teetotaller and sportsman drinks no more than a Fanta or a soda pop, into which he then, under the table, pours his schnapps (which he never pays for either, because he has always entered as a figure of authority). We are dealing with that mysterious continuation of ourselves to which everything falls, because it belongs there, like gravity, at the bus stop, where the car driver doesn't take the bus but prefers to take someone else instead, before darkness falls, which he penetrates with a pocket lamp, but only if it is absolutely necessary. Batteries cost money, too. And here he knows the way at any time, even in the dark, every stone on it and every protected plantation of fir trees, on which he himself need protect nothing and no one, when he sits down in the middle of the spread table of a woman.
What's coming down from the heights there? It's them, it's always them, the mountaineers, the hikers with their own or other women. But of course it's always a matter of where you're standing. Who touches a meadow full of flowers with his feet, and yet the meadow remains untouched? Unbelievable, that there's such and such a number of women, particularly ever since they've been driving around in cars just as much as men and can also turn up in a different place from where they are at home. They are drawn out into town and country, into the county town and onto the country road, and that they are so different from one another is likewise unbelievable. And then they stoop to this man, they've hardly clapped eyes on him and they're on the ropes, he cuts them down or not, in his hands they soon gleam like polished pieces of furniture. Yes, indeed, and afterwards they are alone and have been taken for a ride, with the itch, but not sewn up, I can already see that from this distance. There have been a good five of them in the last two years. Not all that many, I know, but it takes time to look after them, because nowadays they demand quality in order to be satisfied. It's not enough for them to rub up against the wall of the house, which is badly plastered or turning damp, the house should also belong to them after they've been saving themselves so long for the right man. They don't let their cars do something like that either. That they wipe their dirty tires on someone or that someone takes the liberty of doing such a thing with them. Cars also belong to many women. Many cars belong to women. Thus one becomes a vessel, they probably thought, once they had chosen this car in their favorite color and even had to wait for it. One spreads out the bed for that already there. It's recently been specially acquired, together with an orthopedic mattress, for a very special person, who will lie down where no one has lain down before. And one already knows all that in advance, after talking to him just once on the dusty road, where one showed him the driver's licence and the vehicle documents, and he was such a wonderful, unique man, one never saw one like him before, and one knew: He's the One! And why? asks the shop assistant at Billa, with whom, since moving here to the country a couple of years ago, one occasionally has a bit of a heart to heart, next to toothpaste, soap and detergents. I don't know. That's the answer. The rather stocky, but muscular-looking, dark-blond police officer is considered to be a loner, a reputation which he has never really resisted. A man who hides his feelings behind a robust manner, but who can also show small weaknesses. How sweet of him! He effortlessly overcame the barriers with which I have protected myself until now, says this woman to the supermarket cashier, who doesn't understand her and who would at last like to go home. But hardly has anything so wonderful happened to one than one is immediately buried again, and that is the disadvantage with lonely people, worn by miles of worries and suspicion, as if one were the landscape itself, which is idly waiting for what will be inflicted on it in the shape of mudslides, avalanches, and rockfalls. One finds oneself in the water, instead of being water, which can travel anywhere, but unfortunately on one condition: downhill only! So it's better to stay at home, so as not to miss the telephone ringing, or you just take the telephone with you, which can play Bach's D Minor Organ Toccata, which it's been taught. After that you only have to wait for your number to be called.
Then miracles happen, an angel enters and with his wings cuts in pieces what divides two people, and it will come, it will come!-the best-loved miracle, which is no miracle at all, for a human being is as if made for love. But that is deceptive, often a human being only looks as if he is. On the contrary, God never does well by the good, and they, although they, too, love and want to stay, fall apart even more quickly than the rest of us with our ordinary joyless life, and later on one doesn't recognize them again, the good people, when the seams of their genitals come apart and the sawdust pours out, which once lent them a bit of shape at least. Even wood would have been affected by such an experience, the glue would have fallen from it. Because no one reassembles these tender lovers who wish only to forget themselves in love, and this time it reinforces them right from the start with some plywood, so that they can at last stand up by themselves and can stay up a little longer in this position. Afterwards, nevertheless, a human being is never the same again, even after just an hour. Take a look, I'll show you: This miracle happened to the woman there, and to the one over there, too, I think, and over there are five together, but the miracle caused that one a lot of trouble, this self-absorbed, retiring, quiet, shy woman, would you recognize her as someone who moved to the country because people in the city who got close to her which she had always invited, hurt her, mostly without wanting to or knowing it? This woman is too sensitive, she's already paralyzed with fear and I've caught it, too. At this moment the man opposite her is devoting himself entirely to his career as a lover. He has already made some progress, and has got just as far as the little cafe, where they know him and so where he doesn't like to go at all. But this time he didn't want to contradict the woman's provincial loneliness, the relationship is still too new, the woman is already touchy enough, so he let her have her way: to show herself in public with the man! At last! She gets a lot out of that. And so there they sit side by side. On the other hand something like that has never ever happened to the man before, but in the daily tabloid he can read up where it leads: to love. In sequence. Until marriage. Until death. The country policeman's wife reads whole novelettes about it, from start to finish. The man holds his own in his hard job, which one can carry out with a dog and/or motor bike, but one can only bring the dog along in the car, or it has to be left behind altogether. The man holds his own in the atmosphere, the climate that goes along with it, and which until recently was purely man's business. Whether it rains or snows or whether the sun shines, it doesn't matter, the men made it, complains one or other woman to no one in particular. The man is quite different in this respect, usually doesn't even know what she's talking about, at this little cafe table, someone who gave up her career, but who had such a good income in the city and out of fear of disappointment again and again avoided close ties, as she declares, as she already declares, because again and again she was abandoned, abandoned like a stone in the road. That's how the sad Carinthian song goes, but I don't know the rest of the words. I should know them, because soon the whole world will be Carinthia, and then there will be terrible punishments for anyone who doesn't know these beautiful songs by heart. Well, why does she come here, the woman, where no one needs her. He needs her so! He's not interested in what she says. He's interested in what she has. He goes to open up the millionairess, but no, it's not millions, let's make a rough calculation back and forward: it never works out. What one needs is only her property, but she's still using it herself, and even if only to start out from it, to explore the area, its rare Alpine flora and fauna through books and then to cuddle up all the more cosily on the couch with a glass of wine and a book. No, Kurt, today I don't need you, today I want to be quite alone for once, but call me, definitely. If he doesn't call, she goes off the deep end. While we're on its beauty, this area would never get adequate attention if it were not beautiful. Otherwise no one would bother about it, apart from the scantily dressed tourists who get everywhere, and to whom the woman for her part feels superior (among the tourists there are also some who are overloaded with clothing, they just have no sense of proportion). In the man's cheerful disposition there is in principle no room for any woman, which he doesn't say. But for a house of course, always, even though in the nature of things it would be much larger: A house of one's own, somewhere to feel at home. Charm is already lying ready on the plate, today it has to stand in for butter. It'll manage that. This woman would be much smaller and manageable than the house, she could prove that if the country policeman would only take a proper look at her from top to bottom. And in the house there would at last be enough room for his expansiveness, his mountain bike and his hobbies, which are a waste of time. He should rather spend his time with her: Yes, take a look at that, I would describe him like that, too, before allowing myself to be hit. He isn't capacious, but expansive, not in the sense that there is truly anything cheerful about him, but clean and empty. The furniture has been pushed against the walls, so that his body can more easily be encouraged to carry out the much, thank you, practiced movements, which should cause the furnishings no more damage than absolutely necessary. When things have got that far, one wants to have them along with the house. At most the bed will collapse at some point. One sees a person standing in front of one, and then suddenly it's a woman. One sees her waving her arms about, shouting, weeping, saying please please, because he wants to leave so early again today. One can see her performing tricks in order to seduce him, now she's even getting up on her hind legs. She threatens him. Funny, we're already at home with her again. Earlier she calmly made coffee, although earlier we already drank some in the cafe and are now eagerly waiting for the sniffing course in matters of tenderness and trust, which had been promised us and for which we have already put down a payment: Two people who can't stand one another, but don't let go of one another either. For various reasons. In time they will learn to fly and take flight, because there's no other way they can get away from one another. One of them at least has to go so that the other can stay. But why all the work at the stove if the woman in the end-she doesn't quite know how to offer herself up completely yet, she would rather offer food and drink-throws a hot cupful in his face, why all the cooking and raging about so little? Why such a devil of a temper? And now she has to wipe up the coffee again alone and spoon up the soup alone. It really wasn't necessary to throw things around with people who haven't done anything at all. After this noisy scene, the woman, unappeased, but well brought up, is allowed to cook a less solid meal, this time something exotic with pineapple slices and spices, which were brought here specially from the Naschmarkt in Vienna, would you like that, Kurt?, no he doesn't know it and doesn't want to know it. Now this time he doesn't want to, he would rather practice his power of attraction. Please please, eat something, then there's dessert, then I personally will get carried away with you!
Stop, now she has a good idea, she will offer the man, who has already rejected her offer and who preferred to consume his nourishment in the disguise of sausages and fried egg at lunchtime at home with mama, his meal in a completely new, unprecedented way. He will be so happy that he will be unable to control himself, like a spring which would be worthy of control, but meanwhile still has to wait for such a thing. And so she's going to serve his food, you won't believe it, well, then again it's not so original either: wearing exclusively the new, expensive lingerie she bought just for him at Palmer's in town. Is that not a brilliant idea for her brilliant appearance? Is that not a change for his eyes, which on the gray roads have had to see much worse things, often also stirred, beaten or whisked with blood? What else can I serve up? Her entrance, which she should have rehearsed earlier so as not to have induced this dreadful laughter in the man, which will appear here from now on at irregular intervals, would have persuaded him if he had wanted to believe his eyes. After one had listened to one's inner voice, one could spread a little of the food on one's own body, with its juices, so that it can be licked off. For no other reason. A woman doesn't dream of anything like that, she's read something like it on some enclosed instruction sheet, and ever since she believes in the ability of her body, modern, confident, financially independent as she is, to stand up to all physical demands (others have to unreel many miles of threads of fate every day for that), no matter what else one sticks in her mouth, sometimes even a clenched fist, ouch.
Then suddenly she wakes up, as, e.g., today, sleepwalker that she has been, blind as she has been, on the stairs. A little blood is coming from her vagina. What has he stuck in there this time, bigger than a slap in the face, smaller than a tractor? Perhaps the neck of the beer bottle? What was it? And her clothes have trickled down the steps right beside her, in the wrong sequence, some are missing altogether. Furthermore the door is now locked from the inside, didn't I say that before? Did I forget it? Well well, who's in the flat now, in the house which both belong to her, the ground floor, too, of course and the cellar with sauna and wine racks and skis and hobby equipment? The woman sees herself kneeling completely naked in her misfortune at her own front door, a torn bit of clothing, which has soaked up something, clutched to her breast, her eye pressed to the keyhole. Is he really inside with someone else or is my eyesight making a mistake, has it got it wrong or is it suffering from strain?, with one as young as that, has he had the nerve to do something like that with her?, and really in my own home? I've got the essentials right in front of me and cannot deny it, but neither can I talk about it. I think, the man doesn't know how far he can go with the woman. Well, not that far anyway! But he gets going nevertheless. He would, however, prefer to take a fast car. Her role will be as front-seat passenger.
The woman thinks: It simply can't be true that right now, at this very moment, he's blowing his trumpet into such a young girl, she's no more than a child, it can't be-this instrument belongs to me alone, only to me. Although I hardly know how to hold it. But with me it's certainly in good hands, in better hands, because I've already heard many famous orchestras or eaten them out of the tin and waved the baton along in person, leaning back comfortably in my easy chair, because I didn't forgo the planned dream course of studies and nevertheless completed the piano course as well and took a special exam at the end, I'd like to see another woman do that. Others again claim to have seen me pretend to play a piano concerto by Beethoven, but Alfred Brendel was lying on the silvery gleaming windshield wiper and was moving diligently and fluently in time. People lie. It cannot be that this man is already rejecting me before he's even had time to depend on me. Perhaps he doesn't know what he's got in me and that these and similar wounds he beats into me can mark someone for life. They don't draw a nice picture of me. I would like to have a nicer one. I imagine that I have kept persistent suitors at a distance, but not him, the one and only! For whom I have waited fifty years. But not him. I would never do that to him. Before he even knew how nice everything could be for both of us, he would already have turned me down? No, it can't be. Perhaps instead I'll be allowed to crawl around on the floor in front of him tomorrow. So that he finally understands that he could also enter my ever open door, from above and from the front and from both sides, they're my good sides because I've only just fallen in love with him, hark, what enters from outside? Now of all times. No one, I hope. No one must see me like this, naked, bleeding and my clothes all mucky. I hope it's not a colleague of his, from the same station, who's come without being called. Screams outside? That's right, it's me who's screaming, what, it's supposed to be me? That doesn't sound good. It sounds like someone who wanted to cut him short and instead, presumably in a rage, but why?, was thrown out onto the stairs, where it's cold. The body that goes along with it will surely keep in this cold. It was boiled down long ago and imprisoned in a special little glass house, a dear little Snow White in a glass coffin, where unfortunately everyone can see it. That and more than that, more than a coffin, that last little house also provides clothing for women. We don't need a man for that at all.
This woman here is, I think, greedy for property, for whom property, however, was always refused, so silly, and who is now on her feet again, making for the hall window, perhaps she can get into the apartment again that way. But first she would have to go outside for a moment, where everyone would stare at her. Let him come. She's not going to come now specially. He'll see. He should take her and not the other, who hasn't even finished her training as an apprentice clerical worker. The woman has that on good authority. In place of all my property, he's not going to let himself be palmed off with something else, cheaper, thinks the woman, and certainly not someone who's hardly more than a child. He'll prefer a real woman. That's her offer, she can let it stand, we could also make a smaller one, which would not stand so well. We could live in an attic room and be beside ourselves with happiness, although there wouldn't be much space: happiness because the room was holding us so tight that we couldn't fall down, I'm so in love, what happiness, that there's you and me at the same time. There's no room here at all. I've got more than one room, I've got a whole house, where we can make ourselves at home. It's bound to go wrong. Someone who is forced to give is poorer than someone who gives of their own free will. Hopefully this night will soon come to an end and I can stop this pointless work of thumping and kicking the door. His hard knees together with the track-suit bottoms-the pattern doesn't match, but the knees match him very well, once the trousers are gone. And then, and then, pointing at my body, no, not showing the door, I've done that all too often, although we haven't known each other long at all, but shyly (which is not highly regarded, everyone should immediately point to what he has, and what his speciality is, and what he has to offer. I imagine it, as demonstrated by Jesus, pointing to his bleeding heart, often with the smart accessory of a crown of thorns plus two, three drops of blood as an additional hint: Things are already going downhill!) pointing to where this stupid door is placed anyway, that is, in my house!, and where it is out of place to simply come breezing in with another woman, particularly one who's so much younger. So, now all limbs are present and correct, a body as hiding place is present, too, no longer brand new, but a bit all right. In the dark there's no problem. Doesn't he see that. I'm so in love. Likewise there's a suggestion in the eyes, but there's no clear or distinct image in the hall mirror. Why does man always only appreciate in women, how the bodies open their mouths wide and scream scream scream. I still have to cure him of that. It'll turn out all right in the end. He can't stand it. He puts his hands over his ears. But he can't strike a single right note, even one, for instance while he's eating. He's not musical. Actually he's bad-mannered and coarse. No one brought him up properly. Evidently he can't hear these screams either. Or pretends that he can't. He only sees screams if people let them drop out of their mouths in front of him, but they don't bother him, their screams. Usually people stand right in front of him and around him, but never behind him, because the country policeman always wants to keep an eye on them. Some are desperate, point at their burnt relatives in small cars and weep a bucketful. The roads are nothing but a bloodbath, a bloody brood, as if people had been born only to be ripped apart on the roads again. In the past admission was charged for that and there were no roads at all. He's tough. Everything that comes from this woman: He will ignore it, simply because he doesn't see her, if he doesn't want to see her. He's got to change a bit there, she thinks. It'll turn out all right in the end. He has seen too much, and if he hadn't seen too much-this woman would in any case have been too much for him. All her doors are wide open all the time, doesn't she notice there's a draft, she really should shut them. Does the country policeman feel something like fear creeping up on him? The man has known for a long time, what in her case is behind them, he doesn't have to break in, although he hasn't known the woman long at all. In fact he knows in his sleep the location of all the household furnishings, which are supposed to serve human beings for their convenience and which instead wind around their limbs like nooses until they've been paid off. I think they will be kept open forever, these doors, in their frame of a scratchy hair shirt that barely covers them, so that they are not right away recognized as doors on opening, the first time the bell is rung. It is as if they had never been shut, doors, yes, there's a lot I could say about that; a man is, if I have to swear on oath, a man first of all (that's not the only thing here, which I haven't said myself. Real live people once said things like that and still say them, if they're allowed to, word of honor), not one of the many there have been in his life so far, has ever expressed the wish to regard this man as a friendly, family being. Here, in this place, no one has had to leave grammar school early, because no one went there. Here, in this place no one has gone without studying to be satisfied in some other way, for which no money and no position is needed. The positions can all be invented, or here, in the magazine, there are some, too, it's always the same ones, only the people have to change. With illustrations and photographs. In any case, here every woman has tried after a while to get rid of the man again as soon as possible, just as one is always relieved, when the relatives go at last and have let one off this time even though they urgently needed a new sweater. One knows them all too well. They are like oneself, only different.
So here, on the cold stairs, a former foreign correspondence clerk and business translator and part-time pianist from the formerly big bad wild city, holds her head in her hands and blubbers. She knows, in how many languages one can plead and in what tones, she knows many of them, but she should also know that tones are no use if there's someone who doesn't want to hear and feel or has no receiver for them, not even in a dental filling with detector capabilities. This woman simply cannot be understood. That's the way it is. It's all no use. The question, which we have meanwhile almost forgotten, although it's often been asked, goes: Why is the door to the apartment suddenly shut, locked from inside, just where the key is in the lock? And why doesn't the spare key open it up? Because you can't get it in? No. Because it's outside the house under the door mat, where we can't get at it. Anyway, it wouldn't open up at all if a colleague is sticking in the lock on the other side. Can't it be put more simply? Well, I can't do it. And why is the woman still waiting and has now forced her body to wait with her? For whom is she doing it? Let us free the body from its constraints and let us be quite frank ourselves: Of course I understand, that the beloved man can't go home to where his wife is with the girl, after all I've read enough novels about that and similar unpleasant matters. Please, come and visit me and bring me something nice, that's what I said to him, almost cheeky, wasn't I?, after he had examined my documents on the country road, as if he had personally picked up copies of the laws and brought them with him, in order to throw the book at people. It was all as if carved in stone. He had thought for a long time beneath his crash helmet. As far as I was concerned he could right away have taken a cane in one hand and my ass in the other, because I really had behaved very badly on the road, it's true (disregarded right of way of the country road, but really nothing came along, from any direction, and the one who did come I didn't even glance at). The country policeman hesitated, stared at me as if his eyes were halters, oh yes, that's how a relationship begins, even if only to one's own body, but which one didn't have beforehand either. And then he gripped my arm, he gripped me by the arm. In an intense conversation with me he absent-mindedly held my upper arm with one hand. But then I was already waiting for the other hand, so please, when is it finally going to come? So I said, what can you bring me, when you come to visit me, that is above all, you! Yes, always remain yourself. I think you're good the way you are. You are the man of my dreams. Tall, strong, blond, blue-eyed and you look like a Viking, only a little smaller. You have a powerful erotic effect on me. In addition you are the tower of strength I have always longed for, exactly, that's what it says here and as far as I'm concerned it can stay. How lucky that I picked you up on the road first of all, then accepted my punishment, and, already with a firm date with you, on the spot, where I stood with lowered eyes, which were right below my modern short haircut in Caucasian blonde, so already with a date arranged, met you again in an outdoor restaurant in the county town, quite by chance as far as the other customers were concerned and so also found you at last, for my part forever. So, I catch my breath a little, now I want to decide my price per cubic meter. It's to be expected that I set the tone, after all I've seen almost the whole world and understood most of it, too. But I didn't expect that you would pay no attention at all to my tones. You brought a measuring tape with you, what's that for? It's high time to mark out the remaining space, it's the space that I need before your ass can touch my oak trunk (the bed is made of that precisely without any use of iron the healthiest thing possible and brand new and no nails!) for the first time. Why don't you follow me? Further occasions are to follow, until I start feeling better. One last spark of reason has stayed with me, now it arouses my anger, a smoldering fire develops, which eats away my views and opinions at breakneck speed. I know, I know, I should keep up with all the fresh cut flower girls, this year's harvest, hardly out of their leading strings, but I can't do it. You're already a grandfather. Valentine's Day is already definitely past for this year, on which you didn't bring me any flowers. Perhaps there's nothing like experience? Well, perhaps like mine. When it comes to women any amount of experience can in five minutes effortlessly be canceled out by youth. Yet you're not so young yourself anymore. On the other hand: If I want something, a whole peace studies research institute could not get me out of a war with myself, which I would start immediately. I can fight, bloody hell, are you talking to me, then you'll soon see. I shouldn't love him, this man, but I do. So time passes. It's the bloody truth. No letter, no postcard, no phone call, no divorce, no decision at all, no engagement, there's nothing without him, only the naked, grinning nothingness of death, and that comes ever closer instead of keeping its distance. But I still have a lot of time, perhaps the best of times. Statistically speaking at my age the safe distance from death is 38 years or perhaps a little less. I beg to be allowed to write to him, but his wife has never seen a letter which someone might have written to him except the bank. His wife, suspicious that some repayment date had been missed again, would immediately tear open the letter and disembowel it. And if I press him, then he just goes, he really did go once before, that is, he knows how to play the game. Disillusionment will come to me and stay. I want to come myself a few times before that and go again, in order to make things cozy once again where I am. Now more than ever. So who am I?
I mean well by myself, if I love him, but, for me at least, there's a limit to everything. He simply stays away after I have asked him to be allowed to be his wife one day. My panic leads to ever greater states of exhaustion. After three weeks he comes again, at a loss I try to teach him English or French(!), which he may find useful in future, when foreign women drivers would like to ask him something. But he just wants to have a pleasant rest without thinking, can only be induced to make the most essential movement, down to his fly, which he can do in his sleep, like a young dog, except a dog doesn't need one. I think it is this combination of sleepiness and alertness that attracts me so much to him, as if an innocent, unselfconscious writer were repeatedly to force himself to write me dirty letters. Apart from the physical he does absolutely nothing here, the man, no repairs, although in my house there is a constant lack of physical energies, to carry such things out. But then he does listen to me, when it's almost too late, when I tell him, as if I were the only girl in the world, and then he always grips my arm or my shoulder or my hips and looks at me, and I allow myself to be carried away again. Until the tide goes out again, because I never ask questions nor ever question anything else and have already lent him money again. I don't ask him anything either. Ask a stupid question and the postmaster of love replies: host not known. I run hot and cold by turns, if he reaches out to me in a particular way, which I could describe if it were not indescribably beautiful. The next day my description would already be askew as worn-down heels, because then he would do something quite different that I hadn't expected, and which would be much more beautiful. He is sometimes tender and attentive, for which I've been waiting for weeks, but then I'm over-nervous and have to take a sedative. But when he grabs my arm, he could immediately apply to make someone my guardian, it doesn't matter who, I would let him right away. Another time, if he feels like it, my hero drags me by the hair, bleached by coloring and anyway no longer of the strongest, through the apartment, although it should be the turn of my poor arm to be gently held. That's how we always begin. As we go on. One day this man completely tears the gusset of my trousers, although I'm feeling in need of some tenderness and sweetness, and plays around quite roughly with me down there. I fit in entirely with what he wants, but in doing so I at least want my dignity as a human being to be respected. If he doesn't grab me I immediately long for violations. I prefer it the other way, but I don't dare say so, otherwise he'll want a side-dish as well. It all takes place while one, as I do, trusts in love, as all people must. One should rub oneself well with lotion beforehand, otherwise one will burn in this sun. Sometimes he's like a naughty child, he burrows around in my female organism, in which all my organs, I hope, will keep their place into old age, but one can never know in advance. Hanging loose, gaping quietly and bobbing against each other, please, may I present my organs to you, they are entitled to everything, even to take your driver's licence or to fill up an organ donor form, so when he's there, I can't even say it-with him they stand up right away, the organs, without even knowing what's wanted of them, they at any rate are ready. Maybe I'm not yet, who's asking me. Like every child in school used to do when called out, when a teacher still had authority, there they stand. Like the number one. They're already gaping and they've hardly been touched by him, only by him, the lips of my vulva, although I already wanted to slam them shut behind me, but before the world, these little trap-doors with their very own feelings. They only feel something with this man. I don't understand them. I don't understand why. I don't understand myself either. Nevertheless: At least my body is talking to me again, a good thing, that it's not too late yet, a good thing that you have to remain silent while reading. Please tell that to your radio and the other pieces of equipment as well, phew, they're already quite exhausted, it would be a good idea for them, too! How precipitate of the man to go now, when he's only just come, he hasn't even looked at me properly yet. Apart from my hole he hasn't seen much of me yet, the eternal cave tourist. And if he had thought a bit longer, he would perhaps have had something quite different to say to me than what he actually did say. Drain in the bathroom, hot water tap in the kitchen, there's something wrong with the boiler, too, there's something wrong with all of them, there's something wrong with me as well, which would be worth investigating or leaving alone. I have my longing. I'm sure he could repair everything, DIY is his hobby. He doesn't do it. First of all I'm supposed to sign the whole house over to him, then we'll see. That's asking a bit much, don't you think, but I don't have any children and won't have any now. I'm alone.
So, now I wrap it in a riddle: Why am I nevertheless so content, even happy, if he's just nearby and silently sticks just one single finger to still me, to please himself, but of course to please me a little, too, am I wrong?, in my cunt, like a pacifier in a baby's mouth, only that shouldn't be shaken about so much, otherwise the baby's head will fall off. But that he should, hardly has he halfway finished doing that and I want more, much more, am even thinking of getting into a proper rage again, but that he should in all my beauty, onto which only a couple of days ago he vaguely squirted, without even looking what and whom he was hitting, that today he simply, earlier he was still quite tender, that the very next moment he would throw me out the door and down the stairs, that I've really never experienced. The man's got some nerve. I can hardly believe it, and I've never even heard of a similar case. I was not prepared for that. My expression has completely gone off the rails, and I am utterly shocked. All the rails rose up to embrace him, and then this. Not even a serious accident. Only a derailment. Now he's gone. No, I hope he's still there, the brute, the wonderful man, and lets me watch him through the door with a minor, that is, he doesn't even let me do that, although it would hurt me very much. Does he want to make me even more jealous? I hope he'll come again tomorrow, at least, my heart that's yours, em, his heart that's mine, and let me wash his shirt after he's, for a change, discharged himself onto it (he just doesn't leave his juice inside me, he seems to fundamentally, stubbornly avoid that. There my driver's licence was evidently enough for him to see, that I would like to do the driving I still have to cure myself of that. Says the loving woman who has met someone marvelous. Yet I would so like to leave the driving to him. But the car, my car, I would like to drive that) and had to put on a clean shirt, the uniform shirt. Although he's still there now, I'm already hoping that tomorrow we'll be all alone together again. He'll discuss everything with me in peace and quiet. Even an animal has more rights, am I not right? But an animal doesn't have any panties to take off, and that's half the fun. What is left of me for me, since no one will relieve me of myself? He has to go on duty. The policemen have taken care to organize who relieves whom a long time in advance. Then it's the turn of the next shift, who immediately keep the motorized public company and have to put up with a great deal of unpleasantness. But they never take pity on the vanquished.
Well well. Suddenly my country policeman is standing in the door, I missed that somehow. Because he opened it, the door, just like that. Done. Now you two girls can get dressed again. That's how fast it happens. The country policeman says something like that or thinks it, because he doesn't even have to say it. I'll take a look beside you both, he says, in case there's something lying there, and I'll ignore you because I never find anything there. Does someone still want to suck up my tongue, right down to the back of the throat, just the way you like it, but it really hurts me? My tongue would really belong down your throat, it would fit you better than me, my poor, spoiled tongue. That's what you think, both of you, don't you? I would be glad if someone at last took my organs away from me, because I'm sick and tired of them. But you want to hand yours over to me, and then I'll have a double set. Then I'll be saddled with them. The country policeman thinks: I'm not unburdened. I'm depressed. Have the funny feeling that rational control over myself could fail at any moment, and then something happens, which afterwards I won't be able to remember anymore. Is it not also an act of cannibalism, by you two against me, this continual lady-orgasm donation, which I'm supposed to present you with, and you simply lie back and wait for it? Why do you so much love to belong to a master, and why are you surprised at the risk, which no insurance company has informed you about, of then burning up like a matchstick? (Has anyone who called him ever heard him talk like that? This man says nothing most of the time, some believe he can't speak at all, this suitor, who likes to eat roast pork. But already the pullover that his Penelope has knitted him, doesn't suit him. Fate, don't you have an extra thread, and I don't like the color either, but the woman thinks: Now he knows that I've been thinking of him!) There is hardly a coarser, more brutal man, unless he gets drunk, as ever quietly and steadily. Then he becomes almost polite. Then he almost appears refined, but even then he plays according to his own time, which he beats, always into a stranger's flesh, with an industriously rhythmical hand. Yet sometimes, rarely, speech just pours out of him, as with many noticeably taciturn men: an almost feminine quality of Self Dissolution, as if there were a chance of a scene to be played between his whispered, casual obscenities, if he doesn't release them quickly enough from their body prison, so that they can become repeat offenders and earn a little more punishment on the side.
So he opens the door. He opens his mouth, and between his lips and mine there is violence once again, observes the woman at the same moment as its happening, but it's too late: He then sets me down, cursorily wipes himself off himself, and the beads of sweat are trickling from the corners of his mouth and his temples, look, there are more drops on his forehead and the sides of his nose. He doesn't really need the fear he sometimes feels, but it finds him nevertheless, again and again, very easily. It was only me he once told, already very drunk, that he was afraid of being eaten alive by women. He doesn't like kissing, and I've drawn my conclusions from that: I must protect him. If necessary, from himself. It's a pity I actually have to tell him that. He doesn't need to be afraid to get excited, at least when he's with me, I told him, with me he doesn't need to be afraid at all. Now that I know him, I'm not afraid either. He means something different. Women should be afraid of him. It's wonderful, how wrong he is. How many people are there, who don't want anything of themselves to remain? Not many, I think. Most want something to remain behind, even if only the lightheartedness with which they sat down behind the wheel of their car or their achievements in art, hard work, and industry. I don't want to say anything about shame, others will speak all the louder about it. Shame would like to remain, too, please, it wants to write about itself, it wants to state something. But that's rather unusual, after all. Its owner, however, already wants to rise from the tavern table, the food's finished now. He wants to go and look for other private parts apart from mine. Aha. I'm translating the country policeman's words into civilian language: One simply has to handle you and lick you clean uninterruptedly, he says. You women can't leave a man in peace. You do everything for it, you turn yourselves into my instrument for it. Or you turn yourselves into another instrument if I claim to like and play that better: into humming violin notes. I've still got to teach you the flute notes. What, you stick big banknotes, which you'll later miss, into the thongs of the stourists, whom you went to see with your girlfriends, for a change just for women, snigger yell! So you've forgotten yourselves twice already? What's that stripper group called? The somethings. No, not the Kennedys. And the shrieking, always the dreadful shrieking, when more of you are together, and which I nevertheless consider to be an expression of the remotest loneliness. Where else could you make so much noise than in nothingness, or no, the opposite rather. Women. Your weakness is: You can't be, like me, alone with yourselves. I can't imagine another reason why you want someone like me, of all people. The next moment you're already raising the sort of cry I hate, and then you object when we men want to go away from you. Because you think we're not coming back; shrieking yet again, shrieking, however, which this time, fortunately for me, is coming out of the other end of your body and so cannot tear apart the small chambers of my ears. It all depends, however, on which end of yours I'm bending over.
The country policeman knows the word "instrument" from the local brass band, which practices in the fire station. That's why I'm completely justified in using it here, otherwise things wouldn't have worked out so well, otherwise I would have had to make do with something like wood and chopping or with branch and sawing off what you're sitting on. Or I would have had to write down an obscenity, which I would not have liked to do. Baron Prinzhorn of the FPO, I'm telling you: The Personal columns are constantly playing with these words, which mean something different from what they say, why don't they just come out and say it? Why don't you just say what you want, Mr. Prinzhorn? Take possession of the whole country and fuck it?, well, the recipient of these words is a kind of child, fortunately a mature one, who doesn't know how big are the building blocks he has kicked out from the toy quarry, which he got as a present for his birthday. Even someone wrapped up in himself can say it to the deceased or the disappeared, and once again no one will listen to anyone else. I could carry on for days, keeping quiet among these people, thinks the woman, about as long as the period of his faulty development originally lasted, which probably already built up in his childhood, as a teach yourself psychology book I bought for 340 schillings in the bookshop and already consulted in the metro tells me, OK, I'm making an estimate: It'll last perhaps until he's seventy, after that the hormones slowly go somewhere else, or run out or don't run at all anymore. He knows no mercy, not with anyone, this man. He is a disciple of himself so to speak, who only rarely has grounds to break out in justified rejoicing with such exclamations as: I am the undisputed master over your sensitive organs, which at this point I would describe as quite acceptable but nothing special. That goes for both of you, Gerti and Gabi, and I've got lots of opportunities to make comparisons and many other opportunities, too, more than I can make use of. It's all no use, it always ends in the grave. As with my mama. It ends up as an object, more or less as I feel my own body, which can break out under me at any time if I don't open my flies fast enough. That's why it works so well. Because I just manage to control it, it's a worthy opponent, my body, even for myself it is unpredictable. I prefer to look for a solid foundation for it, before anything dreadful happens and my statue topples over, which I have blasted away from myself. So that I cannot be sucked in by the emptiness around me. I always have to run away, but property could just hold me. That's the best thing to stop me falling into this pit full of snakes, which are baled out in buckets, and they're all hanging out over the sides. That is the pitfall, of which I dream so often. No idea who dug it for me. Since I dream about it-was it me perhaps? Perhaps the dead snakes embody a superabundance of property, which has been confiscated. But there's a hole in the bucket, all the muck is running out at the bottom, and only the snakes are left and show me paradise, but I'm supposed to plant the fruit trees that go with it myself, if you please. Or I find a person who already has some: One can never have enough property because we're always striving after what's most difficult, that's man's fate, and best of all we would like to leave the rest of them to their fate, to take from them what they've got as well. So, women, I can play on you like no one else. I lay down everything-when, where and how often. I'm the best you've ever had, and there'll never be another either. I'm very conscious of my qualities, I always say: I am the sorcerer not the apprentice.
Now the country policeman has to go back to Gabi again, who is sometimes bothered by the lack of desires of a child who already has everything. But today it has to be me, thinks the man. What am I to her? Perhaps the rascal with the dimples in his flesh, which she wants to bite into all the time. And she's allowed to move around all by herself under me. I would even like to watch her doing it. So. Now we're over and done with it again. Gabi has to go, her mother's always waiting in the evening with the meal. For sure. That's OK. She's already leaving, Gerti. Look, she's already going out the door and grudges you every glance, but then in a little while, you can have my little guy again, the carefree one, he's already puckering his lips and whistling something for you, although he's really tired, by God. Don't worry, he'll be waiting for you again, but not now, perhaps not even today. Please be patient. I'm not so young anymore. OK, then today. Later. I promise. Possibly much later. Worries and annoyance are things the fellow avoids, whom I have allowed to grow, as you seem to believe, especially for you, so he avoids worries and annoyance like a whole political party, he confided that in me earlier, before getting a good spit at Gabi, the bad boy. Oh yes. So for that you congratulate Gabi. For going. Don't be so mean. And you don't congratulate me? When I've been working most of the time! Is that not worth anything? Have you found your voice again? And that's what you needed it for, for you to scream at me like that? Just you wait! I'm coming right back and then I'm going to give you a good knocking with the carpet beater. I put it next to mine earlier, your voice, you voluntarily turned it over to me, I didn't need mine either. Exactly. I had it, your voice, you gave it to me, there was no need for you to scream for it so much outside. What, I was moaning, too? Why should I have been moaning? I can well believe you, when you say that this is your house, I've now heard it at least five hundred and seventy times. I do know it. The house wouldn't have anything to say if it could speak. It would appeal more to me. And it wouldn't make so much noise if it did.
Well, if you really still want it now, then you want it, there's nothing to be done. Although I explicitly said later, but you don't listen, do you, you don't want to listen, you want to feel: Before I admit that I'm beaten, I'll give you another good scrubbing. The only thing we haven't had a go at yet is your cellar. Your cellar vault, which you proclaimed was your greatest treasure. Exercise never does any harm, that's why I went for a drive after all. I'm going to teach you some patience, because soon I'm going to let you wait again for hours, for days. Just because I happened to meet Gabi on the way, perhaps she was even waiting for me, I can't help that. So. Suddenly she was standing beside my car as if she'd fallen from the sky, once again, I didn't hear her coming, she was standing there, as she does nearly every morning, when she makes a show of going to the bus stop and then disappears with me, and she absolutely wanted me to give her a lift. And I was there. I can't help that. It was the wrong time. It wasn't her turn. What can I do. Oh yes, I know what you like best. Take a look at what I've got between my fingers, it's all wet, apart from some pain, about which I can only be surprised that it's there because I can hardly feel anything. I'm always astonished: What you've got down there, as with a young girl, is still surrounded by a very thick bush. The bush is very cute and exciting, even if not to me, but it has one advantage. That's where I would most like to hide, if I could. I imagine hidden behind it is something intricate, something bigger, tremendous, a building site, a not properly cemented hole, which I'm afraid of falling into. I'm always glad when I come out again, after I've let the hole brush against my lips. If it wasn't for the house, which closes over me like two legs every time, and I'm safe. In the end it wasn't worth getting undressed. I look at you: You were already undressed before. Your risk. Why are you always tearing off your clothes as soon as you see me? And something else, are you trying to belittle me with your pet name? It would be so much simpler if you just kept your clothes on. Nothing to be done. You'll have to keep your paws apart in front of your sex if you want me to drop in for a visit. Perhaps I'll get back to you later. I'm not looking you in the face now, I'm looking a bit further down. I'm telling you half the truth now: It's your house, for which I'm paying this full price, but I wouldn't go any higher. Well, maybe a bit higher. Pair skating with me doesn't work, even with someone who was more frivolous than you. It doesn't work. I'm too fast for you, every day I have to cope in the traffic, which is itself fast. It would also happen without me. I am too often somewhere else. I want to get away from myself before I'm even properly with myself. How I would also like to be away from you, but I don't dare stay away altogether. Your house can't run after me. Only you can do that. Not until I'm dead will my organs not be put to use in you women. Then you'll finally be quiet. Then I'll be quiet too. It frightens me that right away your hands have to start fumbling over me, just when I would like to live cosily inside me and enjoy myself. You are at once rash and idle. Looking alone is no longer enough for you, since you've discovered your bodies. Now you want to confiscate other bodies as well. No idea who put that in your heads. You only are because I am. Aha. As if you were women doctors, doctoring around on me, donating fluids to me, but which always undermine me, and instead draw a kind of basic foodstuff from me, which you use for something or other, which you brew up against me in your pots and pans. I dissolve in your hands as you desire, but no, not really desire, you want to have me quickly to hand again the next time, but, imagine, that's exactly what I want. That's what I want myself! I want to be away. You only want to be carried away. But I really want to be away! I have a certain attachment to this unpleasant situation I always end up in: to be pinched, patted and finally torn in little pieces by your hands and then swept up. As a result, curiously, my appetite grows to its full size and promptly returns to you. As if I immediately wanted to be eradicated. Disappearance, beautiful compulsion to disappear! You're always just screaming: here, here again and again! Present! As a woman! Present purely as woman! This place is occupied! By me! Yours by your sisters! Mine by me! Take a look at your stomach, Gerti, you're not going to get rid of it anymore by running, although running together would be not bad, we could be together, but wouldn't have to be. We would keep a minimum distance from one another. Your figure has problems with its figure. Look at yourself and your hips, they shouldn't be there, they should be closer to you, they could easily come two inches closer together. So Gerti, do you want nothing at all, or do you at least want the finger, which really should be more than enough? You can say it out loud. Tell me loud and clear if that's what you want! Quiet. Now I'm talking. And I'm talking as a woman. I would like to say something, too, for once, given that I've got to write the whole time, because saying the unsayable is part of it, part of all the opening eyes wide and licking lips and throwing back hair, with which we women want to tell men something, always the same thing, and they already know it. Because they're too tired to guess what we want and it would be too expensive for them to pay someone else to find out. We women always want the same thing. And then we want it once again.
There is a kind of woman who, evidently out of spite, can take quite a lot of punishment and is even less merciful in handing it out. One cannot turn one's back on her, otherwise she hardens herself and knocks one down along with herself. And if that doesn't work, she summons up her arguments to help her. But this woman is and remains soft and yielding. She melts away. Or is she hard in order to offend someone? Her water is populated by lower organisms, and she tolerates even those, the little trichomonads, which she has also already got from the country policeman. Otherwise presents from him come only very rarely. Her doctor has prescribed something for them, but you have to treat your partner at the same time. He refuses.
He doesn't want any prescription, it's his job to prescribe the rules. He has no symptoms. Mr. Janisch, you have to take something like this seriously. Otherwise your whole gang of women would always catch the same thing from you and you would catch it again from them, if you didn't have it already, haha. The country policeman doesn't feel anything. He must be sort of primitive or something? Does he feel anything at all? Does he have to be scattered around with his motor cycle first? Does his lower jaw have to be torn off? The woman points out that it could also cause him harm later on, if he's already infected now and will inevitably pass it back to her, no sooner has she been cured by the drugs, but he hasn't. Rubbish, there's nothing that harms me. I'm an animal. Take the soft bits out of women, and then one has to take the rest away from them as well. This woman here doesn't just have her gate wide open, she's even put up a sign where there's really none needed, especially if she looks at one as if she had the eternal bliss, which God alone promises, and he had to let himself be nailed good and proper for it; so the woman has learned this bliss in this man when he had hardly come in off the street. Because she's fallen for someone even before the door slammed shut. The country policeman is sometimes so angry he could kill this woman. There she takes her proud claim on him out for walkies through the whole village. At the time when he had just met her, it had gone like this: She stood in front of him, as if fallen from the sky, in the road, embarrassed, sweating a little because she was in such a rush, even though the car had done all the work, by the driver's door of her car, ready, from now on, to make a happy face at the sight of him, the country policeman, not to take her eyes off him even under the greatest strain, and at the same time draw out his cock, its outlines ever more evident down there, before her inner eye, so that it should jump into her hand with the one sentence, I love you. Meanwhile all this time it was only with a considerable effort that the country policeman could stop himself hitting her in the face. The text with which he had wooed her stood written in raised letters on the country policeman's trousers (there was no price tag. Price list on request from the shop). Now he's supposed to give it to her again every day, preferably several times. With the organ that this dear red, somewhat sweaty face has, and which she likes so much that she doesn't want to let go of it anymore. For the man she has ripened into a whole co-operative house building society, this woman, who's got housing available for life. But ownership would be better. She's still deaf in that ear, but she's already turning her head in his direction. There would then follow conversion of the property, and for that everything else will be laid down right away without asking, do you want furniture, please, go ahead. Do you want me to be laid down as well, with pleasure. That's the best opportunity to lie back there's ever been. You'll only get this house if you take the carpet as a present, and all the fittings as well. The other way around you lose everything, and things will turn very quiet around you, because you'll have to spend the night in the open. Only when the other wild beasts come will you hear anything, but it will be too late. Quite without foundation the man fears something like that, every day, and the bank reminds him of it as well, Dies Irae. The simplicity of his behavior and its single-mindedness is probably indebted to his bank debts. Why does she have to run into one everywhere, this woman, when she gets hot. Why does one immediately have to show up for her, for this demanding lady, who then ends up taking what she can get, no matter what, however often she denies it and says she wants more. Much more can be expected from her. But once she's been turned on, it's impossible to turn her off in time, she's already boiling over with love and desire for this wonderful man, a nice gesture, don't you think?
Then I can just stay at home and let mommy cook me a goulash, what's all the fuss about. At home I can have whatever I want made, but you women, who want to be implacable and not forgive anything, one has to read your desires in your eyes, before one doesn't fulfil them and nails you once again, until one's buried under the planks of one's coffin. In a very similar situation, as already mentioned, Jesus was exhibited on the cross in Gallery Golgotha, do you know where that is? Yet I've known you women inside out for a long time, almost like God. Always the same thing. I'd rather masturbate, and I've been doing it since Wednesday. Since that day I've discovered a completely new method for it in my daily hours of sleeplessness. I confess, sometimes I can't shove my organ into you at any price, I can't do it. I'm afraid of this operation every time, I admit it, but sometimes the fear gets too big. Thanks to my job I have access to terrible pictures of crushed, or, alternatively burnt people, who originally were also highly thought of by someone, I assume, but have now involuntarily had to give up their shape. I think I'm not the only one who secretly likes such pictures, and every morning I can't help taking in their dear, delicate scent. Perhaps something will turn up. That's a good day for me then. I would like to tenderly stroke the tattered skin, the mashed bodies. I'm telling you, at the end my mother was so ill (said the country policeman to the woman, who was framed by her car door, a few weeks earlier, to a woman, who already after three minutes ardently wished to be married to him. One can take language courses, however she wouldn't put this man behind her for a long time yet, she knows. He's only a village policeman after all, he'll naturally feel flattered by her interest, and so on, everything designated, labeled, and put aside), my mama was so ill, you've never seen anything like it. A couple of weeks later the woman is already equating him with God and is herself sick with love, because he can't protect her from herself. She clings to herself, as a drowned person does with water. It's no use. He can make use of her as he wants. Everything you've ever read about organs is combined in these traffic accident victims, though unfortunately it's the wrong ones, that is, the organs would be right, but the places they have taken up are the wrong ones. Have they been flung onto the asphalt road surface just for me to give them the hard shoulder? I'm only asking because I like them so much. Bloody mush. People are muck. For that the man has become an idol to this woman, not man in general, but this one alone, whom she loves. It's a form of glorification, as in the church, of subjection in every area, which she certainly enjoys like a good old red wine, but which is becoming increasingly dangerous. Where do the glass splinters in the mouth and in the hand suddenly come from? Something like that only turns out well if a relationship has to stand up to the tides for at least twenty years, so that one can picture the human ocean, which God has in principle forbidden. His picture alone shall be lawful. He alone shall pass judgement. But one day, someone else will inevitably come along, and there are plenty of other women. If the relationship doesn't last, then the one who gives up totally is finished and ceases to exist. Or a new relationship comes along, which lasts until one gives up the ghost. Listen to your doctor or pharmacist or read the leaflet once again, but properly this time, before you order something unsuitable!
The country policeman, however, knows yet other bodies. He can imagine them at any time, if he wants. They readily pass his lips. He talks as if he had already forgiven himself for everything, but for what? Women don't know how dangerous he really is, and if they did know, they would only steer all the more impetuously towards his powerful, somewhat thickset body cliffs, throw themselves forward, until their little boat breaks against a resistance they haven't seen, because it was buried down below under the women's foam. They would want to introduce him to their women friends, this man, even to their mothers, even if the latter had moved to Majorca or Bali or if they didn't have any at all anymore. But the country policeman obstructs her and him undertaking anything with others, and in particular he obstructs it with this woman and with Gabi. With these two. They are his problem children. He's very secretive. You nevertheless always leave feeling satisfied, the country policeman consoles his female clients, after they, often also on Sunday afternoon, when he's supposedly at the alcoholics' practice meeting of the volunteer fire brigade, have come freshly washed and appetizingly tender, warm, with a floury dusting from their underwear, onto the table without a stitch, their hands in front of their breasts (how curious, that they always make this gesture, they only do it with the country policeman, involuntarily, as if he could catch sight of something. When after all he knows their innermost selves. At some point something does seem to have made them suspicious), and then climbed down from the kitchen table or the settee again. And I'm the one who always has to stand, no, I'm not the meal, says the country policeman Jesus to his ardent admirers Mary and Martha and to his penitents Mary Magdalene etc. and to his people in general, enclosed as he is in his little box, the halo flowing round him (no, his name is not suddenly: our Jorg, as one says in this country, only because he's so adored). I am always the one who eats, and here you're welcome to my body, take and eat, you too, no idea why you're so crazy for it. I don't see anything special about it. I say insolently to this woman, who can be glad that I've come at all and say something, even if it were only to utterly trustingly confide in her, she won't do it for less: Gabi, for example, have you ever taken a closer look at her? Sixteen, T-shirt and jeans and a jacket with a shawl collar and black ankle boots, she doesn't need more than that to look seductive. Why do you always daub so much red on your lips, Gerti? Do you think it's nice? I for one don't like it. These rags in which you drape yourself so that one doesn't look so closely at what's underneath, really, they don't bother me at all. But they don't do you any good either. They come off anyway, they're the first thing to come off with you lot, and fast too, because you know in what order you put them on. The only time you're faster is when you're shopping for new clothes and shoes. I'm absolutely sure that Gabi loves me, don't you think, Gerti? She's so juicy one would like to eat her right out of the wrapper. Meanwhile you're waiting out on the stairs, Gerti, I'm not saying that because I'm annoyed, it's just more convenient: It's best if you wait on the stairs down to the cellar. It will cool you off a bit. It'll do you good. I know, I know, the stairs belong to you. But no one will disturb you there, you like to be left undisturbed, don't you.
Love doesn't pull down barriers, as is often said, it builds them up, so that behind them people learn to wait and are not always pointlessly kicking the iron banisters. Of course you're my main course, Gerti, always, always, don't worry, it's with you and only with you, that table silver and table underwear are lying around and getting bored, so all alone. We don't like to invite guests. And your house encloses only the two of us, and also, if desired, your whole property with a friendly little gesture, come on in!, a house without a guardian and fortunately also without an inheritor. I herewith apply for the job, for which this house has invited applications. One can knock at the door, who's coming in? The bodies wander around in crowds, sometimes I'd like to open them up and for once have a good look at what's inside. But the Lord above always helps me at the last moment, and restrains me or maybe not, depending on whether he's at home or not (and whom on the occasion of my last moment I nevertheless would rather not want to have at my side, after I've had to see so many last moments on the roads. Well, in that state, half burnt up in a Honda Civic, I would not like to be seen by someone, even God himself!), and smashes, e.g., this VW Golf full slap-bang against this truck there, on the left in the picture. It would be interesting to look at the open flesh under a microscope, all the cute little bacteria, how they all swarm around there after only a very short time. At some point the flesh is so broken up that it won't go any smaller. One cuts it into slices and places these under the microscope. One travels far away with the bodies they have, a long way from anywhere, even from me, an accident with the car or the plane and have to eat people, if they have nothing else. That's my favorite fantasy. No, Gerti, you're no obstacle to that, no way. I won't have to cut my fingers on your underpants, your panties have always mysteriously disappeared beforehand. I would rather die than be without house and shelter. I want to be the guardian of everything, that's my duty, that's why I chose the job of policeman. So I rub my hands smooth, spit diligently into them, and again and again, as if it were the first time, force my way into you, best of all through the back door, then I don't have to cover your face with a towel. I prefer this entrance, which is really an exit, even if making headway there is more of an effort. I'm meanwhile thinking about something quite different. You can't have noticed that at all. Why then are you already screeching like that, when the skewer hasn't even got there yet, to roar his commands? It doesn't matter. At least I can't get lost inside you, because your house, my most urgent need, is always all around us, playing, presumably out of boredom, with its dear twisting stairway, which you've polished so nicely with beeswax, yes, the banister, too, standing around looking dumb is the hobby of this house. After all, apart from you, there's no one to whom it belongs. You already cleared away the marks of the previous owner years ago, in the belief no one else would be coming along this way. The house was once old, now it's new. A gem of a house. All around only people who don't know the area. Well. I'm there now and write out a notification of an offense and place myself right next to it. Behind my fly I calmly trace out, because it's what you want, my cock, do you see it? It's like a statue, but not of the Mother of God, is it? I would rather show it to someone else. You look lovely, I lie, despite your age. I think you are arrogant. Well, not now anymore. Don't shout in my ear like that, you don't have to put on an act for me, I'll ram you anyway, until I'm finished, no matter what and in what pitch you shout, and at the last moment I pull it out again, no idea why, the cuckoo pops out of the clock, too, and doesn't know the time, which it shouts out for hours, I mean every hour. You can also twist around under me, to look me in the face as best you can, although you're lying on your stomach, and you can go on shouting if you like, as much as you want. No, no one's coming whom you could have called. At most someone passing the house, who knows you, will be surprised. He hasn't been invited to this engagement party, and your friends and relatives, I hope there aren't any now, haven't been asked to come for that reason. I imagine I'm the only one to come and wolf myself down in a kind of mincer. I alone should exist, and I, too, would like to disappear, but always only in me, not in you, you can believe me. I now know you inside out. I wouldn't like to stay there any longer than necessary. You look out from your elevated financial situation. I would like to keep that situation by the way. I've already checked the basic conditions in the land register, whether it might be possible, yes, everything belongs to you, no mortgages, and so, for obvious reasons, I shall go on leafing through you for a bit. It's interesting. I only enjoy what I can see, because I don't feel anything. For example, your new wallpaper. I like it and it can stay, it's quiet and it keeps quiet at least. Luckily I don't have to feel it, just see it.
The man naturally never talks out loud about such things, he talks, as has been said, very little, but I believe that's what he thinks, quietly, that's the best way of thinking, only TV hasn't understood that yet and gives us sound as well, so that forever sweet toothed we can pile a glob of whipped cream and another and another on top of reality, before at last we get really stuck in. We're going to regret it at some point, when we're feeling sick. Well well, so he wants to get lost inside himself, Kurt Janisch, not in someone else, because something like that would make him afraid? But I don't see much of that yet. Perhaps in the end he even wants to digest himself? Perhaps that's how he likes to imagine it. Then he would have to part with the least of all, is perhaps what he thinks. Why then is he always falling on others for no fault of theirs? That's how cannibals always start. First they want to eat themselves, and then it's always others after all, whom they get a taste for. And when taste has got going, e.g., on an excursion into the TV or a video, then if need be they get to work on the bodies themselves and that as large as life. And already, often of necessity, shit and natural bubbly are flowing out of these bodies, sometimes out of fear that one day one might have to pay for it instead of being currency. I've got the exact figures here. The man says very long-windedly and nothing is said in reply: Think of me as the unhappiest and at the same time as the happiest person if you have to detain me here. And how else should I (yes, me!) express it, than with these few diffident sentences, out of which I might almost have built a conversation between us, but only almost. I would have made a little crib, if I hadn't run out of nails. The bank isn't giving me any credit at all anymore, quite the reverse, the bank wants me to pay back the old loans, and all of them at once as well. Later, like his thoughts, which can never sit still long enough for them to be properly thought through to the end, perhaps by chance, perhaps through planning, this man will avoid prison, because he won't be recognized for what he is. He's meanwhile, but sometimes by the quickest route, heading straight for personal bankruptcy. Or not. I alone know everything, because I have executed it specially in water-colors, is that not unbearably watered down?, so help me. Or is that exactly how it happened? So I'll help you, too, even though I don't know you at all, with my word, which like a go-cart I slide under your uncertainty, into which, after all, I've steered you, and already this man, through the music of his words, can make contact with me, with us, and you can complain all you like about boredom while you're reading this, but please not to me. With this problem I'm definitely not standing right behind you. Not behind myself either. I'm not standing anywhere. I, too, would prefer to be doing something else apart from always reading.
Other people are even blown up by a laugh. But here real dynamite is contained in the owner of an extensive muscle mass that is still to be climbed. Who can do it. Who wants to do it. No one knows much about him. I'm the only one at the moment who's saying he's explosive. And, for all his dangerousness, it's a plain rod that this extreme walker plants in the ground of womankind, yet this rod is a tough one. Basically the man wouldn't need the miracle stick, he always finds his way wherever he goes and a suitable pace as well. He can still walk well alone. The fuse can burn, there can be an explosion, rubble flying up, just ask the manmade lake here at the entrance to the village, which didn't make itself either, what that's like! One wants to be left in peace, is even perhaps a little ashamed, that waves several feet high foam up around one, the underwater embankments, the gently waving pubic hair of the lake drifts upwards like a furry shoe thrown down for a woolly cuddly toy-one has something between one's teeth, which one laboriously has to pull out again, one slurps the rich content of a mellow slime, which perhaps consists of nutrients, perhaps not, but basically one doesn't want to eat any of it, one would prefer to spit it out, let it nourish someone else! A sermon on the mount will be preached now. There are too many who want to eat, and they remove the basis of the man's existence, and one woman or another is supposed to give it back to him: If this man goes and doesn't come back, I'm going to die off inside like a whole region, which has absorbed too much nitrate and phosphate, thinks the woman. He can do anything with me, but he shouldn't do it. This flesh, for example, is so cold, brrr!, because for half an hour it had to lie naked on the steps down to the cellar and almost spend the winter there, you exaggerate. The sun can't yet properly penetrate the walls of the house, but no, it only seemed as long as winter to the woman, it wasn't longer than half an hour at the outside. Perhaps this Gabi girl also has a life's dream, it doesn't, however, consist in giving a country policeman valuable gifts, but in receiving these gifts herself. Will you buy me this, will you buy me that, that's what it's like with Gabi non-stop. What am I going to buy it with. It doesn't matter. The young ones at any rate are still supple, you've hardly pulled them out of the wrapper and they're already jumping into your mouth. Their bodies still deceive themselves all too often in their addressees, they don't read the sender's address and the small print, they don't have any experience and then the wailing and the weeping start up again. They're hardly more than children, who see us again and likewise want to go to the cafe in front of everyone! on Saturday afternoon! They all want to. How will mommy, how will both mommies, how will the cuddly toys who have stayed at home respond to that? If we only knew. Days go by. Weeks go by. His rare visits. Time passes differently for young people. The old save themselves all that, because it doesn't do any good. They learned how to save in harder times, and where do they find themselves now? Nowhere. In no-man's land. They don't know that the hardest times have just begun. This young woman must surely see that a different recipient is marked on this body, which at this moment falls on her, like a wolf, who has at last found the leg of lamb in the fridge. And the second body we see here is likewise mad about the man, and unfortunately about the same one, and unfortunately it had to stay outside, the body. Nothing to be done. At least the body out there wasn't tied to the banisters. All one can still look forward to is loneliness and isolation and illusions. And one can get self-doubt and submission for it, say our entertainment experts with their pouting lips, isn't that so, Mrs. famous sex adviser Senger, you too, in your little newspaper column, where you've been imprisoned for safety's sake, just in case you want to say it to us in person. No doubt someone is about to leave again, although he's only just come, and who will that be? Right, that'll be Kurt Janisch. How dreadful for these two women, each in her way matchless, that they have to experience something like that. And that's why unfortunately they can't set us an example. They don't give anything. They might perhaps have a lot to give us, but they don't do it, they prefer to give it to someone else. But they don't want to go either. The confusion that often prevails in very young people who look at one covetously, because basically they would much rather have the latest computer game or the latest pair of flared trousers bought for them, is that confusion at all, is it not single-mindedness? They are as ignorant as they are greedy, these young people, but mostly they look cheerful, in the hope that then they are more likely to get it. I can't say anything about that, I don't know what they do at which time. I don't know what they do at the same time. This confusion among young people, therefore, is often the result, as one can read here and everywhere else, of too many families having been destroyed, because the daddy, ever more frequently also the mommy, has cleared off, and that's what exactly the same newspaper tells me, in the shape of a quiet different figure, however, it's the authoritative figure of a priest called Paterno, whom I already listened to yesterday, but then his voice said something quite different and his hand wrote something quite different. But the most amusing and friendliest thing, just like the saddest and most frightful one, are often unfortunately the most terrible nonsense, even though this newspaper has already said it one way or another. At least the other way here has not done so. It gave away a guglhupf recipe, hmmm, that turned out well again! Oh, if only they had occurred to me sooner, these pieces of information for the information bulletin of the school of life, sooner than to Mrs. Gerti Senger and the priest August Paterno, before I was able to start a new page! Then I would have also been able to write them down here, these pieces of information. So they're still written down, but written down somewhere else.
There's someone who's earning nothing but blows from life and wants to be given a beating for it as well! In the case of this young woman, whom we've mentioned, the normal breakdown with the help of oxygen is sometimes simply not possible, as in the case of this lake, which we've also mentioned. Surely one should at least be able to breathe by oneself. Can you hear the wheezing? That funny sound? She's got asthma, Gabi, I diagnose with my razor-sharp mind, because I've heard that sound somewhere before, and once I had it myself, half my family has had it, and she can also get an attack at any time, Gabi, if she gets so upset. The man has just explained to her, from tomorrow he can't drive her to work in his car anymore, because his wife has found out. A lie, because his wife wouldn't care, she has her garden and her needlework and her soaps on TV A necessary lie, because the other woman, Gerti, would care, if she ever did find out. But she knows already, Mr. Janisch! But she shouldn't care, because she couldn't do anything about it. If she does talk to him about it, he takes offense and asserts: A man needs that because he's different from a woman. He has already paid her in advance for everything, with his penis, which in a man never lies. By which it often doesn't do its owner a good turn, I think to myself. Gerti should be satisfied and leave him in peace. She would pay for her own presents, many times over, I think to myself once again, for example, this little bouquet of early Alpine gentian in merciless blue, which the man, unwillingly, because what is all this beauty good for, one can't buy anything with it, has picked on the mountain. To Gerti the bouquet is priceless, but she will nevertheless try to cough up something for it. And now it seems as if Gabi wants to get him into trouble, I'm telling mommy, I'm not quite sixteen yet: she's picked the wrong guy! It's legal for the woman, for the man and for another man it won't be legal until later on, that's how nature planned it, and that's also the way the laws of mankind planned it, which have imitated nature and which are then surprised when people now yield and go astray, instead of the laws. So from tomorrow it's finished, Gabi, and you take the bus or the train again in the morning. I've had enough. If you ask me, that's too heavy-handed an explanation for a girl, who likes to be taken to the disco in the next village by her official boyfriend and then simply disappears. Pop! When she needs oxygen so badly. That's why she's out of the house. She says, the oxygen was outside, where she got it. What has her father, whom she no longer has, her mother is divorced, to do with it? Her father has nothing to do with it. He would just order her to stay at home period. So here's Gabi lying about on the floor and throwing her head from side to side and trying to breathe out. What to do, she's completely out of it, and one can't just tie her to the carpet, so that she calms down and just keeps breathing in. Gome on, Gerti, give me a hand! Well Kurt, that really is asking too much of me. So much youth, that's far too much of a good thing, and there's not enough air in here, I think, because none of it can be broken down again by bacteria or fungi quickly enough. Take her outside immediately take her home, can't you hear! That's how it is with nature, with foresight it cultivates its own pests, but they, too, are nature's children and help her diligently in her work.
How easily an accident can happen, and one is called as a policeman, but is on the spot as a human being, when one somehow tries to hold still such a head, whipping from side to side, so that it doesn't just fall off. It's banging from side to side like a bulging garden hose that's out of control, but there must be a leak somewhere, there's such a funny gurgling in her throat, above the collar bone. All this fuss from the hose. Just because no one is holding it firmly. Whoever doesn't want to hear has to feel. When they're listening, people are quiet so they don't miss anything. When it comes to love, they then let out what they've previously seen and taken in of strangers, who just for them have laid themselves down on a strip of celluloid or whatever, it's magnetic at any rate, in order to produce that eternity, which lust supposedly desires. Some people would rather have change. Eternity. Everyone thinks that about a photo, but it's rather easily inflammable. Which one is oneself, too! You wouldn't believe it. We'll immediately send it to an Austrian Lonely Hearts magazine, the photo, the tape, perhaps they'll take it, perhaps they know who we are. I hope not, because we are the FPO candidates for the town council of Ternitz or Gloggnitz, somewhere over there anyway. How they must suffer when they're alone, these people, and no one is recording them! Ecstatic glances, smiling mouths, agitated poses, which were supposed to have been exciting, yes. I would not like to be immodest and I would not like to be to blame for anything either. The older people, expanding a bit, they stay quiet at least and if at all embrace one in despair, because they can't get anything else, in a vise of two thighs, yes one is oneself the sugar cube between them, the man just manages to put up with something like that if need be. He's learned to be a worker. He's an amateur bricklayer, amateur joiner, and amateur villa owner. Whatever one's doing, one can think of something else at the same time, he says, best of all to think, how nice it'll be when whatever one's doing is finished and the freshly painted or stripped and repainted door has slammed shut behind one and one is inside, inside at last. Yes, he would like that. Because no one in this world understands that one would like to lock the door behind one and the world, so that there's no one anymore, not even oneself anymore. And for that one absolutely must have the following: a house and home of one's own. No one should get in. Only you, sweet Jesus, uncomfortably fastened to the cross, so that you don't make any mess either. There's nothing that can be locked up so completely as something that belongs to one. There's no one that can be locked out so completely as other people, above all, those who think marriage, this prison, is the greatest proof of the love of a man for a woman and the other way round, exactly, so when are we getting married, when are you getting divorced? One thing after another, but in the right order please. The marriage, so this woman hopes, will stabilize our relationship, which not even a cellar would do for a gloomy tall office block, when an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale comes along. You can judge. But first there comes the executive. I hope it's not the executioner coming. Even if it sounds macabre to you, that ultimately I only want to die, although in busy traffic I have to be helpful, energetic and quick in my reactions and fulfil modern demands, WHY Asks the country policeman, who is also at his wit's end. Why should Gerti's love of Kurt Janisch be so different from the unhappy relationship with someone or other? No idea, as far as I'm concerned.
So do you hear this unholy racket now or don't you? At the moment it's taking hold of the whole household, where there's even a piano which has to be handled every day, so that it doesn't fall ill, this grand from the city apartment, which here squeezes desperately into a corner and still occupies almost the whole room, while its tone sinks down to its boots even standing in the corner because the climate here is harsh and simply too damp. That's the first thing we'll sell. The living room: where CDs and arts programs, indeed the whole universe, are eagerly monitored and preserved, because nothing in this world remains a secret. What you hear is bestial howling, howling of a harmless, masterless penitent, who doesn't know whom she should touch and for which master she should do penance, and she doesn't even have a veronica to wipe her eyes. So much sand has been sprinkled on them. Her eyes run and run. But nevertheless she's already waiting for the next sin in order to commit it immediately, as a precaution before someone else does it. The man is worth it, but earlier he was inside the whole time, with another woman, with a much younger woman. But the woman long ago wanted to suffer under his whip of flesh again, and he wasn't within reach. Can't be reached at present. Try again later! How disappointing. It's pointless trying to call someone else. If one longs for someone, he should come in person. But the country policeman we're talking about has now, much later that day, actually the next, if one calls the day night, when he left the house of the wailing, weeping woman who seems to be foaming in her own soap opera, arrived in the coldest place possible at the moment outside of a deep freeze: the shore of the lake.
It took him a while, driving with difficulty across stones and through undergrowth, to get there.
He couldn't have acted any differently, he tells himself. He once again feels quite the master of the district, but somehow it doesn't cheer him up. He doesn't care at all whether the water gives up its booty or keeps it. First of all the water gets its packet, nicely packaged at any rate, earlier the country policeman had to go especially to an out of the way tool shed to fetch the tarpaulin, actually he's already been driving around with it in the trunk for a couple of days, what for? (Question as to premeditation: Did he himself put it there with intent, in case he would need it at some point?) Let's go on, then we'll have it behind us all the more quickly. Then the water can chew at the package for a bit or a bit longer, and see whether it likes the taste. It can open its jaws to draw breath, at the same time spitting out the human roll with the plastic cover, then snap at it again, or it can also keep the meat roll of course. Is it meat at all, or flesh? Everyone's always so nice to flesh, if it looks nice and is pretty in the right places, perhaps even transparent?, at least just barely covered in transparent motives, so that nevertheless a bit pops out of the wrapping which is scooped out in exactly the right places, and has been placed there for that very reason. So that one suspects what anyone can anyway see at a hundred yards. But it's important to the man that something more comes of it. The flesh is only the means, the mean value is the money and the highest value is a plot of land with a house on it. For that the country policeman carries out duties, of which he has deprived the community, because instead of directing the course of traffic he has been having intercourse himself, one of my tiredest jokes, I know, but I'm happy that I've found it, I had been looking for it. I know, I know, you've heard it all before. But consider this: There are nevertheless unbelievably few of you worldwide. The man, however, would do quite different things than I would (or than would occur to me), so that his desire for belongings is fulfilled. Two legs spread, for him alone, just like that, and a whole house puts in an appearance right in the middle. So this man puts himself down as an advance, but in the same breath demands himself back again, because himself is all he has to invest. But perhaps he needs himself again later, for something else. The country is supposed to be safe because the existing small stations of the Country Police are not being closed down, which have made and still make a valuable contribution to that.
Here's the charming, artificial, inner Alpine lake again, it's always getting into the picture when we don't want it to. But this time there's a special reason for it to turn up, we had almost lost sight of it because it's already so dark; it's not exactly soil protection, that nature and landscape pastoral care have done to it, but neither are they to blame for what has happened to the water. Nor is it because of prevention of air pollution and waste disposal, no, wait, perhaps it is because of waste disposal, because right now I can see how some kind of waste or whatever it is, at any rate someone wants to get rid of it, is being put into the water there. One wouldn't keep watching mere household refuse so long, out into the barely rising, gently rippling waves, the lake can also toss the roulade around a little, play with it, we'll see if we can't get the wrapping open later, it should be a snip. The man has tied it up well, made double knots, attached something to weigh it down and removed it again, because it could perhaps be traced back to him. He surely doesn't seriously believe that all that will work as permanent medication against the reappearance of the packet! Water can do a lot of things, but one thing it can't do: digest all the things thrown into it. Cyanide from a gold mine into the Danube from its tributary the Tisza! A gigantic dying is just starting, and you can watch it live, you're still alive at least! The poison speaks for an hour, and the fish would have to swallow it for fifty years, if they weren't dead now. Or shall we leave it wrapped up for a while yet, this death role, which someone is playing here? No turbulent river current is playing with it, and the lake is too dull to embark on a proper scrap with a completely motionless, tied up body. So now even the most stupid reader knows what's in there, because unfortunately I couldn't keep it to myself anymore. How does one do that, say something by not saying it? I fear everyone has known it all the time, from the beginning of time, even if not all of it through me. And the Austr. Food Standards Code does not lay down what people and their inland waters are supposed to eat. It only states what they're not supposed to eat. Meat is of course excepted, otherwise the whole of Austria, which subsists on meat and alcohol, would go on strike together with its mountains and lakes. This country always wants a little bit more of what there is, it doesn't matter what, at any rate always more than it can take. Cannibal country. And we like ourselves best when we are well disposed to ourselves, because we've been well behaved, that is our spice, in which once again we want to let the others stew until they're really hot for us. Perhaps, also, because no one can change the thousand schilling note for the taxi for them, not even the bank. Whenever the bank is really supposed to do something, it can be guaranteed not to, it would rather pester us with demands. And what the inland waters are supposed to eat instead, that's written down here, please read it immediately, although it undoubtedly doesn't particularly interest you: at least two hundred years of biodynamic, organic and ecological farming, in order to recover from its own toxins again. Everything should always be healthy. You, too, should start immediately by eating healthier food. Finally, I've attached a number of signal lamps, reflectors and colored adhesive strips to my poetic art, so that if all else fails you'll hear all the bells ringing at once, until you're almost deaf. It'll turn into a wonderful chorus once I've given the cue. And with the words "meat" or "flesh" I've provided an additional hint, superfluous of course, I didn't need to say it at all (at least when a heavy object is dropped into the water, then it's not hard to know who or what is meant), and now it's all no longer art, a pity, really.
But then again, the dumping of wrapped perishable objects is not entirely without risk, if only one man is available to do the job. I have a suspicion that otherwise, and ever more frequently, illegal waste is dumped from this point on the shore, because I've several times seen trucks with their lights out parked by the upper bay, where it's easier to drive up to the edge, and where one can also see more easily. There are no fish here who would like to turn themselves into sharks on a special course, to first of all eat out the eyes and then the soft parts of their catch. There won't have to be a long search for missing persons, because one will soon know and see on photos, that someone has gone missing and is now unfortunately going to be found in a terrible state. It really would be better for this young woman if she were in the middle of the ocean, with forty pounds of cement around her ankles. A father recently even inflicted ten pounds on his child, a little girl, and a beautiful, cool, merry river, whose secondary movements immediately rocked and pushed the child around, although it soon made no difference to the child with all the foam in her lungs and upper respiratory tracts and all the cement attached to her bound feet. Tomorrow the mother and the boyfriend of a young missing person will from the start have been convinced that something must have happened. They'll have some copies of the most recent photographs of the missing person made by a photographer they know and go with it themselves from house to house, into the shops, into the inn opposite the bus stop, and into the bus stop and show it, the photo. They will stop cars on the road and ask the occupants whether they haven't seen the missing person, a certain Gabriele Fluch. Finally they will have had just enough time to stick a kind of wanted poster of the missing person to the electricity poles along the route she usually travelled to her apprenticeship, but the adhesive will not even be dry behind the ears yet, when the packet, not a day too soon, will have been found in the lake. All without any success in life, on a day like any other, life rented an extra room in order to do something extra in peace and quiet, which it usually never does.
It's all basically a world one can keep track of, one can see as far as one's sight allows, that is, differently in the case of each person, and some can see right through bodies, because there's nothing there that could interest them. How copiously this water spreads its wings, how generously proportioned is its space, how assiduously it has increased its biomass and the detritus, so that its need for oxygen has grown exponentially, it's got nothing else to do the livelong day, because it has already killed everything in itself. Is that not a nice symbol for this man here, who is facing fairly critical times, because he would like to digest himself and make himself disappear, and instead always has to be hunting and chasing himself in order to find out which of his hobbies could keep him alive a little longer? Which ones definitely won't, he already knows. And as if there had to be a last straw on top of everything else, now something dead has been added to all the lifelessness in the debris of his life, a daughter from a good home in the village (with a single mother), that's what I've been told at least, but it's not quite right, I think, a present time that was pretty as a picture, and then this human sausage plops into the water, just like that, without the least grace it may have possessed while still alive. The longer I look at this face, the more certain I am: The disappearance of this girl is no problem at all, because she's available reproduced so many times. She has made herself up to look like all the others, in the shop she even chose thick rubber mats as shoe soles, so that the adjoining legs look approx. four inches longer, and from tomorrow her face, which wanted to smile out of magazines, will instead be fixed to the masts a hundred times over. So wherever one looks, this girl exists so many times over that she has simultaneously gone and stayed here!, a whole photo wallpaper has been made out of the young woman. This sweet little mouse, as the poet says, exists so often, even if in another, foreign shape, nothing else has any room anymore between her and her pictures, which all: don't show her!, all photos, which had previously nodded to her, and were immediately cut out of a color magazine with the weapons of a woman, a small pair of scissors. No, these are, rather, weapons, which are such that woman (whoa!) doesn't even need them, there would be nothing for them to do. That's why one doesn't need to be in the pictures in person, one can also let oneself be represented there by other women; I've seen it myself, this nothingness, all the photos as if from the magazine and from the other magazine, I had the time to glance at it, that was enough for me, and I learned something from it. Down, into the water, always just down, and then not again: down. Once is enough. It works the first time, while the photos really always have a considerable effect each time we look at them, unless of course we were in them ourselves.
If it were up to him, the man would row out specially in the boat and there, where it's deep, further out, where the lake snacks on the tree shadows from the steep shore, heave his food parcel in its own snack pack into the water. But there are no oars in the boat, and one can't very well run around the village with a pair of replacement oars, what would that look like. Alone is the night, it always does everything alone, that's why no one offers to help it. The night is the night, that's its attitude. One sees nothing. No street lighting by the lake. No light during sex, that's lucky, because we haven't specially washed our feet, they're quite black between the toes. And the pedal boat, it has a key, even if not for an ignition, otherwise it would be a motor boat, we don't have one available. The man can't get far enough out on the water with his meat (his catch). Yet the killing of his prey cost him as little effort as a cigarette, the end of which burns one's fingers a little and which one quickly stubs out; we see, no, of course, we don't see, it's dark, you don't have any choice, you simply have to believe me, so look at an embrace, which for months has been usual between the two, in the car, in the front seats, while a cock which has been brought along for the purpose is already standing there upright and expectant. One hand stays on the steering wheel, one head is shoved under an armpit, nestles into that damp, cozy hollow, oh how deceptive, as if it wanted to hide away in a cupboard. Long, thick hair, generously heaped with tips from Brigitte on how to shine, but a nut-sized amount is sufficient, spreads out on an arm, a living mass, as one says, everything as usual, otherwise no one would have made the effort to prepare memories of it, and then to hang them out to dry on a TV screen or a poster where everyone can see them, models for everyone for the next time. Then one can do it oneself. There's no such thing. Yet another of those, who behave exactly the same as always, after having read several how-to books, about exactly how not to do it, better a smart short hairstyle, your hairdresser deserves that once a month, than an unkempt flowing mane!, so one of them will unfortunately do it nevertheless just as usual, in the hope of being acknowledged as a good, languishing, eager woman in love. But today she's in trouble, when really it's the man who should be: Does he have someone new? No, daddy, that's not allowed. He can't do that. The capacity to act will be taken out of her hands, since the young woman, Gabi's her name, to the accompaniment of laments, accusations and pleas and already precipitately giving herself up, without any address marked, or what is to happen to the body in the event of death (although one might be able to get something for oneself nevertheless, if one were smart and already donated one's corpse to pathology beforehand), pulls down a zip and takes out a cock, as so often now, it's been going on like this for many weeks. The skill is in doing it again and again, but differently each time. Someone who is easily bored would never manage it. Thanks, the pleasure's mine, says the penis, so now I have to pass into a stranger's hands again, I've hardly had time to get used to the previous pair, and my owner is also somewhat in need of a routine, I would say, run away if you ever catch sight of him in the distance! No one listens to me. I find it rather unpleasant. They always find me, feels a not very pitiable piece of meat in addition to some more pleasant feelings, which are now beginning, have your ticket ready and fall to your knees in front of the bouncer, please, on your knees now, this moment! Gabi's groping, often clumsy fingers are unerring, as if the country policeman's cock had a lighthouse beacon, or a flashing warning light, so that one can avoid it in time (no man is an island, he stands above everything, he is an airplane or at least in an airplane) and not grab it right away, without first pausing and thinking, or if thinking is at all desired, to think about the rubber for insulation purposes. And then perhaps at some point you produce a short circuit, well, you know where the country policeman lives, if you want to phone him there. Women. If this man happens to be somewhere else, they immediately become suspicious, because the country policeman has gone out and couldn't leave a single contact number. For example this house, in front of which he's standing once again, he would absolutely like to have it. And if he had to fight for it, with the clumsy and also somewhat too sensitive weapons of the flesh, then it can't be helped. Flesh. This house belongs to a woman. Its facade already has a skeptical expression when the country policeman enters. We certainly can't fool this house. This house is already made. In the house a commodity wants its eyelids to glitter and present itself with the eyelash flutter of a new striped awning. She has rubbed herself all over with something, the woman who lives here, but she didn't have to make the effort for the sake of this man. He overlooks everything that has no value, nor does he have to ask for patience or look for some peace and quiet, before someone comes up to him, on his own stairs, likewise made of the best, well-hung meat, that no longer longs for anything except to be released from its place of custody and to get away again. Then I would be, says the meat in its own voice, which we like to listen to, and its owner, to whom someone or other will also listen, then the two of them, the flesh and him, would at last be at one with themselves: alone. They, too.
No grave should be made of me, thinks country policeman Kurt Janisch. That would be the worst thing for me. To end up in a small container. No. Preferably in a large one!
The girl on the other hand. Her body still belongs to her, passing its time like a song bird, hopping from branch to branch, until she hits the ground below, but by then she has long ceased to have herself in her hand. So please, what's she getting up to now, she's banged into something with her pointed tits, which she can keep for all I care and whose production in the nearby district hospital is still evident. The man cannot even take Gabi properly in hand for his almost dreamy, yet precisely directed hand manipulations, she slips through his fingers every time, which doesn't, however, annoy him very much. But it would certainly be no big problem for him. Standing on the shore as the life-saver of a small child or a car, he would like that better. He would jump into the waters without hesitation. His penis nods when it's squeezed, but also of its own accord. How the girl has to laugh when she sees that. She asks especially for this movement, which he wrests from an implacable life and from a body which is deaf to entreaties. Women are mud and that holds onto everything. Slime. Something can be drawn out, a sledge, a wheelbarrow, and before one can pull the cart out of the dirt, it's already disappeared again. The mud has it. Only occasionally, during a thunderstorm, do women voluntarily part with something, rushing in fear out of their emergency accommodation with their families, which they must be ready to leave at any time. For once the mud has time to spread, calmly and deliberately, I mean with deliberation. Then there come the women, a whole flood, stir everything up, themselves most of all, because they are so in love, and then they lose themselves, in their own mud, because their partner has suddenly gone, for no reason. What, already? So soon? That's a gloomy prospect! We can't see any reason! Perhaps the mountain will come after all? For the time being its stones are coming down. It can take a while before it comes itself.
I don't know, there's something different about the girl this time, the country policeman is still thinking, as her blissful gaze at him is suddenly as if extinguished. So. Yet another veil over her pupils. Finished. The man's peace of mind is gone. Now he has thrown the older woman, in whom he places some hopes, out of her own living room, just because of the girl. She had become quite unbearable with her constant demands for more, without even knowing everything she's got. She doesn't even have all her wits about her, one is always missing. She should for once go and rub her gusset herself, with her own hands, so she sees what that's like. But when she's supposed to whack off in front of him, then it only makes her all the greedier for him, precisely because he wants to watch her. It is one of many variants of the heightening of pleasure, all of which she would like to get to know later at her leisure. Eager for knowledge she listed them all, the variations on her flesh. She even gives the man orders, because she's waited so long for it. She has a right. He'll take that from her. He has a method for that. He's already dreading it. He knows: As soon as he opens his shop, she's already running in, and he's the one who's supposed to be directing the traffic. He hardly has time to start his engine, and she's already trying to throttle it. He thinks, she wants nothing else except to feel number one in his books. Can't she hear her expiration date, even if she can't read it? Doesn't she hear, on the other side of the door, the moaning of an adolescent still under sweet sixteen? Well, that's a different tune, isn't it? As fresh as a folk song, as resolute as the federal anthem, but one doesn't know the words. All the notes the older woman has mastered, the man knew long ago. Because he reads them from her red, sweating, enraptured, blissful face, which she puts on when she sees him. And the tune she strikes up underneath him is false, he thinks it is even deliberately faked. It is a strange whimpering, which begins to turn into an almost practiced groaning, hardly has he touched her. He wouldn't have believed it, if he hadn't heard it with his own ears. This woman doesn't have anymore devotees than her house. In reality an unpropertied property-owner, that's what she is, who believes she resides in the realm of the untrue but beautiful. That's love. Jealousy upsets whole goods trains, it upsets me too, but the goods are what count. Get your doll out of my house and do it this minute. Oh no. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be so rude, please, don't leave me. I didn't want to order you to do something, which could be terribly painful for you, but even more so for me. I haven't once doubted your love or entertained the least suspicion, even if behind this door you're ramming this little girl into my ground. I love and sacrifice, and I don't draw back from that, because I see that you could never deceive or exploit me. Go now and get rid off her! Before anything else happens.
Such blubbering or something like it, often heard, often seen on the display, but never read, heard, or copied, now emerges from the handfuls of hair flowing down, which gently drape a glans which has already turned blue. We are in the car again, which is standing there, something else is standing too, only the heater is running. Afterwards the man will have to pick strands of hair from his mouth, pull them like fishbones between his teeth, which right away, you never know where you have to be first, it's like the homebound traffic jam at the junction with the Federal Highway to Mariazell on a weekday at five, so he'll need to feign kisses, which would actually have turned into angry bites, if the tongue had only joined in. But it has taken cover in time, sticking to the side of his mouth, so that nothing happens to it; he's already dreading, even before he opens his mouth to let in her aquatic bird of passage, one of many, and in addition all the flaps and nozzles of flesh, all of it, all the flesh won from impenetrable swamps! As if it's disappeared. He must force it, the tongue, well now, somewhat belatedly, it is joining in our aerobics exercise after all, after it had briefly withdrawn behind the barrier of the teeth for a rest. The tongue would fit very easily at the edge of the lake, but it is the slow-flowing rivers of a woman which are squeezed out through the sweet fingers of love. Juice shop. Have your glass ready nevertheless, you won't get anything else. If you place this glass on a tea light, the light will never flicker and go out. Because it cannot get away.
We are now on a parking lot, which isn't one at all. It is, freshwater life-forms can confirm it at any time, almost a bog, thick, juicy fennel stalks everywhere, though not until summer, now fresh weeds are just beginning to grow rampant and swamp the place, foul, stagnant, vegetable, right next to it the winter refuges of birds, it doesn't matter which. The vegetation is not yet fully developed, that's still to come. Rome wasn't built in a day either, but on swampland nevertheless.
We just have to watch that the wheels don't sink in, so that we can get away from here again, but there's plenty of brushwood, it can be put under the wheels if need be. So that we have the necessary friction and the peace and quiet for a young woman called Gabi, who at this moment is likewise rather naughty, to make a face and give this man a blow job. She has mastered that like an older woman, but she hasn't mastered herself. That's something they can all do, women: be bad, until one has to smack them on their raised butts, yes, turn it around to me, whispers the man in her ear, at least she didn't suffocate earlier on, Gabi. She's recovered again. A reason to be cheerful, but only one of many. So now she's ended up here, on this human island anchored in the lake, swamp island, this is exactly where, later on, it's already settled, he has to open up the salty face down there once again and give it a good licking, she won't give him any peace until then. Otherwise he'll drive straight back to the other one after all. Earlier we didn't get to where we wanted, she stopped us right to the end, the other one. Swamps only exist where there is very high precipitation, but Gabi is still very wet, from what, from that. Please, just let me drive Gabi home at least, the country policeman said a couple of minutes ago to Gerti, let me, I'll just quickly drive her home, and then I'll come straight back to you. I'll take her away, and come back as quickly as possible, right away, but you'll have to give me ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, you'll get something in return. No, nothing will get in the way, not this time, it did other times, but nothing will get in the way today, I promise you. For today, even I've had enough. I know: you haven't. This man may have enough, yes, even of himself. Nevertheless best of all he likes to do it with himself, which he conceals from all the people close to him: For him that is the equality on which our civilization is based-to avoid as far as possible being measured against others! He reflects, condemned to making advances: all the women, and so many all alone!, but most of all he is attached to himself and his dreams. They are all dreams of bodies, and they are sometimes even better than the dreams of houses. It is a pleasure at last to have people in front of one, and without the small difference between one another and what they have between their legs, that's not so very important in his opinion. He's had enough of women, he's never fed up with property, but the bodies, they befall him and overwhelm him. Nor does he see anyone he knows in front of him but faceless people in indeterminate positions. How nice. Children, whether boys or girls, get their chance just like adults. The age of the children is unimportant, they can be almost sixteen like Gabi, they can also be infants, it doesn't matter which month. And they all open up just for him, like suns.
So what am I doing here, right, I'm describing one side of the culprit (you can meanwhile take the others. I haven't properly addressed them yet), from which really the return match should now come, normally in the shape of squeezing, pinching of nipples, and kissing somewhere or other, the sort of thing one does, as often as possible please, in the case of this man. With him I fear there's unfortunately too much biting as well, that's the most important thing for him, he could have been recognized by that. It's always the same with lust, people let themselves go, but every tiny change immediately confuses them, and they want to go home again. There is much that distracts them again, their projectiles, even if the change was specially marked in the book of life, even before one opened it. The victims believe that nevertheless, they're not loved anymore if something is done a little bit differently from usual. From whom did they learn it? This young woman here is lying ready on her knees in the car, the floor of which is very clean, you'd hardly believe it, and her jeans are losing hardly any fluff either, they are the most popular brand there is. Because of it the forensic experts will in days to come sweat blood rather than analyze it. So, a couple of bars back: His game, the man's game, now an almost furtive gentle groping, as if he didn't know where this body is, which is where it always is, on the passenger seat, already half on the floor, with its head in his lap, that's how simple the language of bodies is, everyone understands it without words, so with her head in the man's lap: this young woman, already a lover, grazing by the shore, lost, even before she could find herself. As usual the man has spread his legs a little and half turned towards her, as not even God, the Creator, would, because he would never allow his picture to be taken in such a position, he's surely got the right to his image, except no one bothers about it, including his agent, the priest, he's more interested in little boys, and Jesus is just too old (but how else should we find out if he's really man enough to torment us, this Lord God?), heavens, where will it end. Now I've lost the thread myself, the first set goes to you. You can have it, if you like. So, back to the position again: The man, is that clear?, the woman: facing him, her pelvis thrust forward, and the crown cork, with which the penis is sealed, so that it's not exploding all the time, possibly in one's own face, it's in the likewise wide open mouth of a woman, now, say it finally, so: a slight pressure on, how shall I explain it, well the carotid artery divides at a certain point in the throat, yes, there, into two parts, and between them there's a ganglion, and that's important, you should never squeeze it, that is on both sides at the same time, left and right, because otherwise you die or someone dies because of you in seconds, please don't alarm the player, he's almost ready now, and he's squeezing with his strong fingers, which are familiar with signal discs, measuring tapes, laser guns, even an ordinary gun, from above, as if by chance, it could accordingly also have been an accident, if one had no clue about the anatomy of the throat, because one was always concerned with other parts of the female anatomy, where it's wetter and more interesting (where there's water, there's life!), but the man knows this spot, and he altogether knows more about bodies than about anything else, and has attended all the obligatory first aid courses, some even voluntarily, to get on in his profession, which already go beyond first aid and are almost second aid, I mean the spot on the delicate stem of the neck and then also the spot in the fir plantation, he knows them very well, in the young corn which grows right up to the shore in the almost muddy ground, not where during the day people like to say, let's go for a little walk, the spot is deeper in the dark, hairstyle-spoiling forest, and the other spot, the one on the body, this proud article, which is available either completely free of charge or is anyway always too expensive for people like us, when we're standing in the perfume department in order to camouflage it at least, well the body, naturally it likes to put its best goods on display, but that doesn't mean that one can just stick one's hand in and take them. In short: The aforementioned spot is accordingly a little to the side, is easily accessible and the man has strong fingers, which would not, however, have been at all necessary. You and I, we would have managed it, too, if we had known where and known how, to squeeze the nerve spot between the carotid branches, I will find out what it's called, but the doctor, who's supposed to tell me, is still busy with something else. You'll find out right away, as soon as I've found out. At any rate now you know where you shouldn't grab, even if you don't know what it's called. It can't do any harm if, as a precaution, you get an expert to show you the spot so that you avoid it in future. So, no, not again: There's a spot, you shouldn't even try to reach out for it. It's like a door, which you shouldn't open, and now everyone's dying to do it, aren't they? People are allowed to see everything and grasp at everything and they grasp nothing, but just there: really please don't. What, did the man first bang the girl's head against the door handle? No, I didn't see the man bang the girl's head against the door handle. But I'm always the last person to find out about anything. Something on a sunken path through a forest, in the middle of Austria, has, without visible injury, gently, as if by chance, gone slack, the trees only stand up all the straighter, to stand out all the better from the human beings and to display toughness, which not everyone of us manages.
And now she's being cleared away, the girl, together with her name and her actions. Tidied up, wrapped up and removed from the earth and dispatched to the water, where she has already arrived. All that needs to be done is to open the cistern and give the float valve a shake, then it'll flow again and flush away everything that we had intended for the water.