Roses, tulips, carnations, all three wither; but not all at once, because they don't all grow at the same time. Carnations don't grow at all, one can only buy them at the florist. The flowers, how pretty they are, they don't covet property, a little patch of earth is plenty for them, they don't even know that others, less sedentary, covet property that is not their own. They live, and other flowers live next door, for our delight. Shush, they're listening to us! Being quiet, perhaps we, too, can learn new possibilities of existence from them: Is it better to be snapped or to be right away completely broken off? But also how to show off and spread oneself around. All their high spirits: nothing self-important! The front garden blooms and is carefully weeded, as if with a pair of eyebrow tweezers, Mrs. Janisch does that, and she does it on her knees, in order not to fall into the pit, which she doesn't see, but about which she knows: It's over there, somewhere, not far away, dug just for her. Perhaps by her rather selfish husband? No, probably not. She nevertheless seems quite crazy about her beautiful garden, perhaps mat's why she begrudges alien plants any association with her own native ones, which she has so laboriously tamed. An attack of immodesty, that's what one calls weeds. The garden is the kingdom of Mrs. Janisch, whereas her husband is on the lookout for other kingdoms; right now in the kitchen-living room he's bending over an architect's plan, which doesn't belong to him, and neither unfortunately does the house that goes with it. In this plan, as in every plan, including God's, a kitchen is marked in, it's as if people always wanted the same thing and that really means: themselves, except bigger and better please, so that from time to time one can also cook. How on earth did the country policeman get hold of this plan so quickly?, after all, he's not responsible for the land registry but for catastrophes. E.g., when the mountain comes calling, first of all in small amounts, in rockfalls, then later perhaps the whole thing breaks off, is that because of the old mine, of the many very old mines underneath? The whole country is completely hollow inside! And then all the people in the environs of the mountain, which also wants to move, but has no plan for doing it, have to leave their houses, which they built so laboriously with neighborly help, which is what they call the black economy round here. Saved decades for something and now this! The mountain casts an enigmatic glance at us, and whoever he throws a glance at, he follows it up with more, to add some weight to his glance. Who's talking down there? It's only us. So I, the mountain, will make you disappear now. The valley, which was likewise undermined by passages, doesn't want to be left behind and threatens that first there will be one subsidence, and then plugs will certainly soon form, and the water trickling through will become less and less. And then, says the valley bottom, grinning from every crevice, I'll really get going. Because, thanks to the high drop, this plug cannot be expected to hold for long. That is why, says the valley, and it grows ever louder, because it has to be heard above its own howling of subterranean winds, that is why it cannot be concluded, that because the first water and mud subsidence, which will then have occurred, will come to a standstill, that, should one attempt to pump off water underground and put up wooden partitions, that because of that anything would have been effectively sealed off, far from it. Not a trace. You see. That's exactly what will be left of the people down there.
Mr. Janisch would prefer to move into one of the houses that are already there, then he would have two of them, his son would also have his (not quite, the old woman, to whom it belongs, is still alive, please don't forget to bring her no flowers! Not until her funeral will some be handed to her, from the garden naturally, what do we have one for), Mr. Janisch Jr. wants to do some rebuilding then, but that can wait. There's still another person living inside, a person one can't simply take out of it like jam out of the jar. The people here owe the mountain countless unpleasant hours, and as far as dirty tricks are concerned it is in constant competition with the lake. The lake gets something tipped into it which doesn't agree with it, the mountain has thrown off its magic wood and has become a threat to people, settlements, and buildings; it is a wood with an excellent effect on public welfare, so let us set up a welfare committee, not to cut it down, but to keep out the water and the stones and to break off dolomite and other nonsense, but this wood has not kept its promise. It didn't keep the stones to itself, that would certainly have been a feat, since there are so many. And below it, too, there are shocking scenes taking place, a house slips into the depths, and nothing but the balconies with their floral decorations are peeping out, we're enchanted by them, so much beauty in such a small space! It's just being photographed now, before it disappears. Look, the tree up there, it's interesting, too: Its root fibers reach desperately into the air, will they manage to catch hold of the piece of earth that's sledging down to the valley there, but already the whole tree itself is toppling over, and in the air in which its root ropes are waving around it won't even catch a midge, in the air there's no support anymore.
Nice and warm today, but the days are still rather short. It'll come. They're already stretching their limbs. Spring awakens. A girl's room in an attic is empty. The whole business, the dream-heavy feelings behind drawn curtains, at the edge of a precipice, is not the routine case, which it will appear to be for a couple of days, it is not a case at all yet. A young woman is missing, it is assumed she has not been able to resist the wide world, the district capital, yes, the one with the big hospital, in which people die of cancer, which they were unable to show to a doctor of their choice in time-people never have time for the essentials, and if they do, then they wouldn't know which ones and which kind-it is assumed, therefore, the young woman has presumably been unable to resist the world beyond the village and simply hasn't come home for a night. Didn't feel like it. A vanished young beauty, a lost light. Don't panic, beauty is untouchable, just try to catch hold of this beautiful swan, then you'll soon see! Beauty is untouchable, it's for our eyes only, so that we all get something from it, not only the gentlemen who climb over marble cliffs in order to get to know Naomi Campbell or Cindy Crawford personally. Gabi Fluchs will pop up unexpectedly, but she will be most urgently awaited by her mother and her boyfriend. She can be here at any moment. We'll start waiting now. So, early in the morning her mother waits with the familiar comfort of a cup of white coffee and a sandwich with either sausage or cheese, usually with both. Then, as every day, the daughter is supposed to catch the bus, the stop can be seen from the living room window of the detached house, or the train, but the daughter doesn't see why her mother always has to be gazing after her as she does so. Plants bloom in these troughs, too, and reach out cheekily to the shiny windows, until they can get a hold and look into the room, but why then do they so persistently and stupidly turn their heads away to the other side, to the flashing sun? Perhaps they looked too deeply into the window glass? Why do we not want to see what is evident and would interest us; what forces us to constantly incline our heads to the other side? On the other side are the people who should be our models, beautiful and good humored. And we are here.
The sun entices us out there. What, the Worthersee is somewhere else altogether? It can't be! We don't believe it! Well, it doesn't matter, stranger, we'll just drive there. How good it feels, the sun shower. Do we, too, have to find out something that to know would certainly not make us feel so good? We have to see, we won't give up, what others want to obscure: They use sweet smiling cats' faces for that, or stylized portraits of dogs stuck to the windows of cars, and for this purpose alone: to keep off some of the light, to stop the glare. Early in the morning Gabi always thought she looked so pretty in front of the shiny bathroom mirror, and she was, too, remembers her mother. Getting up ten minutes early to put on make-up, that will perhaps get her one hour's pleasure, later, again and again, but not until later (that's the point of pleasure, that one can't consume it right away, first pay at the checkout of the drug store!), and yet she always smiles herself into a good mood again in the mirror, our Gabi, who's an apprentice in a big building materials company. All of it without success. She's hardly started. But the sun has already risen for her, no one can be brighter than it, and the thousand pieces that the atom has ordered for itself in order to enter into competition with them, nothing can be brighter than this sun, except sometimes a human face, which in the end one still doesn't like, for one reason or another. But one is too dazzled to notice. So we'll just leave the face to the one it belongs to. It won't suit him either, it didn't even suit Socialism, which took it off right away and put the old one on again. Then Socialism was content again for a few years with what it was familiar with.
So, how can we help up to its feet this ground, which is just rushing down towards us, down the mountain flank, and promptly landing on its nose, not on ours, please? This nice, comradely mountain-also a face which has fallen and no one wants to help up. The mountain has dropped its mask. Now it already looks different from how it did a little while ago, when it was still whole. Perhaps houses will even have to be evacuated? Watch out, that could mean loss of homeland and lead to critical situations! I wish I could plan an early warning system, but would need help, so that the life of these people here could be maintained to the same high standards they are used to, inclusive of the deep freeze cabinet, into which at least one whole deer would fit if it were foolish enough to go into it. And also inclusive of a glazed conservatory, in which things could very well be a bit more exotic, if we had been sent the appropriate catalog, which we ordered on the phone.
The mountain remains unpredictable, again and again it throws off its debris, which has grown too heavy for it, it has to relieve itself. Last year's avalanche alone, thank you very much, it need not have been so generous, that first the slope slips down, and then all the rock follows. Austria. Just as during the holidays visitors have been getting to know it from above, so for centuries and millennia, mines have been getting to know it from below, at every level. The country's top side and its underside are well trodden. The country exists as positive and negative, depending on where one finds oneself, at the moment unfortunately we hear more about the negative. Why do I always only see the negative, I am admonished. I don't know either. Perhaps I don't know the country well enough, so as to be able to do justice to its good sides. One can be shut up inside the mountain, no I wouldn't like to get to know this country from the inside at all, the outside is already enough for me. We have mining to thank for all that, for being so hollow. You probably think, the doors always open when you hammer on them with your fist? A mistake. Right now you're sitting in the mine cage at the bottom, and while up above the rubble is breaking away from the mountain and howling and raging the mud is coming to visit, you yourself are smashed to pieces down there, and no one will ever see you again. Someone should have taken care of it, the mountain, shielded it from human beings, instead it turned into a shield somewhat full of holes for them. The thunderstorm came, a thundering and roaring as if from a thousand express trains arose, yes, exactly, as if, let's say, rather: five hundred trains are pulling out at the same time. Ordinary mortals were frightened to death, and the rest did then really die, it's true, you can read it up in many other places, if you don't believe me. I think of the big hit that God had with these dead, who will be in the papers for years, but he wasn't on target. The mountain wouldn't have helped me, nor anyone else either. No one helped it, although it was put in our care, and what did we do to it? We hollowed it out completely, disembowelled and made what I don't know what out of its innards. This and many another mountains have been ground down into baby powder, is that not unbelievable? The big doesn't remain big, it is as if it's made for whatever's small. We've already said a lot, perhaps too much, about the water, but we will no doubt be able to say a great deal more about it, when one day it's finished with you. Nature is as romantic as a human being, both want to have a nice experience and can, too, but a human being moves in a larger radius. This missing girl, Gabi, likewise had no end of care, but you see how deceptive such protection can be; you'll understand when the storm comes and you're left standing in the rain with nothing to shield you. All right, all right, I will stop, but not yet.
Gabi is gone, like a part, almost a whole horn of this mountain. Nature adapts to human beings, or is it the other way round? Just try some time to meet a mountain, after all, the tourist brochure explicitly demands it of you! The mountain won't avoid you, but the human being, in this case you, certainly will. Or the mountain's removed from the playing field, where it was only tolerated on the sidelines, in smart, glittering wrapping, as a cheerleader and everyone jumps for joy at it and at its commands, when the team underground in the display mine wants a boost. Someone squeezes his button accordion and there's an incredibly loud bang. Every girl with a boyfriend among the players is already happy in advance, we simply must win, we must! And we, every one of us friends of the mountains, shake arms and legs, to be harvested as ripe fruit by our charges, when the time comes. The mountain's coming. We can do nothing at all about that, except conduct a conversation with it.
What fashionable shoes Gabi bought herself only last week from the birthday money she got in advance! She would even want to be buried in them, even if the layers of the soles have turned out a bit heavy, even clumsy-looking compared with the remainder that is built up on top of them. The mountain, full of understanding, thinks so too. The layers down below have become too heavy for it, and what does it throw off? It throws off its upper story, which is not to blame in the least. A very independent girl, our Gabi, sensible. The new shoes are gone, they still haven't turned up, perhaps because they're too heavy. She also has a boyfriend, who is now at a loss. Although she's only sixteen, with a discount, because she won't be for another two months, she's already had a steady boyfriend for a long time, he's very nice, I think, perhaps a little boring and pedantic for his age. At least he's not one of the inconsiderate, insolent kind, equipped with fashionable sunglasses and ugly haircuts and hooded sweatshirts. He has drawn up a life plan and is sticking to it, whereas the others only have a goal in life, with nothing in between as to how they want to achieve it: No, I'm being unjust, the goal is the fast car and the beautiful house and several beautiful women. Of all the other treasures one only needs one of each, oh if one only had it already!, apart from money, there can never be enough of that. So I'm slandering young people, because I'm no longer one of them myself, and everybody remarks on it. But I'm generalizing again, people are incredibly different, and life is an altogether far too dirty business, particularly if, like me, one doesn't want to get one's hands dirty. Money, that really interests us, but work, no. You will permit me to look at the carefully devised map of New York, as I write this. I would like to go there and as fast as possible! This lad believes in himself, it's only natural, that's he's got something to offer and looks attractive, both of which are quite true, only he doesn't dress well, nor does he come from far away, where for instance Saint Nicholas is kept in store until his big appearance, but he ranks, even among the youth of the village, among the also rans: not an outsider, but someone, nevertheless, on whom one would not place any money, even if one stood to win a lot. Let's wait and see, it'll look different in a couple of years, then he'll be earning a good wage and be able to afford a bit. After all he's getting a good training, even as shampoo and water are running fraternally down the sides of his car. Gabi will then have to run through questions for his exam. One would virtually have to drive across the border to find another little place where there was a similarly ambitious young man. And she lets him get away, our Gabi, when she doesn't even have to keep the door shut herself, she doesn't have to do anything with her friend, just be there, and yet last night she nevertheless didn't turn up at his house, although yesterday as every day he could have been a good influence on her. He is, I can't repeat it often enough, a quiet, hard-working lad, and has never believed what was said about his girlfriend, all made up by her friends, it's said. It can't be true, there, behind the lipstick, inside there's supposed to have dwelt an insatiable appetite, for what, she had everything, didn't she? Feet are made for walking, and the younger they are, the further they'll go, what's the point of this unequivocal remark, if one's still unable to move? It's as if one's nailed to the spot. If we had been apart for any length of time, then it would have been something else, says the schoolboy with his own car. If I'm sitting next to her, I'm always good to her. The room in Gabi's parents' house, that too, I can only repeat: really pretty, cuddly toys, magazine photos without warmth and pity, that this pretty girl nevertheless was unable to get enough points for the amateur model competition. She sent in the photo quite in vain, our Gabi, a narrow miss is still a miss. But now it really does come in useful, the nice photo, which a photographer, who really knows what he's doing, took of her. Because her mother and her boyfriend don't, not exactly, carve it into the wood, but they stick it to the power poles between the house and the next village, and they go even further. Over here, closer, a little bit closer, yes, in the house, you see the room of an innocent girl. Her father already moved out years ago and is living with another woman, three villages on, towards Mariazell. Now that's a woman!, I'm telling you, she's a home-loving creature, gentle, yet as if from another planet, on which people are put together differently from here, exotic and unforced, because one can't force her to do anything; parts of the hands of the second wife of Gabi's father have developed almost into flippers. The fingers have grown together as far as the penultimate digit, it looks strange, but occurs frequently in this district, in which even the valleys have it off with each other, because there are so few of them and they find nothing else to play with except for their own boulders, their own debris, their own bodies. The mountains play with themselves, and sometimes they play with people, if they can catch some. No, don't look the other way! I'd like to continue with my descriptions, but this time something quite different, not far away. I, a pole-vaulter, but one who doesn't like to increase her pace, have for many years been cautiously courting this district with all too many words, and what does it give me in return? My characters evidently want me to fail myself, yet I always fail because of them. Let's see if this time a whole lot come at once to finish me off! What do I see? This district only gives up pictures of itself, pictures which I've had to have made myself. But I'm going to stop soon.
Far, on the other hand, far away from me, something soft, like food, if you insist, I can have it prepared for you immediately: Whatever's lying there, it's not a boat, but we wouldn't need a boat now either, perhaps a shopping cart. The morning smiles, it hasn't read the newspaper yet. The mother, a cigarette bobbing nervously in the corner of her mouth, talks on the phone to her daughter's boyfriend. Both display growing disquiet: If it were really true, that Gabi has gone away, which is what it looks like? Consider the good mood, which disappeared the moment that these two people almost simultaneously picked up the phone, fortunately not the same one, but they wanted to talk to one another. What good does it do? Talking is like walking up and down on a small island. It's soon over again, because one has noticed that one can't get anywhere by talking. So does technology intervene ever more frequently in life, we didn't teach it to be constantly ringing as the signal for a good conversation, which we value more this time, because it costs something, indeed technology intervenes in the shape of Elise or Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, yes, I've heard them myself. And it spits us out again, pale and shocked, ready for the presentiment of a telephone bill. It's printed here: It must be right, we are dust! Except dust cannot rise up against such an injustice, that we are supposed to pay just for talking. Unless one were to blow into it with one's own breath, which we wanted to use for this talking, until we all turn blue, our consciousness expands and we see things that aren't there. The dust is in our bad books, it's fled: under the furniture, the carpet, our feet. Who has given technology the right to spread news, which is then perhaps not even true? Communications technology has done it, this revolution, somebody had to do it. It won't be anything important. Again it won't be this telephone with Gabi on the other end because she had a breakdown; with whom she had the breakdown, that's secondary for now, the main thing is, she's still alive. Come home, Gabi, all is forgiven, forwards and no forgetting, and how can we forget something that we don't even know yet. Perhaps Gabi spent the night with a girlfriend, which one could it be? She never told much at home, probably there wasn't much worth telling about, not a trace of problems. Let's ask her former schoolmates, one is by chance, no, not by chance, employed by the same company, likewise in the office. Commercial training, that lends a feeling of dignity in the face of a society in which only property counts, then at least one knows who has it and why, and so one also learns exactly why one doesn't have any oneself. The uninformed have it much easier in this respect than the already affluent. The uninformed, whom one can also call the unscrupulous, they don't back the banks, they get on the backs of people and suck them dry. Weil thanks, it wasn't much, but now I need another one, one for the road, I hardly felt the last one, it was just enough, that's all. The sick can even threaten the sick, and people like to say this society is sick. No idea what's wrong with it. Usually not much. Why pay interest? It's possible to get by without it. It's also possible to get by without the nominal wage or whatever it's called, which one has before some people or other deduct such and such an amount from what one never had in the first place. If one had something, it's bound to have been less afterwards, but less is sometimes more! No, not this time. Until suddenly the mountain comes down to hit us, and to check whether it can be true, that it got twelve head of people, as punishment, because it's been completely hollowed out inside. Because of the mine, which did not fertilize (but nevertheless fed many), but rather did the opposite: This mountain, thanks to the mining, which undermined it (see job description!), this mountain is hereby wound up. The mountain is closed. No, you cannot take your animals with you, they stay, yes, the pigs, too. The mountain has to eat something after all. He doesn't forever want to be the loser and is now bringing in his harvest, and taking it down to the valley, where it was never allowed to go before, although the inn is there. You'd be better off getting yourself to safety as quickly as possible, the mountain is heavier than you are! Take only the essentials, your savings bank book, check card, documents, cash and the photos of relatives, so that one knows what they used to look like, since now one has to move in with them, be thrown together with them in a heap, a pack, and get along, which one's never done before. And that for so long, until the relatives, after life's long journey, which we have to squash into three weeks, will have aged prematurely and look almost unrecognizable. The boat is full, no, not this one. There's no one in it. Plants don't need to absorb any complex chemical combinations such as vitamins or amino acids, which are a must for human beings. In human beings the chemistry has to be right, otherwise they can't produce the glue for their bodies, to enrich their bases and to attract sexual partners with interferon, I mean, with pheromones. By and large people simply want to be rich, they don't want anything more than that. Women, on the other hand, want love, for that more than a dozen chemical elements are required, which then don't work, because one has swallowed too much of all of them. Not even a simple cake could succeed like that. Women in general, they often want to live in a monoculture, that is always allow just one person to cultivate their little field, and so it's always only the same thing that grows there, and that's never enough for the chosen one. Or he doesn't want it, he feels cramped, he wants something else from someone else. Oh all right, here you have the other thing, luckily we had it in stock. On the other hand, there's also the woman. Isn't she as pretty as a picture? Yes. Impossible to touch her. One particular person would be enough for her, but she can't find him. She thinks this one good and this one, but he doesn't want to. We women waver still, uncertain, which one we should pick. I'll let out the secret: It absolutely must be Mr. Right. No one else will do. That can't be so hard, in the lottery you have to get six right at once. And not one number less in the weekly last judgement, the draw on Saturday afternoon. With people the choice is infinitely large, there must be someone there for you, surely? Well, just take him, it doesn't matter, does it, if you become unhappy one way or another, your kind isn't dying out, believe you me. The loins of the foreigners from the Balkans not least will make sure of that, says the former Federal Chancellor. Let's hope he's right. It can't be healthy to have thousands of possibilities, and only one of them is suitable. The train has departed, no one tells us that over the loudspeaker, a scarf pressed to their face, otherwise one would recognize it and its voice, which in reality, however, belong to a certain Mrs. Chris Lohner, present a thousand times over, one can hear her in all the railway stations of the land. But who hears us? Other objections? Good, I object: A fresh plot contains everything, all the nutrients, in sufficient amounts, and if there's a house on it, that's a whole lot more. Very desirable. Before it slips into the hole. It's only a question of time and company-family planning, whether a new mine is opened up right next door, a new hole is dug, oh no, too near the surface once again, we're in any case already reproaching ourselves for having exposed the people here to such danger, so that we could almost bite their feet from below. There are also voices now, a little a cappella chorus, which says, the terminal moraine, a peripheral disturbance, has caved in and caused the catastrophe, which was in the making for millions of years, even before a drill came anywhere near the mountain. Yes, miners, time also has its questions, although it already knows all the answers. It knows what it means when something goes simultaneously forwards and backwards, because time is nailed down in space and instead people always have to travel around so much. It knows what it means when, the moraine misbehaving, huge quantities of water and mud flow into the underground workings of a mine and crush the people there like flies in amber, unfortunately without making them less perishable. The process is a different one. Amber is like a tin can. Mud is, well, just dirt, not made for people to stay in, unless voluntarily, nose up, to check if there's a little air present, which has usually clothed one so wonderfully well.
Earlier it was quite a different day wasn't it, could I have got the date wrong? Gabi's boyfriend washed his car, while Gabi watched him. She was not allowed for example to get up and go away or do something else, after all one doesn't see something so interesting every day, today is an opportunity for a whole car to be soaped and then get a decent shower. Usually it's something reserved for living people. If I sit next to you, I'm very close to you, thinks Gabi's boyfriend about her, who knows her much more closely than that, but otherwise always likes to have her close, and dips in the sponge once again, tirelessly. Only he who knows longing, knows what we suffer, when we see a faster car. But at least ours has to glitter and flash, even without wanting to take a turn. The Governor of Carinthia, Mr. Haider, has a real Porsche, but unfortunately it's not here in Styria, where feelings have to put in an appearance in person in order to overwhelm one. People don't keep their feelings to themselves, but importune others with them.
The mountain does something quite similar. If a person is hollowed out inside, one often doesn't notice it right away, with the mountain one also only notices when ton-weight bits of debris are buzzing about one's ears like flies, or one starts to fly oneself, when one's hardly learned to walk. One's feet slip out from under one, together with every good ground, which is why the mountain should have remained where it was. It stood perfectly well there. It didn't bother anyone, at least not me. More silent than silence, the mountain didn't say a word, except when the tourists fluttered around its slopes, but now it seems to want company and comes right into our dreary house, immediately going off with it as its new chum. Whoever wants to, can leave, I already said so, but not to the mountain. It can leave, too, as it pleases, or did we give it cause to? We would never have suspected it beforehand, otherwise we would have left it in peace. But where has Gabi gone today, who, in principle, likes to go out, not always with her steady boyfriend, but usually nevertheless, and if not with him, then he feels second best. Admittedly then he's got his car, which is neat and tidy, but he has to sit in it alone. Where did Gabi always get to, when no one saw her? Quite an amount of time, if we add it all up. She can't have disappeared into another dimension and have returned to us unrecognizable, our Gabi, no, she can't have. She has disappeared, trust me on this point at least, even if I once claimed something else. The disco is a temptation, and outside, in the dark, one has to watch out, in case someone grabs the crack between one's legs, someone who is so drunk that he can no longer tell top from bottom, never mind. The woman wants to be free to dispose of herself, so she doesn't let him. And yet, even on the borders of consciousness, the drunk does find a certain spot, always, he whacks the woman on the head, at the same time ridding her of itchy vermin, that's his calling. Him of all people. He's the best thing that could happen to her, he thinks, if he examines himself and her without prejudice. If he's already on the spot, he might as well kill her, because she could have recognized him, who, apart from her, would begrudge him the pleasure. Everything is pleasure, says the television, and this woman in any case loved her figure and her hairstyle more than any human being. But ultimately she was made and nourished for just one man, whom by chance she has already found. Am I not right? This boyfriend is exactly right for her. In future her mother will forbid Gabi to go out without saying where she's going, she must tell her or her boyfriend, that's what she resolves in the course of this very nervously eaten breakfast, in which she pays attention not only to her stomach but also to her inner mother's voice. Later she'll cycle to her shift, sew brassieres in a factory, which lies in no-man's land, or already on enemy territory (the conflicting emotions of women: child or work, enmity or servitude, fried eggs or scrambled eggs. It is certainly hard to decide. Fried or scrambled, one wouldn't like to be either, but that's something for the television, where people pour out their being and then don't want to wipe it up afterwards. They wouldn't even have any time to do so, because someone is already sobbing and throwing their arms around one's neck and begging for forgiveness in front of millions of people for something or nothing at all. Well. We're already in the picture. It isn't reality, in it we would still feel the hand that tears us from this life, whereas on TV one just sees everything, it doesn't hurt) between two small towns, a small town and a village to be precise. In the latter there's only a bus stop, nothing else that could attract people, who in turn should attract other people with foundation garments, corsets, and bras. Things like that always come in handy so that humankind doesn't die out, because that's what women have their bodies for, usually square-built like a honeycomb, and the bees have finally gone. How does one put a shape into a body again? The last but one model can be had at giveaway prices and so already sold out. No, we don't have your cup size. Perhaps you can roll around the floor until you're flat, then cup B will fit you. But this line is also finished, I've just noticed. Ask again in half an hour. So now women are supposed to worry about the underfloor protection, no, the floor protection, as well, so that their body parts can be decently presented. We've got several sizes on offer and recently even in-between sizes. Until the very new sizes arrive and the cutting out machines have been converted. Throughout Europe people are now to be remeasured, because their bodies have changed in recent years. That encourages me, like many writers I'm all too hasty in considering the business of creation as settled, and wanted to devote myself to it in peace and quiet. And now I have to look at it anew again! What a bore. The women working here aren't the dregs, on the contrary, this is sought after, well paid work, plenty of overtime. Mommy is a business and looks at her children. Why are her children so beautiful? Because they are who they've always been, only earlier they didn't know that one can make oneself beautiful, they believed that beauty is not something made but something one receives from nature. That would be fine, we would then only have to persuade nature to come over here as well and do its work on us. But it doesn't do it. No wonder that its stones smash us to pieces, if we give it such insoluble tasks: Making people and then making them beautiful on top of that. Everyone else has to go to the perfume department, so why do we make such a fuss. In every small-town self-service drugstore you can find more beauty than a film star can use up in a lifetime. Nature tries to settle down, but it can't always be the setting for a diamond ring of at least half a karat.
Our Gabi doesn't rely on nature, she has seen too many mean tricks played by nature in this district, without much sweat, but costing us a great deal of sweat. Gabi has accumulated a whole collection of eye shadows, mascaras, foundations, and lipsticks, nowadays it's pure stupidity and ignorance if four-year-olds don't paint their fingernails, but they do it because there's always someone else who has started, and so they do it, too: keeping pace with us and our relaxed behavior. There's always someone else, but one doesn't like to acknowledge them. After all, that's why we go to nursery, to remain forever young and still look the same later on. Until the undeferrable duties come, which take up so much time that we don't have time when we need it. So they don't do like the swallows, who instead industriously build their homes against old stable walls. So they really have not stolen their homes, the poor industrious little birds. The work they have to put in. Children can go where they want, madame, and your child is already almost sweet sixteen, for the Country Police a case like any other, in fact not a case at all yet, just wait another one or two days, we know all about it, a young runaway, an item in the local edition of the newspaper, of interest only to the inhabitants of this village or the neighboring villages. Even in the county town not everyone knows the sweet name of your little place, and you really want to know for certain? Where your daughter is? For the rest of us a quite different caliber of person evades the cameras, photographic agencies, and educational institutions, for example Princess Caroline with her newborn daughter from Vocklabruck Hospital. They escape just like that, a source of concern or of fun, depending on what's in demand at the time: No, I'm mistaken, it's always for fun, yes, we do something, and we do it properly from the start, two or more together at a time. It's well known where they all come from, they are children of the country, of the country disco, where around midnight the sons of the carpenters (and joiners) and the daughters who are at last going to see some drilling, get undressed and show each other their juicy organic pork fillets (hand-reared! No need to stand on the grill and fall through, it's better on the new beige fitted carpet!), because they know what they want: big city life, without having to go there. There are no distinctions at all anymore, as far as entertainments are concerned, it's big and beautiful everywhere where we are, wherever we are. It would be a great help to us, if we could be everywhere at the same time. And here it is already, your entertainment! They nevertheless feel, I don't know why, constrained and want to get away from here as quickly as possible, and wherever they end up, they get nothing for themselves, the children of the villages, nothing, that someone else hasn't got already. And there's even a legitimate claim on nothing, and it is inevitably made, when even just the first pink nipple flares up in the stroboscopic techno light and immediately fades away in a wet mouth. Chunk chunk chunk hammer the bass lines. And the sons of the Alps carefully filled up to the permitted measure pull their height of fashion trousers, which have already penetrated the most remote mountain valley, but not by themselves, they were too slack for that, there always had to be someone inside them, whom one doesn't know, down below the hips, open, belt buckle! Open up! Where is thy sting, I mean: your tongue? Show what you've got under there! and they show cocks and tits as God made them, mostly not very carefully, once again there were too many people working in the shop who wanted to grab some for themselves, in the branch of a gigantic megastore. Right, God, you won't get any thanks for this fourteen-year-old already having droopy tits like full vacuum cleaner bags, to make up for that everything else about her is rounded and bulging, oh no, now she's puking at my feet, and now someone's falling down right into the puke, in a moment he's going to drive off again in his car, relieved. My opinion is, it would have been better if God had put in some overtime and created something better. Something beautiful like a mountain, a valley, a lion, and a Jaguar car and a lake and the like and so much music besides, rather too much than too little, always, no, not this lake, don't claim someone else's glory for yourself, someone else made the lake, but as far as I'm concerned, you, God, could have done it much more often. But the lake was made by humans, but I don't like them either anymore, says God, after all these years they're no longer up to date. They're not the right size anymore, and they don't look right either. I'll go and get the new magazine, so that I can do it better. The difference is really not so great, I do believe that on this point I really am right this time. The people in town and country are becoming more alike at terrific speed, in some countries there is no country anymore, people read the same magazines, and they all wear the same things, there are just two companies that make all the stuff, and soon there'll just be one, which will assume so many names. It is human fate, I've now forgotten what, and some wear it earlier than others, so then it's also over and done with earlier or out of fashion. What counts ultimately is always only all the fine, good flesh, which, since one can't eat it, is again and again and then once more thrown onto the counters in the bars and is downgraded and dressed down, if it doesn't measure up to our ideas. Even the lingerie factory is more generous to us women, who need something different from a man. The bodies have been puffed up in various places by a sensation-seeking press, which shows no consideration for feelings, and feelings are just the spice of bodies. Afterwards at any rate one should take the taxi home, that's healthier for everyone, particularly for the taxi driver.
There go a middle-aged woman, who once gave birth to Gabi, a cheerful teenager, that's exactly what she is, like all the others, a young person, who preferred to be with someone else, no matter who it was, rather than alone, and a young lad, who at the moment is still going to a technical secondary school, hopping from electricity pole to electricity pole (when they've gone rotten, they're butchered and new ones are planted, then new men, whom the country still needed, clamber about on them like squirrels, a Mr. Janisch Jr. among them, he too already the father of a schoolboy, young as he is. A final squirt of milk, milked from a jolly evening in the dance hall, and after that: intermission, then close-down and curtains), and both together are sticking up notices that show Gabi's face, a black-and-white photocopy of an original star photo, yes indeed, that's what it was selected for, but was unfortunately returned by the addressee, and now everyone can read it whether he wants to or not. These photos can't be avoided. It's afternoon, the sun is already decently warm. The thumbtacks bore zealously into the tarred wood of the poles, which bear it patiently and with heads held high. At last they are important, not just for light and telephone calls (both essential to a tragedy! In a good light something even worse could happen, and one would see everything quite clearly and certainly immediately pass it on. So we've got everything here, when on TV a man would like to make up with his girlfriend and both of them cry cry cry so loudly that there's almost not enough power for it). Gabi's mother and her boyfriend knew right away: Something's not right. Our Gabi doesn't simply disappear like that, without telling us where she wanted to disappear to. Life is a crime story, it's unbelievable, all the things that can happen to a person, mostly it's little things, but that's just what one has to have an eye for, because at a second glance people are completely uninteresting. Well, not to me, I live off their diversity, which makes for more work, however. I'm not allowed to declare anyone boring, and if I do, then I have to explain at length why. And why do these two, mother and future son-in-law, have such a bad feeling? Already early this morning. They walk along the route which Gabi usually takes, whether by bus or on her bicycle, even stop car drivers and ask them. The pair of them will end up going on foot to the county town, where the building firm, Gabi's master, is spread out under the vault of heaven on the greenfield sites, which border all our towns, even the least among them, yes, those above all! Only there do the customer and employee parking lots cost nothing, because the ground didn't cost anything anyway. Why stand there at all? Dusty road, paper-strewn hard shoulder for dead animals, I don't want to write everything down again and again, that happens here, but I must. From time to time a wreck is towed away. Injured people have to be cleared away, too, they can't simply be left lying there. They leave their blood there, part of it, and the modesty of their possessions, the half-open handbag, keys, well-worn purse, little lucky charm attached, a little teddy bear, at least it's still alive. Yes, when one drives a car, one has to rely on always looking, straight ahead, but also look in the rear-view mirror from time to time, please don't forget!, and one should trust one's eyes, when a truck comes round the bend doing sixty, it means it!, when it comes up from behind, big as ten water buffalo, and takes one on its horns before one has even heard it snorting. The country roads here are blood roads, and the landscape is the circulation. That's why we're always going round in circles and not getting anywhere, because we couldn't read the map.
Now the flowers go on flowering. No one takes them for a walk without killing them first. But dear hands are already waiting and are held open, perhaps there's a new piece of jewelry as a bonus. She never said anything to me about problems, says Gabi's boyfriend to the Country Police, who would rather follow new paths in traffic surveillance than implacably pursue people on their old well-beaten trails right into their most intimate spheres. One has to catch them in good time, before they go missing or have been so squashed on the road that they can't even be recognized anymore. At the moment local traffic sections are being set up step by step in individual districts which were equipped with the necessary equipment-including unmarked cars! Yes, indeed, just you watch out, something that looks just like you and your familiar little boat through life, which you get into punctually early every morning in order to bring it to life with a divine spark and a whiff of gasoline from the atomiser, careful: A rapacious wolf in a BMW can be hiding there! Since 1991 completely new possibilities also arise from the possible use of laser guns to measure speed. There's one already, who flashes and is not God. It can't be, protest immediately! What do you need a light for, you know very well that you were driving too fast. Big Chief Nimble Forefinger also doesn't need much more than this one finger for the camera gun to achieve a convincing (and lasting, there's a photo as a memento!) success, and the target is always you. So why the gun, we can easily make a rough estimate, that one was doing sixty. No no, it's not so simple nowadays. It was doing seventy-five. The gadget made such an effort. We want to know exactly, and the legality of all measures of criminal prosecution, which were admissible until now, also remain effective when the new police security law comes into force, so pull yourself together! A pretty throat, a pretty pharynx are soon squeezed tight or torn open with no other tool but the mysterious eye, which finds the area, which death particularly likes to visit for a picnic for two, even if only for a couple of seconds, but that's enough for him. Yes, this is a good place to live, thinks death, this flesh is still new or as good as new. It wasn't expecting me, well, so I'm coming unannounced, and no one knows anything about it. So I can easily come again, since no one saw me the first time. The next time perhaps I'll even come in broad daylight, which I don't need to be afraid of. I wasn't caught the first time, although police patrols with two officers each were in the area providing minimum cover! Luckily death, which was informed in person, knows where each patrol is poking around: I'm afraid of no one and always do the right thing, he says, or he can do it another way- whatever I do, it's always right, I am my own court of last resort, so there's no right of appeal, there's no higher court. I see how anxiety takes hold of you. You're asking yourself, why does something exist with which there can be no bargaining, you even bargain in the electrical shop and in the builder's yard, even with the country policemen!, and really do get a lot of things cheaper than you'd thought, just think of your new garden grill, the demonstration piece on which the demonstrations left no trace. Me, you'll even get for free, but in return I make everything you bought beforehand completely worthless. So it's better if you don't buy it at all, you're better off buying a candle, a few schillings, it'll be worth it, to someone, just to you! Well, who will do you this good turn, I don't see anyone who would do it.
Please have a bit more fun while you still can, so that you get to know even more people who will take care of something like that for you. But unfortunately people never listen when they're having fun, even if you bawl in their ear, they're having so much fun. A way of speaking that's meanwhile out of date, this passage should in any case be deleted, I think, but then the whole thing will be too short. The cries of passion, this bawling, with which the genitals, our subjects, distend as if they were frogs and were now being pumped up even further, almost as much as their owners already are, well, we still have mastery over our bodies, don't we?, so these cries should be adjusted to contemporary usage, isn't that so? So, e.g., you can easily dispense with the meaningless courtesy of having to address a country policeman as officer. And then when he forces his cock, lovelessly pulled out of the trouser leaves wrapped around him, between your legs, sweeping aside with his hands the troublesome thighs, and drags you, preferably even before you've grasped who this is, into the bushes, hitting you on the back of the head so that you are involuntarily forced to lower it and keep your mouth shut, because you can't yet speak German well, the language of our country, the country policeman's thoughts are already somewhere quite different, with someone who stands as solid as a building and isn't thrashing about all the time like you, then, then it's quite all right to call him by his first name and say Kurt to him, where on earth is he? Where on earth are we? Perhaps you haven't even met him yet? That's just too bad. Then you can also go alone into the booth with him, and not to cast your vote, which I wouldn't do if I were you.