Grand, wild water, you fall with little head held high, even if you've already been tamed! Here, where you're just foaming, you haven't even been chlorinated yet for your domestic users, who in the city stand under the shower and want to drink you as well (but they prefer to drink something better, stronger). You tumble down from the slopes of the High Alps, which is where we are now, to get away from us and do something useful, perhaps also undertake something entertaining, one thing at a time, work first, then pleasure, cool and clear, free to your home. The limestone High Alps of Lower Austria and Styria can fall down without you as far as I'm concerned, they wouldn't know what to do with you, but no, that's not quite right, it wasn't here, but right next door: A whole lake together with the shoreside trees disappeared in the limestone mountain range! One gulp and gone, as if the lake couldn't get along by itself, as if it wanted to belong to someone else, to the mountain, a big lake, yes, it made progress, only in a backward facing direction, inside, away from the astonished visitors. And it took away all the gawking trees standing around as well, so that nothing would be missing in its subterranean mountain dungeon. The visitors were left behind. You sweet water you, you are gathered up by the steep forest roads, the inclines, the plastic slopes, the rocks, at first you look enchanting, transparent, glittering, then you turn to mud, become soil, while we, along with you, fall into the bottomless limestone pits, but only into the little ones. Here there are no dolinas, which could eat up whole lakes. You have to go further south for that. Water: You come, yes, this, too, along with all the soil into the houses of the area, in order to take a look at what you've been missing when you decided to remain wild. But they upset your plans there (and you had a sparkling water as well, didn't you? Yes. I ordered it, but it didn't come), when they contained you and sent you down the pipes, with no message except purity itself, for which you first had to be caught and held tight. How pleased they were at first, to have got hold of you in the middle of the alpine pastures, you're always trying to run away. But soon you've become a plain fact, which one can also eat, if one still can't grab hold of it; so of course you were contained, so that, even if very diluted, like all truths here, you could be believed nevertheless.
Here, at the start of the snow line, and soon he will spiral even higher up the mountain, a man in a brightly colored track-suit is racing along, as if he were flowing himself, a shadow on stones, away from the eyes of the world. If you ask me: No one will very easily outdistance him, after four miles he's still running quite easily. That's typical again: A restless man who can hardly keep his secrets locked up inside his skin, to make up for that his clothes are a good fit, and they fit him like a second skin. His vigorous ambition, I like it. Yet he is not one of those who want something good in the world. A spirit, who's always negative, except when he sometimes says yes. Fine. His constant dissatisfaction, I like that too. So I put him together for myself and now pass judgment on the result. To each his own. What would satisfy him, now that I don't like so much. So I pass judgment, and my judgment is harsh. He constantly wants to get something for nothing, even if it's a whole house, I certainly believe that. I merely hope the one he has intended for subjugation, whoever it is, will play along when the time comes. He's made a contact, which will be important for his future, and he's not going to let go of it again: Something big can come of it: The obedient oppress the submissive. Neither side will get anywhere. This man would even pit himself against the water, if he could find it, but the water has finally been shut up down below, it is itself a very large place, and it flows away, whereas the man is looking for his limits. Nobody is going to show them to him. Wait a minute, now I see the boundaries, they're made of steel, look like railings, and they are transportable. He didn't set them down himself, the country policeman, his colleagues in the capital did that in front of parliament, to protect the demonstration-free area which the representatives of the people have raised up against the people in order to show the latter: You're not part of us, but don't worry, we'll represent you anyway. The country policeman's commanding officer announces to this mercenary, so often late for duty, in bitter words, that overtime can no longer be paid, because the regional government doesn't have any money left over for it, and Mr. Janisch receives these bad tidings with apparent subservience. Another house less, in three hundred years at the earliest he will have one less. I like that too. The fact that he can accept that. In other respects the man definitely has to be tamed, but no one can do that to his desires. He would need support, because he can't find them, his own limits, and goes unhurriedly onto the wrong track of his being. Well, he won't find the water either anymore, we've put that under the earth. The earth a pair of lips that has received it. The man in his persistent angry darkness would not want to lay himself down in that. The water is already there, no place is reserved for him anywhere. The ground even swallows up houses, think of Lassing Mine, which disappeared, and the consequences! The house, almost all of it slipped inside the earth, you can still partly see the part that's poking out of the pit, if the people living round about let you, you can even see the window boxes usual in the area together with their colorful inhabitants, whose heads are meanwhile sadly drooping. You can still see the very tops of the furniture pieces, dear guests, toys, junk, stuff accumulated over time, but once again no one has time to water the flowers. To do that one would have to leap thirty feet and be able to breathe in mud. The locals don't want any people who find catastrophes beautiful, but now they have a place themselves to which visitors can travel at any time, just to take a look. And they wouldn't even find this place by themselves, they would have to look at the map and ask the locals, because there, where there is supposed to be something, nothingness has stopped over, to be drunk down eternally at the break of dawn. Only in a more solid house could he feel safe in the long term, thinks the man, despite everything that can happen to houses and that can also happen to one with people. We don't need to make any allowances for people who have disappeared, we won't see them again. Right now the country policeman is planning an extra storeroom in the cellar, under the stairs. If he takes something away here and instead builds something over there, a radically rustic cellar room, for example (the bones of the deceased could easily decorate the walls), then it'll work out all right, and even if it were a hollow space, a nothing, which also needs walls, of course, otherwise it wouldn't be nothing, otherwise the whole house wouldn't exist, which is itself a hollow space and only, like the clearing in the forest, becomes one by acquiring limits, consisting of itself, we place an order for them in wood or stone, and then we sit down inside and make ourselves comfortable. Could that be due to the fact that this man in his intimidating loneliness has long ago lost his limits and would like to meet someone who points them out to him again? And this time they should enclose a larger area than before, please. We would be happy if we could see his face, the face of the country policeman, for once, and not only have it described. Or is he himself the drawer of limits, is there something about himself he wants to forget? What does he need so that he no longer hides his light under a bushel, but can forever cast it across a well-furnished room? If the room remains quiet, the light will always strike him right between the eyes and then fall on the Persian carpet, just where the cigarette burnt a hole. After all, we got the carpet so cheaply because of the hole. We, however, with our sense of legitimacy, don't have to go so far at all, to find our limits. They are frightful, luckily they are as a consequence watched over by armed guards. It's enough if we run for three hours till our tongue is hanging out. But for the half-naked marathon man five hours aren't enough either, then we, he and I, read the newspaper, which doesn't want strangers to cross our borders, unless they book hotel rooms or find, somewhat cheaper, shelter on our farms together with the animals. This last three-quarters of a line, but only that, not one letter more, I can't afford to give anything away, I dedicate to the poor man from Sri Lanka, who yesterday was fished out of the Danube at Hamburg as the sole survivor, the remaining fugitives capsized with their rubber dinghy and drowned and have disappeared. Heat-seeking cameras have been specially developed to keep the borders under surveillance. People who are looking for shelter can be identified in the view-finder, even when they're lying flat on the ground. On these human carpets, at least they don't have any burn holes, because in this case we've burnt the whole carpet, we practice our fawning manners, which we require for those strangers who are to be stroked, slaughtered, and gutted. The rest get a good smack around the face and are then eaten by our dear rivers, so they don't cause us any extra work. So here no one slips on carpets of human flesh anymore, people are now enclosed like our springs and thrown into grated refuse containers. And then if they throw a fit, a lid gets shoved on top as well. We once again know everything that we forgot about humanity, when we looked at animals and they looked back at us. And we know even more, when we have looked at these strangers through these heat-seeking cameras and they haven't looked at us, because they don't have such cameras. Indeed. Even when they're lying flat on the ground, the strangers, we can still see them: Aha, so there it is, our own, sole border, we'll find it all right, once we have moved it. At least when our partner plays around, we'll certainly be able to show him our limit then.
The country policeman, whom we actually wanted to describe before we slunk off behind a tree, has a special watch just for running and a pulse rate gauge and a solo gauge that cost a lot of money, oh no, that's not true, they're presents from a woman! With that he could feed one of these poor souls for a week, if he's keen on watches, and knows how to prepare them. The country policeman is informed about that, and his information is very modest: Once the water was still here, right below me. He knew his way around this geo-information system, this hiker and sportsman. This man of the law, his own law of course. Soil, water, forest were indispensable, like him they have an extremely complex range of duties and must not be mistaken as to what they should do when. Now unfortunately we've lost nature; when we were looking for it, it was a handy opportunity to set things right at the same time. The water belongs in the ground, the forest belongs on the ground, the water doesn't belong on top of the ground, and the forest doesn't belong in the water, otherwise the water overflows, I mean, comes over us. I constantly have to make such decisions with respect to politics, economics, and extraction techniques, with very far-reaching consequences, when I want to say something about nature. There's no other way of putting it, because nature doesn't exist anymore, so why should it suddenly come back? Just so that I can look at it a bit more closely this time? Nature is the opposite of something that has something to say to us, although it very often pleases us. That's why we now have to express it somehow, so that everything really does come out. At present nature is nowhere to be seen. Please hand me your efficient planning and decision-making outline, on this basis I shall then be able to write something entirely new about nature, should you in all seriousness expect that of me.
As a child the country policeman sometimes biked along the stream down in the valley with his father, while the water comfortingly bubbled up from the depths, only just arrived from the mountain heights, and still with the vigor of its origins fairly high up hopped over the stones, its own work, because all water comes out of itself, so it belongs to itself and no one else, and so we have stolen and used it, haven't we? or not? And the son also walked around with his father, I can still remember it myself. His father was friendly, sometimes even kind and protective like a hut up in the Alps, unlike the weather house, one never knows where one is with it, sometimes the girl is outside, then the boy, and it's impossible to decide which of the two one likes better.
There comes the nice thought, that one of them sits down on one's face with their naked buttocks, the legs hanging left and right over one's ears like a pair of cherries, and then sometimes one thinks involuntarily: rather the boy. There's more to him. Perhaps the character of the father, also a country policeman, was a bit lacking in color. If we're talking about water: To the son the father appeared dull, as if nothing recognizable could be reflected in him, as if his feelings had been impoverished under the pressure of his advancement and the constant performance of his duty, with which the former small farmer's son had to prove himself. Although everything was always there for the son when he needed it, it works like this: Sometimes pay no attention to the child, then again be strict with him, which is only fair, since for a long time one ignores the child whom one was raising up, until then it falls down the cellar stairs. Keep a close eye on the child, if possible frequently step on his toes so that his legs grow heavy. That will do him a great deal of good, because he will be able to recognize at an early age the difference in his father's behavior, in accordance with the Domestic Animal Husbandry Index. Behavior is fair to animals, if the following points have been addressed: possibility of movement, ground conditions, social contact, hutch or coop climate (air! light! God!) and intensity of care (teacher! cane! stone! scissors!). Points are awarded, and the score should really be higher than 25, if the child is to sit the test and his elders, who, as the word says, are older, are to pass it. As he walks past, the father nods absent-mindedly to you, so, he's not going to hit you, at least not for the next ten minutes. Perhaps he'll hit your mother, because he likes doing that more, but not you. Not yet, this time. Perhaps again the next time. Let's just wait and see. The father has died meanwhile, of cancer. Wasn't he still there, only yesterday, when he had his son read the signs of the shops in town as a reading exercise? The boy looks at what's displayed in the window, then he says the name of the shop. Wrong. But if one can't see it, it doesn't exist, does it? Even forests, though not of course those with a primary welfare function, because they are supposed to protect us, ward off dangers by crushing people, settlements, and buildings, which did not comply with official provisions or prohibitions, to pulp. Yes, they come down in person, the forests, if they've got into a rage. Who would have thought it of them? They're not sorry to make you suffer, when your house was standing on this spot just a moment ago! Was the father not nice to his son, who almost jumped as high as the father's parting when the latter deliberately stood on the boy's toes? The son should please raise his feet when he's walking! Not shuffle along like that on the gravel of the inn garden. When after all one only comes here once a month as a treat. If you think that's nice, then you might just as well regard the struggling bushes in my front garden as embellishments.
The father did well by his son, yet it was always as if he remained in a dazzling, far-off other place, blurred, and that's the way it should be. The child should look gratefully at a photograph of the father to discover his whereabouts: We've moved. New address-Row 14, plot 9. Then we don't need the child for one or two years, because his father is with God. It would be an unheard of event to be able to climb up a ladder for a piece of cheesecake or some other effeminate confection, for a man that's normally a trifling task, a trivial matter. By that I mean to say no more than, and why didn't I say it right away: Every child wants to admire his father, no matter for what, but one doesn't even get business support, no matter for what. The mother has to take care of the rest, that's more than I or anyone else could otherwise ever forget. In the case which unfortunately we have to deal with here (because it won't become healthy of its own accord, now I'll just try a root treatment), the mother was a secret red wine drinker, like so many women in this area. Where the waters don't simply briskly come marching along, but are always plunging down, as I already said, it's not so easy to catch hold of them, then there the wine is allowed to flow freely. The cheapest kind. So, we'll just keep this double measure in the kitchen bench, and then sit down. If we need it and can still stand up, we've got it right away, we just have to raise the lid. Surely our mother will still be capable of rifling her own supplies! The cupboard is big and full enough, particularly if one's seeing double, to open up, so that the whole wine in its bottle-green dress, like a lizard, can slip into her hands and in a flowing movement disappear into a mouth, always the same one. What distinguishes the mother-son relationship? A close relationship would be distinguished by warm-heartedness, understanding and other positive aspects, if such a relationship could be established. Now I have to step back a little, because ignorant as I am I only know about mother-daughter relations, and they, too, are not exactly caressed by the rising sun. At any rate they don't give me rosy cheeks. As a side-dish for everything, except unfortunately all too rarely above us: the sky of an indescribable blue, with sharply defined clouds moving across it and reflected in open, dragonfly-like, gleaming window leaves. A moment ago maternal nodding off drew streaks across the panes, although it's some years ago; stop, there's someone still moving there! I don't believe it! Mommy, you've wet yourself and made your body dirty while you were bedridden, says her son more or less to himself. He had meant not to think about it. To really look for something like it, he hadn't meant to do that either. And, because he seems to need to, he continues: I hope life will one day carry me on to someone who's worth it, someone who is at least as precious as the beautiful women coming from nowhere in the l'Oreal advertisements. Then again some women are not like mommy. They are more like climbing plants, which cover the wall of a house, hopefully their own, and if one only asks them firmly enough and fertilizes them decently, then they yield a crop, and I stand underneath and catch all the fruit, thinks the country policeman.
His father had then removed his mother's soiled underwear, he had shaken his mother out of her panties like refuse out of a bag, the chicken bones are sticking out in all directions-the bag can be used again, not the refuse. Stop, the other way round, away with the urine, the shit, and as always everything that stinks is between the legs. Can they not find another resting place, those two, which would let us, at their center, be cozily all human, because there at least we would be allowed to be so? That's how it was. And then his mother got clipped round the ears again because she was constantly shitting herself. The flourishing of this woman, the wife of a police colonel, don't forget, seems for an eternity before her actual end to have consisted of dying, and unfortunately God/father, very much against his will, should have put an end much earlier to the lying there in bed above me. You try living on a dunghill and doing exercises at the same time! No one in the village suspected anything of the drinking campaign of the country policeman's mother against herself. Or everyone knew it, because they all do it themselves, and if they haven't got the time for it, their closest family members have to do it for them. I know nothing, but say it anyway. I can still see her now, forcing her tiny great-grandson to get into the pedal boat with her, yes, exactly, Patrick, I've just remembered his name again: all alone with his bawling great-granny, screeching abuse, who at this moment also starts to rock the boat like mad. Something terrible could have happened on another, deeper lake, Lake Erlauf, which would have hardly felt this little burden, but swallowed it nevertheless, it hardly bears thinking about, so I'll spare myself the thought, too. Nothing happened, did it: An elderly woman, a child, and how quickly they're gone again! Yes, this stretch of water, this favorite place close to the Mariazell Mother of God, where one can learn sailing and even diving, wanted to do something itself for once and swallow a little boat as well as a whole lot of pee. It's surrounded by the High Alps and the high mountain springs, and in return it's allowed to eat something from time to time, I just made that up, and the lake would perhaps contradict me if it could. After the victims had been recovered, the lake would still look beautiful in the newspaper photo, twinkle playfully at us and immediately tempt new strangers, who are supposed to become friends.
In between, however, she always really pulled herself together, she tried to at least, the mother of Kurt Janisch, I have to admit that, one has to be fair. And that's something God would never be; on the desolate plain, in the deep fir forest, on the mountain peaks and in the valley bottoms they all drink, why only the men? No, the women do it, too, but one wouldn't so readily believe it of them. Well. Ever since, all these years, Kurt, the son, wants to build his own paradise, for safety's sake here on earth. It's true that one can save oneself from awkward situations by swimming, assuming one can and just happens to be in the water, yes, swimming, if you have to, but one can't get very far ahead on life's hard path with it. And only what one does oneself is a job well done. In principle he's always been a teetotaller, the country policeman. But once doesn't count, and so this principle should no longer apply to him. And when it happened, that another well-known local drinker chum (yes indeed, in the school of life she sat right next to the mother of Kurt Janisch, take a look, there in the last row but one! And the other rows are almost all occupied by her friends) in the final stages of a liver value-decline lent out her house for a life annuity, and did so to a Mr. Ernst Janisch, whom she knew personally-I really can't remember ever having heard a single cry for help from her since her fiance failed to return from the last war, and that really is very long ago. So country policeman Kurt Janisch, who helped this crooked deal along a bit on the quiet, stuffed his son together with the latter's little clan, three people in total, into this old lady's padded envelope of a house, stuffed them in with a woman who, stamping like a whole herd of animals, walked and still walks, night after night, and anywhere in the house, whenever she happened to think it necessary to control all kinds of evil living creatures, and does so right up to the present day, yes indeed, she's still alive, she just keeps going! Is it getting too complicated for you with all these old ladies? Don't worry! If you know one, you know them all. Their husbands hammered away till their hearts came to a stop, and the wives boozed, till their reason came to a stop, because it had trickled out of them. In any case no further inquiries may be made about the life annuitant, so that she doesn't end up in a home and her own home at the last moment ends up in the hands of strangers. But the creatures she's looking for always reliably disappear as soon as they've been caught, that is, of course, only when the old dear pours water, flour, sugar or fat or whatever onto the glowing cooker. Only the spilled and buried memories should never be awoken, those we gladly abandon each time to the fire, when they rise up and want to cook something, an ancient passion, for example, which has long ago ceased to be true. Fire gets rid of everything quickly and cleanly, even things which are not there at all. Only our relatives should stay a while, although only in our memory, and then the worms and maggots, who are allowed to gnaw the bones in peace in the endless mine underground, get them. The relatives in their friendly earthen shell, into which they have been thrown, are somehow not quite as dead as all those burnt almost without trace, don't you think? I think that's the way Christ wanted it, and then he founded our state so that the people there can be dead while they're still living, which makes him especially happy, all things, all people belong to him, before and after. They already want to have their death in life. Jesus believes it's all a performance just for him alone, what a fabulous event! In fact there's only one who's truly and madly for him, an archbishop by the name of Krenn. God promises eternal life, and of course the people here go on living every day as if it were forever. That's why they've stashed their savings bank books. Well done. Soon they'll all have to bear names, the dear books, nothing at all can be done anonymously anymore. Well done. That too.
The men in the country policeman's family, including the half portion, our Patrick, are on top of it, no flies on them. They still remember all the fun and games from great-granny, but of course when she joined the family the son's wife naturally first had to get used to creatures appearing to a person outside of wood, meadow and TV, real beasts that aren't there at all. But they weren't on TV yesterday either, so where are they coming from?. In future I'll say nothing about great-grandson Patrick, one less!, because he's already got headphones in his ears, a TV tuned into a space channel in front of his eyes and the door locked. Soon he's going to hear, know, and understand better music, and follow it until the car, in which he's allowed to take a lift, will have wrapped itself around a roadside tree. Today sadly he's still too young for that. To accompany all that the old lady wears, in all the abundance of her house, a not exactly impressive negligee. She doesn't need to. Because only in a house is one really protected, outside one can go for a walk naked and be chased back inside again, for arms and legs and the rest aren't nice enough to be presented to the public; only for the price of a house does one voluntarily face such a sight. So, the rolling thunder, the piercing flash of lighting are on no account allowed to drive in here and stay, as if this were their garage. That is, if one has a lightning conductor, which one should please no longer connect to the water pipe, I don't know why either. It's not allowed.
Now at last it's today again, that's how I want it. Can't you hear?, now one only feels the water's soft approach, like that of the mother who delivers a blow unexpectedly, while one still has one's hand in her purse or one's own fly, a game that one really wanted to play all by oneself; yes, the water's almost noiseless soles, they absolutely don't need to be the latest model from the shop window, with bold streamlining letting fly, they're always on the move, tirelessly!, the main thing is, downhill, but it doesn't see the light of day anymore, the water. It remains hidden from our eyes. There are also tiny offsprings for the hikers and their water bottles, clumsily feeding into little metal pipes, under which was shoved, lovelessly and with no sense of proportion, a hollowed-out trunk of unprecedented ugliness. Tired trickling, two little corpses, wood and spring, which flow into one another and into the bottles or straight into mouths. Let us not be a fearful band, let us be strong, proud, yes of course, it's my pleasure, right away!, whom one must involuntarily follow, as this animal, a fox, follows the call of the wild. But one cannot also expect the animal to clean up its wilderness itself. That or something like it is what the country policeman's daughter-in-law might be thinking, as she scrubs the hotplate and screws the diapers tight around the old woman, so that the woman doesn't immediately pull them off again. There's a strong smell of burning, of urine and of shit, the dear old sisters whom we know already, they're my favorite relatives. As proof of his inability to do small and unimportant things, the man presents his wife as his partner, who is supposed, if you please, to deal with all of that quickly and odor-free, what else is she and the drugstore there for. The partner should already consider what and how much we're going to have later on, namely the whole little house, plus land, that's how it's put down in the good books at the notary in town, and in the beginning was the word, fortunately not mine, you should be thankful for that. Now that would have been something! Now I've characterized love, I think, as well as I could, love, in which women always think they have to do all the talking. I've got nothing more to say about it now. This time, in a solemn ceremony, I'm going to skip all that sighing and complaining that goes along with love and that I bought especially, no one else is going to give me a break. I'd prefer if something as complicated as love doesn't come near me again, let it come to the beautiful and the young. It's only fifteen years or so since it called, please, not again!, I've got nothing in the house. What I know about it really is enough, and it'll be enough for you, too, if you stretch out your arms, to ward off the brutes, whom no one has cut down to size yet (or who have come to nothing), who want to enter you at the wrong end, from art, from piano playing, from the CD player. I and another woman were always so hard working and then that happened. Now we're both older than then, when we were young. Who wants to blame someone if first he wants a house to get to know himself and find out what he's actually capable of, of murder, of roughcasting walls, of sanding down floors, of painting kitchen cupboards or putting up new wallpaper. As if one had to shake bones instead of plums from a fruit tree, which is theoretically and practically impossible, so day after day one has to exert oneself in vain before finally reaping the fruits of one's actions. But one mustn't go too close either, otherwise it falls on one's head. But one has to go up close nevertheless, otherwise one doesn't get anything. Property is the only thing that counts, we are so happy that we got to know it in good time, and that, even if not entirely of its own accord, it has promised to stay with us. But we do have to feed it decently. Property, I know, I know: There are some who don't like the food, and they want to go away again, or the neighborhood doesn't suit them. Sometimes we lose our heads at the mere sight of property, we're quite beside ourselves, how beautiful this house is and the one over there, too, we'd like it even more, and soon we ourselves don't count anymore, we only count it, PROPERTY.
But now swiftly to the other side, to the opposing party, who wants to be loved for her own sake. That's her hobby. What does she tell us, the lady, who plays the piano and is serious about it? This is what she says: My love, you can nail a mirror to the wall over there, if you like, in the middle of the furniture, which you will additionally choose with premeditation. But please don't go! You can nail the whole house to yourself, but please don't go! I would otherwise have to prepare myself to become lonely. My affection would have to change to disaffection, and it wouldn't like to do that. All my life savings are in this house, I accumulated them so that I can make myself comfortable one day, when I am no longer young. Now the time has come. I have personally and laboriously raised the house, first when breaking it in and then at the topping-out ceremony, hasn't it turned out well? What am I pleading for now? I'm pleading, don't go! Take the house, but you: stay! At least give me the address where the house will be put up, once you have taken it! Because I have one or more catastrophic relationships with one or more awful men behind me, and now I want to be unruly one last time, thank you, and sincerely beg you, don't go! Otherwise I've got nothing else left. You can also sell my dear porcelain dolls I've been collecting for years, some of them presents from my old piano teacher, I must call her again some time, but I don't feel like it, I only feel for you, so you can sell all the dear things if you like, because, as you've been saying for a long time, they only take up space, which afterwards you will make up with me. If only you stay here, by my side, you're surely not a man who's afraid of relationships? No, that won't be you, because in this magazine it says that it would express itself quite differently, and you never express yourself at all. You surely won't be the kind of man who admits to having made mistakes and talks about a shared future without there being one? No, that won't be you either. If you like, it's all right by me if you break through that inviting wall over there, it seems, just like me, to have virtually invited you to do so, it seems, like me, to be calling to you: I would like nothing more than to cave in, and if I survive that, I would like to marry you, and then I'll be so happy that on the other hand I could die. We lonely people also like to flee into seclusion, but we are then so happy when, like refugees, we are allowed to come out again, even if only to go to prison. You can smash a hole in the wall with the sledgehammer if you want, even if then the hole doesn't lead anywhere, do it do it, just to love me even more. You'll never understand me, but you must not forget me nevertheless, and you can knock down the wall over there right away as well, I don't mind, you don't even need to ask me if you want to do it, please do it. Knocked out by the effect on my poor wall, I'll sit there but not for long. Soon I would want to come again, like a child to the heavenly father, to whom all children are allowed to come first of all, so that he can give them his kingdom. And you are also very welcome to build a conservatory made of thermoglass onto the garden front, but then, however, one won't be able to get into the cellar anymore, because the steps would also have to be walled up. So you'll have to think that over and look at the plan once again, but instead you can break through a door at the rear, by which you'll be able to come straight into the house. You will, however, be unable to reach the ground floor from the cellar, because you have got rid of the proper door. Where on earth is the architect's plan, I can definitively prove to you that I'm right, only I can't find the plan now, what does it matter, who needs it, why do we have to go down to the cellar, and what do we need plans for, we're already fulfilling them before we have them. After all, we found each other without any plan. At a crossroads, quite naturally. Simple and natural.
Please don't go! Don't go! Something like that crossed my mind as soon as you arrived. I would otherwise have been dismissed too humiliatingly, if you had gone away. Without giving me the reason. Tell me why! I open my mouth to my few remaining women friends, and then, after long streams of tears, oh no, now some have got onto this leaf that fell from no tree, it is, rather, part of what was once tree, I shut up again. I open myself up in order to experience something, and then I close myself again. It's all a boundless realm, but not my realm, it is the realm of thunder and cries, of the roaring foam and of the clouds falling like atomic mushrooms, no: rising clouds beneath which the camouflaged lover can proceed resolutely against his enemy (likewise a lover, like him!) and claim to have been sent straight from heaven to his partner, with an incomplete address, however, and there's something not quite right about the partner either as things stand. But the missing part of the address was completed by the Santa Claus Post Office, why then is what I do and say not so well received? In short, this vast realm is the realm of converted and detached houses and apartments. So that people will at last be happy, they should now all rise simultaneously from their places to look for their very own way, and then they after all just go home, where they can do it with each other in peace and quiet or with somebody quite different or have to wait until someone calls up who would like to do it with them. Never mind. They'll always need a house for that, a house keeps its value. A body decays. There are many who are rankled that they don't yet own this or another home. Love and passion can bear simply everything, but they can't get along together.
The headwaters of the mountain spring water cover 600 square kilometers, I call that almost boundless. A lover like this man is not boundless; a lover she is, and she should learn it's the best way to start, that if one wants to be happy there are always boundaries, even if at the moment they still seem to be far away, and that one shouldn't cross them, if one really isn't the water in person. Otherwise sooner or later one ends up in the swamp, which the water, however, has also made when it had nothing more useful to do. Now such nimble, pleasant creatures live on this treeless terrain, pleasant!, because they are so small and one usually doesn't have to see them, the plants alone, sweet grasses, reeds, sedges (what is that? Please write to me without delay, if you know!), bulrushes and cat's tail to gnaw at, I tell you: a paradise! All these plants are rooted in waterlogged soils or at least ones that are flooded from time to time. Have I promised you too much, when I promised there would be something happening there? Take a look at all of it at your leisure. You can nevertheless not turn into water or only with very very great difficulty, but I can understand that is what you want now. You can only become dust for the time being, if you like. You don't have to thank me, I've saved you something there, everything that comes in between, you know. At best, if one is brave enough, one can melt at the sight of another person. What, not the thing for you either? You're more someone for processed cheese slices in the handy tear strip pack? If you were fluid at last, then many of these creatures would frisk around beside and in you, you would see them at last. You could become a place to spend the winter! What do you say to snow geese and other water-dependent birds of passage? Or would you rather be a breeding ground? Herons, coots, cormorants? You would never be alone again, I can whisper that to you, but you won't hear me. These creatures always cry so loudly It would be a preparatory exercise, a little bit of a change, to be as sweet as this Claudia Schiffer (you, who in time to come will step in here, there won't be many of you, but I have to tell you that she's the only woman in the world who during this period of time will not be covered up by the rain of self-hatred), liked by everyone, if I only knew how it's done. But even more I'd like to know how one manages to look like that. Watch the snow, when the sun kisses it, it disappears for sure, but how good it feels at the same time! I'm telling you, it feels like it's in clover! That's exactly how you have to do it. Forget yourself! Only a short time ago you thought you satisfied yourself, not some pictures or other, what picture should human beings present after sport has finally finished with them? There you sat, pedaled away, hopped in a sack, ran as if newborn, fresh off the treadmill and the rowing machine, and you grew hotter, grew tired, careless, aha, you've forgotten to turn off the stove in the sauna and to bring those legs together that belong together. You brought others together. What, in your health club there's a guy standing there at the juice bar and giving you a wave? Unbelievable. His BMW is already waiting outside? It's incredible. Then you must be under twenty-five or live near the city boundary, so that, if he had come from out of town, it wouldn't take him too far out of his way to drive you home. And exactly there, in the fitness shop, but which is really a people gallery, this exciting man has just turned up, long hair, naked to the waist, short trousers, an isotonic drink is dangling from his waistband or it's sticking out of his back pocket, and there you've found a man, whom you now have to listen to attentively, a figure bathed in light, and yet to a great extent innocent when it comes to his appearance! That's just what I don't understand! Hard to believe. Well, I don't know what his limit is in weights. Someone to whom you have to listen attentively, whether you want to or not, and although he doesn't even want to talk to you. As he does so, his eyes roam restlessly around the room looking for something better. Never really paying attention. Oh dear. A considerable degree of harmony between two people, a good strike rate, everything is just right. But then: He made my thoughts go completely in the wrong direction, a woman says to me now. But I'm not listening to her either. What am I saying. I'm telling you, each time one duly heats oneself up again for life, even if all the vitamins have meanwhile unfortunately been killed off by the frequent reheating. There we sit in all our cause and effect, desperately embracing the other, as if he had ever been even a little hot for one; it's embarrassing for me to say so, but at the moment I find the water and his homes much more wonderful than your feeling, which you wrote to me about yesterday, and which, as I see with some disappointment, is smaller than you made out to me, because you're still alive; at any rate this feeling is certainly smaller than your apartment. How otherwise, in all its protectedness, could it survive next to you? That's what you would like, isn't it? To be protected. The big one. You won't do it for less. How on earth did this man hit upon me, this woman asks herself and the one over there, too. She is afraid of being completely alone, because everyone has turned away from her, and above all, she's afraid of having lost a terrible amount of strength with the man, before she will even have got him. Kurt Janisch. If he were human, he would feel sorry that the woman would give up years of her life on the spot for him, because she believes that when he appears, the heavens open: One gets in, but one doesn't get out again. He only wants her house, after all, yet how small it is beside her feelings! But he doesn't know that yet. And when he does know, it'll be too late. How frail is man, high up on his population equivalent, which he produces, calculated from the daily accrual of commercial and industrial waste water, which largely does not concern him, and his domestic waste water (dishes, baths, etc.), which certainly does concern him. Why does one not simply go to sleep and dream? I don't know, but thank you very much for showing me this possibility. What is so wretched about me that I can only be used for writing? But still, I'm well out of it compared to you. Because such a quantity of feeling can't be described at all. So no one is going to reproach me if I can't do it either. Like many other colleagues, one would have to make do with water, if one wanted to work that out. Fire is OK, too, but it eats up too much, too quickly. It leaves nothing behind. Water leaves more, it has brought so much along, principally trees, boulders, mud, etc. Love, please, you take over! Otherwise I have to do that as well. Well then, I'll jump right in feet first, because I never look where I'm going anyway, sweet mistress of language that I am, it loves me at least, now where's she got to? I can't even hold on to it. Puke. Retch. Here are a couple of names with which I would like to do that too. You can think up the names yourself, one of them could well be yours.
So far so good. Without pumping the water drops through brick conduits and galleries to the city, where it is forced into the bunker, I mean the reservoir. We've given our promise, but the reservoir has to keep it without reservation. How should we talk about someone who kills himself or others or no one at all out of love, or for some other reason, which I, because I have to speak, jump after, like an angler with his net when his catch threatens to slip off the hook and escape. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be carried along by happiness, rather by the air under an airplane or of course by our dear water, please, there it is already, fulfilling its duties, answering the call of nature which it itself is. Water, of which I ceaselessly talk and sing, that glittering whirling mass, which after a few lines is already so close to our hearts, furthermore water has more solid properties than our feelings. Our feelings say, if you really love me, then you will do that and that and that as well. No talking back.
Without much huffing and puffing, the fit country policeman, at the moment not on duty, otherwise he wouldn't be here, continues to set his sinewy legs in front of him, always one after the other, and the forward body always goes a little way ahead, uphill, where one's feet never like to rush ahead. They can't because the body doesn't want it, it has its own sense of rhythm. Every person has to follow his own body after all, which is his guiding star in the darkness. He appears on his own stage, the country policeman, but he's so quick that he's hardly appeared before he's disappeared again and has turned up somewhere else, two feet, two-and-a-half feet, three feet further on, not much further, hurrying almost involuntarily as if this subterranean water was carrying him away on its shoulders. That it can do so, we know, indeed, this very water here, in this catchment prison, which rumbles underground and once fumed and foamed above ground, when someone threw something in, which didn't belong there. Nevertheless, it was immediately carried away by the tireless force of nature, constantly making unscheduled reappearances, and when we see it, it's as if it had never been gone at all. We always only see it for brief periods of time. Now one only sees, built into the rock, the water's little house, in which it, unfortunately enslaved, yet full of energy, romps around and which it wants to get out of, no not out, it wants, as always, to go downhill, otherwise we would need a pump. And we humans have exploited this quality of plunging water as we exploit everyone and everything we lay our hands on. Now it has a reason to perform its duty, soon it will admire on TV the plates and cups of the good-looking neighbor, which were washed up with it plus a very special liquid, blessed be its name. One spent so long persuading it, yes, still the water, of its usefulness, and now it really does believe in it and, in order to make a career for itself, abstains from loud roaring, rushing, and foaming. These three words are good, I think, we'll hold on to them as long as we can and then recycle them when possible. We mustn't repeat them too often, otherwise we'll be reproached with that, too. And if we say it's intended to make all the hard things we have to experience go down smoothly, that it's for an inner creature that in a certain way also has quite a hard time of it, because every time it wants to kill, it gets a pailful over the head or the turned up garden hose in the face, then once again no one believes us.
For his age, but then again he isn't so old, he's in the prime of life, Kurt Janisch is in very good condition. After all he trains to stay that way, he's already done his stretches today, he usually does that at home in front of the mirror in his parents' bedroom, perhaps to check whether he's still there in the mirror which is firmly fitted into the wardrobe which already belonged to his parents. There has to be a mirror in every house, and if it's too small for our height, then a bigger one simply has to be put in. Strange, such a good-looking man, married, R.G., and then he doesn't like to do his stretches in public, although people would like looking at him, no one would be biased against him. At home, there he likes to look at himself, sometimes endlessly it seems; so where does this aversion to the unknown, but even more to the people he knows, come from? He always does his running in more out of the way places, all of which he knows in his sleep, he grew up here after all. Glances turn to follow him, involuntarily, of men and women, under the firs and pines and larches, often glances of strangers, who are on holiday here and among whom ill-humor because of the weather and the people, with whom one can't have a conversation, but who are fitter than oneself, who only has three weeks in the year to make a proper go of it, is at all times very much in fashion. But at a table with a decent mid-afternoon bacon snack and a large wine and a couple of glasses of rowanberry schnapps good sense soon evaporates and is replaced by senselessness. One can also knock it back at home with a roof over one's head, above all if one's a teetotaller, but, as already mentioned, the country policeman doesn't like the glances of strangers, which he easily takes to be disparaging. To him they're like slaps in the face, which really he should be dealing out, glances, which make his body inwardly devour itself as if of its own accord in a kind of shame, yes, that does occur to me repeatedly: devour. It's really true, what the poet said: Shame always outlives one, no matter whether one's inclined to it or not, and inclination's always downhill anyway. There's someone who only wants to be away, cleared away, and yet does everything in order to be there. Someone who wants to plant his house-signs in the landscape like totem poles. They are supposed to stand and speak for him, because he doesn't like to do it himself, although women in particular are constantly demanding it of him. Their wish is that through speaking their interesting personality becomes even more interesting, that it will be interwoven as if by a glittering lurex ribbon. Something flashes, what is it? Oh, I see. It's the pullover, not the gold filling. They first want to go through many mouths, women, conduct amusing verbal skirmishes, but then again they want to be stilled, when, e.g., someone takes the lips of their vulva in his mouth, sucks them briefly and then bites them as well, which wouldn't have been at all necess-ary, but one liked it nevertheless. Yes, please, once again, please, next week as well and the week after, until nothing more is left of us, that's just what makes it so especially good. That's love. The country policeman would now rather look for a roof, under which he would like to go up and downstairs. And the car, it stands on the parking place that goes along with it or in the garage. The country policeman has covered a large part of the garden in cement for his car, although his wife would have liked to grow flowers there too. Now only a teeny weeny patch is left for something so superfluous. The rest is paved over for eternity, even if the mother earth below has long been healthy again and would quite like to breathe again. So the country policeman's wife only has this narrow strip left for the flowers, but boy, there the double-blooming garden plants throng together, deluxe models only, it's something she has achieved by her obstinacy, the patch of garden is her hobby. At the garden center the grower has all the plants looking three times as thick as they would normally be produced in nature, only in the garden catalog do they turn out like that, creations of God, notorious for putting a gloss on things; I would not have thought that a civilian, who is not God, can bring forth such plants, but I see it's possible, nature really puts up with it. Yes, I could love such plants, but they only exist twice, once in the catalog and once again in the front garden fragment here, so that people can see them, yes, that's part of it, what do you mean see?, but of course!, through the gaps between the fence posts or over them. A woman is different. A different woman would be different again. This woman wants her work to be admired, she is not the secretive type like her husband, quite the reverse. She's happy that she can make a fuss about her garden, which her women friends admire, which, however, she is not allowed to have, she only has neighbors. Her husband doesn't like to see her gossiping with them, nor does he like to see what others see or have, precisely because they have it and he doesn't. He prefers to see, if it's true, that this woman is clinging to her possibility of existence, or whether perhaps she would let go if one talked her into it. He doesn't want the consequences; he's so mistrustful he doesn't even trust the sunbeams, which descend on his wife's garden like an army, one that doesn't destroy, but brings fruitfulness. Yes, that's where it rises, the dear sun, over there, go on, take a look, it's free, but put on tinted glasses first. Not a speck of weed between the larkspurs and the columbines, which both equally look as if it isn't really them. To me they look like rare orchids. How does the woman do it? She could win prizes, but she wouldn't be allowed to, unless they were paid out cash. This garden is like a wonderful silk cloth, preciously woven in the most marvelous colors, so beautiful, just fantastic. In front of it a solid gate, at the sight of which one would prefer to get lost, in order to be saved by it. Others would like to be transparent, so as to be able to ooze through the fence and have time to read the notices, which were stuck into the ground beside the plants, where on earth did Mrs. Janisch buy them? With the husband nothing would be any use. Although: He's not really shy. It is as if his body were a language, which he himself has first of all laboriously to learn, while others already know it. There are others who sometimes even speak themselves as a foreign language, and then they don't understand themselves anymore. But it doesn't bother them, because occasionally they like to find out something new about themselves, and regret that it will never be in the papers. They say to themselves: How could I have married this or that woman. They wake up between the legs of someone whom they've only just met, these brave people. Today they are in charge. Yes indeed, these decent, hardworking, and competent people have become a power in the land nowadays, and I wouldn't like to get in their way if I were you (I think I might be able to do it!), unless you were sitting in a shiny Jaguar, like the one which the new Minister of Justice would like, and I would like too, gone all gone! The minister is already gone, too, and a new one took his place. The country is called: Austria. Get to know it properly or get lost! The country policeman at any rate always knows where, but not who, he is. Instead women want to get to know him better and even better. He wouldn't care, their building plan would be enough for him. Then nothing would be unfamiliar to him anymore. Nothing would have to be fought against anymore, one could offend everyone, and one wouldn't even make enemies. Everyone would be like us. Like us. The country policeman thinks little or a great deal, depending on whether it's necessary. But he doesn't say much, and if he does then his mouth moves as if held in place by a steel bracket, that's how greatly he restrains himself when speaking. He can hardly get his mouth open, not even for a greeting. Can it be, that women find something like that really so interesting? Because they don't listen properly to what he says, and in no time at all he can rise to be their hero (and not a zero, well it's a rhyme, if not a good one), because heroes never have to say anything and can just hit one in the mouth? Perhaps. They know how to speak at any rate, that's something that women can already do, they don't need any previous knowledge for that. They manage it, even if they've never gone to the university of life, which one begrudged them, because they had one or more brothers, who in turn would have died in the hell of dissatisfaction if they hadn't been allowed to study. They never finished it off. Studying. But look, this woman here managed it under her own steam. How peacefully she carried on her modest dealings for decades! Playing the piano, what do I know. She had already conquered heaven before she showed up here, and brought heaven with her, to fit it into the jigsaw of the mountains, in exactly the right place, well, here it also has fresh air right down to those lying at the foot of the mountains as well, who all wear sturdy Goiserer boots, which, as the name suggests, come from Bad Goisern as do only a few of the chosen of this world. It's a small place, we can't all come from there. Only Little Jorg H., he can. Back to heaven. First, this woman had been looking for heaven for a long time, probably she mislaid it, but that's precisely what it isn't: a floor. And now, hardly has she found it, she has immediately invested it in a certain person. Unfortunately he, too, has meanwhile got lost, without the woman having noticed. This man and in a way world peace and in many ways music as well and reading: her hobby, these things had all been the stuff of her life. Now it is nothing but this man alone. Patience, I'm running too far ahead. I'm not going to reveal my whole army to you already, it stands on clay feet anyway, but not in China. What does patience mean, everyone's already gone to sleep. Why did I start sticking the twigs and flowers on it, which were caught by chance in my camouflage net? So that you wouldn't see everything at once, which you've seen coming, and now you've turned me off. A flick of the wrist was enough. Before I could get around to the business with the apprentice and Miirzzuschlag, and you could talk and smile about my many earlier remarks, which today I bitterly regret.
I hear music, it's like my wasted life, one hears it from far off, the music of life, and a moment later it's faded away again. I can't do any better unfortunately. At least be quiet when you get up, and go home, any book lying there will be able to do it better.
They often cling to him, women to the country policeman, like the members of a society which has a code of honor: stick at it! But he always makes a particular preselection, this man, before there's real fun and games with the women beneath the foaming clouds, before a thunderstorm, behind the dance floor, up on the rocky slope, where the last fruit trees are almost lost amidst the boulders and, startled by the first frost, shed their fruit before it could ripen. The women who have left their cars on the windswept lower mountain parking lot (here there's a panoramic view, and further up another one, where in the wind the flags crackle) and throw themselves into the mountain wind, who crouch down among the dwarf pines to answer nature's call, except when they can hear someone, at the same time panting in fits and starts because they're not used to such a gradient, in short, these women have become ripe for love, without yet having found the pleasure of harvest, which is what they themselves are, these red-cheeked commanders who have lost their whole army, on their way ahead, doggedly, to the peak. They nod to every passing hiker, a little shyly, almost embarrassed, and no one notices that there's only one whom they mean to see, who has sent them a special summons for today. Now they want to comply with it, so that he can look important, which appears neither advisable nor necessary to me because ultimately they will lose everything, instead of getting even one bouquet. There's no doubt about it, there's one man they particularly like, but they don't admit it, the women. He's a country policeman by profession. They shouldn't do it, commit themselves to this person's charge, of all people, and sign on the bottom line as well, so that they may be bound accordingly at any time in an oath of disclosure, by which they swear Jesus appeared to them and told them that they will certainly find happiness with this man. With him. They only have to renounce all others. Such men have already arrested mothers of small children at red lights and simply abandoned the children to the traffic and nothingness, the rattle of the salvoes of headlights on the wet asphalt. And if they throw themselves into his arms, although I've warned them, the women, then they should at least finish it before the glue is dry, but in his place now, the wall, on which they wanted to hang his picture, is vanished, simply gone. Their affection should turn to disaffection, I think, while they still have time. Unfortunately it's again and again enough for the women that they're given a feeling, afterwards they can no longer tell whom they showed it to. In any case, suddenly it was gone, who had it last? Unfortunately I can't remember that anymore now. No matter, the relationship carries on, the tensions with the family also grow, one is called unstable and doesn't know why, because he's the one, as sure as night follows day. One doesn't doubt a love and doesn't entertain a suspicion. There is someone who reads her and doesn't even have to turn her over, because he already knew her inside out. One day it could be too late, how often have I written this sentence, and it's still good. It's indestructible, the sentence. Unfortunately I always have to say when it's too late. This time I can't say so yet, but I have a bad feeling. Well and good. Here's my clock, right in front of me. Writing, that's taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Silly cows, women. All of them. Above all, the educated ones (at least I'm not one of them), as a man I once met who specialized in deceitful promises of marriage personally assured me. But they squander themselves precisely because they think it's all too late for them. Who would promise marriage if he could also get on the train without it and get away with other people's anonymous savings bank books, you see, and these are people for whom the train would even wait! Not the other way round. Instead of women in their maturity beginning to save and to be economical. Every decent liter of wine knows that it improves with age and roughly how much it will cost. Do you know what a care home will take off you? You, and everything you own as well, and your children have to pay the rest, who will be up in arms that they have to raise so much money. What, you didn't know that? One can't really say squander with respect to these women. They rashly expend themselves, but at the same time want to hold onto themselves and even pocket a juicy profit, because they've still got a couple of things to take care of in future, intimate care included. Things which they believe someone needs. First locked up then cared for by staff in white coats. That's what we needed.
The country policeman is always all ears for himself, he has nothing and no one else. He needs no one. Everyone gets what they deserve. But you say stubbornly, they're not getting what they deserve, just feel for a moment, or listen! Not even money is so self-seeking that it could simultaneously expend and hold onto itself. It casts out a little beyond itself, what is it?, like a fishing-line, is that not a goldfish on the line, still as agile and amusing as in the old film of the same name?, never mind, whirring and unreeling itself it races across the countryside, this female self, yes, now I see that it's a proper self, which only in recent years, since there's been a special ministry for it, now unfortunately done away with, has been used to making decisions of its own, and was even encouraged to do so by the newspapers. And then it does catch on and decides in favor of one who's caught its eye, where it's an irritation and causes tears to flow, and bit by bit he destroys everything again. He doesn't even need an argument to do that. It's enough for him to be there. I'm fighting to get you, says the woman. No thanks, that would hardly have been necessary, says the man. He's someone who quietly makes his contacts: houses, property, gardens, apartments. He's not been very successful so far, but in a very short time he will perhaps nevertheless rise to be the hero of a whole fleet of houses. On his steamer, there he'll be admiral. Traces of blood in the stairwells? We'll wipe them away, what does it matter. Traces of sperm in pubic hair that belongs to a dead woman? Oh dear. We should have thought of that beforehand! It would have been a good idea, when we squeezed quite lightly on the nerve center (situated at the bend of the river of the carotid arteries) of a desperate girl, what if we left behind usable DNA material, like the single hair in the case of the notorious pencil murder of St. Polten, which perfectly matched a particular person? No, because we no longer know how the hair found its way into the files. Since this time no intercourse took place, we needn't have any worries in that respect, this time only her mouth and his hand moved, slowly, over her throat. Several women have already disappeared in this area, I just wanted to say that, no one knows where they got to, a new age is starting, and once these women, too, made a new start, going somewhere, hitchhikers, mountain walkers from other countries, a widow who lived alone, I've no idea where they all are now. Once a skeleton was found in the forest, which had a woman's stocking wrapped around its neck, a lot of it had been dragged off by animals, there was too little left for the forensic doctor. The hair on the skeleton's head, traces of it, like the faded color of a lioness, no idea to whom the hair belonged. A human being is kept upright by energy, and in this case or another one, that has now been switched off. Wasn't hard at all. But before that, only three days before, then, e.g., this desperate women, her head thrown back, had her cunt clamped round a cock, as if she never wanted to let it out again. What did it lead to? Ultimately it led out again. Such a feeling of love, she had really got hold of a mousetrap there, this young woman, the man under her couldn't get out of his car seat. He almost got into a panic. First she gently guided him into her, and then he thought he wasn't going to get out again. As if she wanted to clutch at a strange, quite new possibility of existence, that's how furiously that evening she threw herself on him, who is in reality inviolable, and sat herself on that thing, which as ever with him was standing straight up. No chance of resistance. The woman launched herself at him, pulled out his cock without further ado and used it as a guiding thread inside her. Yet when it was inside: yawning emptiness. Where can a person find his personality, if he doesn't have one, to fill the gap? Then strangers often have to fill the gap and pay a high price for doing so. And if these strangers don't want to pay, then one has to add on something oneself. You can die doing it! That is the law of pornography, even if one can't read: Out and in, and after a couple inches it's curtains again. It doesn't go any further. It could possibly go better. Every door can do it with me, every pencil in my breast pocket, so why shouldn't the two of them not manage it with one another? With the man it didn't perhaps happen quite voluntarily, he didn't have any great expectations, I think, but young flesh is a party, which cannot be so easily ignored, as when for example it puts in a noisy appearance, in crowds, for Mr. Haider, and it wants to have music, too. Most, however, play their music against this gentleman and have fun that way. Later we wiped out the young woman's vagina with a rag from the trunk, and this rag will surely have left behind fiber traces, we simply threw it into the bushes, but a couple of miles further on, no unfortunately we dropped it, where we happened to be standing, oh, if only we could remember! If only we hadn't been so lazy, to get rid of the rag, that would have been better, so that no impression of the indescribable stupidity of the wrongdoer would arise. There are already a whole number of Tempo handkerchiefs lying around there, which are quite stiff from everything they've already had to swallow in their lives. But the most important piece of evidence in this tangle of pubic hair would certainly be these stupid fibers. What use are they, when the cloth that goes along with them cannot be matched with a human being that goes with them? They are of use, when the sperm adhering to them can lead to an arrest, if, after mass screenings, it can be assigned to a particular man. And with the secretions, which are adhering right next to it, one can then also lay hands on the woman, who was firmly tied up in her plastic sheet, wait, no, we've got the woman, it's only her murderer we haven't got yet. Well, I think they'll know immediately who the woman was, her photo is still pinned to the poles everywhere. Apart from which, everyone here knows her. The man, therefore, must go back to the scene of past pleasure, if possible even before shop-closing time and the body being found, and search the bushes. The rag has to be disposed of somewhat further away, and, who knows, perhaps there are older traces, on paper, which point to him, to manual use by the country policeman. It's no fun. The man will have to root around there in the dirt, pick up the rag and get rid of it. Otherwise his colleagues would take this rag to the laboratory. The man is tired. He's run out of juice.
No, not quite yet, I can hardly believe it: His cock is almost sticking out of his fly again like an inquisitive child, if he only thinks about it. About all the women and what it's done with them, and what it still wants to do. It seems to have liked it, it wants to know what became of this girl, by whom it was mischievously, almost shamelessly handled. But it knows. This man is incorrigible, no efficient planning and decision-making structure applies to him when he follows his cock, which would like to harden and attach itself in someone, but doesn't have its own hook. At some point the women fall away, and then he falls out of them. Every night, as he falls asleep next to his wife, lonely and alone, he shakes his penis, his maypole, which is allowed to remain standing all year long, and there's still something hanging at the top, astonishing. To the man, it's as if this shaking passes over into his sleep, it must be so, because at some point there's peace, when sleep at last also condescends to catch sight of the tireless ones. Now we've painted such a nicely deviant pattern of behavior on the wall. I can't bear to part from it. One can collect as much information about people as one likes, but the police, the investigators, see principally what they get their hands on, but never more than the surface. The rest is for the refuse collection. The police psychologist with his lopsided profile of the criminal really should go back to art school and produce a new one. The outcome of the search, the dead woman we've found, wait a moment, we don't have her yet, but we'll soon bring her in, yet the core fantasy that triggers the killing, unfortunately we can't find that, because we don't know where at all we should look for it. This man is wild but left to his own devices, others have a room with sport and hobby apparatus instead and are also content with that. It's no wonder that the psychologist can paint this room for us at any time, the room really needs it, too. Here's a man who since childhood has been engrossed above all else in his feces, but understandably he doesn't make a show of it in public, he's not a dog after all, and so we can't observe him live. No camera would stay with it, and they are simply there always and everywhere. A pity, we've never seen anything like that. But soon we'll have a new TV program instead, in which the murderers will be allowed to have their say. Then a childhood is marked by the death of an alcoholic mother, the interpretation is risky, however, since everyone here boozes, though not all with the same consequences, but the son's skin, stamped blue all over by this creeping death, will never be found again. Only slipperiness will be found and cold and rejection and hunger, but after something else, no idea what, and a sticky rag will be found, not, however, what was lying underneath it. The big roll of plastic will fit one woman like a glove, as if she had been poured into it. It seems the forest floor alone was under the unimmaculate cloth. Nothing else. You know, something terrible happened! And already the memory of a dead woman is linked to weeping which never ends, with fear of darkness, and right next door a woman has died again, not quite voluntarily, not of love, but nevertheless. It wasn't her fault, but she had become party to the invisible struggle of a furiously nail-biting consciousness against its owner, who is likewise a kind of anxiety-biter. He snaps before there's even any need. So that later on nothing else can happen to him. The nipples and labia of several women know all about that, they can make a discordant song of it, but they don't necessarily sing it at the choral society, but off the marked piste, and so one knows nothing of the other. It seems to me that as a result this man I'm talking about is all the more concrete, also more alive to the women he meets. They think they know where they are with him, they have felt love's hot breath, the desire of hot teeth, and this crescent-shaped bite proves it to them in case they've forgotten, my God, how it hurts now, earlier I didn't know yet that it was going to hurt so much, when I tenderly permitted, no, asked for it. Except these women appear to confuse the house of their body with something that is decidedly more permanent: solid stone or made of the more dainty insulation bricks. Not bad either. They can't compete with that. A matter of taste. So they have to hand over their little house oven-ready, so that it can be done up at last, so that washing can flutter outside, but not their washing, flutter as cheerily as a song that can go round the world all by itself, one only needs to turn up the radio. One would rather be turned on oneself. The wounds have to be disinfected and cooled down with bags of ice. That's what happens when one holds the head of someone desperate to one's breast: Either he cries until he gets terribly on one's nerves, or he right away bites you. Someone who owns nothing will at least be interested in their property if in nothing else, think these women, and how gladly they would immediately like to give away themselves and all their property as well, so that they will very soon awake in the light, in the wonderful light of love, that pours from a person who has swallowed, no, not a pot plant, but a pocket lamp. And he is now her sun. For the man they would be the filling in the Swiss roll, so to speak, so light, so fine, with their property wrapped around them, and in which they have wrapped the man, hm, tasty! That's how they imagine it. Until the women no longer know where they are at all, and they suddenly have to dispatch themselves to a lawyer to have it explained to them and to see who or what, if anything at all, comes back to them after a while, after, attested by a notary, they have surrendered their property to someone who will not have been worth it. Doesn't matter, it was worth the property. Now they are. No one. Alone. Now the lawyer is supposed to rescue them, no no, that he can never do, the signature is already standing there and absent-mindedly filing his nails. Yes, anyone who takes offense at the pleasures of others puts himself at the mercy of a bad mood, my dear Mme. Piano Teacher! And there it is already, the rotten mood.
The country policeman knows how to treat women, my God. This person, alone on the dusty road, in the window frame of a rented apartment, she should really be quite herself in her yawning impatient disgruntlement, so, she's been stewing long enough now, now the telephone really should be ringing. Oh it's you. How nice. Where are you. The whole time she's been looking for herself, but actually for someone else, who understands her, and then she'll know who she is. A ton of books with signposts right next to her bed, where will we set them all up, and so now she's found herself at last. No wonder mat it took so long, because she has found herself of all things in another, where she had not expected herself to be at all. That's how one becomes important. Ringadingding, now show me the golden ring, says the alarm clock. Time to get up! High time! Life is here now and is about to kick down your door. You've signed the request form for life at the notary, Gerti, Andrea, Karin. Good. So. Now the women know again what's supposed to be in their petition, worked out down to the smallest detail, which they will soon withdraw again. It should have worked one way or another, but it didn't work out. For years there have been rumors, even in the county town, that one time or another the country policeman is supposed to have tried something on the side and then on the other side, but who's going to check up on it, one doesn't check up on colleagues, even if one doesn't really like them. He can't have had much success, if one looks at his debts. Why does he have to buy so many plots of land, he's already got one, his wife's. A name is mentioned, I don't know which, and where a meeting could take place, at which this name was mentioned. A rock is a resistance, which it's no effort to climb. But the lack of resistance of these women, no, I don't believe it, they even leave their garden gate open, which is only two-and-a-half feet high anyway, just so that at last they can begin to love. Every day they are the latest special offers again, simply because they are something quite special. Anybody who didn't want to spend too much money would grab them right away. But what they promised at the beginning was already the end. As if love could not have climbed over, if it had really wanted to get in. The women have lost their appetite now. Today they have again summoned so much spirit out of the bottle, and now they want to be carried off on the spot. As a bloom is caressed by the sun, as softly, and the main thing is, as quickly. Best of all immediately. We have to beat the sun to it. It always goes away, just when the flower is feeling happiest. They want to look for food themselves, the women, an ancient male privilege. But they shouldn't do themselves harm, the silly things, whose personal best time so often appears to be achieved only in death, when one or two people stand around their bed and don't know what they're supposed to do. Yes, the sun shines, too, mat's their aim, that's what they're working towards. The more strength the women put into their lives, the more strength they will lack later, in the care home in Majorca, where meanwhile of course their language, the language of money, would be spoken, if they had been able to keep any of it. Of the money. Their searching is like silently getting up and going home. But they stay a little longer, dust furniture, knick-knacks, pretty little somethings. All superfluous, it all slips through their fingers. But now they really don't need anything but love anymore. Because they don't have anything else. I ask you: Do you need anything? And this was how you answered me. With finding oneself is how they answered me. They must have lost themselves somewhere, where could it have been, in order for them to be able to pull themselves triumphantly together and throw themselves into someone's jaws again. Some sauce, please. Why should we interfere with their goals? After thousands of years women in general have at last grown up and make their own choice from the menu, and they choose, well what, they choose themselves, and that in someone quite different whom they don't really know at all. He's like me, they think, he's not like Walter or Gerhard, who meant nothing to me. Then they might as well have just held onto themselves. But this attitude will really never be able to tempt women into moving somewhat more prudently. But it isn't necessary, they know where their purses are kept. Here I can see all the more clearly, fearfully, that something is going to happen. I see it before my eyes, in my little workshop, where my work is being wrought now, and without any heat, I manage without warmth, it's all alone and so very small, I can't throw it into the fire yet. I have already hinted to what class of people this man belongs, that is, he belongs in no class at all, he belongs back in the kindergarten of humanity, where he, like us, should actually have been brought up, but his teacher was baffled by him, there sits a schoolboy who doesn't say anything, although he's been asked a question. A smack in the face, quickly, the way one chops wood, so that something comes out at last, but nothing comes out, only a creature briefly flutters up, because it has been disturbed, but it right away settles down again. The lad still refuses to learn, although we've advised him how he could do better, because we're sorry for him and add: Well, that's another fine mess, we really wouldn't like to know what's going to become of him. But now we know, whether we want to or not: a country policeman. A childhood memory suddenly rose and immediately fell again, we'll first have to digest this memory.
Now the country policeman walks briskly ahead of a woman, trotting lightly like a wolf, across the mats, where hayricks will soon stand. He can write more than just his name, he can draw something up so that a notary can make a fair copy of it, whereas I have an unfinished manuscript on a screen in front of me, which glows it's true, but only illuminates a small part of my brain at once. The country policeman, however, has the overview and keeps it in mind, too. He always keeps everything. The name of this person counts more or less. That is, where it stands at the moment, on the promissory note he has issued, all he can do is keep his fingers crossed. But the man knows where he can get something. There's hope yet. If there isn't, then I could stop at last, you've said it. Don't you see it, this body I can see in front of me, I could almost take an interest in it myself, my eyes want to see something indecent, and my hands want to attack something indecent and play around with it, and then unfortunately I always want to say something unmentionable, how embarrassing, even if only for me. Not so fast, my room has to be tidied up first, I can't let anyone see it. Yes, this body, which we're going to keep running with, this arrow taut against the desolate sinews of the landscape, and he, he is supposed to have become the prize of this woman? No, personally I don't believe it. I thought it was she who had become the prize? One day she'll eventually wake up, and then bingo, but she doesn't win anything. At some point, one day it's payday, when the bank statements drop as deep as the unfathomable ocean, except with a balance one can fathom why it is so low at present. It won't be her day, thinks a woman, but her time will nevertheless have come. Then he'll get a divorce and marry her in order to get the remainder from her as well. She believes it, she is imbued with this conviction. She wants to give him a very affectionate answer, very softly in his ear, for this party of her lifetime, but he isn't there. At last he'll listen to her for once. Yes, the time has come: Her answer isn't enough for him, it's not concrete enough for him, not adult. He tells her loudly. Do grow up. In a moment he'll be raging noisily on the street again, because the door will be locked, but not seriously. To the woman, it's as if he's always sending her back into the corner, although she even had years of musical instrument tuition and, perhaps out of revenge, even gave some herself. But she is unable to play this instrument. The greater her love for him, the smaller and more insignificant she feels. Often, when she catches sight of herself in a mirror or reflected in a shop window, she finds it impossible to grasp that he is with her and that it is her. I, another? Don't I hear pounding live beats as an accompaniment there? Please not! Do I have to listen to them as well, even though I only know the classical music of life, like the woman I'm talking about, and who likewise loves only classical music? Unfortunately it doesn't mean anything to the country policeman. In a self-analysis he would say, if he could: This woman is completely fascinated by me. I radiate an inner strength, which she has always longed for. How nice for me, it's a real gold mine. No, this man is like no other I know. Perhaps he's like the sea or the mountains, I know them too, but only superficially, the mountains a little better, one can at least build on them, if they don't throw themselves away first. Here building has been forbidden by the countryside commission and two hundred other organizations. One is only allowed to trample around on the mountain soil if one is a summer sportsman or a winter sportsman or an all-weather sportsman. The mountains simply belong to everyone. Only in heaven will we conquer them. The country policeman belongs to this educated and charming and attractive and active woman alone, as she hopes. She wants at last to find an inner home and shelter. That's crazy.
She can throw him alive into boiling water, for all I care, and jump in after him, and once he's heated up, eat him up inclusive of core and stalk, or whatever it is she wants to do with him. I've held her back long enough, in order to adopt her cause, let her gobble him up and in return present him with all the dishes and the house that goes with them. She will be digested by him and disappear without trace. I can see that already. He turns to her, as he always does, it takes quite an effort on his part, he tends always to turn away from a person. As a child only bed-wetting, and he didn't really want that either, accompanied him for a long time, like an annoying pet that won't go away. Wait a minute, where has the woman got to now, she hasn't gone to make another coffee, has she? Doesn't she know what to do with her time? He quietly follows her and studies her like a schoolboy, as if she were a text, which one has to learn in order to make the grade, and that is always property property property. The party he supports says so too, it tells its supporters that they clearly stand out from the others and deserve everything and more of what they have and still want. Except the members of parliament shouldn't earn more than 60,000 schillings a month, but that no longer applies now either. Property can become a nice hobby, but one has to train really hard with the tax office in order to keep some of it. This man here should be properly acknowledged by me, as a student, main subject: Live, but don't let live. As student of the university of life, if you like, because he knows what matters, the quiet values. Property. Or have you ever heard a house speak, except through party noise and TV from an open window? What appears easiest to us, this man finds difficult: to be a human being, so say the poets, who have understood nothing but want to talk all the time themselves. Well. The High Commission of Curtains is closed now, so that one doesn't notice right away that official business is being conducted here. This man, therefore, is a fellow student, but one who doesn't really want to learn anything, nothing, from nobody. That one can buy dolls in a sex shop, whose bodies look in a way unappetizing, well, the head's OK, that while masturbating one can pull a plastic bag over one's head and tighten it at the throat, till one almost pops off, and then one pops up again, the bag abruptly, suddenly open!, please, don't forget that!, and there's our orgasm, which we once had and have missed for some time now, there it is again, stronger than ever before, stronger than with any woman, stronger than any arm. We had begun to believe we won't get one at all anymore. But the shelves are full. Every poor man wants to be rich, that is just as natural a phenomenon as the fact that one can introduce all kinds of things into one's asshole, both small and surprisingly large objects. That, however, one has to do with the other hand, one hand is supposed to tighten the bag. So one hand always knows what the other's doing.
He goes to the hairdresser once a month, the country policeman, to get a haircut, today is not that day. A conviction abruptly pervades him, unexpectedly, he then wanders through the territories of idleness, nothing, he wanders through the territories of his job, there he has often struck lucky. While driving, women make mistakes out of carelessness, absent-mindedness, or incompetence, and already the country policeman has them by the skirt and doesn't let go again, if they're to his taste and he has got hold of their address. How quickly they consent and more as soon as he has unpacked them. It was the handy packaging with the thread, pull here, which opens even the most buttoned-up. He stirs up a fire in them. The bodies can be thrown away, the heads one would keep, so that one can make sure that they don't talk incessantly, the women. They're real gold mines. They immediately offer him traveling expenses, gifts, then themselves, then the rest as well. In return they want to build on him. The same thing he has in mind with them. Except that he also wants to get hold of what they've already built. What appears difficult to us, to destroy someone and obtain a cement collar, in order to reliably sink the booty to the bottom, this man takes all that for granted, if you please. That's what he's there for, and he wants to put himself in every other place as well, which at the moment, unfortunately, is still occupied by another body: one or more rooms in one or more houses. Squeezing into the bodies of strangers, that's good too, then only oneself is left over, a bird, which hoarsely, hoarsely crying, scrambles around on a corpse and doesn't know where the eyes are now, which it wanted to pick at first, so that the dead, with whatever senses, could no longer distinguish him. He wants to remain unobserved, the man. It didn't, unfortunately, work with his dead mother, he must still succeed. But then he would like to get into everywhere else as well, squeeze in, in order not to let go of himself, to be by himself and to stay that way, when he inflicts his wounds, of which others with small twitching body parts always die, after they have watched anxiously for a month, for years, what is to become of this child. If someone looks at him like that, the country policeman would rather eat himself up, so that nothing, not even himself, is left to be seen, only a house, another house, and another house, house-proud. Then at least he would be: gone. What kind of man can he be? He is like an angel with inner eyes, no, not an angel looking backwards in case someone is standing behind him with a stone. His muscles and sinews don't know why they are inserted into a thin but firm nylon skin, which can contain simply every body shape no matter where it leads. But not for long. In a moment it will clutch a tuft of hair again and pull everything attached to it to the ground. Exactly the same thing will happen to this suit, there was a very similar one in the advertisements for holidays in Austria, encoded however, otherwise no one would have put up with it, the suit-here we are shown the population in the dress of the country, and all the things it gets up to: Sport, please take over! But the whole population has been locked up in its clothing so that it can't get out and do any harm, as so often, our population, oh dear, too late, now it's out, now it's out-an endless mountain panorama in the background, which is supposed to represent the boundlessness of this in fact rather small plump land. We've meanwhile given up this goal again. People don't want to visit us anymore. But yesterday on TV they showed us the new ski suits for the world championships, and we were all annoyed at the way they looked; I saw nothing but shininess and lightning flashes. My eyes were dazzled. In history: boundless crimes. In the present: boundless pleasure on the high crags, to which the paths lead, so that we can look down on the others, paths on which we sportswomen and sportsmen can roll or slide around. We are the party, which is the only one to let us join. We are the party, which we have already joined, because: We are who we are. And not anyone else.
The rumble of thunderstorms is approaching now. We are all in the dark about ourselves, but to make up for that our conscience is clear again at last, it wouldn't have had a chance against this weather anyway, which we didn't ask for, which was given to us as a present, and which now only harms us as far as the strangers are concerned, because today it's coming for the third day in a row, thunderstorms, rockfalls, hail, avalanches. Who will keep the children in the Alpenrose Pension occupied until it's fine again? How wonderful, altogether elevating, after the mountains have risen up against us, when we are at last allowed to enter the mountain refuge, and the landlady hands us the strong hunter's punch, the parson's nose, the smoked ham rolls, while outside the world public walks past and ignores us instead of dropping in. It's on its way quite without trousers, the world and its organs, without sweatshirt and even without walking shoes, we bought them all, we chose them from the catalog. That's the way we like to see the world, naked, bare, and dumb, so that we can again and again lead it up the garden path. We're somebody again, but which somebody? We are a European, fallen from heaven like the first sunbeams, which are now coming out at last, we have done so much and more to make it happen, that the foreigners will be happy and be our friends! But it was worthwhile. The civilized nations have taken to us again! Well, thank you very much!
He is otherwise something of a disrespectful man, the country policeman, and so he demands all the more respect from the young recruits. He doesn't care about anything except this house, this one and that one too. I should explain that in greater detail now, but it's not necessary, because anyone can put himself in the same situation and immediately sign a savings agreement with a building society. But I don't know, there's something, it's better not to visit people like that, they always only serve themselves, perhaps because they're stingy. That means that people who join up with them always have to live in reality and are not allowed to dream. Someone who one day falls in love with them is soon looking anxiously at them. Where have all the dreams gone? Such people can always hold onto themselves, even if they briefly give themselves away or rather: lend themselves out. It only looks as if they were expending themselves and spoiling others with their presence. We've got plenty of time, it only takes half an hour of my time, but not this one, to explain it to you in greater detail. You're yawning. You've heard it all before. I know. Even the country policeman's trainers are of the opinion, with respect to the rocky ground, which they briefly but firmly touch, that everything on and over which they climb belongs to them. We take care of our homeland, and we like to keep it under control, and these are brand name shoes, even if I got them a little cheaper. Oh, a little herd of chamois, there are even two kids with them, how nice, about ten yards vertically below the gravel path. They don't crush anything at all under their hooves. How lightly these animals whose bodies appear so heavy jump from a rock on their thin little legs, we look enviously above our allied walking and trekking shoes at the same time trampling a couple of tufts of grass at the edge of the path, where a short time ago they were still found alive, so that the animals could eat them. High above, a pair of buzzards, crying loudly so that the little animals can disappear in time, who still have to live off their winter fat, and are keeping themselves upright with their last reserves of energy. The district has become noticeably lonelier since the springs can no longer be marvelled at on the surface. We've been struck by that. For that reason, as well as for others, tourism has declined considerably, many have got alarmed about it, what's happened to our attractions? Where are the foreigners? Why don't they come? Are we being boycotted by our own guests? What have we dished up here? We've dished up the same as usual, haven't we, schnitzel, chicken, sugared pancakes. The mountain, which is one thing that doesn't consist of food, we're not the Land of Cockayne (or are we? or are we nothing else?), has been locked up long ago, but it can easily be unlocked. Like an envelope, which anyone can tear open to read what message the landscape has and the one over there, too, the message is different for each person and so it's no problem to recall the messengers, our ambassadors. We are not to blame for anything. That's accompanied by loud music on the radio. And those who remain are already more elderly fellow citizens and prefer to walk around on the plain, look up in astonishment at the snow-covered peaks, take photographs and turn themselves into a reference work, which inns in the valley serve the freshest trout straight out of the stream. We'll go there afterwards and open the filler pipes. Come on in. All right, but here the path already goes up into the mountains, it's not my fault, it's better if you just stand still. Snow on the felling areas higher up in the forest, on these breaks between the trees down which the avalanches raced with particular abundance this winter. It is now late spring (spring comes rather late here anyway) and still correspondingly cold. The noise of the inn died down long ago. Here, at least in the more low-lying parts, agriculture and forestry used to be carried on, but now an eternal water use ban has dawned. Further down there's a catchment basin, but you won't catch anything. It is the area, measured horizontally, which is bounded by watersheds, yes, shedding can hurt. In between there's the water, one hopes likewise permanently separated from us. Sports which are kind to nature are always welcome, but others not, absolutely no mountain bikes-strictly forbidden! This poet doesn't want them, and I don't either, but can't say it as nicely as he can, who would like to kill the poor cyclists, who would also just like to have fun. But running or walking, that's OK, isn't it? No, the poet has nothing against that. Although: Every step crushes approx. one thousand insects, a mighty spectacle, which is unfortunately also coming to an end, but only if one were as small as this ant here, there you are, its time is already up. That wouldn't be any good for us: being crushed underfoot. Nothing is grown here anymore, here there is no chemical treatment for plants, and the plants of course look as one might expect, somehow wild, tousled, worse for wear, puny, don't you think these are chance creations? They've got no breeding. Once they wouldn't have been allowed to proliferate here in such numbers and take away space that could have been used productively. To the country policeman, the thought that something could not be useful is unbearable, and yet he involuntarily relaxes in this dramatic landscape, from which he has learned, at least, to appear wild and romantic when necessary. Nature belongs to all of us. Too little always belongs to the country policeman. Nevertheless. There are some who say they have observed that sometimes he also went here at night. Sometimes he deliberately stands on every cluster of flowers, no, today he doesn't want to pluck and pick up anything, not even edelweiss, nature isn't that interesting after all, it's not an animal (put it this way: An animal is nature, but nature is not an animal, providing milk and eggs which we can use, and to be honest, nature doesn't provide me with much either). It's called an eco-system, only Kurt Janisch doesn't see how and where there's supposed to be some kind of system at the bottom of it. To him nature is a green chaos, like the party associated with it, and like the chaos in his brain; and only his body, so that its performance improves, is worth being first looked after and then honed, one thing at a time. From such people we should learn to obey the state, without them needing to waste any manners on us. When they kick down our doors because we're black or have worked in the black economy, we're harvested and only then cut by the neighbors. A policeman is always right.
It always makes sense to work at something, and mining has had the sense, over the eons, to throw the mountain bit by bit into the depths, in seconds if necessary, and even under the mountain there are things happening, which are perhaps beneficial to it, but certainly not to us. Because the mountain can in a short time virtually liquefy itself deep inside, yes indeed, in the depths, as if there were not already enough water there! So now it also turns to mud inside, and after that, watch out, it breaks through. And it breaks through into neighboring, already packed, old worked out chambers, and sometimes, if they have not been properly backfilled, these are particularly susceptible. Who actually checked the consistency of the packing material, of the concrete? No one? Well, then of course we'll need to call the Country Police to find that out, but not today and not this country policeman, he won't be on duty. But one day, one day some time, he too will try to find out whether it's true that lean concrete packing was used or not. Like all of us, he will need experts to do that. The information won't be volunteered. A subsidence might perhaps have occurred if the chamber had been properly packed, but not this catastrophic breakthrough, which took people into the pit with their eyes wide open and afterwards didn't let them out again even with their eyes shut. They're still down there. Ten head of them. No, you won't get anything out again, on the contrary, you're still in nature's debt and have to pay. So: What interests the country policeman about women also lies more below the waistline, which the more fearful don't even dare cross with their eyes. The country policeman, once the sunny credit side has been checked, always only looks there, an area about which he has already collected further details on many occasions, so that he knows his way around, if he ends up there again. It's nicest in nice weather, this area, then one can at least take a good look at the landscape, to see whether a couple of death's heads look back and nod to the camera. All these fit to use lives have been buttered into the landscape and then crushed by the magma, well, by the shit, until they themselves have presumably become as soft as butter. Don't follow this mine to the bottom, follow Kurt Janisch uphill, even if it's hard! Weighing heavily on him, as on the management of the mine: economic pressure. He must find success. He must. Failing which he must go broke and be declared bankrupt. There we have the mine, and there we have Mr. Janisch's fly, they stand opposite one another like two terrace restaurants by a lake competing for customers. What will you do for me? You'll get from me! With fewer people the mine had to produce as much as with many. It routinely had to increase the tonnage. What must Kurt Janisch do now? Be at the right place at the right time, have his arguments acknowledged and have the buildings and apartments of lonely women valued. The Leoben Public Prosecutor's Office is waiting, at some point someone will stray into their side street. If the mountain doesn't come, then its prophet of property, Kurt Janisch, will come to us in the cramped building, and then at last we'll have him, we don't have anymore room. Otherwise we have to come and get him. One hears rumors, these little liberties of the propertyless, but one hears nothing concrete. Welcome meanwhile to the Barbara shaft, where, however, there's nothing left to save.
In the mountain wind there's no question of forgetting. One can think things over very well while running, until the moment comes when one doesn't think at all anymore and just keeps running, like a machine, like a politician who wants to make his mark, as if he wanted to have himself hewn in stone or at least have his picture taken, just as he has become through running. Now one's happy at last. One will outlast all others living, because one is so healthy. Now some forward thoughts turn up as well, yes, they get the better of us, but they aren't very good. One would never have credited oneself with such thoughts. The colors of this Janisch track-suit: copied from the professional athletes, whom millions look at, to see what's on their clothes and which is the right stuff, too. So that they can likewise load their life trolley with it (as if it weren't full enough already!), except now the colors just won't harmonize with nature. They have, however, been chosen for the sake of miles of arduous running exercises, these colors, so that at some later point, the frozen sportsman can nevertheless be found and given a decent burial. He stood out very well from the white of the snow, thanks to his track-suit. The mountain rescue team will see you better against the rock face, against which one day you will stick like a squashed fly, and if you have your cell phone with you and its battery isn't flat, then nothing worse can happen to you before the alpine rescue service's bill for recklessness and anarchy and the telephone bill land in your letter box. Then you'll bitterly regret everything. Then there's nothing to be done. People in their eccentricity repeatedly gets into danger and have to be got out of it, so that everyone knows: They're back again. And on top of things. In sport people themselves have to be so much on top of things that they no longer need the mountain tops. But everything can also be quietly simulated in their very own personal fitness center. These feet, made for walking, running, or driving cars, now carry out one or two of these labors on the conveyor belt, which man should really wait upon, instead of it waiting upon him. Number three, the beloved car, which is by itself as strong as fifty pieces of fitness apparatus, unfortunately had to stay outside. One can always improve one's performance, if necessary. The country policeman, I think, seeks solitude, not only to train there in peace, but principally to meet someone who will flatter him. Look, a woman in love, how nice, and she has already been affected by his behavior, as I see. She staggers behind this person like someone with a fever or a mad person, in order then to be allowed to sit down on his cock. This woman wishes to allow, for the umpteenth time, a couple of parts of her body to be pulled out and entrusted to the cold mountain air. It is precisely those parts which this body table always laid with the best tableware has made available for this one man, to allow several tests to be carried out. What for. So that this man will once more be able to pass muster in the woman's eyes and senses. That's what for. She already knows that in advance. But the said parts will not remain free long either. A printer in a bank will later have stamped something as proof that they are no longer worth anything. Because now the country policeman has the money. The body parts are all occupied. To make up for that we are now unemployed. The country policeman will have confidentially informed a woman on the telephone, he's driving past the farm, you know, knows anyway where the barrier is and where one unfortunately has to pay, and then up to the last parking lot before the path up to the summit. Yes, even a country policeman, although he's got ID, if he's not on duty, has to pay the toll, and then, Gerti, you climb a bit following the red markings, you know, as always up to the bench with a view where we often used to sit. From there you simply go straight ahead, where there's no path at all anymore. So then we'll follow the path that belongs to us alone, right, where at most only the hunter is allowed to go, who is allowed to do everything, then continue to the right, as far as the point where you see the cross on the summit of the Windberg for the first time, you know, if one can see anything at all because the fog comes down early there anyway, you know, I expect, that you'll already have pulled off your panties or not put them on at all and opened your bra. Why. What for. We don't ask questions. Actually even the country policeman, even though he's got his mountain rescue certificate, shouldn't leave the marked paths without authorization, except in an emergency, nor should he encourage others to do so, especially not someone who is not really certain on her feet, nowhere, not in life and not in death, but who would want to start an argument with him. He's born here and knows the area as well as he does his own trousers, which, as already mentioned, are skin tight and leave no room for mistakes. It's easier to get into the mountains than into these trousers. But the mountains can be treacherous, never underestimate them! Even if one knows them, they like to get up to their tricks whenever they want. The country policeman doesn't believe in the legend that if one kills a person they return as the lost, because death supposedly doesn't like it at all, if one anticipates his plans. And the dead keep on coming until they are completely forgotten. Their ghosts meanwhile wait patiently at home, behind the barricade of the earthly, until they are informed that the time of being forgotten has drawn near. Young people (cf. Gabi) are of course forgotten more quickly, there are soon too few who have known them, and they have other interests, there was in any case not enough time to really get to know Gabi. The way she really was. On the other hand it is of course outrageous: so young and perhaps already dead! Her characteristics were hardly clearly developed yet, moist walls, into which someone pushed his hands, fleetingly The priest, should the unthinkable really be true, will have to lament an imaginative young life, which is now shut into a coffin, it's incomprehensible, inconceivable, that it could have happened, but the girlfriends will move away at some point or devote themselves to their own families. One surely shouldn't kill in full bloom, but in the bud it's perhaps not so bad, except for the one directly affected, who knows if it would have come to anything. Oh Gabi, I think it's enough to drive one to despair. In this weather, with all the road accidents, the ghost drivers on the autobahn late at night… you could have died so many times already, it's a wonder you lasted as long as you did. But now it has happened, I fear. Perhaps the murderer is in some danger? One can never know. A stab of pain tightens my breast, but not for long, my breast wants to go on breathing, and it's best if people arrange to be free right away, if they find someone with whom they can stick their genitals together, again and again, until finally it holds.
A girl disappeared from a village, it will be days before it emerges where she's got to. Nature already knows, even if only a tiny part of it, and we are likewise a part of it, but a quite different one.
The country policeman races uphill through the wilderness. Even if you, too, find him good looking, then suppress this impulse on the spot. At present this man has other worries, because of an oil-smudged cloth on which there was something else as well, and that he already threw away days ago, into a bush. In the forest, which is itself beautiful, don't you recognize it? Yes, that one! Everyone likes to be in the forest, there's not such competition for light and space as in the water. There the pine trees have long ago crushed one another to death, their interlaced spindly little branches have formed a scratchy web, and their roots have sucked up all the water, which others would have needed much more. Underneath, dead needles inches deep. Not even mushrooms grow here anymore. This wood should be vigorously thinned out. Nature puts everything they need at the plants' disposal, and they have the ability, which humankind doesn't have, of synthesizing all the necessary compounds themselves: Please give me a dozen chemical elements, then I'll just produce myself, and then there'll finally be peace! Is what I unfortunately don't say. Is what the plant says to me. We're choosier, we aren't agricultural products, we only eat them. Who please will now reduce the acidity of this soil for me? No volunteers? I would need nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. Not available either? What else have we got on offer, in order to enrich the soil? Protective enamel and a grinding machine? Can this woman still breathe in the knowledge that she didn't even put on her panties and already unhooked her bra in the car, in the parking lot, full of anticipation and in a breathless expectation, which almost made it difficult for her to walk uphill as well? Her fingers trembled so badly, but she didn't need to be told twice, she understood properly the first time and hesitantly agreed to the unreasonable request. Someone who wants to set out on an arduous walk lasting for miles in her body shouldn't have to pay a toll a second time and then perhaps even have to lift up the barrier himself.
So there she steps out of the undergrowth, the woman, who hasn't often done something like it, still less in this condition. She steps forward as arranged with the man, she breaks clumsily, almost stumbling, careful! (over there is a vertical drop of at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet), out through the white channel between the boulders and the old glacial sand, which is lying around on the ground, and immediately tries to flit around the exotic beast, which is standing there scenting the air, as tenderly as an insect, and to pull out the yarn she has prepared for the net, and now the crochet needles, and stick the plug into the socket prepared for it and see what happens. She says what happiness is to her: that he's there now as arranged. I love you so much. Miracles can't be more important than they are now, because they have already occurred and every hour new miracles arrive, which could perhaps make us even more happy, or right now, here comes a new miracle, this very moment, as arranged between us. But it's only the old one, wearing different clothes. The woman makes the man, whom she could persuade to meet her here and now, even if only briefly for a moment, he hasn't said a word yet, but she has already said many, which I don't want to specially mention, the woman makes the man flinch with her words and appearance (he is not equipped to scratch her off the wall yet, behind which she has entrenched herself, but in a moment the whole thing will collapse, this silly wall between them), while she immediately he hardly has time to raise his hand, pulls her blouse out of the yoke of the stylized dirndl skirt and pushes the loose bra up. Now it's only hanging by the straps, which really have nothing to do anymore, under her chin, like a somewhat oddly cut collar, and then, didn't you see, then her heavy breasts, both of them, have fallen out underneath, past the open traditional dress, towards the ground. The woman has been warm all this time, for days now; yet as if out of embarrassment, to distract attention from herself by pointing at herself, she tumbles out of her container, meals would be astonished, for no other reason than to be taken out and polished off. She already acts like a woman possessed in anticipation of pleasure still to come. There's no restraining her. So there she's already handing him her meat loaves for starters in her cupped hands and simultaneously instructing the man, even though her senses have yet to get used to such coarseness, but it's already bubbling out of her, she instructs him therefore to lift up her skirt, she doesn't have a free hand anymore, and as arranged she isn't wearing any underwear. You see. That wasn't so hard, was it. Does he not first of all want to exhaustively probe her, before he comes into her and then, the obligatory part, as completion of the given theme, talk of his love in her ear, into which he should gently blow, that's nicest, yes, he should declare his love, so that she can talk all the more exhaustively of her own? We can by now ask for that at least. We're paying for it, after all. Instead the man strikes her, almost affectionately, lightly on the side of the face and indicates with his other hand, he indicates a little roughly to leave this path on which she's standing, which isn't really there, however, it really isn't a path. The woman doesn't understand right away and is still acting as if she can't wait a moment longer and so, right here! wants to obtain the promised and longed for importance, under him, on him, between him and the void, floating in the air, sleeping on the earth, it doesn't matter, here and now, as we had agreed. Perhaps he could for once at least anticipate her and be the first to pull down his trousers please, but she doesn't say it out loud, that is definitely a fantasy of hers, which doesn't need to be interpreted. After all he could unfold her right here on this little frequented path leading nowhere and penetrate her, no one else is coming, never, not at this time, which we agreed on, and when it's already beginning to get dark, and it's not a path anyway, at any rate not a public one. Down with you, on your knees, on the ground, I must, I must. I want to, too, but something else, wait, so, my breasts are already completely released, they can now, and with pleasure, fall against your hard male chest, and then you've got them ready to eat close to your mouth, if you want to take a bite out of them again; who doesn't dream of roast pigeons flying into his mouth or whatever it is one likes to eat, a pork cutlet perhaps, with cucumber salad. So, here I throw it down for you as arranged, my whole heap of flesh, you can rearrange it with your hands until you know your way around, you don't have so much scope. You can let them hang down to the left and right of you, my fun bags, my dust bags, or I can give you a suck and blow, or you can bite very firmly again, as you did recently, it doesn't bother me so much anymore, and that's what we firmly agreed; well and good, I shall now let my breasts fall and throw them to you, you'll instantly intercept them, right, it's good food for the hound in you, whom I've met one or two times already. It's no use running away now. But I only got used to it with a lot of whining, so quickly, I wouldn't have thought it of me, it likes to bite, if it's roused, the dog, what can one do, I know, I know. I'm happy that you still find me so attractive. But now I have both hands free and can pull the dress higher myself, up to my waist. But that's only possible if we lie down. Why are you wearing these silly jogging pants, you have to shove them down to your knees so that you can at least move yourself a bit, are you doing it deliberately? We agreed beforehand, didn't we, so you could easily have worn another, more practical, more sober pair of trousers, e.g. the jeans, as usual. Oh, I see, the trousers are supposed to be camouflage, because you're supposedly going jogging, and anyway we still have to talk about something that happened yesterday evening. There's something we have to talk about, a sentence from one of our sentimental films, where the Alpine dairymaid has a sweet secret and is itching to get rid of it again in the forest. Something that I know. You know already. But not now. The god of love is standing beside us and will hit us on our naked butts, because at this distance it would be a pity to waste an arrow. He doesn't need the arrow for us anyway. We already love each other. Look, the skirt is gone now, it's no longer in your way, and I've already climbed halfway on top of you, you see, that's how I do it, I'll be on top in a second, done. You don't have to do anything anymore. Except get a millionairess to appoint you her heir. The dirndl skirt and the breasts are staying firmly up, have you ever seen anything like it? kept there by their own gravity, we can forget about them, but down there, get a hold of that, it's already as wet as a whole lake, and look at the thick vegetation that's growing on it! Like dwarf pines, only with curls. You've been wanting to get in there all this time, Kurti, my Kurti, am I not right, or do you want something else? No. Nothing. Grab a hold, how wet my swamp down there is. That's all happened for you and because of you. That's what we agreed, didn't we? We can talk afterwards. So now she gets her second, now already considerably harder slap in the face, the woman, and at last starts, somewhat belatedly, to blubber again. As usual. The country policeman didn't even need to put a proper swing in it, and already she's wailing even louder, before she's caught by the second blow, which she didn't see coming, perhaps also because he really did pinch her nipples so hard, just as she had offered them to him. She had not thought that he would accept her offer. Her mistake. She comes a little to her senses again in her strident intoxication, which accelerated the importance as lover which she has assumed from zero to two hundred in a couple of seconds and then mounted to a frenzy. Then came the drop; having hit bottom, she at last listens to the man again, and allows herself, half-naked, the skirt already gathered up, almost dripping, not at all mistress of the situation anymore, a hunted creature, who a short time before still thought herself a huntress and as if raised high on the shield of a Diana with menthol bottle plus bow and arrow, to be pushed and dragged behind a group of somewhat taller dwarf pines, it's really a whole dwarf pine wood. One wouldn't be hidden standing up, but for what we have in mind, one would at most be able to notice a slight movement in the bushes. There wouldn't have been more than that. Now at last the country policeman drops to the ground voluntarily and smoothly under the assault of the woman and her weight, which has increased somewhat in the course of the dull, uneventful years, as if he himself were ground, gives way and collapses under the force of an event, with which nature senselessly, intelligible only to herself, babbles away to herself. And then the woman throws herself full length over him. She is so in love, she knows something like that is only available free or not at all or for a great deal of money. She of course will get it as a present. His cock is already standing there, well done, as if it had already been there before the man, first, from the very beginning. One can hardly get the elastic of the leggings over it, which one has to, so that there's a proper space for the explosion of two bodies. The woman has personally ordered everything for the table of her life and had it delivered to her house as Sunday dinner. A call is enough, enter my house. The man no doubt can hardly wait to be introduced to her smallest room, and to have her served up nice and hot, a room which may be small, but a bit all right, but you can get lost in it nevertheless, if you don't know your way around. Sometimes a man gets out of hand if he has chosen the wrong kind of sport and doesn't know what he likes. Is that a moving pavement or is it a tiled floor, from which the blood can easily be wiped? The woman should at last show the country policeman what she wants, so that then he can do something quite different with his living, headstrong property. The woman is good at pointing, she was, among other things, a kind of piano teacher, and so this here is her stick with which one can go walking, walking, walking. Mrs. Gerti, please show me at last, with this pointer, what you want and where you want to go. You don't have to say it, but you should tell us nevertheless. Then we'll see our goal, but we don't have to see you. Who still has self-control? Nobody has any self-control anymore. TV tells us that and shows it to us once again, if we haven't understood. Too late unfortunately. After eleven p.m. Her body strikes a rougher note than is usual with this woman. This isn't a game. The country policeman hasn't really got his mind on it today, but he's making an effort because he has to. His mind is on another matter, which he goes over in peace and quiet when he's alone: In the communal shower, the men's bodies, nice people to whom one doesn't have to be polite. Fine young bodies, in a bundle, one next to the other, all without clothes and simply unthinkable without their little man, at which one casts glances surreptitiously. Best of all the country policeman would like to carry them in his arms, their bodies dangling to right and left as if lifeless, what a wonderful, limp, and yet heavy burden that would be for this man. Everything open and spread out, what there is, nicely prepared and presented by nature and borne as if on one's own body. Weapons. Beaming, he would be allowed to see every last thing, precisely everything that is forbidden! That most of all. He would help matters along with his hands, if he couldn't see far enough into the other bodies. What is a woman against that. She's dirty. A fish factory. It is neither necessary nor advisable to fit into a woman's body. Something of this body always clings to one, that can never be washed off. The country policeman secretly likes to look at pictures of naked young men, which he bought far from his place of residence, magazines in which all the cocks seem to craftily eye him up, iridescent as snakes, with the bounce of steel springs. He thinks of these young men now, he knows each one by the first name printed under the photo. Perhaps the names aren't even true. One can hardly ring these men up. But no. That would not have been necessary at all, he gets his erection anyway, whether a woman lies here and offers herself or not, making an effort to be nice, but also passionate if so desired. Both. One needs both and can do both. One would like nothing better than to tear her to shreds, this woman. Instead, decorated like a fighting cock, with its little red helmet, his cock enters Gerti because that's what she wants, it would prefer to go somewhere else. And once it is standing erect, it can't do it fast enough, so that it's over and done with once again. Oh dear, already over? Please, here's the gate, where it always is, and as always it's as wide open as a barn door, and we eat human flesh like a horse. No music needed for resuscitation. The man can't bear to hear anymore, he's already had to hear so much, for him the whole thing is a process without any adornment. This process can just go ahead and proceed. It'll be over all the more quickly. The man really has no grounds to care one way or the other, all he needs is the ground, he can throw the rest away. Doesn't Gerti have a Walkman there in her bag, on which earlier she could listen to Mozart as loud as can be? Immediately it flies out of the bag and down the rocks. We don't need it. Yes, only now does he notice, as the gadget is already in the air: She did indeed have one in her bag, and one of the earplugs was still in her ear from the climb, but she had already switched the thing off earlier. A pity, perhaps the chamois would have got some enjoyment out of it. The earplug is also pulled out of her, the gadget falls silently past the rock faces. The woman disregards it. She is still trying, through hectic squeezing, stroking, turning and pulling, to at last get the man to come onto her wavelength where they can swim away all alone, but together, the two of them, in the ether, in infinity, for as long as they want, today, however, only at the time we have agreed. It's OK, Kurt, if you've got the cash, Gerti. The lovers. After all they belong to one another at every other time, too, just as they wish. At all times. The woman has ceased to exist and lives only through him. The lips of her vulva are briefly raised, he enters as agreed, and the lips close contentedly behind him. What was that noise, stop!, draws back for a moment and listens, darling, please don't stop, one listens with one's ears or the headphones and not with one's cock. This woman can never tolerate a distraction from herself and her subject, which is again herself. Her soul now buries itself puffing, panting, groaning in his. Earth flies up. We've managed it: The grave gapes open. The woman pulls his hand away from his own genitals, they're growing out of him, so there can't be any misunderstanding. He has to hurry up and get started, and then it should take a very long time and proceed tenderly. She shoves it in with her own hands, what has been held out to her in one hand, grips the rest of the man by the ass, shows her two rows of teeth, cries out, and beats him rhythmically, if at first still somewhat cautiously, but soon more vigorously on the back, she's got a sense of rhythm, but it's her rhythm, not his. But it's precisely at this pace, hers, not his, that the man is immediately supposed to go on, but at the same time stay there and then: never go away again. Go away: no, he can't do that. I believe and see that for their pleasure such people can sometimes behave as if they're crazy, this woman here, for example, but where the pleasure is supposed to lie I don't yet understand. I shall read it off myself and pass it on, if I find it. It exists, this spark of love, but one has to blow strongly on it and stick at it, so that the next time the spark doesn't go out with someone else. When one's in love, then everything is much more beautiful, but also more terrible, knows the woman, probably because a little bit of the spiritual is also involved, isn't it? No, it isn't! He will bring her a beautiful weakness, the man, but not until afterwards, when everything is quiet again and one can think and talk about everything and add oneself at will to what has been thought, at the places where one fits in. But only after it has gone on like that for a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes or as long as you like, a stiff cudgel thrashing the inside of her abdomen and at some point she has to cry out loud involuntarily with pain and pleasure, whether she wants to or not. She doesn't. And she mustn't. Otherwise it will occur to a hiker to see if anyone's there. In between he has to place his hand over her mouth, she'll chase away the animals and all the other hikers with her bawling, and chase them exactly in their direction. But we can't be doing with that now. There's no one there, darling. Everyone's getting ready to go to bed or has already done so. Doing something like that in the freedom of nature could become a habit with her, fears the man, who prefers to do it to her in her house. As caretaker, so to say, no, we don't say it like that. There he feels safe and protected, because it will soon belong to him. Here in the wilderness he almost feels afraid, no, not that, but he doesn't like it so much, one easily gets dirty, and that makes the woman at home suspicious. No, not really. This woman here is a burden. A pest. Today he would perhaps like to treat her somewhat more harshly and also take her from behind, which she doesn't like so much, so that she gets out of the habit of constantly ordering him around. This way, yes, this way, too, no, not from there, please not, I don't want that. Perhaps then at least she'll manage without him for a while, but not too long. Please not. Please not. You're not made of sugar, are you. Perhaps then at least she'll be quiet for a while. He goes at it a little more easily now, the man, he's got time. He'll convince her all right, after he's plumbed her ass a little at the entrance, where no one's keeping watch, that pain is not an expression when someone is suffering. Because there is no expression for it. A scent is stuck in front of his nose, which he doesn't like so much. Now he's in the beautiful forest, he is master of the situation, no matter which, he turns Gerti roughly on her stomach and now he really gives her a chance to shout, but she's somewhat subdued. If she really wants to, then go ahead, she'll have good grounds. No, he would rather have the ground. From which mountain peak has he just come? He's only on his way there? What, hasn't she just asked him to stop again? What, already? He's hardly started. This way it's not quite as nice as usual, Kurti, this isn't the way I imagined it, another way it would be much nicer than usual. Wouldn't you rather like to come from the front, so that I can look at you lovingly as you're doing it? I like that especially, to look into your dear blue eyes. No. That I don't like so much. I prefer it another way. I like it like this and like this. Yet the man could now slowly and thoroughly subjugate a whole nation, and if it were up to him, he would do so at any time. No. He's not going to stop now. In half an hour it will already be pitch dark, and the newspapers would be unable to see the whole nation trembling before him. Someone unimportant, who becomes important, a big event as recently in Ischgl, where the snow turned hard as stone and rose up against the people, because they abused it for their own pleasure. Minus ten, and a terrific band stands behind the popular girl group, girls who can sing terribly loud, whoever they are. Next week it will be a world-famous boy group. We will no longer be able to read the newspaper and not know what is happening to us, when the snow turns into concrete and collects in a single place, where it doesn't belong at all. There's no kissing now. One can't call it rejoicing anymore either, what the woman there is doing, who tried to throw her weight about, but there the man has already shoved her face into the dried up, pointed needles and gleefully rubbed her face in them, so that the decayed, rotting stuff presses into her mouth, nose, and, ouch, into her eyes. He'll come to regret disdaining my genitals, she hopes, although he does love me, but I'll be able to convince him, he doesn't really know about these things yet, I'll persuade him to love and honor all of my genitals and always to support their unfolding. Coughing and spitting and with her butt involuntarily rearing up and twisting round, the body comes and thoughts go until the man, with an almost careless blow to the small of the back, can once again control the spring sacrifice, which he has laid hold of there, finally on this occasion, and she lies motionless. She succumbs to her determination as woman, but she has determined place and time, something at least, no, nothing. She can hardly make so free now as to prescribe all the things he's supposed to do with her and above all: where. How long? As long as it suits me. But you don't suit me, you're too tight for me. The: please stop now, I can't anymore, doesn't properly get out of her mouth anymore, because her neck is firmly pinned to the ground as if by a vise and she can only occupy herself with agitated waiting and involuntary flinching and twisting around, because of constantly being pinched, and thrusting her butt, until he's finished at last. Soon a little blood flows. Well, she'll survive, at home we've got a good antiseptic cream for wounds, for use both externally and on the mucous membranes, since we've known this man, but it won't be quite as nice as we had agreed beforehand and as this woman had imagined it. No, this time, unfortunately, it didn't turn out to be as nice as recently, she's almost unconscious now, hey, wake up!, but the woman will, when she takes stock much later, have been happy and content about so much affection and that at least he won't have killed her. Perhaps the next time. But a human being endures a great deal, I sometimes think: everything, but there are worse things than everything, and that is: when one doesn't get everything one wants. The terribly hard pinching of her buttocks wasn't very pleasant either, the woman registers, whose cash register rang and rang, because something was put into it, but without the man appearing to be at all aware of it. The woman counts up her takings-nothing there, how is that possible. Why does he do something like that? Presumably out of love and passion, neither of which could be controlled, and have swept their owner along like last summer's floods, but only half the street, they at least left the other half for next year, and next year the street still won't have been repaired. A fine weakness, in the local authority as among people, which is not to be confused with inactivity. But a new age has dawned meanwhile, don't you think? Do you know, for example, that age in which women determine what they want and when and where and how and why and above all: where they want to get to? Is there a secret compassion somewhere in him, thinks this woman, it must be there somewhere, mustn't it? Has it perhaps been half suffocated, because earlier she threw herself so intemperately and gracelessly on this man? But what should she do if she simply can't control herself in his presence? What, you don't know the forest? I do know the forest, except not this one here, how shall I find my way out again? No, there is no secret compassion in this man, I say in his stead, not for anyone. But at least he takes his time with what he does, one has to admit that. However, for some people even time itself lasts too long. They wanted a condensed, abbreviated version of time, so that afterwards they can enjoy the infinity, the eternity of pleasure all the longer. At any rate the man has long ago ceased to be afraid of shit, I can assure you of that. He had to wipe it off his own mother often enough or scratch it off somewhere else or pick it off the floor. Would his penis stand up like that if he didn't like to do all that and didn't like me at least a little, thinks the woman, just as with violent jerks she feels him discharge himself into her and after that fortunately quickly become smaller and slip out of her. No sound apart from loud panting and puffing. Well hello. Is he not pleased at his success, for which he had to struggle long beforehand with himself and with her? Is he not tired by now and would at last like to be a little tender? His grip around the woman's neck relaxes at any rate, with a sigh the man collapses into a loose bundle over her, unfortunately with his whole weight on her back. With that it's already certain that for a while, until he's had a breather, he will cement her breasts into the ground and her breathing will be considerably restricted. But she has enough breath, confidence, and voice left over, in order quietly, but in detail, to declare the following, which she can't hold back, it simply has to come out, now is that supposed to be a question or not? Gabi is supposed to have disappeared, at least that's what I've heard. You see what happens. Didn't you take her straight home yesterday? I know, of course, where she was yesterday and with whom, and what should I do about that now? It serves you right, if she's run away from you, and now you only have me. Where did you drive her afterwards? Why didn't you take her home immediately? You should really know where she is. Will you go to see her again when she's back and drive her to the office early every morning? Don't think that I don't know! I've known it for a long time. Once I even followed you in my car. Where is she now? Since she hasn't come home. I know exactly, that you pick her up almost every day, early in the morning. She tells everyone she takes the early bus or the train, but almost every day she drives to work with you, that's what I've heard. I've heard as a fact, no, as a rumor, she collects used tickets from her colleagues and hands them in for her travel expenses. Her girlfriend says that, and another one, too. There's a few in the village who know it. So if they check, she doesn't need anything else. That's fraud, isn't it. Or worse. They'll surely immediately notice that the number codes on the tickets she's handed in were bought at quite different stops or even for quite different journeys. I've thought about it for a long time. How has the girl got the nerve to do it. You saw her last. Or did you take her somewhere afterwards? Ouch. Don't hit me again, don't ever hit me, and if you do, then not in the face, I've got the impressions of your hands and of the pine needles all over me, people will notice if I have a black eye as well. No, personally I don't care, but I would prefer if you didn't do it and would be satisfied with the love that I give you. Yes. I love you. You love me too. Other people don't know anything. They're not there at night, in my home, it's impossible, no one can pretend as well as that! No one can. You love me, too, I know it, I know it. In fact I don't even exist anymore, only you exist. I would like to talk to someone close to me about all of that, but I have no one. You must love me, a little at least, and one doesn't send what one loves to its ruin. Perhaps we need more room for each of us, not only in our bodies, where space is quite limited, as I noticed again earlier. We need more room for the two of us. My house would be the solution. I agree completely. Let's move in together. Please. I'll let you know immediately if I'm planning a change in this situation. But what should I want to change? I want to change that you always return home to your wife. I want you always to stay with me. Asked about my most intimate feelings, I reply, I would not want to change anything in this respect. I would want to have things exactly as they are now. Except that then you'll always be with me. Then I would not have to long for your presence, because I would constantly have it around me. And if I didn't have it once, then I would, warmly wrapped in the distance which there would briefly be between us, wait until you were with me again. Thanks for that. We have nothing to give away, but we'll be able to afford a bit. I can promise you that. That's more or less what I wanted to say and now I've said it. I long day and night for the sight of you. Look how courteous nature is, it lets us go first, before night falls and one simply isn't noticed anymore. And the ground opens and swallows one up.