Life can't be buckled on and off like a pair of skis, on which one glides through nature, through this fantastic, sometimes however snow-covered wealth of amino acids and vitamins, which cannot be won by adventure alone. One has to take the amino acids and vitamins as an extra, unlike the plants, which are able to produce these materials themselves. They take the elements which they need, and which have to be available in a form they can use, and off we go. Fresh soil contains all that in sufficient quantities, leached-out soils don't contain it, they are exhausted, because for too many years the same thing was always expected of them, they would urgently need variety. Aha. This soil is now acidic. That's not so good. The acid content must be reduced, absolutely, yet the way it's done is usually wrong. People bend over their soil, which is always too little for them, always too small, yet they've usually erred on the side of generosity already and expected too much of it, above all when the soil is in the water. Every day one gets dirty and cleans oneself, it never goes very deep. The people now gather in the village and talk about a young dead woman. The ceaseless circles in the water which spread out from her seem to have no cause, at least the cause is not known. The young dead woman has already become quite indistinct. The more she's talked about, the more sensation-seeking and meaty the talk, the more she seems to disappear from the little interests in life among which she existed when she was alive. This Snow White lay for a couple of days in the dark, cold water, a long, long time, no, only a relatively short time, and has not decomposed. The corpse remained fresh in the water, but as a corpse nevertheless. No prince could awake her, and if he were to take the girl to his chamber, she would rot, smell, become worm-eaten, post-mortem lividities, greenish discoloration of the abdominal wall would follow. Rigidity for a while, so that one could stand Gabi upright. Blooming churchyard roses on the cheeks, no, not them, because there were no wearisome and impractical death throes. The jeans limp as leaves in their water bag, in the green plastic sack. This Snow White died gently from the throttling of the glomus caroticum, an itself agreeable ganglion. The vagus, the tenth cranial nerve, is immediately paralyzed, and one dies a reflex death on the spot. So no further attempts to kill this girl were necessary. No poisoned comb, no poisoned apple, until no more breath came from the child's mouth. No shock, except to us, when the girl falls to the ground and the slice of apple flies from her mouth in a high arc. There was no object which led to death, it was the arms of a hunter of men, and no forceful blow on the back at the right moment could return life to this body. First there was a small, then a more violent disturbance, a mouth which seemed made to kiss, yet we see no poison component, which could have made the girl very ill, we see only that no more breath descends this living human shaft, down this breathing pit. The breath has gone, the death roses are resplendent or not, it all depends. But unfortunately the investigators will only know and interrogate the official boyfriend, who weeks later will carry the coffin with five school friends and not stumble, so that no piece of apple may jump in a high arc from a mouth and bring the girlfriend to life again. At the moment he is still stunned, the boyfriend, but it could be an act, let's keep on asking him questions, we don't have anyone else at the moment, let's ask this good-looking, ambitious lad, who's not a prince, but has something to offer nevertheless, in which as a precaution he had installed Gabi like a chip, which will hopefully work. Let's ask him why he could cope with the spoken exercise in the first period so dispassionately and calmly. Only now does the boyfriend notice: This component, Gabi, has unfortunately broken down and with it the whole apparatus. When one notices something, it's always already too late. Nothing works anymore. Those whose lives are up to the minute know all about these electronic devices, but if even a tiny thing goes wrong, they have to fiddle around for a very long time, and they then become really uneasy and quickly substitute a couple of other parts in the device as if it were a hen, hoping the device won't notice, and really take offense. Just a moment! Good. Life can go on. Everything is working again, if I may say so. Let us make another attempt and equate Gabi with Snow White, let the waters race upwards against their intentions, let us hurl them upwards so they are new and pure again, exactly, for once in a lifetime back to purity, out of all the lavatory bowls and wash basins and bath tubs: up, up, and away to heaven, so that they can fall to earth again. If one then takes the new module, the one which at present prevents her from functioning, the poisoned piece of apple, out of the girl again, will it function again, the child? No, still not, perhaps one would have to fit a completely new part into the one who does not resemble a dead girl, only a sleeping girl, it would have to be fitted in, so that this positive impression is maintained, only better, more perfectly, most perfectly of all, if life returned. Please, sit down! What's still missing? The calm of harmony between Gabi and her boyfriend, which has been irrevocably shattered. Now and beyond that she walks at best invisibly beside the young man, which at least has the advantage that she can go away unnoticed, when he happens to be washing his car again. Whose duty is it to stay? No one can be forced to do so. Some went away involuntarily, our dear dead, most of them, they didn't want to either, but had to. They certainly wanted to know what it's like on the other side, but they didn't really want to experience it themselves, at most through the media, that would have been more comfortable than having to go there oneself to the dark, the other side, sister of sleep, in which every animal can carry on the infinity, no the finiteness of its existence. But every human being can't do it, he has to stop and retire from the game. No matter what he last did, death is inside him as a sickness, and each sickness immediately reminds him that unfortunately he has to die, but hasn't got to the end yet. Do you really believe that we emerge from death as spirit, if in life we haven't already got to know the spirit? Where should it come from, so suddenly, above all, when death, like that of Gabi, came quite unexpectedly? Above this stretch of water, in the lake in which the dead girl lay for a couple of days, nicely wrapped, as if the water was instead supposed to be kept from her, took up her residence before being conveyed back to the shore by the attractive force of several country policemen and their paddles, there hovers no ghost, no, not that, but I don't see a spirit either, no matter how hard I try. A man of God could not be fetched anymore either. After that only hikers walked round the lake path, three men in knee breeches, climbing boots and anoraks, but they didn't see anything. They probably didn't look into the water, but into the finders and viewfinders of their binoculars and cameras, but they didn't find anything. It doesn't matter that there was no spirit there, since if man had spirit, he would be God and would be immortal, which has meanwhile got a little boring even for God. There would have had to be a meaning in Gabi's life, in which she would have been able to follow and observe the process of her own life. She would have had to have the feeling: all in one, not one for two, no, one just for one alone, because that's often how women think, I believe, when they wish for wedding presents or at least a firm warm body there, where it absolutely doesn't belong, and also where, if it does end up there, it usually doesn't want to stay; this body is different, and it wants to make other, better sexual contacts, as does that one there. He won't find it difficult, he's been alone for a long time. The country policeman. He quite likes the woman and the one over there as well, but the inclination on her side is much greater. Please be my wife, who still wants to hear that nowadays. Well, she wants to hear it and agree immediately. But I don't want to grant her that experience now. A middle class life together in comfortable circumstances, of a kind she once left, after all, because life as an artist appeared so very tempting to her, but then wasn't. It is not foreseen by me that people abandon themselves to one another, it is foreseen by someone else, however, that in death they give themselves back to their species, from which they have only borrowed themselves for a short time. As so often, it's precisely when one is finally supposed to give oneself back that one can't find oneself, one has already had to pay a fine for being overdue, without having even begun to get to know oneself in the book of life. One may not like oneself, but one is very far from wanting to give oneself up because of it; and everything appears dreary and empty to people, a watery, an ice desert, a motorway on which a ghost driver is getting ready to transform the isolation, the little people existence of the living, of this mother with the infant in the baby seat, of this driver of a delivery van full of ladies' clothing, but without a lady companion (ow! not again!), of this student, who has just picked up his clean washing from home, into something merely alive and immediately after that something dead. These people, these damaged but then ultimately still unexpectedly dead people, because I think no one foresees their last moment, at least they're no longer around for it, they'll still manage it, to go back in time, before their birth. Some of them no doubt don't know for quite a while that they are dead, and their colleagues, who meet them, probably don't know it yet either, they're not usually in any newspaper, where one could look up their dear names, and even on the screen only their crushed, sometimes burnt-out wreck is shown, as if that had been the most important thing about them. Do you believe you thereby help nature to become aware of itself as its own spirit? If you don't even show the spirit on TV, so that everyone can buy one or one like it? How should we reach it, if this wet snow avalanche was not announced in advance by the weather man? And God, too, you only show made of gold, silver, or marble, yet he worked so hard and took on so much, precisely to leave matter, the material, behind him and to be able at last to return to himself again, in spiritual form, as spirit, who's in good shape (at any rate he's got no competition in human beings, against whom he could measure himself, he made them, after all!), in order to fly around everywhere, into people, out of people again, just as he pleased. So please, in or out, as far as I'm concerned: I'm not an airport, I'm not even a taxi stand. One step further, no not as far as that either, don't you see, that's where the precipice down to the Hollental begins, the hunting rights have been leased by an industrialist from Germany who has retired from business and who now only wishes to devote himself to his living young wife and his dead animals of every age. The ground belongs to the Federal Forests (actually: the Habsburg Family Fund, but you can forget it, unless Zvonomir Habsburg, no sooner than he can speak three words, demands it back from you in person, then Flobert pistol in hand you will step outside your little house, which you had to save so hard for, and blow him away, the splendid pretender to the throne, yet a trace of his breath will then be able to blow you away, and the cameras will want to be there, too, but arrive too late, yes, that is ALL, that we'll never get: consideration), the shoes in which you're standing you bought at Dusika Sport, you could have got them cheaper at Shopping City Slid, the car drivers belong to the country policeman, who gets money for them as well, and so in this way you'll manage to get nature to kill itself and even to regard that as its only goal. It will cast off its covering of visibility and sensuality, push through like the last caterpillar through the last cocoon or whoever does it, until the construction of the butterfly has been completed. The imago then appears in a glow, beating its wings, the full-blown image of the finished creature, over the lake, but for the young dead woman it's no incentive, she cannot of her own accord slip out of her pupa, the plastic sheet and float around. She will be floating matter in the water if she's not found in time, which has hereby occurred. That is how I decided it. In death this young girl cast off her pupa wrapping, but unlike the Son of Man she did not become God, a pity really. Her death should be seen in a rather more negative light, let's see if me negative has a point, too, yes, I see it, it could be the peak of what a human being can reach as nature, and that is the peak of an iceberg. From this frozen mountain peak he can see God much better, because he will have come considerably closer to him. Believing that won't make you happy either. Her nature, the nature of the young dead woman, will burn itself up, as if it were a ship, she will go out of herself, behind herself, floating if necessary and reappear as spirit, young, pretty, smart, hard working. And here we have it, the finished young moth, pretty as a picture, nice to see you!, we usually only get oldies here, you dear newborn spirit, whose shoes and handbag are missing, choose something in the wardrobe department, we have millions of ownerless bags and shoes in stock, which we have taken away from people. At first I thought, Gabi still has her shoes, but they're gone too, sorry, my mistake. Who knew that shoe soles bear clues, which can be traced right back to the murderer? I should have known. Someone else knew. Who pulled off her shoes, and where are they now? I would incidentally urgently advise you not to take this step into the unknown, which Gabi had to take, oh no, too late, now you know it already, the unknown, are lying amidst fallen rocks down below and can try out everything on yourself. But all in the proper order. You must on no account become spirit first and then die, otherwise people will see you as you transform yourself and then wander around endlessly and without floodlights, illuminated only by the little red lamp in front of the tabernacle, which God moved out of long ago because he found a bigger apartment, flutter over the snow-covered slopes, which won't make you any better or more beautiful either, in the night, when one can't see very clearly anyway, but of course one does see the dead. They have a bright radiance about them, though not a happy one. The dead. Actors and audience in one. They so rarely become spirits, because, as already mentioned, they nowhere find spirit, which they could slip into like ichneumon wasps. Then they would eat up the spirit in order to survive. Death could certainly apologize to us, if it comes too soon, one doesn't do that, the housewife is still busy putting on make-up, doing her hair, and stirring the mayonnaise, nothing will come of it, I can see that at a glance. I've already said it several times, I think: Only with death and the Olympic Games is taking part all that is required, but I'll now add that, thanks to the admission ticket to our own death (for which we waited in a long line at the abortionist's, who in the end sent us away again, because we were already too far advanced and unfortunately had to be born), we have also become part of the self-realization of God, yes, that's his hobby and his job and once again of course it's entirely at our expense. Even God cannot be expected to pay the prices at the Manhattan Fitness Club. Presumably you, who are individually so dependent on others that you have to read books to have at least a clue about the spirit, are anyway no more than fertilizer for the salvation process, which consists in having to dissolve oneself, take one's leave, as you please, done already, how can one so completely distort the necessity of dying? It is my only very personal consolation, please forgive me. This young, dead woman, I have to laugh at her stupidity, to entrust herself to a beast of prey, to put a little hand on its fly, why would an animal, which nearly always goes about unclothed, ever have needed something like that, its heart hardly beats any faster when it brings down its quarry, and when the animal has to work it can't pee at the same time that's taken care of, I think, by the north adrenalin or the south adrenalin, which it then produces. The animal. It would carry out these actions again at any time, to get something moving, says the animal. Someone who works for a Muslim charity organization or the like and also earns money through it is also living dangerously, says another animal, a Fuchs- fox-from Gralla, after his own hands exploded and he went the way of all flesh, following his hands, which pointed the way. The application of force is always unpredictable. That's the way it is. How fortunate, that the fox spoke to us a little beforehand, about his very own truth, which strangely enough doesn't appear more peculiar to me than this whole country in which I find myself at present. It's better if the country is concerned with itself for a bit, in order not to alarm others.
So now the doctor cuts this young dead woman open from top to bottom, the skull is sawn open, there's no cause for hope anyway, and a silver friendship ring is pulled from her hand, which once felt something, to be given back to her family. Death. It draws its terrors, I think, solely from its linking of individuality and no longer being. If we were all equal, we would be indifferent to death, because we could only die as species and not tell one another about it. Just look at this spirit, for example, it's a very new one, a group of people thought it up when they realized that they would never be more like God than in this film about pilots, in which they were able to achieve power over themselves and the likes of us by a kind of surprise attack. For once at least! You can see for yourself how the little bit of spirit that was produced will try in vain to reach us in further episodes every evening before the news, in order to outdo the news in advance in horrors, and so today, too, it rehearses it again from the TV set, because without rehearsal it can't do it: inflating itself. The spirit is unceasing rehearsal (one can tell its knowledge of the futility of its attempts from looking at it, I believe), desperate efforts, without success. If you don't understand it immediately, you can also read up on it in Austrian Broadcasting's Teletext service; the spirit is very concerned to make it exciting for us, so that we at last take note of whatever. Announced, e.g., today: Train crash in Norway, so you shouldn't travel to Norway. Have you understood that at least? But it's no use, because tomorrow there's something quite different again, even more horrifying, but somewhere else. The TV is the immortal spirit's favorite place to stay, perhaps even the place where it originated, because it doesn't seem to want to leave. No wonder, it's nice and warm, it's almost as if it were still inside the head. But perhaps television is also the only place where, against its better judgement, the spirit can still hope that we pay attention to it. And so it makes its compulsory contribution to the process of growth and decay, we watch the Universe program and see that the beautiful butterfly has already emerged and has inflicted a terrible fate on a cabbage leaf, and so we give it a good hiding. We would have managed that even without the television. But the spirit doesn't know that. Now it's offended! Yet I like it so much. You can also get by without it, but I don't say so. Basically everything can happen by itself. Once the spirit was the whole world, today it is, e.g., a family soap, which scorches its feet if it doesn't immediately keep on running to the next episode, always ahead of the advertisements, chased by them as by a bad-tempered lioness. Always keep moving, until we are allowed to see the Lord God, who will possibly provide a poorer picture, less clear (even though the set isn't broken!) than in the nice nature film before. Apart from that God's only on once a week, on Sunday evening before the prime-time film. And if he appears earlier, we switch him off. And if he nevertheless drops by unexpectedly, he sometimes comes disguised as a bishop, so that we can get used to the sight of him, and that in the shape of Mr. Horst "Derrick" Tappert, who has begun a completely new career, because this time he, too, would like to show a bit of spirit, at least more than before. It seems to be infectious. He would almost have died, this washout, he comes to us for bit of starch. Here I have to agree with Hegel's critics, all the pain, all the suffering, all the hardship, all the everything, all the death in itself, none of it will result in even one less innocent dumb sheep writhing on the slaughtering block of history. God created, and then he didn't waste another thought on what he had done, I'd risk laying a bet on that. I've gone on often enough about it, now that's that, once and for all, I have to accept it, and that is fortunately also the absolute end, and I don't ever want to write something down again. Now, poor child of this world that I am, I would at last like to meet the world spirit in person, so that it sends me a completely new bright idea, how I could shape my talent for invention-which I once, during carnival, in front of lay people, disguised as spirit, because for sure no one would have suspected that I was underneath-even more purposefully and ambitiously, above all in terms of content, that's my weak point, here I state a doctrine, which goes: I don't believe that myself! Or better, I avoid the spirit as I have done so far and instead show myself, quite stunned by my significance, personally, just as I am. I am I. We are we. I signify nothing, but I have a certain significance, as you see yourself. Perhaps I am even more important than you! Until now at least I've got quite far like that, and I don't have a car. If I don't believe it, why should you believe that one can get anywhere without ever putting anything in the tank? Your travel group met half an hour ago on platform four, but now this train, too, has left. So if contrary to expectations the world spirit does come after all, because I haven't come to it, I shall do everything to send it, which kept me waiting so long, back to where it came from, with a single haughty glance. Now I don't want it anymore. Off you go. To church. Because that's a place I never go to. So I shan't meet it and so will no longer have to relinquish my own thoughts. Bravo? Did I hear rightly? Bravo? So now I don't need the spirit at all anymore. I am acquitted, goodbye Rome, away, away to the Maldives, into the sun! To live at last, as a whole party with very many suntanned people in it shows us every day. I can't dive, don't swim very well. In addition I haven't maintained my species. I didn't, however, receive any child allowance for it, like the mother of Gabi, our young Snow White, whose awakening from a medical point of view is here formulated in an imprecise and scientifically somewhat shaky way, perhaps because she didn't wake up anymore at all. No dwarves, who cut a stay in pieces, so that the girl first breathes, then comes alive again. We have no mention, no indications of renewed activity of the heart in the wake-up phase, nor is there any breathing as further sign of a resuscitation process. Where is the corresponding opening of the eyes? Who hears the famous exclamation, with which the seemingly dead like Liz Taylor, she, too, a sister of death, return to life: I was only sleeping? Where are the journalists now that I want to awaken? No, our smaller, younger sister of death is not sleeping in her black wet coffin, in her green tarp. She really is dead. Absolutely. The absolute pure and simple. Eternal as the spirit, to whom unfortunately, although I have so little ability to believe in it, I've taken a fancy, as to malt cough drops, only: What did it do to me? She has, admittedly, been on TV several times now, but she can nevertheless no longer reach us, this young dead woman. In each one of us we all die, dies our quite unkind kind, but not mine, I did not found any nor carry any on. That others have decently done so is no comfort to them, when the scythe hisses round their ears. But usually we're not sitting comfortably anyway, why should we be just at the moment of our death, then we've got other things to do: weeping, breathing, praying, paying attention to heart activity, checking the funeral parlor, hoping for a resurrection scene and knowing that it won't happen this time either, taking leave, fighting against it, refusing to stand for interruptions, screaming and scratching the bed, water or snow blanket AND: at every, really every opportunity propping oneself up with a new significance, which is not due to one and will soon be replaced by a coffin lining, which is supposed to absorb bad smells and stinking fluids. One had no significance and does not have one now either, with the exception of one's nearest and dearest, to whom one meant something, who are also, however, pleased that we're gone at last and that they'll have no more trouble with us and we couldn't take our money with us and have left it behind.
It's all been said, perhaps someone said too much and is now holding his hand to his mouth in dismay, but God's always in his son's way, who's simply younger and better-looking, he's gathered a group of disciples around him, whom he's keen on, and God is already regretting having taken him back and taken him in. He himself became younger as a result, at least he looks like it, but it's also more of an effort keeping up with the young people until one's 47. Jesus wants to do sports, Jesus wants to make work for himself and catch souls, Jesus is constantly dragging in errors and cobbling together eternal truths out of them, always the DIY freak, well, he's not very skillful, the way he does it. And at the moment the Country Police are going tirelessly from house to house and conducting interviews, they've got to do that themselves, no one will do it for them. Narrative debris rains down on them, sometimes followed by stubborn, persistent silence, just like the rockfalls at the moody Neuberg Rock, from which they sometimes come thundering down for days on end and then for days there's nothing, and decorate car roofs with dents, but there the Lord God has much nicer decorations, big halos, which he could break off if he intervenes too vigorously in our life. He doesn't do it anyway. Here is the office of the company for which Gabi worked, and he's already hanging here too, the man on the cross, in the boss's office, not in the sand, but hanging in the corner. A plain, modern cross, bought in a craft shop, and the prominent victim is so full of pride at his stiff price that he's almost bursting out of the screws with which he is fastened to his instrument, which is, I believe, by now more immortal than the sportsman on it, we could just drop him; yes, you are seeing properly: beneath it a candle and a heart-shaped vase, with a bunch of dried flowers sticking in it, that's how the personal secretary likes it, who distinguishes herself from all the other women in the company and likes to emphasize this distinction in her appearance, she has, e.g., cemented her hair with hair lacquer. And then there's yet another figure who is distinguished from the secretary by not appearing at all anymore: a young dead woman. The company is in a state of agitation because of it. If the young commercial apprentice is already dead, why poke around in her life and leave behind prints that could then be mixed up with those of the murderer? It really was only a vague hint by a girlfriend. We're going to follow it up now, we followed up quite different ones that led us nowhere, and we've often had our heads in our hands, always one bit of head in two hands or a bucket of sand, which extinguishes everything it gets hold of. Can't you remember anything concrete, anything? Any detail, no matter how small, could be important, please try to remember. One colleague remembers that Gabi was the only person in the company who, because she was still attending technical school, got her travel by rail and bus reimbursed. The officers are instantly electrified: do you still have these tickets? Of course we still have them. Take a look: Neatly stuck to A-4 pages are all the tickets. Gabriele Fluch collected fifteen schillings for every ticket. One takes what one can get, and then runs and sees how far one can go with it. Not far enough. The officers take the sheets away and decode the number codes stamped when the tickets were cancelled. Result: More than half the tickets were bought at quite different stops, often even going in the opposite direction beyond Murzsteg and Frein. Now we've got another clue and immediately attach a belt, so that we don't lose it again and can hold on to it; given how our own ships of life sometimes pitch and roll, we can do with it. It turns out there are several colleagues who regularly gave the girl their used tickets. They say they didn't give it a second thought and never asked any questions. Only one female colleague, with whom Gabi often ate her sandwich at break-time and afterwards emptied her yogurt tub, throws a little find at the officers' feet, which she'd been chewing on for quite a while, so that there's not much left of it: She has someone who gives her a lift, she said that to me once, Gabi, but I shouldn't tell anyone. And another colleague remembers once having met Gabi at work, before the Mariazell bus had even arrived. (Is later confirmed by several employees.) Now the narrative water begins to flow, even among Gabi's colleagues; almost all manifestations of water appear pretty to me, above all the high-proof ones, ice is also nice to look at, perhaps to eat or for ice-skating as well, but not for walking on. And I don't really like steam, then I'd rather go on stumbling through the narrative debris, there I know where I am and what I'm doing, it slips away under my feet more often than I would like, but it's not as perfidious as steam, which obscures things, and ice, which comes up at me from below and unexpectedly smacks me in the face. Why is this road suddenly folded up, it's not a spare bed? An employee states that he saw Gabi one afternoon in the post office in Murzzuschlag, where she was posting company mail. She left the building before him. He himself drove straight home. On his way he passed Gabi's parents' house and saw her already crossing the road; it was long before the bus was due. The girl must therefore have been brought home by car, but by which one? At the time Gabi was not yet a spirit being, they're up to every trick, and so couldn't overtake herself, since she was not yet in eternity and still knew where front and back, past and future were, even though she would no longer experience her future in person. What does an outsider know. The only concrete lead from the neighborhood so far also relates to this car: A neighbor diagonally opposite confirms that once in the morning he saw Gabi come out of her house and without hesitation or hanging around get into a parking loted around the corner. This neighbor, a retired woodcutter and still active poacher, like most of the men here, states the girl had certainly given the impression that she had been expecting the car at just this spot. So she got in without hesitating or even talking to or conferring with the driver. When that was, what kind of car and who was sitting in it, the neighbor knows none of that. Most of the other neighbors say nothing. It's always the same. The country police officers, among them Mr. Janisch, whom everybody here knows, a good-looking man (strange, how often this attribute is applied to him. As if one had a blood purity medal to award, but knew he didn't need to accept it; because once he at last has an opportunity to do so, he will only accept cash or good old real estate, which always comes more than one at a time, because one piece of real estate alone would not be a match for Mr. Janisch; and he will take every opportunity to press up against younger colleagues, to pass his hands over their hips and to let them properly feel his little fellow, from behind, as if they didn't have any eyes there. None of them dares say anything!), knock at the door, talk to the people on their list and hear not a word more nor less, which would be less than zero. The people listen to the questions, but mostly they don't react at all, as Kurt Janisch and his colleagues soon readily have to agree. Their statement sheets are as empty as the Gobi desert, and their content tells us less than that of a prayer book, because we don't believe the people, as God doesn't believe us either. The doors are silently closed behind the officers, and Kurt Janisch and his colleagues go away from the houses again and their buttoned-up inhabitants. It is a world of silent witnesses, none of whom have seen how regularly for more than a year a girl didn't get onto the bus only a hundred yards away, but into a strange car, which really no one recognized. A pity. We all have cars ourselves, except me, and so cannot call each and every one that doesn't belong to us by its first name. Other girls often kept a place for her in the bus, but they also never saw who gave Gabi a lift when she wasn't with them. Nor did they talk about it. And her mother and her boyfriend heard nothing and saw nothing, for over a year. That's odd, isn't it? This one cup of cocoa, half drunk, which was all that was left from the party, luckily it exists, so that the forensic doctor is able to state, with considerable certainty, that Gabi was probably already dead one hour after leaving the house, at the very latest one and a half hours.
Since no person can cope with his life, he should really wish to get to the end of it. But no, this uncertainty of existence is supposed to go on endlessly, and precisely in the shape of the person as whom one lived. Death only breaks off what in any case was never going to finish. The great unknown, the murderer, the phantom, who tore and garotted Gabi where the arteries divide at the neck, why search for him who put an end to a certain young woman? She must have been at a certain place at a certain time, unfortunately we only know her final address, the lake, the water, the watery dump, yet her whole life passed at a certain time and in a certain, rather small place. Her death doesn't mean that now she is everywhere and nowhere, there and gone, but her death has put an end to her having lived at a certain time in this village in the Alpine foothills. Strange how much people like to think of death as an entrance to eternity. I prefer to stick with the corpse, that's something that's there, for a while, the finality is superfluous, when one knows: It is the case that this body decomposes, till it, too, has liquefied and at some point disappeared, washed away, dissolved. I stick with this body, not in the posture of a mourner, as dogs do it, but more out of interest. No matter how insignificant this dead girl may have been, something of her is there nevertheless, which we can hold onto, she is such and such, and she is simultaneously not at all. Matter tied up in a plastic sheet, from which hair is floating at the top and socks are sticking out at the bottom. The shoes are gone. I cannot say anything about this bound spirit, nothing good, nothing bad. I can't see it, after all. I assume it is finally freed from its finiteness, but I fear it has not become infinite as a result. A puzzle, that the Country Police neither want to nor can solve. They want to find the murderer and what inspired him to snuff out the spark of another soul and perhaps other souls besides, because: Where are all the women who have disappeared? In retrospect on their photos they have such an odd expression on their face, we'll make a photocopy right away, so that we'll know, if we see one: That's one of the missing. For the times of the lifts Gabi got this much is known: There was no time for love. From the well-substantiated departure and arrival times of the very punctual girl it emerges that at these times the two never had more than twenty minutes free time together at most. Probably the time gained on the short stretch was just about ten minutes. What can you do in ten minutes? Briefly place the weight of your own body on another one, in order to keep the latter quiet as if with a dummy, to pacify it at least for a little while, until it cries out again? Take in one's mouth a very precious body part, which doesn't belong to one, anxious, but curious every time as to the taste (not everything comes in bags, otherwise it could easily be taken with one on every errand, but one could leave it standing somewhere), and whether something comes out and if so, what does it smell like? Lodge in Gabi's cunt as in a kind of institute, from which one is released having given an undertaking and with at first dark, later pale spots on one's trousers, but only so as to be able to return at any time? Simply a man who wants to talk to a girl about something? I don't believe that. Gabi never went out without her mother, her boyfriend, her girlfriends, says her mother, says her boyfriend, say the girlfriends. They also say that in newspaper interviews right after Gabi's disappearance. If that's true-then why did the girl make such a secret of these lifts she got? Presumably because the man had something to lose, perhaps because he was a close neighbor of Gabi and didn't want to be recognized, although or because everyone would have known him anyway. They just didn't know that it was him. It was no stranger. One can have a scrap with father and mother, a stranger dumps one like a piece of scrap, somewhere, such people have no environmental consciousness. Someone familiar won't manage that, because he knew the girl's purpose in life and never wanted to meet her again! Just don't turn into a purpose in life! He preferred to clear the girl out of the way for his own safety, the murderer, rather that than become his all and all, which yields nothing. So, now we'd rather put the body into this long-prepared green plastic refuse bag, which comes from a building site, because building sites are my whole life, to say nothing of the houses in the making, that's something one can hold on to, yes, the bones, the hair, the finger and toenails can stay too, but not as long as a house that was well built in a good mood. For all eternity, where the believer will be able to meet all these houses, or they meet him, boom!, a negation of the negation, because the perpetrator isn't building a house and probably won't get one as a present anymore. The concepts of finiteness fall out of my hand like the builder's hammer at five o'clock in the afternoon. Finally I don't know what to say anymore. I just say, there must still be this one minute left: Nothing is left. Death is natural, yet this was no natural death. Do you think Gabi wanted to own somebody who already belonged to somebody else? I don't believe that. I'm not a believer, that's why I always cut myself so badly when I come up against the limits of my existence. Then I believe that things go on, I so much want to follow the believers to where they're going. But it's not possible, and at the borders you can't go any further either. As if I were a foreigner from outside the wonderful Schengen states. Is there someone there. No, no one's there, because everyone wants to amuse themselves and hence at present and for all time to come are not and will not be at home. One can only amuse oneself outside, our European house is almost always too small for that, and now it's also too small for Austria, the model child, which never did anything and never will do anything. But neither do we want to allow others, since we are no longer welcome anywhere, to be at home with us, the inhabitants of Austria (then we would have to evacuate our common house! Anyone could come!). Anyone else there, who in return would perhaps like to see me happy? He wouldn't have to watch, because he wouldn't be at home when I came? Who, if I cried, would hear me? No one? Perhaps because no one has noticed me yet? And the perpetrator of this murder evidently didn't want to be noticed either, which doesn't surprise me. If he carried away any wounds of his existence, then they can't be seen at any rate. Otherwise we would immediately have him by the collar, as he runs bleeding through the estate, while something bigger looms up over his figure, the Beast, panting, which has lost its parking space and will never stop in its search for a new one. And if it has found one, then it would already always be too small, it would have to be a whole house at least. If a human being has to die of himself, why should he not be capable of creating a simple house with his own hands and the partly foreign capital of the building society? But its launches put out to sea, laden with interest, compound interest and gallons of our blood and our tears, and one never gets the interest, because so far the agreement always had to be renegotiated prematurely each time. With a pension fund that wouldn't have been so easy to manage, they are a work of the Devil. So it's easier to die than to get hold of a house. In death one still hangs around for a bit, with building work the ground gives way beneath one's feet, because it's already been secured with another plot, which was already heavily burdened or was insufficient in some other way. Mr. Schneider, the real estate shark, he always bid against himself, so that the prices of his real estate to the banks should go sky high. Who says real estate is fixed property! Against that a dead woman, every dead woman: She only moves when she's thrown into the water, and then she moves gently, very slowly, to the rhythm of the waves, the water moves her, of their own accord the dead don't move, this dead woman doesn't move. The water carries her around, gives her a shove when she weeps, so that she's quiet again. The water is sweet. I wish I would dare to enter it more often and risk entrusting myself to it. And all the purification plants, I wouldn't even see them. Do they want to clean the water? Then no living things could exist in it anymore! I don't want to permit them, these purification plants! Yet without them, things somehow wouldn't work either, we would have bits of shit floating beside us, and we would soon have water where now there's still land, one would have been exchanged for the other, trash and smut for clarity and truth. No, we're not going to do it like that, give oligotrophic and mesotrophic waters in return for eutrophic ones. No, we're not doing that. We're holding on to one lot, and the others can go somewhere else, so that we can send our dirt there and can feel good again here. We don't need anyone else, the water and I. Do we? Perhaps I, too, will be discovered one day, if someone dares to penetrate me. Who knows.