Be thankful I'm not doing you bodily harm. I was taught how to. You have to force yourself at first, but then it comes easily, of its own accord. By the way, I've got an idea for a new series of photos, I could make cuts, incisions and little holes in your skin. Or I could use the children's water-colours to get the effect.
I've been baking, I made you an apricot flan, poor Mumsie tells the children ingratiatingly, seeking sympathy and not finding any. She is counting on education, which prepares the way for understanding and sympathy, and on their hearts, but their hearts have long been missing that particular beat. You invest so much in Rainer and Anna, but all you get back is Rainer and Anna, minus the warmth and affection, and nothing more. There is the flan and there are the glass dishes. I'll put it here, with all the books, there's no room for a fresh flan any more, clear this stuff away, can't you!
No. Won't. Those books are worth more than any flan. We're just reading about how this existence of ours is valueless. Get lost, Mama, the twins chorus, sending their mother packing. She's unwelcome everywhere, poor soul. This has catastrophic consequences for her general condition.
Having given their mother a thorough yelling-at, the twins promptly turn to the flan and gobble it all up. This isn't beneath them at all.
Not a single piece is left for Mama, though she would have liked one too.
RAINER BELIEVES IT is tantamount to degradation of a woman if she submits to physical contact. You can see this in the case of Mother, who is frequently to be heard shouting for help in the bedroom. But it is out of the question that abnormal acts are being performed upon her and that that is why she's shouting. Relatives have often noticed that Rainer's look isn't normal, perhaps it is because he has witnessed this bedroom business too many times. But he has never watched. His head has always disappeared instantly under the blanket. You see nothing in there, and all you smell is yourself. On occasion Rainer will only take soup and he'll refuse to eat solid fare in spite of the fact that men usually adore hearty food. Anna sometimes eats nothing whatsoever. This may go on for days. When the siblings get up from table after eating nothing, they lie down together on one of their beds (which have been separated by means of a purpose-built partition wall, he being a boy and she a girl) and screen off the outside world. Rainer writes poems, the better to screen it off. Frequently he sees faces in trees and they inspire him, headcase that he is. He has no friends, only mates, and Rainer, who despises matiness on principle, finds that often they don't behave in maty ways to him. In the case of a writer like Musil, writing is often a graceful act, like a silvery fish leaping; but not with Rainer. In his case it is someone rummaging and then digging his teeth in.
Every moment, Rainer and Anna are aware that thanks to their parents' having moved to the city they were spared places like Ybbsitz, Laa an der Thaya, Laa an der Pielach or sundry St Michaels. They are glad they don't have to live in the kind of wretched provinciality they know from Grandmother's farm. Anything but that. Where screaming alpine choughs, crows and other vermin claw at trees already seared by winter. Where various clouds go whizzing across the dismal sky, deer call, and reeking Volksschule kids and feeble-minded Hauptschule kids pack their flesh into the mail bus. The poverty bacillus is rife amongst them. A steaming mush of woollens handed down by older siblings.
They don't have any fate ahead of them, says Rainer, they're already condemned to death even before they're born, and every one of their heads contains the same picture. The picture inside one head is identical to the picture in the next. And to think that this is in the open country, a free country, though there isn't really the least hint of freedom. Dreary landscape stretches away into the rain, you can't see where it ends but it does end, the limits are in the people's heads. The siblings have discovered narrow-mindedness in the city too. And they rejoice in the discovery, because they themselves went beyond those limits some time ago. They have snatched at the bluish umbilical cord of the places they were meant to stay and bitten it through with their sharp teeth. The trickle of blood is dripping off their chins. A pale pair of tongues, Rainer's tongue and Anna's tongue, are licking at it. Soon there won't be a shred of skin left of the natural bounds of birth. Infinite expanses are revealed, with a cold sun like an unbroken yolk in a bowl of milk.
If anyone's going to do any breaking or hurting around here, it'll be Anna and Rainer.
No more crisp frost on village streets. No more thin-soled Sunday shoes unsuited to weather and wearer alike. No one goes in to see the Western with a spring in his step and (though the only others there are jerks with snotty beaks and hair slicked back with brilliantine) emerges from the cinema a cowboy. No fear of coming home too late or of being hit with hard objects. And then having to lug the heavy bucket of piping pig broth out to the sty. And if you forget to take off your good shoes beforehand they'll stink so badly you'll have to downgrade them for wearing to the sty only.
The twins are not marginal figures. They are the main characters. They are the centre of things, which is not a central point at all but in fact a broad spectrum of people.
What the siblings exude is not joie de vivre such as a youngster listening to a transistor radio exudes but rather anger and revulsion. You give your kids all the love in the world and the way it turns out in the end you might as well not love them at all. They believe that there is a part of every human being that is not pre-determined. Something unforeseen that is outside society's bounds and thus completely free. Only underlings like cake and the music of Elvis, Peter and Conny.
Rainer sups clear chicken broth with unidentifiable things floating in it yet again, things that cloud its clearness after all.
Then you could always tear these new Conny-style skirts apart with your teeth. The skirts are in fashion, recently the grey masses of girls have been eager to wear them because the material is cheap and they're everywhere you look and if the skirt is red it sends a cheerful message and if it's blue it's dramatic.
Destroy the piled-up crow's-nests on the heads of unbelievably ugly girls and dismantle them by pulling out the hairpins. Grind velour pullovers between your teeth for as long as it takes for all trace of the pile to have disappeared, leaving just the floppy smoothness of ordinary pullovers. Rainer bites his lip so the blood flows, seeing them pass him by, saying take me, no, take me instead, they've applied black eyeliner to their eyelids and white lipstick or pale pink lip gloss, they are a grey flock with occasional patches of blossom in their midst. Beneath the underskirts specially starched by Mummy there is an abdominal smell. They have to have a petticoat. But it won't wash itself.
Rainer does not want closer contact with a girl just yet. He wants to pass judgement on them from a distance. He still has time for intimacy, he knows.
Mummy enters abruptly and is justifiably alarmed by her brood, but she says: what's needed rather than this is for our off-spring to have beauty in its thoughts, words and deeds. That is why they go to the grammar school. You learn that there. What they need is to build bridges, not demolish them, one bridge leads to our fellow-man and the next from our fellow-man to us. The twins do not want to build bridges.
Anna: We are ourselves indeed a freedom that chooses, but we do not choose to be free. We are condemned to freedom. If I look at you, Mama, that's plainly true. Forsaken in freedom. That's you exactly. And that forsaken condition has no other cause than the very existence of freedom. You can tell by looking at you.
Mummy does not understand. What she does know, though, is that the world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egoistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates.
The twins explain to Mother that the non-existence of that selfsame Mother is conceivable and possible. But I gave birth to you, me personally, one after the other. So you exist. That's why. And so do I. What rubbish. It's a beautiful, infinite, bright and youthful world, especially if you're young yourself. And now they can cut out the new Elvis poster, at last she gives them permission after previously having forbidden them to do so.
Mother is shoo'd out like a fly. And once again the children have the not-quite-normal look they had before.
Mother leaves, and in the doorway she says that her children, who will always be little children for their Mummy to look after, their whole lives long, ought to take pleasure in the insignificant things in life, too. There are people who take no notice of strangely shaped trees, flowers or bushes by the wayside, or even damage them. These are the same people that are cruel to animals. They are thoughtless people, ordinary, average people. Which her children are not. Her children should heed the little things that others disregard. She brought them up to do so. And she has often had to struggle with her husband. The aforesaid husband is a soldier and thus of coarser stuff and he'd rather watch cheap B movies. If he were not of such coarse stuff he wouldn't have been able to kill. He needed that coarseness. A soft streak would have been amiss, it would have been at odds with the profession.
Mother can still see his wide-open mouth as he watched that entertaining Heinz Ruhmann flick. It was Die Feuerzangenbowle, his very favourite film. He has seen it numerous times and never tired of it. He is the only one to have perceived the subtleties of the film. Everyone else brays out loud at obvious gags. When it was made, the film was an indication of what lay in store. Father could see as much. Often, without being asked, he describes the content of Die Feuerzangenbowle. Unfortunately the children won't be getting to see it. In the film, the New Era was already showing its true face, in the shape of a young teacher with nationalist ideals. The teacher in the movie says that the Old Era must be unremittingly put behind us. Daddy thinks so too, and the twins are busy creating the New Era. Which is even newer than the New Era in the movie.
What are you all going on about, I'm against anything traditional that's out of date, you know I am. And I saw a whole lot of musicals featuring Marika Rokk, she has tremendous stamina and amazing willpower, because she still dances. And then there was that sentimental Hans Christian Andersen movie. The star killed himself and his wife and children because the wife was Jewish. Before he died he had one final opportunity to display his profoundly humane brand of humour, which was not a destructive sense of humour. That kind of humour only works if it comes from deep inside. Deep inside he was lacerated by fast-acting poison. Some people die less conspicuously and perhaps the torment they suffer is even greater. As it was, his innards were torn apart, and all that remained to posterity of the Danish teller of fairy tales was celluloid. Something survived him, at any rate.
What wonderful, wonderful times they were. Scorching hot desert sand.
IT IS ESPECIALLY mild, this spring light that enters through the glass doors designed by Lalique, doors that were at the World Fair in Paris back in the twenties and subsequently brought to Vienna. In her own imagination, Sophie is also made of glass, or sparkling china, or (best of all) high-grade steel. Sport polishes Sophie up and has already succeeded in making her agile all-round. And what sport cannot manage, her father's library accomplishes: supplying the cultural background. She is more of a sporting lass than a culture vulture, though. No intellectual supers wot, Sophie. All of her contours are rounded, firmed up and gleaming. Dirt is altogether alien to the way she is, just as years ago everything that was un-German was alien to the Germans, artfremd, though nowadays of course a mighty tourist industry is getting under way, bringing the world into the Germans' homes or else transporting the Germans far from their homes to the world.
Nor is there any point on that smooth surface where an attacker could get a purchase. True, it is a tempting challenge to a groper, but he invariably loses his grip. Sophie enters wearing a tennis dress (she almost always wears some sporting outfit or other) and asks Rainer (who has a love for her that he doesn't show, so as not to compromise his position): Can you just lend me a twenty for the taxi, I haven't got any money on me and Mama's gone out for tea. Weeping softly, Rainer rummages in his little purse, Sophie gets the money, which represents a large sum to Rainer and which he will undoubtedly never see again. Because money means nothing to Sophie. She takes its availability for granted. Whereas Rainer gazes after his delicious twenty for quite a while, even after it's long since flown the coop. Rainer's father considers that riding in taxis indicates an ambition to be a grand seigneur, an ambition that his son must quash, but it's pointless if he goes paying for other people's taxis. To Sophie, a taxi is a means of transport.
Sophie will never give the money back. She will forget about it. Because for her it has no real value.
Rainer's thoughts will dwell compulsively on that and other money. But he will never dare ask for it back.
The carpet is a great soft Persian expanse, Sophie is something you have to get inside but you don't know how because there's nothing to get a grip on. Should you fuck her in the mouth and pound her tongue to pulp so that she can't come out with any more of those thoughtless hurtful things she says, or should you do it from down below, which poses problems since she never lets you anywhere near the way in. You slip off. Though slipping off is nothing compared with the downhill social slide! It's the lesser evil. There may of course be a causal connection.
Modern paintings and objets everywhere, emanating long traditions in culture and art which you can only share in once you have taken possession of these things somehow or other. The best way of doing this is to take possession of Sophie, but (see above) there are no loops or straps to get hold of her by. Though Rainer has studied the rules of art thoroughly and has a good knowledge of them he owns no art objects whatsoever. Oh and anyway, the rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all. Rainer has reached this conclusion all on his own. People, on the other hand, are subject to laws because otherwise it would be every man for himself, anarchy. So says Rainermother to Rainerfather and so says Rainerfather to Rainermother. Rainer, however, has rather a penchant for anarchy, precisely because he knows the laws that govern the social life of man and despises them. Everything has to be destroyed. And nothing built up again afterwards.
Out shoots a Rainer mitt to apply the tried and tested lever hold to Sophie once again, but she glides straight through him and says she has to get changed now. Yet again. I'll come with you. That's what you think.
So he stays put. One of the countless errors of the middle classes is that they are soon demoralised when they venture out on their clumsy forays. When they have a real chance they relax their grip and do not even pretend to persist. The whisky's here. Help yourself while I'm gone.
Rainer tugs violently at his cheap loose-fitting pullover, Sophie gives him the slip, yet again. This is getting dreary.
His wretched brain wanders off to old and recent humiliations. Points in his deformed mind where the film is forever catching and sticking. Nothing of beauty. Only unlovely things. Sunday outings with Mother surface, trams smelling of damp socks, crammed with pathetic grey crowds of people of the kind a long war produces and cannot disperse right away. Off we go, to the Vienna Woods. Balaclavas made of unravelled respun wartime wool, baggy skiing trousers, brogues, and worst of all the dreaded packed lunch. Giving off a cheesy reek. Making you thirsty. But you can't go to a cafe or restaurant because it costs money, children can drink water, but there's no water anywhere to be found. Presently the cheese sandwich will be exuding its quintessence from beyond Mummy's cheap metal teeth and sending forth stench from her stomach, because she didn't chew properly. Chewing too much simply spreads the evil taste everywhere.
The detested shelter where they have to wait for at least twenty minutes till the next 43 comes curving round. The end of the line. Neuwaldegg. Invariably packed in the middle of a pack of impoverished humanity. Often they save the fare and walk back along the Alszeile, at the end of which (isn't Mummy super) they are allowed a ride on the merry-go-round for the cost of the tram fare, which brings home to them all the more clearly the fact that they are children, a fact they want to put behind them. Nonetheless the kiddies, Rainer and Anni, shout and cheer, the poison of passing cars already in their heads and hearts. Not because it pollutes the environment (which has already been ruined by the War in any case) but because there is no capital to buy a car. And then there's Anni, grubbing in dog-dirt and wastepaper to draw attention to her serious emotional problems. Emotional problems are a luxury and are therefore ignored. She wants to be on her own in a swish car and not stuffed into a lousy tram (let alone with the family) where everyone is equal and you can't be special. If you were in a Mercedes, no one could come up any more and ask: What's the boy's/girl's name. Stroking your head with hands that quite plainly proclaim their owner a member of the worker species. And not realising that the infant they're patting already bears the poison of individualism in its heart. And is prepared to squirt it.
Once, when she was being stroked by one of these mittened hands, Anni actually wet herself, and all the while putrid garlic breath was wafting across her and she was being talked to as though she were a normal child, which even then she wasn't. Neither normal nor a child. The hot urine trickled down between her thighs (that downward impulse), ate its acrid angry way into her hand-knitted woollen knickers, and relentlessly found its way out of the dismal Sunday scene, along the grooves on the floor of the tram. Drip drip. Down fall the maternal arms like clubs and thump and retire upwards again and then down once more, keep-fit for Mumsy who has just had a nice relaxing outing. Insane bawling from the female infant. At the first blow, Rainer has instantly taken refuge between two aged granddads, clawing hold of the Vienna Woods walking shoes one of them is wearing. Does the lad go to school yet? What's your name, sonny? Piss off, the lot of you.
And out there the Opels and Volkswagens surge out of the autumn haze like sharks, great powerful bodies, unswervingly obedient albeit untamed, and promptly shoot back into the mist, certain where they want to go. While the 43 strains and rumbles ponderously on. Anna lies in her own puddle, appallingly dirty, and Mummy asks other mothers for advice, what can you do with a girl who's so big but still wets herself. Well, you'll just have to do a wee-wee before you start, isn't that right, sugar?! Just remember next time. You wait till Papa hears about this, there's more thrashings to come. Even if Papi only has one foot left, he showed what he could do with his arms and they're as strong as ever. If you have two of them, the brats make twice as much work. Quiet now, or I'll slap you again.
The siblings link hands stealthily, unnoticed by the masses, they bare their milk-teeth like vampires, just wait, Mami, till we're bigger, we'll do the same to you, and worse.
Under the seat are an apple core, two cheese rinds and several wurst skins dropped by someone who thought himself at home and supposed he could make a pigsty of a means of transport that belongs communally to the public. Anna is not remotely consoled by the thought that a part of the tram is hers. It also belongs to others. Some people imagine they're at home wherever they may be. Doubtless he does the same at home. Yuck. Some people.
Young lad Rainer bites into the cheese rind, retching, and sucks at it hard like a leech. Damp sand grinds between his jaws, where some teeth have yet to make their appearance. Slosh, the stomach's heaving already, the bread and dripping (half rotten by now) are straining for the exit. The emergency exit. In the long run you cease to take any pleasure at all in a family outing if it always ends so embarrassingly. One of them pisses, the other throws up. And to think you could be sitting in soft leather seats the whole time, saying where you wanted to go and getting there without any problem at all.
Effortlessly, Sophie breezes in. This time, for a change, she is wearing an afternoon dress, as she has to go into town with her mother. Bright light enters from behind through the terrace door and, far from roaming aimlessly about, instantly settles on Sophie's blonde hair as its resting place. The parquet flooring glows a little too.
Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature.
The child in Rainer cries out loud, the worst thing of all is arriving at the last moment and not finding a seat left in the tram and having to stand. Whining is useless. Grown-ups won't get up, but a child has to be prepared to stand up for a grown-up at any time. So there you are, jammed into an ugly dark forest of bodies each of which is just as unattractive, with no entrance or exit in sight. You're in for good and you've got to go the distance. Packed in among the rest. Hiding amid winter coats stinking of mothballs and pre-war anoraks. And somewhere or other (you're spared nothing) there are two good-looking youngsters, no doubt students, whose fathers have their own cars but do not have the time today to drive their son and daughter here and there, but there is a car, there is one, it's theirs, these two talking about skiing and group travel as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You've got to emulate them, though maybe you'll never manage it, with a Papa and Mama like yours. You've got to emulate them, as soon as you're old enough, though that will be a while yet. How streamlined they look, like the people of tomorrow, and how stylish they are. And those fashionable tight ski pants! Those two belong to no one, you can tell right away, they can live their own lives. The way things still are now, though, the maternal hand pushes you down to the floor, crushing you, making you retrieve a banana skin with your teeth.
Sophie (whose exterior betrays no signs of any such physical functions, and certainly no low or base ones, but who nevertheless is in excellent working order, though you can't tell how or by what means she operates) leaves for the umpteenth time, off somewhere that's labelled No Entry. Almost every time we meet her she will be needing to go somewhere in an urgent hurry though she'll always arrive late. Which doesn't matter in her case. And Rainer is the one who remains behind, vexed.
THEY REMAIN AT the edge of things, not because they're afraid of the light but because the light, understandably enough, is afraid of them. In schoolyard and classroom alike. The wolf pack always cluster together in corners. They flaunt their unchallenged ubermensch status, which the rest would like to flaunt too but they only have unter-mensch status, which has to apply to some in order that the contrast with the ubermensch achievement be clear. Out from the gloomy corners they stick out their legs, suddenly, and almost invariably some Mummy's boy or a Daddy's girl in a checked, pleated skirt goes flying. Their well-behaved fellow-pupils say they never run out of subjects of conversation when they go to an ice-cream parlour with their boyfriends or girlfriends. They talk about rewarding ways of using your spare time, what's going on at school, and who's going out with which Institute of Technology or University student or who only got a neat, natty clerk to go out with. Other subjects of conversation are concerts, plays, exhibitions, parties and records. The Anna-Sophie-Rainer lobby give stuff like this the thumbs-down. They have grown out of the record phase, or at least if they do listen to records it's only cool jazz or rock. When Sophie gives things the thumbs-down she does so less vehemently because she has no need to show vehemence. Things come to Sophie, and sometimes she says: go away for now, and sometimes she accepts them. Depending on her mood and whim. Rainer says it is good if she is hard, the only place she should relax is in his arms, there she can be soft if she wants.
Sophie has to be properly motivated if she's to commit a crime, or several crimes, because she herself does not believe she needs to make the effort. Nor is it nice to stay up at night perpetrating deeds that shun the light. It takes willpower, since you could just as well be in bed reading a suspenseful thriller.
The writer Adalbert Stifter, a suicide victim, raises his voice above the noisy German lesson. The victim of his own failed life-plan and a wrecked marriage, he has nothing better to do than drivel unctuously on about Whitsun celebrations when he goes out to the hushed edge of the wood at dawn, not where there is a cocky little fawn (who gives a damn about his funny little cock, says Anna, or words to that effect) but where instead he goes walking in what he considers to be the endless countryside, as it were, though what would he know of infinity. His mind is incapable of grasping the concept. Rainer senses within himself the infinite potential of a writer who breaks loose of all the fetters. He is the one who apprehends infinity, not Stifter, as Stifter's ruined life showed, a life in which he never dared venture anything. With military precision, Adalbert Stifter continues his review of various beauties, not only living but also inanimate. Nature tends to an inanimate condition, thinks Rainer, all we do is assist the process. He promptly passes a note to this effect to Sophie, who is scribbling outlines of horses in her spiral notepad. She thinks nothing at all of inanimation. But she thinks a lot, far more, of sporty animation. You have to become aware of your own body, or of a horse's when it shifts from a trot to a gallop. Then the wind caresses horse and rider alike and the fresh air dispels bad or restless moods. You shouldn't rest in a breeze such as that or you'll rust.
But Evil prefers places that are sheltered from the wind. Pale young softies would rather seek out the seclusion of cellar bars, and out there, in the light of day, you can help blind people cross the road or stroke the doggies.