Greed (21 page)

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.