Lust (24 page)

They are out to pluck the last little flame from his lighter, to take it to the humans below him, who feel closer to God than he does. He doesn't care either way about the fire in the village, he doesn't have to take it there. Gerti has escaped the vortex of the stove, where things spatter and crackle nicely too. But now it's enough, it is time she was taken and set, this precious gem in the Direktor's home. Examining her closely, the Direktor takes her by the waist and begins to drag her across the nighttime ground, touched with hoarfrost. She stamps and kicks her hooves, that's the last straw! She is still wearing the silk dress she had on this morning, in which hopes were aroused, and from the front and rear, Gerti's figure being what it is, things are looking good, even though it is as if the day, weighted with snow, were starting to sag a little. The student is simply not a giving man, nor will he ever be one. He looks out, shading his eyes, but there is not enough light to present the couple in glory. He does not always spurn the unfamiliar. After all, he did make a try at striding out brazenly over the fields, annoying the game, breathing the air and then returning it, used, to the piste. Still, it doesn't reach much further out into the landscape, his shining aura. Nonetheless, it can supply a frame for this holy family and the card-format view that includes them. Michael shades his eyes to let them grow used to the dark. Nature is not gentle, Nature is savage, and people fleeing from its emptiness take refuge in each other, of all places, where someone else is already in occupation. Perhaps Michael will go for a drink with the Direktor, who would like to finish the picture Michael started with his own stupid brush, the little prick. Amid the firs you no longer need language. Let's just throw it away!

Silence sweeps the streets, and God transfigures the inmates of the region — indeed, several of them are still at work, some carving and snippeting at their furniture and homes, the rest looking after their current partners

who are in non-permanent residence. New ones are forever having to be hauled home (and promptly their usefulness is at an end) to make Nature's standing promise of work and shelter come true. At long last they settle down! And so they keep the promises Nature mistakenly gave them: the gentle blunders that became human beings; and human errors have destroyed the forests that give them life, too. One further thing that Nature promised: the right to work, according to which every occupier who has sealed a pact with his employer can be delivered by death from God too (God's stinking delivery). Now I've made a slip as well. Nor do the lords of the land know of any deliverance from the dilemma. There is less and less work, there are more and more people doing everything they can to see it stays that way and to see that they themselves stay. Like now, wearily but proudly hanging their signs of life on the wall and handing in their cards. All around, bodies are beginning to develop, and the most oddly constructed of figures are coming into existence. If the architect who made these motorway-users could see the freaks arising flushed with hope from their crumpled marital beds (to think of all the other things they've crumpled!), he would promptly redesign them, given that he himself rose again in a far more thrilling way from his cramped sepulchre to set us all an example, which can be studied in museums and churches. The bad witness we all bear the creator simply by being there and not being able to help it: now they are all stirring and humming, and as their bodies work they move in the rhythm of pop music on the 03 station or a simple record. How calmly Marx responded to us! All the spendthrift debts which they are now collecting, hugging each other tight: who would give them anything at this hour! Not even the innkeeper by the bridge, obeying his dark instinct to earn more than he has spent in the way of drinks, trying the food he himself has prepared, where 86-year-old kitchen maid Josefa licks the plates clean and gobbles up the leftovers.

Something is always left over of the work, to which they are more devoted than to their dearest beloved. The women have been freshly prepared, or preserved. Yes, they too desire something, but not for much longer, the way they're roaring under the lash of the weather, which even dictates their attire. Thus their round fat bodies hum away, life goes on, man vanishes continually in death, the hours sink to the ground, but women flit nimbly about the house, never safe from all the blows that fate deals. How alike their habits are! Every day it's the same. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Procrastination, procrastination! But the next day has not yet come, the woman of the house cannot yet enter it, to be finished off by yet more work. Now they repose unfeelingly in each other, the pistons thrust down, a course is set for the pathless shores of bodies but the goal is missed, yes, we may fall but we do not fall a long way down, we are as shallow as the shallowness about us. If our deserts went by what we earn, we would just be able to buy ourselves some shoes for our weary wanderers' feet, but no more, and already our partners are lapping about our ankles, they want to play themselves and think they are trumps, oh horror, they really are winning the trick! And the distance to the heavens remains ever the same. Quick, let's place a foot on the runner-board of the car, which we have wrested from our bodies in the form of work, many many hours put in at the factory. We have entered as children of God, and after many a year nothing remains but to board the cheapest of mid-market cars, and we whose gears have meanwhile changed slightly are refused access to the works by a master of shifts who newly holds the stick. Right, they have eliminated our place of work entirely, and now the factory operates almost on its own, it learnt it all from us! But before poverty moves in and the car is sold, let us ourselves come back a time or two from foreign parts. Let us squander ourselves in someone else's parts a time or two more. We will not be driven away from this table by any

thought that has eluded our possessor, nor by any suit advertising in the newspaper, any nonsense to put a prompt stop to our lives because we poor work-horses absolutely had to have a few more horsepower in our meadow. And then there's the Direktor: he is not the sole ruler by any means! Not even the firm, that captive buzzard, can soar as it would. Who knows what other beast it might encounter!

Thus we all have our worries: whom we could love and what we could eat.

One would not imagine for a moment that there was anything fake about their feelings. Rather, one would think they were genuine jewels that others bedeck themselves with: the throngs of thonged bodies, tricked out in their best (new shoes!) and wandering the paths of their little love affairs, turning to a restless trick or two in their rooms. A human choir sending their many-voiced echo up unto the father in the air on the chair-lift. It was he who created the erogenous zones with which Woman pretties herself up of an evening, rapidly shoving her work out of sight lest anyone pay her properly. Flabbergasted, the men gape into their women's holes, torn by life, and yes, they shudder, as if they knew that the box has long been empty from which the seeds have been shaken out for years. But the dear women are so attached to them. And tomorrow morning the first bus has to be caught, no matter how helplessly they have to thrash their wives, who are attached to them and their short barrels: shoot! Jobs don't grow on trees.

The others, too, take this road to death. They accompany each other for a while, and breathe loudly at the gate, for it to be opened to them. And there come yet more people who have fallen into each other's weakly branches, to tangle their limbs. So that they are a twosome when they have to face their foreman. One has to be able to do

something or other! To be bigger and more numerous would be a good start, if one is sinking beneath the stroke of the factory's daily scythe. And from the spoils the owners pick out the very best that you experienced this year on the beaches of Rimini and Carola, where, blooming luxuriantly, you sank beneath the rubble of your short-lived pleasures.

The Direktor of this factory drags his wife back to the car, meaning to shorten this short break by breaking a record at the work he understands best: words of love from his transmitter sound in her ear, and she receives them thrashing and stammering as loving couples without a stereo receive their dance music after midnight. The window, where we can see one of those brightly coloured tracksuits such as generally fetch up in day-trip bars for filling, remains obstinately lit up. The young man stretches out his sleeves, gathered in at the ends with strong knitted cords, and stares out at these charmless people, who are nonetheless perfect in their way if one considers their income from the toil of humankind and their influence on state parliament politics. How wonderful to sing together with the rich and still not have to be in their works choir! To learn their ways and still not have to stand in the fields and have one's hair cut at harvest time! Like lumbering oxen the two cars are grazing side by side in front of the house, and one of the animals is now going to be disembowelled. The door opens, the light goes on. Words of endearment are sent to Gerti's home parts. This paterfamilias has not come to punish but to comfort and to resume possession, already there is a gleam as of a city beyond his gates. He has no desire but for his wife, who is sufficient unto him, unlike others who cannot stop making modest demands and singing and saying which of the photos in the relevant publications they prefer. How busily they bustle about at their sexual enterprises after work! And just take a look what these pikes in carp

ponds have caught: it seems to me that at times Nature is inclement. The Direktor is attached to his wife. Her broad thoroughfares are familiar to him. And while the silent inmate of the home is still suspended in mid-air with his nice motorbike catalogue beyond the window, the Direktor slaps Gerti across the front seats (having first had to push a button, I won't say which), yanks her dress over her head and masters her buttocks so that, via her dirty and off-limits route, he can penetrate her interior. Tenderly hands knead the udder. A friendly tongue licks into an ear. This has often been done in the past, for people like to build a house beside one that is already there, not to support their neighbour but to torment. It is a little uncomfortable, true, summer is far off, the road is remote, the animals taste good, and everyone comes to the appointed places or at least is collected in the box not far away. This crashing surf can surge upon one as if in one's sleep, and hide on a raised look-out in the midst of Nature. Below, in the shimmer of the field glasses, the allied members liaising between work, money and the powerful who don't like to be alone, are flitting about. They forever have to lie on one another against one another. Human activity resumes with new aims, the weather is cold, and every time the Direktor withdraws his sturdy prick a little he casts a forceful glance at his silent admirer at the window. He only has to go through a slight contortion to do so. Perhaps the young man will cop a handful now as well! As far as I can tell, he's really doing it. From the waist down, we men are all members of the same club, when all's said and done. That is, our members belong to our women and in the street we allow fate to be pressed into our hands without offering resistance. Let us make ourselves comfortable in each other! Michael has his hand down the front of his tracksuit trousers, I think, and is cramming his clothing full of himself. And Gerti's dress is now completely unbuttoned too and her bags and pouches are flopping out, if you'll pardon my

mentioning it. Never mind, even if the Direktor's feeling the draught, within himself he pays attention to festive-ness and quality, we forgive him. Face forward, the woman is squashed into the car upholstery, as if slumber lay concealed in these leather shadows. Her legs dangle to left and right out of the open door. And her husband, this bellowing native of the country, to whom we have entrusted our homeland for him to make paper out of it (the trees would have been condemned to a close shave anyway), he is far more at home here than we could ever be! I hear this bird shouting as he sings. He slips to Gerti's side and rams several of his loving fingers inside her. He speaks in friendly tones to her, describing the winners she still stands to score. Then he drives into her hole again with a crash. Briefly he withdraws and feels up his sceptre: as we see, his pace is unmeasured and immoderate. Now the woman is being examined by an expert who is harnessing his energy under the bonnet and sending his little salesman off, indeed, even accompanies him in person, we'll manage this, no problem, and then lock up afterwards.

Gerti's secrets have long been revealed, her closed doors are wide open, now she's dealt a few blows on her behind and back, that's how friends deal with each other, that way there's no mistake. The Direktor also drives the vehicle of his tongue in, who shall interpret that for us? A number of young village men have taken up their posts at the posterns of naked women and are hoping to be considered when posts are assigned. They want to collect but not pay. Their wives help them with their immortality and with the high mortality rate of their work. But the Direktor goes his own hot way alone. Everyone is familiar with his still youthful radiance. The woman, commingled with him in disorder, now has to put up with him in her arse, there may be any number of paths and some may be better surfaced too. While other people are at the mercy of disease, this lordandmaster is serving

himself with equanimity at his usual counter, where his child came from too, right next door. No need to be afraid, his member is safe there. Now the excited animal goes for a trot in the woman where it has been taken in order to grow. It catches slightly in the chain it has torn loose, the calf. And so it stands stock still till it's shot down. The familiar trampling and traipsing has already worn the woman badly. Never mind, there's a good cream for everything and a cash present. Grease well and you get ahead better. And soon fresh greenery will be coming up for the man to pull out.

What a divine group, though soon they'll have to take a rest. Body to body, they are a threat to each other. Whimpering after a number of further slips, the Direktor collapses limp upon his wife, who was so well-appointed. He has reaped her high-yield region thoroughly, it has his recommendation, and now there won't be any fodder growing there in a hurry. His river shoots wrathfully out of him, and from the labourers who are presented to them on golden platters their gods and personnel bosses seize the share that is yours by force. Go on, choose the best from a wide assortment too, and see: you already have it at home, call it your better half and leave her doing the washing-up and scrubbing and sweating!