Lust (18 page)

The Frau Direktor kickstarts her car and drives cumber-somely off to catch up Michael, who can be heard on the piste by now. Laughing and yelling like a policeman, he whizzes past his friends, or crashes into them, a jolly jape. Even at night, his memory keeps all the places he goes to logged away. That and only that is what's meant when people say they're meeting others on the same wave-length, the permanent wave a terribly fashionable hairdresser has created. But watch out: don't miss the next wave of fashion. Often we may shake our heads first, but then it does go with us for a while after all. Look at my head, and don't be afraid to give something new a try. Free trial offer. We carry ourselves round in a printed bag from a sports shop. We don't have to mind how we go; the road we go on would be better advised to mind us, since we could easily ruin the vegetation for the next five hundred years. This Michael would not crack the earth open if he were to fall, as we less skilful ones would. We are not flowers, but still we want to shove our heads through the wall of Nature! Michael, though, will only be splitting his companions' sides: the whole time he's been telling them, laughing, about the funny thing that happened with this woman he reeled in yesterday and threw back again. The burden of failure lies like a load of firewood upon other shoulders, many of them, so that we can lie warm abed. We only need to set it alight. And in love a mouth encounters breath where something has just been boiled. The woman is no longer completely bright and bushy-tailed. She drags her fingers through her hair, ruining the work of other

people under whose drying hoods she trembled. Right now, a bunch of children may be waiting outside her house, members of a music group sent out under threat, but so what, it's only a hobby anyway. The sons and daughters of those who groan beneath their poverty. Those who even have to spit in their hands if they're to summon the energy to be fired. Already the woman has forgotten them. And herself. And drives to the foot of the piste, where the right of the speedier is demonstrated. Where tourists, put down and put up with, unshackle their gear, or, two by two like patient animals? heave their heavy rear ends marked by the ne'er-to-be-mended tumbles of Life into the chairlift once again.

Forwards, ever forwards. We don't want to look back, after all we haven't got eyes in the back of our head. The woman's high and mighty heels dig a hole in the ground. Astounded, the winter holidaymakers float like boats across this poster landscape where everything is in tune and only one person is disinclined to join in the chorus. The torrent of people pours incessantly down the slope. Let us be more appetizing! More digestible! Lord, these tourists. Eternally cemented into their uniforms, straying every summer from the mountain to the beach, and, the moment they're beached, finding it's winter again and wanting to be up on top, where they hope to find their bliss: being there is all that counts! And a loftier, more conspicuous, more pleasurable overflow into the valley below. Though they'd rather be invisible when the boss flares up in front of them and roars like a propane stove. Isn't it lovely, that light blue jump suit with the fur-lined hood and a pullover red as a clipped ear peeping out! We might be tempted to forget that nothing we're wearing matches, nothing about our persons goes together, the upper and lower parts, heads and feet: it's as if every one of us were made of parts of different people. (Let's face it, that's how we maturer women are built, somewhere along the line we lose our shape, and then no one will

love our shape any more.) And all those different people are different in terrible ways known only to the martyred lower classes. So here we all are, martyred on our crosses but wearing our best clothes. Doesn't it look priceless!

They stand around in groups, smirking and smoking and drinking themselves empty, the disciples of sport. They have little of each other to declare as they bob at anchor at the valley terminal, smiling. The peak of their experience is: eating to live! They talk about it. Their ignition sparks light up the land more brightly than those who have to build on it. Ah yes, the tourist trade is very profitable! Now they are collecting their belongings, while the branches sag heavily under the weight of snow and daring light, barely sensed on their nylon apparel, clears a way through the beautiful snow, which lies placidly on what was once a meadow drinking water. Soon the water will no longer be able to seep down into the ground. We'll have boarded up the earth and lacquered it with tracks. Every one of them has private suspicions that he or she's the best skier on the slopes. So all of that has ended well too. In winter, when the land is supposed to be asleep, it is woken up good and proper. Noise pours from faces. In seconds people cross distances that have been measured out and reach out for parts where there is no ceiling above them and no ground beneath them. Blameless children fall by the wayside. Let's not be packed away again in our original box, let's not splay our legs unnecessarily if we've learnt how to do a perfect parallel swerve now. We can ski world champions into the ground. And that goes for our cars too, in their classes. What a day. The young people bare their heads. Snow falls on them, but they need not be afraid, it won't stick. The Austrian Winter Sports Association does not tremble before our souls: it takes a tight hold on our limbs, wounded in their pride, and pulls us down head over heels. It bandages our thighs, and next year we'll be coming again. And getting on. Let's

hope that next year lack of snow won't leave us being shoo'd about like insects!

Like sand in the clockwork of the world we drift into the valley. Our skis, our sharp edges which others are forever trying to smooth off, bite hard into the firn, the snow marked with signs: every man for himself on this white festive garb on which we are tumbled like refuse. Most of it belongs to the Austrian forestry commission. The rest, a nectar of hectares, many thousands of hectares, belongs to nobility and others who have taken possession of houses, people who own sawmills and have contracts with the paper mill, long-term contracts signed in blood. Chairs on which things that have been said acquire meaning! Wonderful. We all want change, it is all to the good, and skiing fashions in particular change every year, and get better and better. In haste the earth receives the sportswomen and sportsmen; there is no father to take them in his arms when they are tired, but there is the Frau Direktor from the paper mill. Come over here a little, if you can move fast enough with those things on your feet. The light will soon be coming from her mouth!

Michael laughs, and the sun clings onto him. In the course of decades, the landscape has undergone change so that it will only receive those it finds congenial. The farmers no longer qualify and are sitting watching TV at home. For a long time they were the surly saviours of the land, giving rude replies to the agricultural co-ops, but now those days are over. Change is the garb we wear now. Our neighbours are shaken to the very limit of their understanding. In our colourful clothing we have become something to enjoy when we lie about on our skis in the woods with broken limbs, skis that were once there for wild animals to gnaw at and now merely signify gnawing pain. But we want to be wild ourselves, too! To shout out loud so that people far off hear us and are

startled: avalanches that contain us when we feel like spilling over. Getting out of ourselves. Sitting in the lap of mountain crags! And the mountain hurls rockslides at the incautious. Nowadays the land lives off such people and takes pleasure in the fact, and even the pubs positively reek of our taste.

The woman thinks — and in this she is as mightily astray as we are in the scraggy woods — that she cast a glorious net over the young man the day before. She clapped her frightful image upon him, and now he keeps the picture in a breast pocket, a dart of cloth, and is forever taking it out to look at it. Now it's time he came out from wherever he's hiding from her. Quietly thinking of him isn't enough for her. There's an incessant dull thud of lust in her. And the slope promptly returns an echo of the yodel, having no use for it. It has its own sound equipment. On all quarters, people are squealing like stuck pigs, as if their sharp, narrow blades are cutting right into the very storm. No longer kept alone by the night, when you can see nothing, the woman wants to be dazzling bright in Michael's eyes. To make an appearance here in one's genuine shape takes extreme courage, you have to be strapped and buckled into your gear by the sharp looks and skis of those on the slopes. The heels on the woman's impractical shoes drill into the snow. Heavens, isn't she aware of how, buoyed by feeling, she's practically clambering and crawling up this hill? Unski'd, I mean unskill'd, as she is, I can't help wondering which way and how far her efforts in her unsuitable footwear will take her. She's wet through already. The heels of her shoes are tearing holes that it will be hard to close up. We ladies have to sow ourselves ruthlessly on the fields, on the parquet dance floors, where we have to prove ourselves among the vultures. But we want a little more of a return than just laughter, even in sport! Wherever you go, we first have to be valid for the journey (slot your ticket in the machine, that's right),

and for every occasion we have to be got up in appropriate style so that, once open, we can be slammed shut again. Creative endeavour is ever at a rapid end, and inevitably we discover what discover we must: to wit, whether we fit the furrow we've been strewn in.

This woman, enamoured of herself, inebriated, tumbles into pits in the snow of her own digging, and there is no hand to drag her out by her new-waved locks. Dear lady, we are sorrowing for our departed friends, who have had to leave for home already! But we are still there, and the season tickets that will take us over the hills and mountains are at our warm breasts. We don't wish to give offence, but you've set up your safe home in the unsafest of places, so that you might just as well have none at all. The sun screws these youngsters by setting too early, but in the dark they will pair off promptly once again, too. It is our right to scale the mountains, and no rules govern our conduct there but the law of gravity. In amazement we swerve and give way to each other, but at times we take the wrong direction: never gob or slash that way or you'll get your own self straight back.

And what of the others? Just you take the average employee out of his locker! On the ski slopes he comes into his own, the lackey, the creature of obedience, a being insensate yet still with a vote, who imagines he has the right to look right through this woman, laughing. With nothing but the voice of youth he can make fun of her any time he likes. In the office, the young gentlemen have to behave and beware of the boss, but here all their pining is at an end as they fly past the pines, past Nature, as if they were so generous that they'd give themselves away! Immortality! Gold medals will set you free. And anyone who takes a tumble in the slalom as he might take a tumble in the tempests of Life will soon find that no one will shed a single tear for him!

Beneath the ice on the stream there are whole clusters of trout, but in winter they're difficult to make out. Michael's friends are sitting about together, welcoming each other and looking up over their sunglasses. Michael swings down the piste in a spray. Everything's going to be fine, because some very good-looking girls have turned up now, they'll turn in and turn over and then return. They stand there indifferent to us, we who do not blossom like the untouchable snow over there against the rock face. They are still too close to the origins from which they came. All of us take pleasure in new things, but only they look good in them. They are as they are. Remote from the pastures where we fat cattle graze, ashamed of our own thighs. We have lost sight of our own beginnings, they are mantled in a mysterious radiance, hidden far beyond memory, not to be repeated. It's not just in our social positions that we're stuck fast.

But let's return to our human analysis, anatomy, anomaly: the woman rushes from her Christian Social environment and flings herself upon the student. At this precise moment his ski poles are still dangling from his wrists like an afterbirth. See: what was richly rewarded last night with an ejaculation now supposes it can venture into the light of day, looking almost human. We're not used to having the wind blow about us like this, we live in a two-and-a-half room apartment! By these toilsome tracks we'll never make it to the top where the streams come tumbling down and the skiing is top quality. You and I, we'll be seeing each other again at the snack bar, queueing among the multitudes. No home for us at dusk. A time when many are to be avoided but few to be sought out. So that, as rivals, we can lay ourselves like burdens upon each other's shoulders, heavy as weather.

Clumsily the Direktor's wife in her cloak of mink and alcohol casts herself upon her current lordandmaster's

breast. She wants to quit this world with him, spit out the pips and start up her own Sunday supplement. She wants to start anew, with Michael breezing lightly about her. But let's see things as they are: this Michael can't take this woman as she is because the problem is the way she is, her years, how she looks. Particularly here, in the bright light, with the tackle of all these sporting folk grinding and creaking in the cold. But the light of love — which goes by our side from the very start, though even our cigarette lighters burn brighter — has fallen upon her. And has cast her on the ground like a sack of garbage that's burst open as it falls. And the locals laugh. Far away the trucks go thundering by. Can you hear them? Mind you step aside a little!

These people barely feel the need of rules. After all, their feelings regulate their lives. The woman doesn't improve from constant use, but if she herself wants to avail herself of a young man, make herself available to a fellow who lives nearby: no, it won't do! The sons of Fate skilfully cover themselves with their hands. The woman blushes scarlet, her face glows, she isn't there. She just doesn't show in this young man's viewfinder. In the eyes of this beholder she isn't beautiful. Youth, like the day, grows and disports itself and does it with each other and then, buckled to its skis, falls into and upon the village enclosure. No matter what, all things present are fine by Youth. Youth is its own performance. Everything belongs to it. And nothing belongs to us, not even the place where we sit in motorway restaurants and the waiter, not deigning to attend to us, carefully fails to register our presence. Gerti clings to Michael but slides off his harassed plastic clothing. As anyone of his age would have been, he was carried away a little by the woman. He's easy-going. He likes it here. People like him are given away in recognition of loyal custom by the local tourist office, who put him in their brochures. Whichever pub he may be in, the air-conditioning breathes silently