Lust (22 page)

have been brightly inscribed in the tablets, and as for what one has eaten, from one end of the sacramental menu to the other —! No, here on this wallpaper there's nothing but Taste! Our son, our audience, is already familiar with body-wrestling and finger-painting from many an occasion in the past. He extorts a promise from Father in which sport, his god and idol, plays the principal part. Alluring promises will call upon him. He will be summoned forth by carpets of exciting snow laid out upon the remotest mountaintops. I mean, it will be exciting to see all those skiers racing across the ground to the centre of the world. The child is promised an experience, for Father is expecting a good deal of Mother's body and its ramifications stretching out into the night: this landscape cannot accommodate more than five thousand!

They strut brimful in their functional trousers, the lordsandmasters, and the son is already making his own contribution too. This child, whom Mother cannot reproach with growing too rapidly, after all, she fed him with her own frugal self. This child, a member of the fresh generation, has been brought up by his mother, wound up, and now he can't be stopped, he just keeps going! But now for the lordsandmasters, of whom the Direktor is the highest. His prick can be born in seconds at any time from a warm bath, be pulled out and do its work, and then be reeled in again, contented, by Fate, wherein dwells the strength to play tennis, ride a motorbike and bustle about other such business. When you walk it jiggles, gentlemen. Men try for a great deal amid the weak branches, but I am alone. The child is thinking about a period in the history of the earth which unfortunately he is unable (too late!) to experience retrospectively. A while ago, Father fetched out an encyclopaedia and bent pedagogically over his carefully calculated number of child. Anything more from a child would perhaps deflect Mother's interests too much from

Father. Father wants to tie his wife to the bed himself, venomous as disease: God is mean, but he's not the one I mean at the moment.

Like a bell the Direktor rings over his seated group. Outside the trees stand dark, waiting. The family is reconciled, heavily and discourteously the scrotums hang in their very favourite disguises, in paper-lined cupboards, in the balloons of underpants and tracksuits. You just need to reach in and see, everything can be fetched right out again. The sex we belong to, each to his own — as elastically as the rubber band that keeps the poorer bunches of people (they do not count individually) all together, it snaps out of the sack when the lonely man addresses himself to his property as to his shadow, which is the sole one of all living things that fits his measure precisely. The bundle of life, right, sags from the body and we feel fine. Those who want a lot will have to go and buy themselves something. Even the boy: already he's glowing like a real man who bows others and bows to others. He goes from the one to the other, pointing to his own person, which cannot be improved, and carries on along his own envious track, whizzing past us at high speed. The mere impression of it is a very deep one. Yes, this boy may be small, but he's specifically designed as a man, I believe.

Now he's still just a wretch, a brat, so small, but he beats on our eardrums and sends us flying to the poor neighbours, who would complain if they dared. Lovingly Mother bows her mouth to his hair. Father is already becoming inexhaustible, he can hardly contain himself. It's what he keeps concealed from his employees at other times, now he can't help squeezing his instinctive urges tight. He shoves up to his wife from behind. The woman bends contemptuously forward so that life stirs in her depths. With laughter, since his mother's tickling him, the boy shits himself, dumping his dung in Mother's

face. Never mind, we go on frolicking about as if we'd just repeated, damply. The woman really has to watch out, but it's too late already and she's half exposed at the rear while at the front she's still sucking up to the child, telling him nicely to be a good boy and tidy away his toys. More this man does not dare, yet still he wins. Like a low-flying aircraft he strokes his wife's behind. Like birds flapping against the light. Today Father can sense his health roaring within him, winning free extra goes. Secretly, under the camouflage of his house jacket, he places his swollen warhead against the slit in his wife's arse, where he thoroughly examines what is at his disposal. He only needs to plough this one furrow, thus the farmer helps the good earth. None of us has to bear the burden of life alone. But why does no one help him buy a car, so that there's something to carry the load companionably with him? Let us look with our eyes open at each other's sex, so that we shall be calm and slender, just as we try so hard to be with medicines and diets. Zealously competing with the others who have come to lay their own spoor. Even at the open door, the Direktor is still pondering which entrance to take, to run himself in, what an honour, to be offered up in a sheaf! Oh God, how beautiful to be a heavy load in a cart stuck luxuriously in the mud for a good wallow. Some vandal has torn down the traffic signs!

The family go on kissing and farting. The time of blissful waiting is over and happy words are in the air. The voice of the king of the house oozes out, it becomes a battle, which he wins. He gets carried away by himself, heaven came close to forgetting the workers and employees who have been well and truly screwed by the boss on high and his holy church and have to stand in their byres, well-proportioned, well-appointed, angrily jangling their bells and chafing at their ropes. What? They don't even refrain from kicking their one sole space?

The woman knows where her husband's shoe pinches, the one he will kick her fence down with in a moment. Sometimes he can hardly wait till evening and tells her to come to his directorial office at the factory, where this bird of prey can contain himself no longer and angrily desires to move into his own homeliness. He reaches into the clouds of his sex and it grows, like fire. The little winner is already being pulled out of the little room above the trouser legs where he has been lurking till he is shown the voucher for a trip of a lifetime, to the golden rain in her apron. Happiness for the owner, from far away his dogs can already smell him and are at each other. Every day's a holiday. Will sleep at least find us today? We have earned it, waiting in silence on the mountaintops under our warming layers so that we do not stamp loose any planks of snow. Just think of the many folds in men's shirts alone, from which men can tip out their sacred streams!

And Gerti's stylish clothing is breached today for the umpteenth time as well. The lordsandmasters and their bellows, with the help of which they can make a loud noise; in summer the breeze is mild but in winter we have to take our own breath. The child almost fails to notice that he has come among us and is being kicked. Won't it be time for dinner soon? Will the Direktor have to let his wife out of his clutches for a while yet again? Does he want her completely sober? Mutely the animal and its rope look at each other. The Direktor can do even more: mix his wife's body, in all its shapelessness, on the kitchen table, just as it suits his dough, which will rise when covered. Thus the family makes its own food and the earth its creatures, thus the guests bid their farewells on the thresholds although they have been well fed. Gentlemen! You are strangers to me as well, it's true, but you throw yourselves about so that the nets squeak. Plates of sliced wurst crash down on the tables, the family sit, the weighty wedges of bread with clearly distinct

grains, coarse and costly on plates rimmed with grains of gold, they have all foregathered here before so that Father's will be done. First he will spread thickly on his wife, and then, still smiling from the day — after all, he has earned his bread and now he is giving the bread to his family — then, right, the heavy drumsticks will beat down on the woman's hollow-sounding pelvis. I believe myself, but I don't believe in myself! Anyway, let's observe the holy days, and let us have the works choir sharpen our instruments! The child must live, that is how things have turned out. Abruptly and without warning, just as the sun sometimes strikes with lightning speed. High on the peaks it is already lighting up for tomorrow, but we the salaried, we who matter, we who are on the pay lists of the paper tigers, we have already had our crackling fire today, we held our bodies close to it till they almost dissolved into light and nothingness. My only advice is: make sure there's something to drink, then your worries are over!

A little ebbing sound is still entering from outside, but after all it is late, and the private sector is screening itself off to entertain itself alone. Those who have to provide the food and entertainment in the little houses above the rushing stream, where they rattle the crockery, forever half begotten, half ill-bred: yes, we women, right! On our own territory. All we can do to make more of our men is stuff them full. Now the family lock out the animals, who can no longer come shying in to us from the dark. And in the village, too, eyes are now being covered everywhere, you just keep your eyes on your own paper! Tomorrow they will all make paper out of the trees of the vicinity, as if it were a holiday. In the mean time, the Direktor is even forcing them out of the alliance he forged with them and the union. Only those who sing the right notes get the right notes in their bag. The misshapen assembly rooms in the county town pubs roar with applause when they perform there, long since

planned as a dish, amiably shuddering at the noise they've baked themselves, as if they meant to gobble each other up. Again and again some portion of Man is climbing onto the woman who belongs to him, to tire himself seriously out. Thus they hang like rocks from their brood and from their spouse's breasts. They're used to it. A stroking hand that sometimes comes out of the darkness brushes them, briefly, as if it were a branch armed with fruit. If only they could remain lying empty just a.moment longer (then they would occasionally feel the breeze)! Let no one pick up the empty bottles right away! Now the women are using their weapons to flatter, so that they will be given a present, a new dress for their inconsequentiality. They please by their capacity for endurance, but they do not please many. And then a burnt goulash promptly becomes an entire world.

Well be in touch taste hearing sight and smell.

When the door has been locked, Gerti too begins to calm down in her little fortress of curtains. But is that any reason for the Direktor to get violent? The child races from one to the other, puffing itself up. Father wants to make the child a gift of oblivion, he picks him up by the fly and drops him on the floor. He wants to throttle a social choke from Mother's gorge at last. Quick, put in a finger! Only the child, played by a boy, is still bothersome, gushing truths from his likewise throttled throat: he wants a present. What cavilling criteria went into the choosing of this child, anyway? The parents are blackmailed and sit silently on each other in their beautiful residence. The supply of child language seems inexhaustible, but it is not very varied, and only involves money and goods. This child makes a plausible wish for whole whirlwinds of technical appliances, tootle tootle tee! His language stumbles out of all the hollows Mother has fixed pictures of animals over. Mother loves this child because they both obey the same law, which says

that not the earth but Father begat them. Whole catalogues of merchandise shoot out of the child. A horse could be bought as well. And the child wants to be absolutely at one with one thing, which isn't the voice of the violin, it's sport. Goods become words become money. Father has to let go of his trouser sack again, in which he is restraining his thing, one really cannot pass this woman by without doing something. He'll lick this kid into shape all right, perhaps drag him in to dinner by the hair? The TV set is a source of sound and vision, an octopus stretching out its tentacles into the room, enabling Youth to recognize itself in the image of sundry famous persons. It is very loud. The club spokesman angrily shouts out his decision: that all three were made by one and the same father, true, but were made up by me!

Mother lurches about in her alcohol-soft body and knocks against her household utensils. Without any necessity, this family buys its surroundings. Just look at this peace! The tables are bending beneath the glow of the table lamp, which is shining on the secret, sacred foods. What a homely country. Father's half-stiff tail is laid like a retriever, good boy, between his thighs on the edge of the armchair, the glans half peeking out, the railings bending under it. It falls from out of men, where their innards begin, where they can make more haste less speed, and on and on they chase through the undergrowth. No, this sex will not lie down to sleep till it has roused itself up and thoroughly rained itself down. That's how they'd like it. Father whets himself on his seat: how variable and how lovely is the valley between his thighs! How long it's been, and how long it is. The woman gazes ahead, and sometimes slaps the table. If she had her own way she'd promptly be off after her latest desires and storming into that considerable prospect called Michael. That path is now closed to her, I fear. She murmurs dark words from her scarcely open

mouth. The student's holiday home, that place of pilgrimage for Gerti's flesh, we'll still have time to drive over there later. The children do not sing in the houses and do not clap their little hands, nor does the sun dare venture anything any more. Silence falls. When, I wonder, will the woman grasp the urgency of her local security organ?

The child buffoons about, now wound up into a total beast. Invariably before he has to go to bed, when one has so little interest in supper, the child starts flinging himself about, in sheer physicality. Mother too lays her head violently on the table. Her gaping wound is connected with Michael. She indicates that she will not eat anything but will have something to drink. Father, who is bursting to be off hunting, is already upping the tempo in his he-man clothing. He finds the child a nuisance, here he is in his own house, after all, where people die if they don't make it to hospital in time. The last workers escape the weather and hurry into their blessed parlours. Soon it will be completely quiet. Father's prick, that herculean muscle, feels the call of Mother. The lordly dog is still lying asleep, but soon he will have the scent in his nostrils. Upstairs the child will be talked to about school. Then the doubled-up woman will be pinched in the warm flesh of her shoulder, she will be taken by the shoulders and put upright again. Nowadays the child is increasingly acting the self-appointed boss at dinner. Disturbed in his desire, Father sinks deep within himself, indeed we see that Mother too has arrived here, only to carry on and then return. These people cannot sit still, which is generally the case with the uncannily rich from foreign parts. Nothing keeps them in one place. They drift about with the clouds and the streams. Their crowns rustle above them and their purses bustle. Elsewhere things are better, and they bare their breasts to the sun. And always the same answer to the question: who's that on the phone? The child becomes an even