Lust (6 page)

citizen! Everything belongs to him and his dear parents, to whom in turn the child belongs. Mother covers herself hurriedly. As if with hay. The boy has already grasped that evil has a name: Father. But Papa does still buy the baskets of goodies, the sackfuls fat with bulging fun, and binds his son with strings of gold. The child affects not to have noticed the bonds that bind his mother, there on the sofa; instead he reads his parents a list of conflicting wishes. You can drive it on sand, gravel, stone, water, ice and snow! Or a Persian carpet. It has to be bought. So that one can look back from far off in the landscape, back at home. The woman is having fun in her handcuffs, she thrashes her legs, her eyes fixed on the uncertainty that is her child: whatever will become of him? An eaglet gnawing at a sportscar? Beak hacking into the flesh of a human breast? Will he accept defeat in the slalom, which is staked out behind the house and is meant for fun and to accustom humankind to detours? Everything this Man and his manchild wish for is dangerous in one way or another. With her teeth Mother tries to pull a blanket over her bare nipples, into which Father has just sunk his teeth. Abruptly the images on the screen are lulled asleep. The child is there. The child wants a motorized sleigh, but in these parts motorized sleighs are officially banned. Customers are entitled to have their demands met; the woman has to look the part.

The Direktor expects to be able to phone home at any time at all, including office hours, to check that he is being thought of. He is as inevitable as death. Always to be at the ready. To tear her heart out. To lay her heart on her tongue like the host, and to show that the rest of her body is in readiness for the Lord, as he expects of his wife. To this end he keeps the bridle on his bride. He keeps her under his watchful eye. He sees everything, he has a right to examine whatever he wishes. For his prick it bloometh in its prickly bed, and on his lips the kisses bud and blow. But first he has to take a good look at

everything, to work up an appetite. For you eat with your eyes too. And nothing remains concealed, excepting heaven unto the eyes of the dead, who placed their hope in it at the last. Which is why the Man wants to make a heaven on earth for his wife, and she sometimes makes the food. You can get away with requesting it three times a week, her famous Linz gateau. And as for the famous Linz dictator, the Man can voice his regard for him in the back room at the pub, where those assembled take solace in History's merciful ability to repeat itself, and look into a glass, darkly, to see what the government has in store for the country.

The Direktor is so vast that you couldn't get around him in a day. He is open to anything, especially the rain and snow that come from up above. There is no one above him, except the parent company, that is, but there is no protection against it. When it's a matter of his wife's sharp edge, though, it's no problem opening up the tap and letting it spurt out. The woman twitches like a fish. Her hands being bound. While the Man tickles and prickles her a little with pins. He pricks an ear at the store of feelings he's hoarded deep within. Words fall from the video screen like leaves, they fall to the floor, floored by this one-man win in the human race. At a loss, the woman casts a protective glance at a dying plant on the window sill. Now the Man is saying something. Words as meaty as steak. He doesn't mince them. As his blood and juices gather, he talks incessantly of what he will do and what he won't be able to help doing, and he uses his savage claws and tame teeth to gain access to his objective, to add mustard to his sausage. His wife's sex is a wood from which an angry echo returns to him.

Recently he forebade his wife Gerti to wash. For her nmell too belongs to him entirely. He ransacks his little woodland, heaves the weighty heel of his loaf into her bread bin, a nuisance that she is often so swollen, damn

it! Ever since his guts failed him and he stopped the small-ad search for strangers desirous of swopping wives, he's preferred it to be the gusts of his own desire that search out his wife. Lifting her skirts. He wants her trailing a banner of sweat, piss and shit scents. "And he checks that the stream is flowing in its own bed where it belongs. A living heap of garbage. Where worms and rats go burrowing. With a bellow he takes the plunge, he gets a move on, quickly reaching the far end where his home is and hell be cosy again and now and then he'll toss one back or simply watch the fishes jump. He reads the papers. He drags the woman from the swamp of her cushion and cracks her open. And there on the sofa yet again he has his nice little toy complete with tits to play with, trembling at what his veins have done with his member.

He likes to have this woman, the best-dressed woman in the village, going about the house in her own dirt. Angrily he hits her about the head. In their transubstan-tiation he has had her body rebuilt to his specifications. It is a vessel designed for copious giving. He too is replenished nightly, his self-service store, his toy grocer's where it's perfectly okay to set a little something aside. The front door key confers the right to today's special, clit served any way you want it, or you can slam the toilet door; the Roman Catholic homeland is flexible, but it allows people to go to pregnancy counselling or the altar. The house has to send out SOS signals while the woman is being utilized. Later a choice bottle of wine will be uncorked and the screen will show other bottles being uncorked, pop! and the choice bodies will examine each other's genitals, rattle at the handle and cast their seed on stony ground. How greedy we are to watch them. But others are watching us. Crunching salted snacks, nibbling the gentlemen's sausages or the ladies' titbits.

The boy will perhaps stay at the neighbours' tomorrow.

They have an exactly identical house, only less of it. The Man wants to drive his savage cart into the woman's dirt. Who practises breath control and has to dive to one side to escape his prick as it crashes into the undergrowth of her panties. His body has had an overpowering effect on all kinds of people, thanks to music and song, they have been packaged up in portions and deep-frozen for later when they will be needed on the job market or to sing in the choir of market forces. The moon is shining, oh look, the stars are shining too, and the Man's machine comes crashing and roaring home from afar, ploughs up the furrow she has cleared with her teeth, sets the cut grass flying like spray, and pumps the woman full to the brim.

4

THE WOMAN, HER BODY flailing awkwardly, strikes out into the wind. She has been made flesh and has dwelt among us. Her off-sales service has ministered to the hungry in every way: she has been worn out by the Man and by the child, sweetest of bridles and reins. Caught in the net, she tries to catch her breath for once. Throwing on her dressing-gown, she sets out trudging down the snowed-up path in her slippers.

First, in case of emergency, she has to put the cups and kitchen utensils away in the cupboards. Under the flowing water she scrubs the traces of her family off the china. And so the woman preserves herself in the very accessories that she is made of. She arranges everything, even her own clothing, according to size. Ashamed, she laughs at the fact. But it's no joke. Orderly arrangement is added to the blessings she already enjoys. She herself is left with nothing. Of the bloody bird feathers on the path there is little to be seen now, for even animals must eat. A sooty layer coats the snow, it took just a few hours.

In his office, the Man reaches contentedly under the lampshade of his waistband and lets a little air in. He talks of his wife, of her figure, without troubling to indicate that it's his turn to speak. Be quiet, now his works are speaking for him, there is a choir of many voices for that specific purpose. No, he is not afraid of the future. His purse is full, and the more he spends, the more he gets!

The woman senses the snow gradually invading time and space. Springtime is still a long way off. Not even today can Nature manage to look freshly painted. The trees are grimed with muck. A dog hobbles past her in a

hurry. Women come along the path, looking as if they'd been stored in cardboard boxes for years. As if they had awoken in a fine house, the women inspect this other odd one out, who keeps herself to herself. The factory provides many of their husbands with work, what else? Unconscious before their time, they'd rather spend their time wih a bottle of wine than their family. The woman glides past them into the gloom, she hasn't even put on shoes to go out in the snow! Meanwhile the child is out and about somewhere, romping with more of the same. He refused the food she'd cooked, refused with words that tore great gaping gashes in his mother, and went off with a wurst sandwich instead. For much of the morning. Mother had been straining carrots through a sieve, for the boy's eyes. She cooked the lad's food herself. And then, a bent stalk of humanity, she gobbled up the boy's helping herself, standing by the bin. When all's said and done, she did produce the child from out of her own self. Her sense of humour has not grown, though. From the fence by the stream hang icicles, the capital is not far away as the car drives. It is a broad valley, and not many are employed in it. The rest, since everybody has to be somewhere, are at their onerous places of employment: they go to work at the paper mill every day, while others commute even further afield, much further! Up there on the mountain is where I love to be, with my flock. The woman's mouth freezes as tiny as a marble. She clings to the iced-up wood of the railing. The stream is bridged from both banks, the ice is slapping its back, Creation is groaning under the fetters of natural law. There's a faint gurrgling sound. Just as the that will melt all the barriers in this good life we all lead, levelling us so that there are no distinctions any more, so too Death may be the reductio ad absurdum of this woman's world. But let's not be personal. The wheels of a small car crunch and bite through the tightly-packed snow. Wherever it comes from, it's more at home there than its owner is. What would the commuter be without it? A dung heap.

Because when he's pitchforked into a carriageful of humanity he's simply dirt, that's how his parliamentary representatives see it. It's a question of crowds, of masses: they're what prevent our economy from collapsing, bunched inside our factories, propping them up from within. And as for the unemployed! A shadowy army of nothings, who do not need to be feared because all of them vote for Christian Social Democrats notwithstanding. Herr Direktor is flesh and blood and eats his full share thereof as well because ladies in aprons serve it to him.

You are advised not to drive in this weather if you can avoid it. On the other hand, you are expected to be at your place of work on time. To this tune, the trucks are out, gritting the streets, leaving their wares. All the woman has to offer is herself. Oh, and one more thing: don't call out the emergency services unless it's absolutely essential! The poor creatures. You wouldn't like it either.

The children howl down the well-ironed snow into the valley in their plastic birthday shells which stick to their skin or fly past their ears. Sullenly the older ones turn away, their chair-lift tickets dangling at their padded rotundities. Speed is not magic. They roar like railway stations. The woman is frightened of them. Alarmed, she cowers in the cornices of snow left by the snow plough. Grinding and crunching, cars loaded with families, whole cargoes of miserable beatings, trundle past her. On the roof racks the skis are at full stretch to restrain the hatred of the passengers. The skiing tackle stares down belligerently like machine guns. They plough through the many other containers of humanity because they merit a better place. So thinks everyone. And shows it by making endearingly filthy gestures out of the window.

Sport! The fortress of the common man! From which he can do his shooting.

Believe me, everybody, but everybody, cart afford to break a foot or both arms! Still, you can't help feeling that these people are dependants, up the hill they go and then come gliding down it and even feel good doing it. but dependent on what? On their own images. And, as if they themselves were no more than mid wives of reality, the images are screened anew every day, but bigger, better, faster. And thus, kicked down from the television watershed, they tumble to the other side, where the ordinary people mill on the hill of idiots. Ouch. In discussions they never get a word in edgeways. And if they do they are instantly interrupted by someone who ranks as an expert, who doesn't share their worries about rank. And the Supreme Being, who has studied the rankings, is deaf to their whining for a home of their Own, which they say they need so that they won't have to sally forth — they can sully sport, that silly Aunt Sally of an Olympian idea, on their very own doorsteps.

The woman slips and slides at every step she takes. In the car windows laughing faces appear, soundless. The driver comes within a whisker of death. The snow falls amply on one and all. But they all ski differently, just as no two human beings are alike. Some are better than others, and others want to be best of all. Where is the lift slope for every degree of difficulty so that there will quickly be more of us? What was slack and limp in its house just now is firmed up when it emerges into the air. But it looks all the smaller. Thanks to the sturdy Alps!

The woman emerges from the cover of her circumstances. Out of humour, she hugs her dressing-gown tightly to herself. Flails her arms about. Some of the children she hears yelling from afar have been torn from their weekly dance and rhythm class. These children

were bred as this woman's hobby. After all, we've got enough room and love for the child to set him clapping rhythmically. That will help him to nod his head in time at school or stand up when it's time for prayers. There her son is, in the midst of them, demonstrating with every step he takes that he is a grubby finger above them all, poised to smudge them. He has to take first bite of every wurst sandwich. For every child has a father. And every father has to earn money. On his junior skis, the boy terrorizes the little kids on their toboggans. He is the latest edition of a bright star that has the gall to appear every day, always wearing different clothes. None of the others rebel. Though his back has to put up with a lot of covert and wasted gestures. Already he sees himself as a phrase expressed by his father. The woman isn't wrong, vaguely she raises a hand to wave at her distant son, whom she has recognized by his voice. He barks the other kids to attention, the way he wants them, and his words cut them down to dirty heaps as does winter the landscape.