Lust (7 page)

The woman writes characters in the air with her hand. She does not have to earn her living, she is kept by her husband. When he returns home at the end of the day he has earned the right to set his signature to life. That child was no accident. The boy is his! Now he no longer sees death ahead.

With pent-up love she seeks out her son in the troupe of children. He bawls and bawls and still he doesn't tire. Was he like that when he crept from her ground floor, the womb of Mother Earth? Or, as his heavenly father would put it, was he first led astray, were the arts of life at work on him, carving him into something he was not, that no boy at this age ever was or ever shall be? The child claims rights of those who think differently, rights as inclusive as the treaties signed by nations. He parrots his father's expressions: you have to grow a little every

day! Great! An erection! Men are always a little ahead of themselves so that they can look at themselves whenever they want. And the child, made of a being that has long since, like clinker, fallen down behind him (the bell foundry of his mother), will presently, in a year or so, squirt high as heaven where little ones are welcomed in to have a snack.

The boy goes racing through the midst of comrades and cameras as if through open and welcoming doors.

The cold has stolen into the woman's feet. The soles of her slippers are not worth mentioning, but she herself doesn't say much anyway. The soles barely protect her mortal soul from the ice of the world. She stomps on. Better look out. Slide, don't let the others shove you. But people are forever shoving. What else should it mean when the golden-headed sexes, after a fashion, open up In front of the furniture, sole intimates and witnesses of their talents? What if they were to be slung derisively off the summits of their wishes? The woman is holding onto the railing and making good headway. Foodstuffs are being lugged homeward all around, for meals are the main thing in family life. Rolled oats spray from the women's mouths, I'd say they were worried what the expensive ingredients might get up to in the pan. And the men are there, at their plates, filled with a sense of event. The unemployed, who have deviated from the kind of life intended by God and blessed in the sacrament of matrimony, can just about afford to live, but the good life isn't on the cards: no adventure playground, no casino, no cinema watching a lovely film, no cafe with a lovely woman. The only thing that comes free is the use of their own families. The boundary lines are drawn by sex. Which Nature surely can't have planned, at least not like this. Nature shares the good life with us so that we can eat of her produce and be eaten in turn by the owners of factories and banks. Interest would have the shirt off

our back. But no one can say what water does. It's plain to see what is done to the water, though, with the cellulose plant pumping its waste into the stream, which is in no hurry to get anywhere. Let it pump its poison somewhere else, where people like their streams to supply dead fish to eat. The women examine the shopping bags which they used to get rid of the dole money. Consumers are well advised in the stores, where special offers are announced over the public address. Special offers are what they themselves were, once! And their men were chosen according to their means. But now they are treated as the meanest of creatures at the labour exchange. Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer and playing cards, a dog's life. But not even a dog would be so patient, kept on its lead outside the wonderful stores filled with fine wares that mock us.

Nothing is ever lost. The state is at work with what we don't see. Where does our money go, once we have finally got rid of it? We burn to be done with it, the notes are hot in our hands, the coins melt in our fists. Yes, we must part. Time shall stand still on payday so that we can stop and take a good look at our stinking and steaming heap of money, still warm from our labours, before we transfer it to our accounts. One day we'll be in clover. What we'd like best of all would be to lie back and rest amid our hot golden nuggets of dung. But love, ever restless, is already looking around to see where there's something better than what we've already got. The people who live where skiing originated, people who once grew here like grass (the world's most famous skiing museum is at Murzzuschlag, Styria!) are familiar with it only by sight. They are stooped so far forward over the cold ground that they cannot find the trail. Continually others are passing them, to do their business in the woods.

Like a horse the woman tugs at her reins. Embarrassed,

In their Sunday best, the strangers brought together by an ad in the personal column used to sit on her sofa, mostly two by two. Dejected, the woman giggled, toying with the glasses on the coasters, and the men, the members of the club, were out coasting, their members wanting new toys. Unbuttoned, unbraced. Wanting to change to a new feed bag once every so often. Standing poised at the living room table, slinging the women's legs to left and right about their shoulders. When you're on your travels it's nice to leave your old familiar ways behind; and then, when you return home, how com-forting it is to go back to those old ways. At home the bed is a four-square thing on solid ground. The women, who go to the hairdresser every week, are properly put through their paces, because that's what they thrive on. Well-upholstered bodies, well-upholstered suites, an orgy of fleshy padding, as if we'd won an unlimited suplly of experience in a lottery. Intimate lingerie is sold, so that experience — the kind of experience we women hopefully and vainly long for — will look different when it comes to call and we are asleep and turn over and store it up.

My the pricking of his flesh, and the liberties taken by the press, the Direktor is unceasingly goaded onward. He takes liberties himself, e.g. he pees on his wife as dogs do. Having first made a little mountain of her person and clothes so that it's downhill all the way. The scale of desire is open-ended, what Richter would presume to judge? The Man uses and dirties the woman as if she were the paper he manufactures. He is responsible for the well-being or otherwise of this household, greedily he yanks his tail out of the bag before he has even shut the door and stuffs it, still warm from the butcher's, into the woman's mouth, setting her teeth on edge. Even if they have company for dinner, bearing their light into his darkest recesses, he still manages to whisper sweet nothings about her genitals in his wife's ear. Uncouthly

his mitt gropes her under the table, burrowing into her furrow, taking her fear, which strains at the lead, for a walk in front of his business associates. The woman has to be kept on a short leash so that she knows what's what. She has to be ever mindful of the pungent solution he could steep her in. Man and wife must cleave together, so he laughs and reaches into her cleavage before their guests. Which one among you has no need of paper? A satisfied customer is king. And which of you has no sense of humour?

The woman goes on. For a while a big strange dog joins her, hoping to be able to bite her foot, since she isn't wearing proper shoes. The Alpine Association has issued its warning: there's death in the mountains. The woman kicks the dog. She doesn't want anyone or anything expecting anything of her. The lights will soon be switched on in the houses, and every hearth will then be a place of truth and warmth, and the hammering and chiselling will be starting up inside the women.

The valley is peopled with the wishes of part-time farmers. The children of God. Not of the personnel manager. The valley shoves up closer, like an excavator digging up the woman's footsteps. She walks by the immortal souls of the unemployed, whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commanded. Youngsters flee their fathers and are chased by curses sharp as axes through the empty sheds and barns. The factory kisses the good earth from which it has taken the all too acquisitive people. We have to find ways of rationalizing our approach to the federal forests and federal funds. Paper is always needed. Now look: without a map, we would be headed straight for the abyss. Somewhat embarrassed, the woman thrusts her hands in the pockets of her dressing-gown. Her husband does take an interest in the unemployed, believe me:

even if they are not kept busy, the thought of them keeps him busy, he never stops, never a moment's rest.

In the mountain stream there are no chemicals learning to swim at this upper reach, just the occasional human faeces. The stream tosses restlessly in its bed beside the woman. The slopes are steeper now. Over there, round the bend, the sundered landscape is growing back together again. The wind is growing colder. The woman doubles over. Her husband has already kick-started her t wice today. Then at last his battery seemed to be flat. So off he drove to the factory, taking the hurdles on the way in massive voracious leaps, leaving them under his tyres. The ground crunches underfoot, a grinding sound, but It's not the grinding of teeth, they're hidden underneath. At this height there's little but rocks and mud off the scree. The woman has long since lost all feeling in her feet. This path can't be leading anywhere but a small sawmill at best, the grinding of teeth has ceased there too, it's silent most of the time, how can you say anything anyway without your teeth in. We are on our own. The occasional crofts and cottages by the wayside are equal, they have similarities. Old smoke rises from the rooftops. The occupants are drying out their floods of tears by the stove. Garbage is heaped by the outside toilets. Battered enamel buckets that have served for fifty weary years or more. Stacks of wood. Old crates. Rabbit hutches from which run rivers of blood. If Man can kill, so too can the wolf and the fox, his great role models. Slyly they slink by the chicken runs. Nighttime visitors. Domestic pets get rabies from them and pass it on to Man, their lordandmaster. Eat and be eaten. Take a good hard look. Like what you see?

There she is, tiny when seen from our vantage point: the woman, at the end of the path, passing by, like time. Already the sun is very low. Clumsily it is sinking towards the crags. The child's heart is beating elsewhere.

For sport. This Son of Man, this woman's child, is a coward, to tell the truth. Away onto the flat he steers his toboggan and he's out of earshot. Now, at the latest, the woman ought to turn back. Up ahead there is only some character on a cross, magnificently out-suffering all who have ever suffered since. Given this beautiful view it's hard to decide if we should have this moment last forever, and forgo the rest of the time that we're entitled to. Photographs often record this dilemma; but afterwards we're glad we're still alive and can look at the photos. It's not as if we could send in that remainder of time and receive a free gift in return. Still, we always want things to be beginning and never ending. Out into Nature go the people, hoping to return with an impression which their weary feet have made on the earth. Even the children want only to exist. As quickly as possible. On the slope with the ski lift. The moment they've tumbled out of the car. And we take a deep and innocent breath.

This woman's child still can't see further than the end of his nose. His parents have to do that, they even have to clean the nose, and they offer prayers unto heaven that their offspring will beat everyone else's by a nose. Wetly, he sometimes offers his mother his mouth, his face half free of its halter, the horse collar of the violin already off. And as for his father. In the hotel bars of the county town he talks of his wife's body as he might talk of the founding of an association sponsored by his factory, though soon he'll be relegated to a lower division. The words that come from Father's lips have a pungent odour. You wouldn't find them in a book. To leave a living human being dog-eared and tattered like that and not even read her! Centuries will come and centuries will go and still this Man will bounce back. Jesus: you can't keep a good man down.

This morning the woman was in a waking dream, a

waiting dream, at the house, aimless, waiting for her husband, waiting on her husband, orange juice or grapefruit juice? So that he would catch her scent. Lick her off. Angrily, on the wing, he points at the jam. For it is written that she shall wait for him till evening when he cometh to bed down in her lap. Every day he uses his appliance as he has done for many a year. And what an impressive score he's run up. Men like scoring, one way or another. They're born with a target in their breast, their fathers send them over the hills and far away, just to shoot at other men's targets.

The ice is thick on the ground. The grit lies scattered carelessly as if someone had emptied his pockets. The municipal authorities grit the roads so that vehicles don't break their tyres. The pavements for people aren't gritted. The idleness of the unemployed is a burden on the budget, but as they idle by they do not burden the mow. Their fate is in the hands of someone who already has his hands full with a wine glass and plateful from the simple buffet of cold cuts. The politicians have to wear their big and bursting hearts on their tongues. The woman gets a firm footing on the verge. Here, the law of the catalytic converter rules: unless money is thrown at it, the environment won't react to us ambitious wanderers. And even the wood would have to die. Open the window and let feeling in! Then Woman will show" that disease afflicts the Man's world.

Flailing helplessly, Gerti stands on the ice. Offering herself. Her dressing-gown flapping about her. She claws at thin air. Crows caw. Her limbs fling forward as if she had sown a whirlwind and couldn't grasp the soughing and blowing on Mother's Day or the slurping of the Man at her trough when he appears below the table to lick the cream from her bowl. Woman is forever earthbound, they compare her with the earth, so she will open up and receive the Man's member. Perhaps lie

down in the snow for a while? You wouldn't believe how many pairs of shoes this woman has at home! And who is it that's always egging her on to buy more clothes? For the Direktor, people count simply because they're people and can be used or else can be made into consumers who use things. That is how the unemployed of the area are addressed, who are in line to be eaten up by the factory when all they want is something to eat themselves. For the Direktor, they count doubly if they can sing for their supper. Or play the accordion or fool. Time passes, but we want it to say something to us. Not a moment of peace and quiet. The stereo drones eternal: listen, if patience and not the violin is what you play, what you have, oh sainted ones! The room is uplifted, a ray of light falls upon us, the beatitudes of sport and leisure cost the earth, and on the operating tables we re-enter the peaceable kingdom, resurrected, whole again.