Lust (8 page)

5

THE SUPERMARKETS ARE bursting with captivating goods, people are their captives. On Saturday the Man is* supposed to be a partner, helping take in the catch in the nets. The fishermen sing. It is a simple tune and by now the Man has managed to learn it. Without saying a word he stands among the women who are counting their loose change and fighting starvation. How are two human beings supposed to become one if humankind cannot even join hands in a chain for peace? The woman is accompanied, the packages and bags are carried, no fuss, no noise. The Direktor is expensively showy in public, taking up the space that is other people's, checking to see what they're buying, though that is really a matter for his housekeeper. He is a god, scurrying to and fro among his creatures, who are less than children and collapse beneath temptations vaster than the ocean. He looks in other people's baskets and down cleavages, where undesirable colds are revealed and hot desires are concealed by neck-scarves. The houses tend to be cold and damp, so close to the stream. His wife's hand is rummaging among dead cellophane-wrapped creatures in the freezer, and when he looks at her, the paltriness of her meat, her fine clothes, he is beset by terrible impatience to let her partake of his own ample meat, his dong, his wonderful shlong. He wants to see it stir at the feeble touch of her fingers like a creature roused by the sun. He wants to see that little animal of his awake at the touch of her varnished talons and bed down again to sleep inside the woman. She'd better make an effort, in her silk blouse, so that he doesn't always have to do all the troublesome work himself, manhandling her breasts out and placing them on the plate of his hands. Why can't she serve herself up, be a little obliging, so he doesn't have to waste half an hour picking the fruit from the tree first. In vain. He pauses before the check-out to survey

the gaping emptiness of his property, before which the goods are sitting up and begging, good boy. A number of supermarket employees are dancing attendance on him, who has taken their children away, some for his factory, others because they are having to move or become alcoholics. He is their lordandmaster and even lords it over time.

The shopping bags have done what was required of them, they rustle and bustle through the hall, helped on their way by a kick from the Direktor. From time to time he tramples on the food in a temper, so that it squirts in the air. Then he tosses the woman in amongst the other goods to complete the picture, and she is allowed to breathe his air and lick his penis and anus. With a practised hand he catches her tits as they fall from her dress, they are already sagging and wilting but he gathers them into bunches like balloons with a firm grip. He seizes the woman by the nape and bends over her as if he meant to pick her up and stuff her in a sack. The furniture is glimpsed fleetingly as if it were on a flying visit. Clothes are scattered. You wouldn't say these two were exactly attached to each other, but in a moment they are well and truly attached to each other; funny, that. This particular patch has been used for grazing for years. The Direktor yanks out his product, which isn't paper, it's altogether harder, these are hard times after all. People like showing what they have hidden about them to each other as a sign that they have nothing to hide, that everything they say to their inexhaustibly flowing partners is true. They send out their members, the only messengers that always return to them. You can't say the same of money, for instance. Though it is loved more dearly than the hooves and horns of the loved one, already gnawed at by dogs. The products are produced, to the accompaniment of shrieking and thrashing, the tiny body factories grind and crunch, and the modest property, burdened down only by the

happiness babbling forth from the lonely TV set, pours into a lonely pool of sleep where one can dream of bigger commodities and more expensive products. And humanity flourishes on the bank.

The woman lies wide open, open wide, on the floor, slippy slithery eatables slopped upon her. Stock still. Only her husband is permitted to deal in her stocks and bonds. An honest broker. He falls from himself into the furnished emptiness of the room. Only his own body comes anywhere near doing justice to him. At sports, if required, he can hear himself sound and echo. The woman has to crook and angle her legs like a frog so that her husband, the examining magistrate, can look into the matter closely. A court of no appeal. She is flooded and shat full him, she has to get up and the last of her clothes fall on the floor and she fetches a sponge to clean the Man, that irreconcilable enemy of her sex, of himself and the slime that she has caused him to emit. He sticks his right forefinger up her arsehole and, tits dangling, she kneels above him and scrubs. Hair in her eyes and mouth. Perspiration on her brow. Another person's saliva at the base of her throat. The pale killer whale there before her till the friendly light dies, night comes, and the animal can begin to lash her with his tail again.

They are usually silent as they return from the supermarket. Some of them, trying out their horsepower, hurry on by, and are unforgivingly preserved in memory. The milk churns by the wayside, the atoms breathing terribly in and out of them, stand waiting for collection. The farming co-operatives are at each other's throats, all of them competing; they cannot for very long bear the scrutiny of even the smallest holder, who cannot supply much milk and who cannot even be allowed to bleed dry. The woman is cloaked in the darkness of silence. But then she laughs, laughs till it seems she will never stop, to humiliate her husband. The

pedantic patriarch. Such notions, keeping such a close eye on the girl at the check-out. Like so many of the wives of the unemployed, she mustn't make even the slightest mistake. The Direktor steals up beside her, she has to enter all the items again to make sure there isn't a single one too many. It's almost the same as in his factory. Except that the people here are smaller and wear women's clothing, from out of which they look about, finding that the family fits tightly and pinches. The Direktor has been known to pinch too. They fold in their wings, and from their bodies the children shoot forth, and the fathers zap their flashing lightning into the kiddies' newly-opened eyes. Disorganized flocks of women shoppers, intent on their shopping, shove past the ones who are enchanted by the goods, trying to make it to the grave as soon as they can. Their heads rise sheer as cliffs at the special offers. There are no freebies for this lot, quite the contrary, they are relieved of a part of their earnings from the paper mill. Horrified they stare at the boss, whom they hadn't expected to see here and of whom, to be plain, they were hardly thinking at all. Often we open our doors only to be confronted with people we hadn't been expecting at all, and then we're supposed to feed them. Salted sticks and potato snacks are all we can come up with to overshadow them.

Gorges of shelving recede to the distant horizon. The bunch of people disperse. Already the last of their wishes, like the straps of sweaty vests, are slipping from their weary morning shoulders. Sisters, mothers, daughters. And the holy Direktorial couple, in perpetual repetition, are on their way back to the penal colony of sex, where they can whine for redemption to their heart's content. All that they receive in their cell, through the flaps and holes, is gruesome gruel, lukewarm, poured over their outstretched hands. Sex, like Nature, has its following. Who enjoy its products. And wear frilly lace for the purpose and the products of the

cosmetics industry. Yes, and perhaps sex is the nature of humanity. I mean, it is in humanity's nature to chase after sex, until taken whole the one and the other are of equal importance. An analogy may convince you: you are what you eat. Till work pulps the human creature into a grubby heap. A melted snowman. Till, marked with the weals of his origins, he no longer even has a hole to retreat into. How long it takes, till humanity has finally been questioned and learns the truth about itself . . . While we're waiting, why not listen to me. These unworthy creatures are important and hospitable for just a single day, the day they marry. Only one year later they are made liable for the furniture and car. The whole family is liable for the crimes of one member if he can't keep up the payments. They even buy beds on the never-never, the beds they frolic in! Smile into the faces of strangers who lead them to their mangers. So that a stalk or so of hay wisps in the breath of sleep.

Before they move on. But we, we have to get up at an ungodly hour every day. Alone and in a far-off place, we merely gaze down our narrow road, where the sweethearts we couple with are now the objects of other desires, to be used by others. They say a fire burns within women. But it's only dying embers. The shadow of afternoon falls on them in the morning when they creep from the gullet of attic bedrooms, where they have to look after a bawling child, into the maw of the mill. Go home, if you're tired! No one envies you. No one finds your beauty disarming any more. He hasn't for a long time. Rather, he strides out briskly, leaving you, and starts his car, where the dew lies fresh and glinting in the first bright highlights of sunshine. Quite unlike your matt and dull hair from which the glinting highlights have gone forever.

The factory. My, how it deals with the unskilled folk who are pumped into it from inexhaustible sources. And how

loud it is, inexhaustibly drowning the din of the stereos! A whole houseful of humanity. A factory built on the Direktor's lot. His plot. Who did it? they wonder, fetching a refreshing Coke from the dispenser. A tent of light and living creatures, where paper is manufactured. Rival firms are putting the competitive screws on, and if anyone ends up getting screwed it'll be the employees at the mill. The company that owns the factory in the adjoining federal province has far more clout and is right on a major traffic artery, the bleeders. Wood is pulped and the pulp is processed at the mill by people who've been pulped, at least that's what I've been told, and I'm glad that I, being free, can go into the silent woods in the heat of the day and spew my echo out. The armies of the irresponsible, people like me, who read their papers on the toilet, see to it that the trees disappear from the woods so that they can take the trees' places and unwrap their food from paper wrappings. Then at night people drink and worry. And when there's a dispute, the bloated and blinded multitude plunges into the depths of night.

The factory has gone to the wood. But it has long since been pining for somewhere else, somewhere that production costs are lower. The divine hoardings that line the arterial roads set the hordes dreaming and steaming off on their toy train sets. But the points all point to nowhere. And even the Herr Direktor is in the hands of the powers that be. Gobbling public money. Opaque are the policies of the owners, whom no one knows. At five in the morning people fall asleep at traffic lights on their hundred-kilometre drive to the factory At the very last crossroads, at the very last holy red light that toys with them, they fail and are killed, failing to slam on the brakes, failing to break off their dreams of the last grand slam Saturday night. Those TV caresses, which for years have nourished their pawing and panting, they'll never see again.

And so they all cause their women to sound forth once more, that they might not hear the last trumpet at least till next pay day. The trumpet call of rumour never falls silent in this place. Those who have been dropped by the banks sit chirruping in the furrows, eating their last crumbs of bread. Behind them a wife wanting her housekeeping money and new books and exercise books for the children. All of them are dependent on the Direktor. That big kid with the mildest of tempers. Though his temper can snap round with a crash, like a sail, and then we're all in the same boat. And promptly fall out on the vast, wild side. The side we flung ourselves across to at the very last moment. Because we don't know how to strike up our thousand-voiced siren song to better effect. Even in our anger we are forgotten. But our running sore is hurting. And we run wild.

6

THE WOMAN GROPES HER way along a fence by an old volunteer fire brigade station, failing in her confused state to find the emergency exit from her memories. There she goes, not even on a lead. The dirty washing-up waiting to be done is clean gone from her mind. Already she has ceased to hear the familiar jingling of the bells on her bridle. Speechless, she licks up like a flame, like sparks. She's left them both behind, her practical-minded husband who is a great sport and is still growing, regardless of the flames shooting from his genitals, and her child, all gut and screech like his violin playing. Let them drone and howl together. Ahead of her is only the cold tempestuous wind off the mountain. The terrain is threaded by a few paths leading into the woods. Dusk. In their cells, the housewives bleed from the brain, from the sex they all belong to. What they have bred they must now tend and rear and keep alive and cradle, in arms already laden down with hopes.

The woman moves towards the icy channel in the cleft of the valley. Awkwardly she wanders across the frozen clods. Now and then animals are revealed through an open stable door, then there is nothing. The rear quarters of the animals, pulsing craters of mud, are turned to face her. The farmer isn't exactly in a hurry to clean the shit off their hind parts. In the large livestock sheds in wealthy regions, the animals are given an electric shock through the yoke about the head if they crap at the wrong time: cattle training. Beside the cottages, wood is stacked, wretchedly snuggling up to the wall. The least you might say of Man and Beast, their common denominator as it were, is that both are tucked fast in their beggarly beds by the snow. Sparse plant life, tough leafage, is still straining for the light. Iced-over twigs play with the water. To be stranded here of all

places, on this ice-tight bank where even echoes founder! Nature presupposes sheer scale: anything of a smaller size could never excite us or entice us, tempt us to buy a dirndl dress or a hunting outfit. Just like cars approaching a distant country, so we too, like stars, are nearing this unceasing landscape. We simply can't stay at home. Someone's put a country inn there, just for us, to put an end to our rambling. And Nature is put where it belongs, with a preserve for domesticated deer or a path through the woods with every tree labelled for our instruction. In no time, we know all there is to know about it. There are no mountainsides to cast us wrathfully down; quite the contrary, we gaze at the bank strewn with empty milk cartons and tin cans and we recognize the limits Nature has placed upon our consumption. In springtime all will be revealed. The sun, a pale patch in the sky, and only a handful of species remaining on earth. The air is very dry. The woman's breath freezes as it leaves her lips, and she holds a corner of her pink nylon dressing-gown to her mouth. In principle, life has ample opportunities for everyone.