Lust (9 page)

The wind forces a frozen cry from her lips. An involuntary and none too savage cry, a mute sound squeezed out of her lungs. Helpless as the child, a field tilled and ploughed and beaten till it's used to the treatment. She cannot take her beloved child's side against his father, because after all it was Father who filled in the order form for extras such as music or holidays. It's all behind her now. Her boisterous son is probably tearing downhill into the dusky valley at this very moment, like an upturned plastic ladybird in his plastic moulded sledge. Soon everyone will be at home. Fating. The terror of the day still pounding in their hearts. If the child doesn't have pieces of shell stuck wet behind his ears! Such filth. That children are here today and gone tomorrow, like time, is the responsibility of women, who stuff food into their own or Father's images

and show where things come out again. And, wielding his sting. Father drives his sons out onto the piste, where he can be lordandmaster of the leaderless mob.

The fist knocks the woman senseless against the railing. She has left the last of the cottages far behind now. The children's babble told clearly of how wonderful life is if you let circumstances pull the wool over your eyes. With eyes wide open, the woman always has to go walking on other paths, she's always been squeezed from the tube of her house into the open. Quite often she's gone astray. She's lost her way a time or two and ended up at the police station. Where the officers opened their arms wide and welcomed her in, offering a place to rest. The poor folk who spend too long at the pub get a different welcome. Now Gerti is silent. Amid the elements. Which soon will lie wide open beneath the stars. The child who has been singled by Fate as her surviving next of kin is boisterously tobogganing down the tracks left by others, shooting a breeze of his own creation. Those who have some notion of what's what prefer not to cross his path, not to cross him. But Mother, impelled on her travels by his will, travails from valley to valley to buy him something. Now she is like a sleepwalker. Gone. The villagers stroke her image behind the panes and try to meet her so that she will put in a good word. The Orff courses for infants, which the little ones try hard and often to get out of, guarantee their fathers work at the factory. The children are left as a deposit. They rattle and bash their drums and cymbals and recorders. Why? Because the goodly hand of their caring lordandmaster who owns the factory, a sheltering place for one and all, has staked them out as bait. At times the Direktor stops by and dandles the little girls in his lap. He toys with the hems of their skirts, ahem, and plays with their dolly tea-cosy dresses, isn't this cosy, but doesn't dare wade any deeper in their waters. Still, everything happens under his guardian hand. The children clatter away on

the air holes of their musical instruments. And lower down, where there are openings in their bodies, a terrible finger comes out softly into the clearing, as if in its sleep. And not till an hour later will the children, be safe in the breath of their mothers. Suffer the children to come, so that the family can take their supper in a merry atmosphere in the sunshine in the glow of gleaming classical records. And the teacher, as soon as the children crowd into the room, sits totally silent in her compartment, beyond the window of which the station-master goes on moving his lips till her train has left.

The Direktor approves of everything his wife does. And she puts up with his ever-ready meat battery. Slotted home to light up her health. He seems almost amazed to find his natural fertilizer enriching her well-ploughed field time and again. To have his load crash time after time upon the deck of her ship. From her sleeves, in alarm, comes intermittent piano music, only to fade and die again. The children don't understand a thing. Except that their bellies are being stroked and their tender inner thighs. These unmusical creatures have not learnt any foreign languages. From the corners of their bored eyes they glimpse the outside, where they can idle their time away undisturbed. The Direktor is on his way back from the heavenly choir where their fathers idle their time away disturbed. And the thunderous god's fingertips cling tight to the strawberries that have already started to ripen in their cold, hard beds.

It drives the Man nuts, he's white-hot and could crush flies in his fingers at the thought of it: this tiny start that even children have on him, which he has driven out of his wife's body with just two fingers, so he can clamber up and be king of the castle. Just having the woman at his disposal isn't enough. He has to spread out in her. Act the lout. Make himself at home. Put his feet up. Let's face it, what he wants is to hide away in her and get a little peace.

Now and then, still trembling with the heavy, droning beat of his wings of flesh, he offers an almost apologetic apology to this gentle creature upon whom he cannot impress his stamp, even though he has gobbled and spat out every millimetre of her flesh. Preposterous, really, to be ashamed of a decent day's work on the marital job!

When night has nearly fallen there are some who go from village to village in their vehicles, a spawn of stereo speakers squelching music about their brains. One driver, a guest in his vehicle, pulls over by the woman. The pebbles of the forest road fly from his tyres. Most men are more familiar with their cars' biographies than with their wives' autobiographies. What, it's the other way round with you? You know yourself as well as you know the simple person who revives and restores you every day anew? The light of your life, slinging out your U9ed rubbers? Then count yourself fortunate and sit down!

Now will all of those who want to drink all night please stand up and go to the back! The rest who would rather drink to the small hours, small talk, bed talk, till they have the affection of another, stay put. Night is there for the sole purpose of draining the bottle of youth. Which kicks and yells in its glossy mag nappies. Now at last youngsters can smash the glass vessel the schnapps drips from, the light bulb of their upbringing, the backs of their hands will be marked in discos and their faces by steel bridge railings. That's the way of the world. Right inside us. Unemployed youngsters are chary of the road into free open spaces. Warily they torment small animals they have managed to get in their power, in soundless hutches. No one will take them at the garages and the glitzy hairdressing salons in town. The paper mill pretends to be asleep too, to avoid any social dilemma when the village lads, wings folded shut and heads retracted, smash into it. Because they would like to stir

the paper pulp along with the others. But what they actually do is to drink too deeply. They're already wearing their Sunday best on weekdays. Anyone who has a small holding back home is the first to be slung out of the factory and keeps his wife busy back home. He seems to be self-sufficient in food and to reap a harvest of divine plenty. Anyone who slaughters animals in private cannot have his heart entirely in the factory, declares the personnel manager. Either one thing or the other. The children fall ill. The fathers hang themselves. No money on earth can ever pay them what they're owed.

There he goes. Driving by in his very own car across the frozen earth, right by the woman. Young though he is, he has already passed his finals in justice and life in the fast lane. He still has parents too, though he doesn't need to bother about them, by the long and dusty road a senior employee has to travel on the way to getting his face on the Austrian People's Party campaign poster. That way is as long as ours from the door to the heating or newspaper, which make things so comfortable for us in this medium-income-group state. His parents have bought a weekend home here fairly painlessly, with a bank loan. The house is available for rest, for sport, and for resting before and after sport. Unlike them, this man is a member of an exclusive student fraternity where the aristocracy thaw open the eyes of the middle classes and promptly gum them shut again. What this fellow can't do isn't worth mentioning in the Vienna Young Athletes' Association circular. His is a non-duelling fraternity but the fraternizing is hearty. Heartlessly the small fry get their knives into each other. But meanwhile the big boys are casting a bright light and climbing their way to the lop, amid the mighty shadows that chart their progress, stepping on the hands and heads of the rest; and presently they relax their bowels, and their sails fill with the wind they pass. You don't see them coming. But suddenly there they are, in parliament, in the government.

Just as with agricultural products, which don't poison you till they're off the shelf and in your guts.

The woman has to stop. It has been snowing day and night. The mountain air hurts. The rays that fell through the trees have vanished now. The young man brakes so abruptly that a number of books that have long since turned against him fall upon him. They tumble into the legroom in front of the passenger seat. The woman peeks in at the window and sees a head that was legless last night, a skull that got a skinful like the hopeless folk around here under whose feet the earth is steaming. They know each other slightly by sight but neither has ever taken mental note of the other. The student reels off various expensive names she ought to know. The lofty peaks about them glisten in their caps of snow, the snow reaches the whole way down, to the workshop depths where humanity is busy crafting wishes for a new set of skis.

Meanwhile the Direktor is waiting in his office, and won't be any help to us if we go pounding at his door. The farm lads' dads have thrashed them black and blue, the cows at home are black and white and that's how they see the world, and here they are, braving a first step into the poorest-paid group of industrial workers. Soon they become aware of women. They bark and woof when they see women in cars varnishing their nails at a red light. They are the unimportant guests at the set table, invited so that they will see in good time just how unwelcome their intrusion into the yielding fabric of society is. From where they sit they can't even see all the social burdens that are heaped on the groaning table. There they sit, on the seats of their leather shorts, yawping to find their member of parliament already sitting there, wanting to drink their life juice concentrate straight from the can. Sons of the earth, they seem. Made to love and suffer. But a mere year later all they

want to do is drive fast, be it a moped or a used Volkswagen, so the hair flies about their heads. And the river flows jauntily along beside them, finally to receive them with no questions asked.

The woman is so tired. As if she, complete with her still passable figure, which is usually covered by her husband, were about to topple over forward. The eyes of the world are upon her, at every step that she takes. She is buried among her possessions, which heave high aloft, foaming with conditioner, from one lowly horizon to the next. Then along come the busybody villagers and their valiant dogs, scraping and scratching at her doings till a thousand conversations have dug her up. Scarcely one of them could say what she looks like. As for what she's wearing, though! If only all those voices were uplifted on Sunday in church! A thousand little voices, flames flickering heavenward from the dusky workshop where the daily papers have done the preparation and fashioned people into clay vessels. The Direktor is cock of the walk. The women of the village are merely side-dishes to go with their husbands' meat. No, I do not envy you. And the men, like chaff, like dry hay, fall upon the computer-printed slips which record their fates plus the overtime they have to work if they're to strike up the happier tunes of life. No time to have fun with the kids after work. The newspapers turn like weathervanes in the wind, whether the employees of the paper mill sing or not it's all in vain. Back at school they all did well, I can't figure it out. They must forget it all later when they become figures in the business, commercial or industrial statistics, or black holes in the sporting universe. Word is passed to them of the games young people play the whole world over, but by the time it reaches them it's too late and they're slithering down the gentle slope outside their house, not that it takes them anywhere but another icy path to the tobacconist's on the corner where they find out who won. They watch it all on TV. They want to

be bottled as deliciously as that too. Sport is their holy of holies, the holiest thing they can lay their fettered hands on. It's like the dining car on a train, not an absolute necessity but a way of combining the useless with the unpleasant. And, after all, you're getting somewhere.

The Direktor's wife is expected to get in out of the dark, into this car, so that she doesn't catch cold. She is not expected to make a fuss. Nor to carry on the way women like to carry on, when they first serve up dinner to their families and then spoil it for them with their nagging. All day long a man lives off the beautiful image of his wife, only to have her nag all evening. From the private boxes of their battlemented windows, where window boxes of flowers and plants form a spiky defence against the world, they look down at others who draw the bow too tight and relax their own longings out of sheer exhaustion. They put on their party best, cook for three days ahead, leave the house, and throw themselves, as you make your bed so you must lie on it, into the nearest reservoir or river.

The student notices the woman is wearing slippers. Helping others is his job. There she stands on her paper-thin soles. One of the legion of henpeckers who spend their lives eating leftovers spurned by the family. She takes a swig from a pocket edition of a bottle which is held to her lips. She and the village women and all of us, there we stand, dripping and thawing, facing the kitchen stove and counting the tablespoonfuls in which we dole ourselves out. The woman whispers something to the young man, she's picked a right one here, a right wing one at that, who's often fraternized till he was drunk in a heap on the floor. He returns her gaze. At the slightest stir of feeling, her sleepy head is already resting on his shoulder. The car tyres rasp, wanting to be off. An animal stands up, hearing its cue, and the young man too wouldn't be averse to rummaging in this woman's