Greed Read online

  Yet I fear, only if he were addressed in the Name of the Republic would it be a matter of concern to our community of the living, and that can take a long time. I am filling the time in between with my unproductive song. There is a limit, but it just isn't given to some people to be happy wanderers, although the snowdrops, that's right, it's spring now and that makes us happy, are stretching out their little digger claws towards the soil, as if they wanted to pick up the soil instead of your shoe sole doing it sooner or later. Even Kurt Janisch sometimes asks himself where this dark side comes from (for which he has a certain warrant because of his profession, and which, whenever one thinks, now the lightbulb's gone, grows even darker still. Who on earth lets down the blinds in the middle of the night? Only someone who's going to shun the light of day come the morning!). He can't work it out. His parents didn't really ignore him, they didn't encourage him either, in any respect, not even to keep going with that smart appearance of his, which was already there quite early on, someone was bound to come and hitch a ride with him, a nice girl perhaps. Someone is sure to be able to make use of it, this ghostly, pale, curly-haired and yet nevertheless robust figure, which a person can't help, but the country policeman can, because he's constantly exercising it. God has given it to him along with the commandments, so that a man forgets obedience again, because he's so busy with his appearance. Women in particular do a great deal for their appearance, so obeying an industry prepared to go to any lengths, whose products constantly contradict one another, otherwise why would there be so many? The country policeman only rarely thinks about his actions, with which we shall have to concern ourselves, prefers to stay on the surface of things, where he passes his comb through, drawing furrows in his dark-blond hair like hammers in a rock. The comb has been moistened first, on his head then it looks as if there's rain, from which one should have protected oneself. Now the country policeman has himself risen to quite a high rank, and even his grown-up son already has a good post, even if not at the station, where he would unfortunately collide with his father's position. Yes, and something else I wanted to say: His son already has a little house, too, great, even if it doesn't properly belong to him yet, it's been acquired on a life annuity. But the life, which at this point is still owner of the house, has subsequently, unfortunately and unexpectedly, with varying success, but by and large rather vigorously, gone on living, although originally it seemed no more than a ruin: an old woman who now only rarely gets a breath of fresh air, although it really should be the duty of the country policeman's daughter-in-law to take her for walkies every day, but one can't do everything oneself. Nor can one yet kill her, e.g., with lily of the valley leaves, it would be too soon, there would be talk in this tightly defined community, and the clusters of people would grow together into an almost impenetrable hedge (though loaded with good fruit!), which like a net first protects the wrongdoer from himself and then, if he has not harmed himself, hands him over to justice. The country policeman's son has a wife, who belongs to God and the Virgin and every Sunday morning and every evening bloodlessly sacrifices herself in church in front of the tabernacle. That's how she was brought up, and she has arranged with her will to go on in the same way voluntarily, even without the coercion of the nuns, who fine-ground her so that some day she will fit through heaven's gate. Ten years ago she gave birth to a child, a son, which is the sole meaning and purpose of marriage. A daughter, a few more kids even would have been welcome, too. God said nothing about having to change the diapers of an old woman. That's why the young woman is so pig-headed, there's nothing more solid than the views of the Church, so the old dear can just lie there in her own shit until evening, or until she rusts, we're going to evening mass now, she has to stand firm until it's time to go to bed, the old dear, not the Church, it has already stood firm for much longer and doesn't need any diapers either. Because it takes and takes and never parts with what it has. Perhaps that's where we learned it, no, we could do it already. And the son, let's just say what his name is, his name is Ernst Janisch, and he in his turn has a son, Patrick, but the wife belongs half to God and the ancient woman three quarters. Every day she swallows two liters no problem, she has to be given that, otherwise she throws a fit; that results in a lot of excreta, if one's not allowed to go to the john because it's one floor down, built-in to the present home of the country policeman's children, where it's used much more often. That's not how the old woman imagined it, when she indirectly put her fate in the hands of an official. But what I'm writing here is not intended to be an investigation. The diagnosis "initial stages of liver cirrhosis" is anyway certain, I think. If God still manages the last drops of the old dear, he will himself be so far gone that he won't be paying attention to anything anymore and overlook many sinners. Never mind. This house will then at last belong entirely to the country policeman's son, he'll never share a thing again, not even with this God, we can collect the money ourselves. God will get our sins, he'll have to make do with that.

  None of all the promising properties of which there are expectations, there are considerably more than I was able to enumerate here, is at the moment completely paid off or has paid off or is even really in prospect, with the exception of the old woman's share, who, if nothing out of the ordinary occurs and the Lord works a miracle, seems to be declining into eternity and otherwise. The country policeman's daughter-in-law has anyhow made a nice down payment on this eternal bliss, in the shape of a son, who is still a child, especially pleasing to God. God scrubs his soul in confession, the priest scrutinizes it for dirty thoughts and tells the son, after he himself has had a good wank in the darkness of his soul, his favorite place, to join the line of little children at the back, where it's easy to get at him; the line, which the priest receives for children's mass once a week, snakes round there, hissing and scuffling and, making use of the flat of his hand, if someone chatters or passes on unpleasant truths, he sends them home again. Are these personal belongings not perhaps burdens on the development of a still young man, who would urgently need a few mortgages in order to unburden himself a little? To him even curtains are already a revolutionary decision, he's always saying he only needs the bare minimum, and that's the ownership of house and real estate. Otherwise he's stingy, the mechanic, the engineer, and his father even more so. His wife has to embellish the front garden with cuttings which, as if something like that were not constantly happening in the world on a grand scale and as a warning to us, she secretly plucks out from the pots at the nursery. Does this son of man perhaps want to keep the little house but get rid of wife and child? Can all his faithfulness so quickly be over and done with? He hasn't had the family so very long yet! Perhaps there'll be more children! We shall find out or again maybe not, depending on whether I can express myself intelligibly or not and don't mix up the dramatis personae all the time, at the moment it doesn't look as if that's going to happen. Why on earth did I start off with three generations, in fact there are even four? Oh well, they're not all present at the same time after all, and anyway they're all the same. Are we all going to get into the same boat, what do you think? Who wouldn't like to have at least one little house for themselves alone? He could drive under the bridges or drive along the motorways up above, but the house would stay patiently at home and wait for him.

  The son of the present country policeman is employed by the Post Office as a telephone maintenance man and mender of faults, he attended a technical secondary school, whose graduates call themselves engineers and are everywhere much sought after, in particular by the telephone companies, shooting up everywhere, soon there'll be just one, hot for our voices. In order to consolidate and shield his permanent job, the son goes every week without fail to his bank on the main square, as if his determination would bring in somewhat more than his securities justify, horns lowered in anticipation of contradiction, inflexible, immovable, his hands, however, pleading, raised almost hesitantly, off he goes to the bank, which gives him credit, until he will have lost every security and fi
nally will only be able to dumbly, imploringly hold out his hands, they stay where they are. To be rich depends on a precise knowledge of what one has and what one could still get. Why does the Church do so little for its own, who fill its buildings so assiduously with flesh? The church doesn't care whether people come or not, it's nearly always locked up anyway, except during mass, when the holy Eucharist listlessly does its duty in its cubbyhole. It should be possible, for example, that pious vergeresses like the young daughter-in-law of the country policeman, in the course of selfless activity in the service of the parish, could spy out little houses becoming vacant more quickly than others, why not, and why then don't they inherit? Why then does a nephew from Linz inherit, who has never even seen a church or his aunt's little house from inside for years? And why are we not all wealthy film stars, who go home and wipe off our desires with our make-up, in order to have bigger, more beautiful ones the next day and particularly in order to have a good night's sleep, so that you can't tell our lives by looking at us and we can all candidly display ourselves in the magazine? Luckily crimes of violence only rarely occur around here. You won't believe just how few people there are who have no relatives at all anymore! Then there are others again, who disguise themselves as widows with perms, and who turn out to have a faraway son after all, who slunk off in good time, but who, at the crucial moment, changes the course of events, which most of the time were themselves slinking along. What a bore! There comes this son, from Linz or what do I know, from Recklinghausen, Germany, or Canada, where he had been thought to have gone missing in the smelting house of a steelworks or underneath a gigantic stack of wood, and the fatted calf together with the house are already waiting for him, without him having done a thing for it. The will is now challenged with a heavy sword, just wait a moment, thwack, and the air's out of it. Perhaps the Church only exists to knock reason into the old folks who have to die soon anyway, to ensure they step into its marquee in good time and to prettily illustrate the dark abyss of hell. Heaven is always other people, when they benevolently take our property off our hands. Hell is in us. The Church itself prefers to inherit, instead of its half-witted employees getting anything.

  The son of the country policeman remains sitting immobile in the customer's easy chair of the branch manager, afraid of inadvertently betraying through the language of his body, which even he doesn't quite understand, anything, even the tiniest bit about his true and presumptive properties which the bank doesn't absolutely have to know about. What do you need this scrap of paper for? What's on this bit of paper doesn't interest me in the least. Only the signature counts, and what's printed above it. Only then is the truth also legally binding. Today the bank is to be informed of the prospective salary rise, which was notified in an informal letter. Of course all this is merely a provisional state of affairs for this employee, because soon his properties will be more numerous than the grains of sand on the vegetables freshly pulled from the garden, with which you can save money shopping. The wife pulls it right out of her heart, in which no one lives anymore, because her husband moved out years ago. Yes, this house is yours to hold, says God, and means the body of a human being, even several houses together wouldn't make a knight out of me, thinks the country policeman, who knows about such a tin man from a book of tales from this area. His son is already as zealously greedy as his father and he would stop at nothing, if people didn't voluntarily die beforehand, sometimes admittedly pretty late in the day. If the dear lord knew to whom they raise up houses, instead of him having to steal them as his children do, who even have to take care of that themselves.

  The rage, which is sometimes hidden behind a cheerful smile, may then suddenly but all the more powerfully shoot out, if the old body, which goes along with every pension, shows itself unasked in the hall next to the toilet door, where it doesn't belong, it belongs once and for all up in the attic. This old woman has a pretty thick skull, but a plastic screwdriver handle, which has many smaller, interchangeable heads, its changelings so to speak, is after all not made of cotton wool. It's good and hard, even if not fatal. Saints sometimes yield and concede something, but not this head. If you please, here however we have a corresponding bruise on the temple. Why does the old dear have to keep on falling down! Gome a bit closer again, you old heap of shit, then we'll show you how wretchedly you can bleed behind the bright and cheerful geraniums on the window sill, which are on the outside so that no one can see in. The people in the bank yesterday irritated this man impermissibly with their glances, and he has a very violent temper, aha, he's got another appointment with the branch manager, he must be short again this month! He must've taken on too much with all those mortgages and bills of exchange and foreign exchange credits! Janisch Jr. feels their looks like branches prodding the wild beast of prey inside him. But if it really came out, they would be the first to run away screaming. He says to the branch manager: It'll break my wife's heart, if it's not possible for her to open a knitted goods boutique downstairs in the basement. For this purpose the cellar requires large-scale reconstruction, damp coursing and internal and external fittings, all depending on the available cash, which you and your bank will hand over to me today, otherwise I'll be even less successful with my repayments than before, and then you can forget about the total amount, because then you'll get nothing. Yes, Frau Eichholzer is still alive and we hope for a long time to come, my wife's looking after her and the Church isn't going to come to my wife and take a look because of an incontinent old woman. My wife sees the inside of the church every day anyway. Smile, smile, my wife would be like an open book for the Dear Lord, if he needed to read it, but he wrote the Book of Books, so from one eternity to the next he doesn't need another one. But he knows everything anyway. Smirk! And: No need to worry, for all that, we've already got an eye on the house after the next one, although we will already have taken on too much with the last one and its renovation. The land it's on will provide enough security for the mortgages on the first. We can acquire a whole string of houses, one always secures the next (they'll be real castles, when we're finished with them) even if not quite legitimately and if we only knew which. We already know what we'll use for the back-up copy, the money from the bank, your money, a sweet mixed community of several mortgage, discount and other loan providers, yes indeed, we will get houses and homes, and we'll rent or lease shops in them, we'll paint windows, we'll seal floors, we'll agree on built-in cupboards, we'll mislay tiles or trample on them in a rage, because they don't make up the desired pattern, one way or another. The point of these little houses inhabited by organisms will be, that each preceding model can be taken as security for the subsequent one, well, isn't that a good idea to stimulate our economy and remove superfluous living beings? With people with a weak heart it's even possible to use bulbs, e.g,. of the pretty lily of the valley, we already said so, really everyone knows that, and the patient will have such a delighted look on her face, when we mix it with the wild garlic curd and spread it on her slice of bread. Snigger. Snigger. Thank you very much, now I'll go again, to hurry along the building work. You'll see how nice it'll be when it's finished, after all, it'll still belong to you for a while, dear bank, trust is good, supervision can hardly be better. You'll surely understand, once I've laid the foundation stones for the extension of this home right up to the attic! Often things that happen nearby have an effect far away. If you don't believe me, then just place a small coin in the bulb socket and turn the light on!

  Sometimes the banks keep watching far too long before they withdraw to their uneven path. Until the branch manager loses his post and the debtor, who has to take the penultimate path, has turned into a whimpering wreck, because now he even had to sell the car, which was still whole, his only friend, who always ran decently alongside him, because there wasn't enough money for gasoline anymore. Now the debtor has to try to be a light in his own darkness in order to offer the bank manager a good picture. All of this with his meager talents, so that the extension under which every joint is
already groaning will be stretched once more on this rack. And they all watch as one desperately negotiates, as everyday troubles turn into catastrophes and get into the paper if one doesn't keep quiet. While a whole house floats away. The branch manager will have to chuck money at it again, otherwise the whole lot will be gone; usually the auditor checks up on every peanut, which good children have set down, and which mark an ever broader sloping path, at whose end stands the most beautiful of all houses, the witch's gingerbread house. Where plump little fingers probe helplessly in the air, basically long ready to roast, so why hasn't the witch laid the table yet? Because she wanted one more side-dish! Visit the fairy tale world of Police District Murzzuschlag (Styria): Mon. to Fri. 8-12. That's what they look like, don't they, reality and its dreams? Why don't human beings just explode, except with anger? Surely they should have gone to pieces long before. So that's why the term really can't be extended to the twelfth of never, you can be sure of that Mr. Janisch, even if your father is a respected member of whatever the club is, oh yes, of the Country Policemen's Club and of the Country Policemen's Sports Club and the Country Policemen's Canine Sports Club, every one of whose members ended up hanging on the tap at the inn after a dinghy training exercise, I mean, who ended the exercise correctly. When it comes to emergency operations we recently also had the real thing, when that big blaze was raging, as a result of which in the town center of K. a whole number of roof timbers and furnishings with a total loss of more than nearly three million dollars went up the creek, so that's when these men had to carry out their perilous duties, apart from the Country Police more than 29 fire brigades from the whole region, well, is that not something? And all the farms set alight by children and little more than children, well, is that not something, too? Children are stubbornness personified, after all. So that's why, for the sake of your father, we're giving you one last extension, Mr. Janisch Jr., who knows if some day the roof over our own heads won't be burning, we've read that the Fire Investigations Officer of the precinct where your father is stationed finally established that a rusty little stove door was the cause of the fire. Man walks, who counts his steps? No one, there would be no point, whomsoever God wishes to show favor, he drops down a detached house from heaven and makes sure that the new owner is standing right below it. The debts will eat us all up, if we don't turn into beasts beforehand.