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  The Man pushes on alone. But it can't be good for the woman to stay in this position for long. This position she has in his house. She wriggles and jiggles and has to open her legs somewhat. His teeth pluck at her belly regardless. The Man inhabits a living hell of his own, but there are times when he has to emerge from it and go down into the pastures. The woman resists, but her resistance is doubtless no more than an act, she is welcome to another slap or two if she wants, if she's set on denying the Man's soul its light. A fair amount has been drunk. The Direktor almost spends himself entirely in his expensive surroundings, in the gloom of which he rages about the food the woman cooks for him. She does not want to let him in. And he feels so big, as if he were all men in one. Just to unload a little here between the standard lamps would unburden him, after all, he has to bear the burden of many who do nothing but grow like the grass on the riverbank, stupid, never giving a thought to the morrow when they must get up. Hermann. Now, having lifted up his wife out of her shoes, he continues the uplifting experience by straddling her on the living room table. Anyone can look in, anyone can envy the rich the beautiful things they keep hidden away. She is flattened on the table and her breasts, big warm steaming cowpats of breasts, flop apart. The Man lifts his leg in his own garden and then off he goes and lifts it at every corner he comes to, too. Not even the haziest patch of ground is safe from him. It is as normal as erotic love, which has never started a fire in their dry wood, the dryness they are born to but do not want on any account to remain in. No, the Direktor will reply to small ads, to exchange his old Ford for a more up-to-date, more powerful model. If only it weren't for the fear of this most up-to-date of diseases, then there would never be silence in the workshops of the Lord. And in the home too there would be notices on the board: Desire, the white member (of a well-hung parliament). Mighty waves go crashing through Time, and mighty is the foaming desire of men, unceasingly. Far-off places are where they love to roam, but they'll also use what they've got at home. The woman wants to get away, to escape these reeking fetters. She has been drawn forth out of nothingness, out of the void, and every day the Man cancels her with his stamp anew, rendering her null and void. She is lost. Mechanically he flicks the woman's legs over him. Various objects belonging to the child fall off the table and bounce softly on the carpet. The Man is the one who still appreciates classical music. With one arm he reaches forwards and opens up the deck. There's a sound of music, the woman puts up with a good deal, mortals live on their wages and work, but, right, music really is an essential part of the experience. The Director's weight keeps the woman down. All he needs to keep down the workers, as they joyfully return from their labour to their leisure, is a signature, he doesn't have to lie upon them. And the sting that hangs by his testicles never sleeps. But in his breast his friends sleep, with whom he used to go to brothels. The woman is promised a new dress as the man rips off his coat and jacket. He is fighting the good fight against alcohol, his tie is twisted into a noose. If I could only have this clad in brand new words this minute! Underhand the Direktor has lit the stereo's fire, and now the music is racing off the turntable and setting the Direktor racing: pick-up arms move forward to play their part, and a Direktor has to got his end away! For his pleasure shall last till you can see the bottom and the poor, drained of love, are sent off the rails and have to take a ride to the labour exchange. For all things shall be everlasting and what's more they shall be indefinitely repeatable, so say the men, and they give a tug at the reins which Mummy once held in her loving hands. Of course you can, dear. And now the Man slides into his wife as if he were greased, in and then out again. Nature cannot have been mistaken about this field; we don't want anything else growing here. It is a community of flesh, and the farmers, who are quick to cry if they're not taken on to earn a little on the side, grow angry if their wives stroke the surprised cattle destined for the slaughter. With Death the gentlemen like to be on good terms, but business must go on as usual. And even unto the poorest shall gladly be accorded the daily pleasure of their women's embraces, where they can be Big Boys after 10 p.m. But for this Direktor time doesn't count, he doesn't have to clock on; after all, he manufactures time himself, and the cards are punched in till the clocks cry for mercy.

  He bites the woman's breast, and her hands jerk forward. This only excites him more, and he hits her on the back of her head and tightens her grip on her hands, his enemies of old. For his slaves he has no love either. He stuffs his sex into the woman. The music races ahead and-their bodies race ahead as well. The Frau Direktor loses a little of her control, the bulb's a little loose, better screw it firmly in again. The Man is a sleeping dog that shouldn't have been woken and fetched home from a circle of business friends. He carries his weapon below his belt. Right now he has fetched his pistol out; out it has come like a shot. The woman is kissed. Spitting words of love are slobbered in her ear. This flower wasn't in full bloom for long, won't you thank it? Just now he was wallowing and waltzing inside her, soon his fingers will be producing a fine sound on the violin. Why is the woman turning her head aside? In Nature's society, there is a place for every one of us! Even the smallest of us, even the very least member, though it won't be in great demand. This Man has emptied himself into the woman, he wouldn't mind trying out naughtier tricks in the pool some day! In the correct questionmark position for diving, the Direktor withdraws from the woman, leaving his waste behind. Presently she will be caught in the trap of the household once more and will return whence she came. It is a long while yet to sundown. The Man has poured forth his joy and now, the slush dribbling from his mouth and genitals, goes off to cleanse himself of the day's toil.

  The community looks up to them in all things. Let's face it, it's a community short on sporting lasses to look up to. The woman beds down in her troubles and Hermann beds down on the woman, in the peace of the night. And then their son: he has mastered the other children more completely than his violin. Father manufactures the very least of the things that pass beneath the flame of his passion: paper. All that remains, wherever the eye looks upon the works of men, is ash. The woman averts her gaze from the table she has laid, opens a hatch in her dress and tips the leftovers in, true unto herself. Today the family, en famille, is drinking in its own memories from the projector. The food is late, the boy is late, he messes it about terribly. He won't do a thing he's told, he isn't as good as gold. For months he's been promising to improve his violin playing, but Father finds it far more enjoyable to lavish blows on this friendly young creature. The whole country likes to be lavish. It lives on Art. But not all the good citizens and the faithful do so, and none would merit a Very Good in the tests.

  The woman's tongue is a dress that covers everything. She absolves herself crunching the salted snacks that seem so much bigger on television than when the hosts dissolve to meaningless nothingness in the mouth. Still, we too, when our bodies are in an evening mood, tip the snacks into our very own personal sewage systems. Father bends over his son. Tender as sausage. Son is sure to get his BMX bike. The Direktor's son enjoys the village children's envy as one might enjoy a stiff pinch of power. Out he promptly goes into the open to smash something up. But the boy is Father's spoils, he spoils him: he has to bow his head over bow and violin today, so the sound that's produced can be used elsewhere to oil feelings. Father likes to show off his progenitorial profit at the instrument. And how Father makes use of this instrument, his child, as if the boy were a shell he had cast off! The boy's wrist has to be relaxed and flexible, it's better for trade, and with the delicate bow he shall roam to and fro in the pastures of the immortals, the family of the great, who are all to be restored to life with great, familiar, restorative sounds. Such horrid sounds, too! Jagged Mozart, if you're in luck. And if you've been tied down by the ankles to prevent you from wandering far afield to graze in other pastures.

  The banks offer shoulder-bags in an attempt to win the custom of the very young. Even this riff-raff, the mere proteges of parents, want a
ccounts of their own; there's no accounting for it. In a year or so the money will be looking good: it'll be a car, for death on the roads, or a furnished apartment, for death in your own four walls. Always assuming that – like the Direktor's son – you are a child under fourteen, guiltless, single, alive, but already singled out for a life among the clientele, the future consumer guild that will tax their hearts with the wish – consume their souls with the desire – to have some gilt-edged value added. Perhaps some of us are destined to be clerks behind counters, for what are all these benches doing here anyway? The boy, scarcely baked through, dashes out into the biting cold. He has to take the healing plunge and cool off. He has to listen to the cries of his people, so that he will know how to make them cry all the more.

  The Man, having shaved for the second time that day, returns to ride the woman like a boat before his flood. Her hills and valleys plus branches etc. offer prospects of plenty, true, but that final perfection conferred by degradation is still lacking. The Man, buoyed up on the breeze, creates the woman. He draws her parting and tosses her legs apart as if her bones had wilted. He beholds God's tectonic faults on her thighs, they do not bother him, he goes climbing in his private mountains taking a safe path that he knows well. He knows every step along the way. How should he fall? It is his own house. And who indeed would not wish to hang his hat on a peg of his own? Property imposes no duties on the owner; it merely prompts envy in his rivals. Years ago, in the Book of Life, this woman shifted into reverse. What can she still be expecting? He reaches under her skirt and batters through the walls of underwear. He wants to force his way into his wife (this is just a family affair) so that he will sense where his limits are. I rather think he would burst his banks, if it weren't that he's rudderless. He'd be giddy, up there on his own path. All in all, men would quite stand over us if we didn't enclose them within us from time to time, till they are tiny and quiet and quite surrounded. Now the woman involuntarily sticks out her tongue, and why? Because the Direktor has activated a muscle in her jaw, by means of which a snake could spit venom any time, it only needs to be shown how. The Man leads her into the bathroom, giving her his non-stop line of reassuring patter, and bends her over the edge of the tub. He fumbles in her undergrowth. So that he can get in at last without having to wait for the night. He parts her foliage and branches. The tatters of her dress are ripped off. Hair falls into the plughole. Her behind gets a good hiding: where can she be hiding? Where else but behind these gates, which the howling mob will storm and breach at last, the whole amiable crowd of consumers and foodstuff-of-life manufacturers shoving forward to the buffet. Here we are. Our services are required. The woman is offered an organ of similar design or of similar value. He'll screw the ass off her, it's all he wants in life, except to screw the rest of the world and draw his massive monthly salary. A shudder goes through him and he spends his entire sum, far more than any money he could make; how should the woman not be touched by this ray of annunciation? Now she contains the whole man and nothing but the man, as much as she can take; and he maintains the woman, as long as he finds her interior and wallpapering pleasing. He shifts her forequarters into the bathtub. As the proprietor of these and similar premises, he throws her back room open. No client, only he himself, can let in so much fresh air. No one but the Direktor can rain down on her like this. In a short while, with a yell, he will have relieved himself, this enormous horse, eyes rolling, foaming at the mouth, driving the cart right into the dirt. The woman's car is not there for her to drive wherever she may please; he has already shown her the route she is to take, shooting a track clear through the forest for her.

  The woman clumsily kicks her slipper heel out, kicking at this clumsy heel who's slipped inside her. She's heard his private parts slapping like a harvester against the rim of the bath. The kick enrages him. The shit will be sticking to him, what a life. A wily lot, the weaker sex. At pains to look beautiful into the bargain. The Man resolves to command the woman to observe their marriage contract. He claps his hand across her mouth, and is bitten, just a few percent of her jaw power, so he has to withdraw the hand in question. He covers the woman with night. But for her enlightenment and his own satisfaction, he shoves his electricity main up her arse. She tries to shake him off, but quickly tires and has to go through with it, eyes shut. He has no love of the wild. Being so wild himself. All about them is a yawning emptiness in the house: the only signs of life are the bushes of hair on his and her abdomen, a sign that says you can get it on tap right here. This year's wine every day of the year. Can't fool us. Awkward nothings are slobbered into the woman's warm earhole. The power of the Man! No need for trickery or weapons. She need only open the gate, for this is his dwelling place, and it's hard to keep back his seed. With a smile, the Creator brings forth out of men their product, so that it may grow accustomed to dashing about in our midst. The Man distributes Creation at a forceful pace, and meanwhile Time passes at a pace of its own. He smashes the tiling and glass in that shady room, which rejoices beneath his busy endeavours and in the brightness of his light. Only within the woman is it dark. He enters her arse and bangs her face against the edge of the bath. She cries out yet again. The pilot settles in for a lengthy session in his cockpit. He himself may already be at rest, but his cock is pitting itself against the elements, ever onward, cliff to crag.

  Such a one dives into the shit as others dive into the sea: throwing the switch marked blow on his appliance, he goes on full throttle until he has totally emptied his dustbag.

  2

  LATER SHE CALLS FOR her son. Though not so long ago she felt replete with the dear image of her child, her one protective casing to guard against the groping Man, who holds her tighter than a customer holds the drink of his choice. He needs no protection for his sex, and his torrent pours down the nearest channel. The child knows a good deal about all this. The boy peeps grinning through the keyholes, spying out the joys of the home. The boy cops a sly, audacious eyeful of Mother's body, having come in from the wilderness out there, the wilderness his comics call the Wonderland of Childhood. Is that smile on Mother's face adrift like a boat? Or has it been carved into her features? The child can't tell when he snuggles into the nest that Father built. They belong to each other, for the meat inspectors who crowd outside the fence. They even seek each other out, undirected as the potpourri of clouds up there in the purple sky. Not knowing why. Though perhaps they do know: the child has a hungry mouthful of dirty talk to be stopped, talk concerning his mother and the blood that frequently stains her panties. The child knows everything. He is white and his face is brown from the sun. In the evening he will be bathed. He will have prayed. He will have done his work. And he will cling to the woman, graze upon her, bite her nipples to punish her for allowing Father to explore her tunnels and piping. Are you listening? This is language itself, wanting to get a word in.

  The miracle of travel is that one encounters an unfamiliar place and then flees it with a shudder. But if one has to remain together, a four-colour poor-quality reproduction of Nature, each belonging entirely to the other, a family, then you will find only the Pope, the kitchen and the Austrian People's Party to honour your work and to grant an indulgence for all the sins it has committed. The family, this vulture, keeps itself as a pet. The child never listens. There he sits with his secret playthings, which partly consist of disgusting pictures and partly of the original material for those pictures. Son contemplates his little tail. Often his gun is jammed. There the selfish kid squats with his private collection, almost human in his blabbering greed. The Pope has whole libraries of the stuff. Mealtime. As it enters his insensate maw, the Man praises the food his wife has prepared. Today she did the cooking herself! What happens on the plate reaches his place of residence, his address deep down in his gut, where it is tossed to and fro like an eaglet in the spinning air. This is the responsibility of the woman. Of women. The Man questions his wife with mute glances: time to bang the daylights out of her again? But the boy might hear
if Father gets into the woman's yawning emptiness now, she tells him, hoping to get away with this excuse. But no: off she is promptly led, in obeisance to the Man's ludic lust. She clings on tight to the bedroom door, but the boundary line is the bathroom, one door further, where the limits have already been tested and exceeded today.

  It all happens very quietly. Today, unusually, the Man has come home for lunch. Man takes his animal food from the pastures out there, and yet he does not recognize his four-legged friends when he finds them in the serving dish. At the last, the woman is required to undress. Now we've got more time. The child has been stuffed; it has to sit still at school. But for the woman to be preserved, she first has to plunge into the Man's foaming waves. The Man sees himself as a Noble Savage. Buying his meat at the woman's counter. The family is like a small business, a snack bar in the station. Quite alone, a manikin on one leg, for you can't rely on the second leg, the woman. The Man's claims to his own territory, the divine mountain paths where only he may go a-wandering, have already been registered with the Austrian Women's Disaster Relief Group. A-frolicking he will go, aloft on the wondrous paths. But every evening at seven on the dot the mountains toss him back down to the eyrie of twigs he collected himself. His wife (he tells Nature with a smile, lying) is waiting. He has to go to lasso her in. He and she together constitute an association for life. A space tiny and bare as memory contains the whole of him. The woman does not die, verily she is created by the sex of the Man. Who has reconstructed a complete original scale model of her lower abdomen in his lab. How the Man loves making his appearances, a body straight from the freezer, thawing as fast as he can!