Greed Read online

  Yes. They will take murderers home, where after only a few days the latter will kill the woman's children, one at least, as we already said, unfortunately we've always said everything already and made no bones about it, we had no bone to pick. They do something like that, the murderers, because they don't want to start a new life and if they do, then alone or with someone else. But never with those whom they already have. Perhaps their souls want to become human beings, but reason wants something else, it wants what we all want but don't dare do. We should all hate corporeal life, but only this country policeman, among others whom I do not know, really does hate it. One just doesn't notice at first, because he sometimes jokes and laughs and sings songs to the accordion.

  Since it never comes, one will always think love is somewhere else, chase after it oneself and soon turn from hunter to hunted. Well, go on, you too can bring a murderer into your own home, or you can at least correspond with him beforehand, so that the anticipation is all the greater, e.g. this knife-killer, who likes to wear ladies' tights so much, you'll have plenty of them in your wardrobe! No, not him, he's already dead! Later on the thirteen-year-old son would only have masturbated onto the tights anyway, thinks the country policeman who has followed the case in the newspapers and on TV; he himself has certainly heard of such sensational cases, but he has hardly ever experienced any himself. He fills a post, which fits him very well. Not bad, the cap, and the revolver in its holster. Great. Looks really smart. The culprit would hardly be out again, thinks the country policeman gloatingly, before he would smack this woman in the face again, who's standing there whimpering in front of his typewriter because of some petty pub brawler, who put her in hospital for three weeks, and is begging for a permit to visit him. But her tormenter will never let her write the novel of his life! Well yes, at any rate not on my typewriter. No way! There will soon be PCs purchased, which can store even more in their memory, about which women can then be reminded if need be, when they stand in front of one again with a smashed face.

  Yet there was no right of return. The perpetrator will write the novel of his life, in which he would rely more on reality than on dreams himself. In order to become famous. Women are worse, without having been really bad, they age early and like to neglect themselves, unless they get attention. Then they blossom and smile dreamily. For that (to get attention!) they would do anything, they would even kneel in front of the American president and take his penis with all its secret characteristics, which haven't even been shown on television, in their mouths. We won't need a bed for that, although we will unfortunately need a judge, and the judge is the whole nation. That would be something, everyone looking at me! I would be able to put up with that, no problem! Something that every murderer is, really every one: ambitious and attention-seeking. If they were allowed to go home, they would immediately sit down at a piano, even if they couldn't play at all, just so that people would listen to them.

  One really would have to arrest men and lock them up in order to be able to protect them from women, thinks the country policeman, who knows it all or at least has heard of it recently or seen it somewhere. He will draw his conclusions from that. We catch them, the women, act as if we worshipped them, thinks the country policeman. Why not the other way round? Why should they not adore us, in this particular case me? It can't be so hard. What does that mean? I could manage it, couldn't I? So, now life is for once really being challenged, it's no game anymore, and one declares oneself the victor. One would have to intercept the eligible women before they get murdered, thinks the country policeman. First of all we'll send tact off on a long journey, basically women don't like anything like that, they want to be taken hard and anyway we've got enough juice to score in the big road battles between pedestrian precinct, sports center and shopping center or get us to the industrial suburbs where the formerly flourishing nationalized industries are on their knees and trying to crawl away but are stopped by a ball and chain held tight by the trade unions from undertaking a flight of capital abroad. The unemployed will then just have to see how they can market themselves day after day. Lack of tact but not lack of talent is all that a murderer needs. And we've certainly got that, if we look at ourselves in the right light in the mirror! The curious may stand around at the scene of the accident, the country policeman climbs over the ribbon and is at last free free free. The lake is still. There's already a woman who's involved in the accident, she owns her home, and she is likewise free, even if not in sexual matters. A freedom, however, which she doesn't appreciate, she would much rather be in the custody of a man and not be responsible for it. And that one over there, she even has a whole detached house to herself, although she's only a single person. She's screaming, screaming, screaming at present, as only such citizens scream who haven't had an interlocutor for a long time now. Aha. She has the nerve just to roar away like that. In the past she's always behaved with restraint, but now she's straining to let it out. Now she's letting go. This heart demands precision, is it really just her that's meant, her alone, the woman, the only one, or are there rivals? Anyone who wants to get to the country policeman must knock first, but is often sent away again by his colleagues. We are none of us poor, and we don't like to be shown the door.

  One has to know the secret of how to get a good grip on women. One doesn't absolutely have to be a doctor in order to slit people open, but it would be better if one were, if one wants to find the serpent in the stomach, which once led us astray, the evil one, where else should it be: as a man one would like to be doctor, psychiatrist, surgeon and anaesthetist all at once. Even if one had nothing else to do it with but this fairly long, powerful organ, the scalpel, which doesn't have to take time twisting and scraping when it wants to get in, it's not a spiral drill after all. The drill imposes itself without even glancing once or twice up an empty dead end in case anyone is coming down it at the wrong moment. Courage grows with appetite. The screaming woman beside her car which has got a dent in its tin roof suddenly falls silent and stares at the man in a uniform, as if she were looking at a live man for the first time. The mascara is running down her more than fifty-year-old face, it doesn't really matter. The face shouldn't stand for so much food, because it looks a little puffy, but that doesn't matter either. Down below, on the valley side of the lake shore, beside the woman and the country policeman, the landscape spreads out alongside the highway. The landslide has finally been cleared away, also the hair, which strangely enough they found in it, these thick tufts of hair, no one could work out what they were doing there. Ultimately it makes no difference, who or what one embraces, the important thing is that one can grab hold of it when the time comes.

  There are lights on in some houses where widows and other single persons are living. Their faces are like unentered rooms, which are waiting for someone to switch on the light so that they don't have to do it themselves anymore. Their organs roar. If need be, they would even commit a murder themselves, if only someone would at last come to them. Some unfortunately are shaken by the tree of life before their time. To ensure that their passionate feelings don't perish unused, they get into their cars and drive off in order to get to know someone. To be finally brought in as harvest, by the traffic or its guardians. Don't get killed and don't drive too fast. Just don't make a mistake now! Fifty years with a clean record are soon used up! Someone simply has to make this country policeman rich, otherwise the needle will stick. No sooner does one lay one's hand on a woman's neck or throat as gently as a hypnotist than they throw back their heads like horses, bare their teeth and get so wet that foam squirts from every hole. No one sees them fantasizing about vanished love. Everyone sees them longing for a new one, and here it comes. What a good thing that I got into my car. Oh you pale-colored Japanese mid-range car, which was seen at the scene of the crime! The tongue is displayed in the open mouth and wants to be bludgeoned by another tongue, where's the limit? The lips still want to linger at the place it all happened and exchange further caresses, as if it was just like
a Mills amp; Boon novel; tin for gold chains and rings and bracelets, just as gold was given for iron, where's the limit? Where does a body have limits anyway? This longing: women who desperately observe their own state, size up a distance, but cannot get back to dry land again unaided, in order to reach a more pleasant state. Marriage later not excluded. As if they couldn't let themselves out, because they're the only thing they have. But why then give it away so greedily? They can hardly wait to thrust themselves forward in the most complete way, to give themselves up to a stranger's hands, without a female assistant animal keeper on TV having tested the fences of the little house, the barred windows of the apartment (so that the animal cannot fall out onto us), in which they, the people are to land, usually not very gently. No matter where they come down, whether a soft or hard landing, the important thing is that we come, have a little slime rubbed into us, have the Kleenex to hand and hold the stalk tight before the bloom of budding affection has shriveled again. Before it even rose properly. Everything as usual. Precaution is better than after-care, e.g., after a cancer operation. A big opportunity, authoritative entrance, the gun, a uniform which announces the master, because it runs ahead of him with a caliber of approx. 9mm like the obedience which one knows how to produce in a woman. Strange, that others have such problems with it! The curtains with their curtain rail-lubricant (unfortunately he always has to leave, pilots always have to come down again, too) are torn aside, the neck is stretched in order to gaze after him, as he disappears down an alley beside the drug store without looking back. And yet one had embellished one's pink and bluish gleaming interior, which can only be reached though a narrow passageway, but that's the way he, the only one, will come, so nicely with folds, in order to give it a new look, but there was no need for that, one discovered. You, you're fantastic, one clearly heard that, it's only three weeks ago, and one heard it from a mouth above a square jaw, and meanwhile a hand leafed around below and sometimes also climbs higher, where it pinched, scratched and practiced slapping the flesh, just great. Was it true, what one felt then? Afterwards they don't rightly know, are already greedy again, the street door only has to slam shut, and so want to have it again and again, in order afterwards to consider everything in peace and quiet. Is ready cash, jewelry, ownership of real estate available? That, in turn, is more important to the man, and a bath tub now would be nice too, muses the country policeman, who has made himself dirty and furthermore would like to get rid of the smell of perfume. His wife isn't waiting at home to get a smell of the man, because she wouldn't dare do that. This man now belongs to me alone, I can do what I like with him, thinks the victim, for as long as she can still think. For as long as she is still all there. Another man is meanwhile already dead, inside him are the drugs Anafranil and Euglucol, they lower the blood sugar level and improve the mood, but it's no use now. The criminal was female and turned to unfair pharmaceuticals. An athlete doesn't need anything like that. The woman is often like someone dead anyway, because she does not know when and how she should move during sex. The murderer gets on top of her and drives around the place as he pleases, a ghost driver, who's never changed direction. A spook. He's driving around with the dead woman in his car, he's even got on top of her, imagine that! He's filled his car with corpses he's picked up for himself, which he'd rather not make a noise about, they're sleeping so wonderfully beneath and behind him, just don't wake the dead! The murderer can awaken a feeling. He himself must be cold. He dare not be modest.

  Kurt Janisch (I always find it embarrassing to name names, don't you think so too? It sounds so silly, but how else should one speak to people?), the country policeman, always already feels the juicy colors all around him when he wakes up in the morning, but they don't mean a thing to him. But it immediately drives him out into the front garden, where the flowers bloom and promise something more, that is, a woman whom one can pick up with flowers. The country policeman likes to wander amidst the greenery of the rural hills and mountains, where even people are allowed to live, although there's not much room for them there. The people are enclosed by the mountains, like a child by his cot. Without fail they settle in the valleys, right up to the hills, where vacation homes have to take leave of the world, when the landslide comes, and everyone throws themselves at everyone else, because the holiday makers want to play away. The sleep of the country policeman is like the paths through the mountains. There are many of them.

  Why does it occur to me now: Yesterday Kurt Janisch dreamed of a pair of bears who were once young, a yellowed photo shows them in their young days, they had been intended for a nature reserve in the area, quite near, but then installed in a bear-pit instead and nevertheless delighted the tourists for years, even behind bars. Now the two bears have died at a great age following a long serious illness, one right after the other. That's how one knows that time is passing, when the photos curl at the edges and turn yellow. Death pushes itself imperceptibly over life, the photos of the happy young bears are overlaid by the old tired animals with mangy fur. Oh, the soft hair of human beings, why does it move me so? Their trees grow heavenwards, but the country policeman, the squad commander, comes and cuts them down if they threaten to harm his superiors. Yes, sir, we also conduct security operations, and our dogs recently received yellow blankets for their assignments, so that they're seen immediately and they don't cover any strange dog with impunity, the brutes, the good dogs, along with their good noses. The Dobermans are sick too often. The Belgian shepherd dogs can take a bit more. It's only the poor bears which are dead now.

  TWO

  There lies the gravel pit, a stagnant stretch of water which, like every other, spreads before us forever flat beneath the surface pressure exerted by God, dark and yet open, an opaque quantity. Oh, if only the ecological balance of the water in it had not been upset! Hence, sadly, the lake is not a dark jewel encircled by mountains, which sometimes throw off their nerves, the water varicose veins in the rock and cast them down their own besotted slopes, man and his misdeeds are to blame, yes, yes, the landslides-everything slips down the slopes over their hips, the mountain shorts, the earthen covering, this sodden, doused greenery, which can no longer hold on there. Unfortunately it rained so much this spring. Tracks were buried on which cars were parked oh dear. People can no longer leave their vacation destinations and are left sitting in the locals' trap, the latter have to scale the heights of their best manners in order to bear the visitors for so long. In the winter they had already practiced killing by avalanche, the locals and their native snow, that triune son of water. (Meanwhile the water has assumed another form again.) This living play of nature finishes off everything in a trice. And right away here comes a whole concrete wall of snow, this popular, but inconspicuous (once arrived, it simply lies around everywhere) piece of sports equipment that falls down to earth around the clock and no one, apart from the athletes, really pays attention, unless they haven't got winter tires fitted yet. And this snow is suddenly like stone, like concrete, which has a stomach ache and thus must empty itself over everything. We, too, have to watch it on TV, even though we're more interested in the little football. The lake then. One essential detail's missing, that is, there's no life in it. The trout go strolling in the River Miirz, they avoid the storage lake, they already die before that, hooked by an angler or from the power station sludge if the sluice is opened too quickly, I've already mentioned it somewhere else. I still don't entirely understand the mechanism, but whatever it is, the fish die in the hundreds. It happens in a flash. In every kind of rock and in every kind of terrain there are suitable basins or cavities into which water fits, but then again its composition doesn't suit the fishes. They would have said something about problems beforehand, if they could have spoken.