Greed Page 8

  Oh, how nice, the sun is just taking a final brief walk on the steep shore! So brief, that the darkness, with which I am to be punished immediately afterwards, seems even darker to me. Beyond the lake the windows of the inn flare up for a moment, so it must be about five o'clock, the time at which the sun, at this time of year, graceless as a sleeping infant, but it just doesn't know any better, stands up, pays and begins to leave the garden of the inn, a beginning which also already leaves one behind. Most are in any case sitting inside, because after all it is still very cool outside. It's no different for the highway, which is pleased to make the acquaintance, even if only fleetingly, of the vehicle tires; briefly they snuggle up, could be friends, and then they're gone again, next please, so that rubber can rub off and rub out. They always leave just a whiff of themselves behind, the tires, or somebody dead, they get right on top, dead animals, too, cats, snakes, hedgehogs, hares, even deer and stags, which are then hurled to the edge of the road and left lying on the shoulder, left for the ants and worms to eat. Soon the sun will be gone completely. Wind rises. The water in the lake (here I am, as I see, tireless in my urge to describe!) is hardly ruffled, where are they, the graceful waves, they could certainly be a bit more full of themselves. Are they stiff with fear? Fallen silent at the sight of themselves, because they have no tender, sweet face, which they could raise to look at and assess one another? I would so like to know more about the inn, but I would not so much like to see the kitchen before I eat, and still less afterwards. Tourists are always strolling past it, cyclists are flashing signals in the sun with the mysterious, rare metals of which their sports equipment is made, their backsides cannot arouse any desires for assessment, they flash by too quickly and are gone again. What else? Over there's the path to the Alpine springs (fifteen minutes by bike, on foot it all depends), which were enclosed for the Vienna Mountain Spring Water Supply, a sight which would be worth visiting, but which one can no longer see. Before enclosure it was a nice destination for an excursion, now unfortunately the water always stays at home and, in accordance with its demands, the home is built of stone and concrete and what do I know, ceramic pipes?, and like everything that's always sitting at home, no longer interesting to the beholder. One can hear it frothing, one can hear it murmuring or whatever it does, but here, too, one no longer sees any reflection, no bubbling merriness, no little clouds of foam spraying rainbow mist, no cheerful rushing over stones, no roaring gushing forth from the earth, there's no sitting in a concrete home and throwing foam around. The water is located, properly enclosed, inside a pipe, and in the city it ends up in our glasses and pots, why then do I feel that something's not right? I would be the first to complain if instead I had to knock back the ground water from the Mitterndorfer bore with all its nutritious nitrates!

  Well. The families are slowly setting out for home. Small children are stuffed into strollers, hands are shaken, parking places found and, to the patter of spattering gravel, abandoned again, whatever's alive, which is anyway only held together with difficulty, is finally pulling away in different directions. Those who are allowed to stay together tie themselves into little bundles of rods, which will soon hit out at one another again, they can hardly wait, the couples, the passers-by, the relatives sort each other out and lie down voluntarily on their jigsaw underlays, where they are to be properly fitted together along with their often quite unusual hobbies. Swimming, tennis, skiing, hiking. They have looked at the area or even live entirely in it and hence only have short distances to go, usually by bike, in order to get back home. But the bikes of the natives, whose customs consist in always being customers for something the vacationers already have, these boneshaker bikes are different. They are plain objects, which don't trumpet any kind of sporting ambitions, they can't keep up anyway. The mountain bikes and their handsome owners in their handsome clothing, they're like the fingers of a hand being moved, one moves and the others join in. They are many and quick, to us whom they leave standing they say farewell even before they've seen us. What should the people here begin, when they began to look for stuff like that in the department store in the county town, at first among the special offers? But the children of the villagers have steadfastly cut imitations of racing bikes out of their parents' living bodies and are beaten for it (more often than the city children), because so much has been spent on them. The bodies on the adults' bikes are wrapped up in exemplary manner, sometimes still even in a dirndl, clean, although ever more frequently one sees shorts and jogging pants on the bodies of mountain folk. Undignified times, to what do you drive your occupants and why do you drive them on when there is no place to which they could drive? But don't be deceived, even if I constantly attempt such deceptions, so as to make things simpler for myself, many also drive to distant lands, to places where I've never been. I, however, have really never been anywhere yet, not because some sins or other could wrap themselves around me there, but because I'd rather sin at home, where God even announces the weather to me in advance on TV, slowly, so that I can write it down in case it's worth the proper guilt. Sinning is enough, there's no need for surprises as well.

  So the children are decked out with spoils, which their relatives have forced on them or which they have cadged for themselves. If someone has lost his self-control with them, then their bawling can be heard as far away as the lake, but no further, the lake is the limit. It swallows everything. I've already said so, but it's on my mind nevertheless in a curiously insistent way: Usually children like to gather on the shores of bodies of water, they splash about, splash each other, pick up small stones and throw them at one anothers' heads, get onto air mattresses or air mattresses which have disguised themselves as animals and, as if spellbound, they stare into the distance, where such animals sometimes sink without a sound, or where boats have fled as the only way to get away from them, in order to do a few exercises on the waves. They beg to go out in a boat, the children, best of all in a pedal boat, which can never ever capsize, there are three of them here, but they don't look as if they're ever used. Some water is sloshing about in them, cloudy, muddy, sluggish, how did it get there? It's too little for a leak, for the free and easy games of boisterous water fanatics too much. The boats are definitely neglected, I can see that, but why maintain and look after them if no one wants to go in them? Presumably it squeaks, when one, what do you call it, the thing you step on, like when you play the harmonium, it's not a bellows, it'll be a kind of plastic paddlewheel or something like it, so when one operates these things, and the boat moves jerkily and haltingly forward, how about greasing the bearings for once? There's even a steering wheel and one can imagine oneself at the helm of a speedboat in which one could have an accident. That has already happened to world-famous people, spouses, fathers. One can put the fear of death into younger siblings with malicious words if one pretends that the boat is certain to sink now, because it's not going to stay upright much longer, luckily I can swim, but you can't, tough. These are all things one can talk about, but no one talks about them here, it would be superfluous. One doesn't talk about things which normally can only be written, but neither are the people who live here in life's good books. They'd rather pay on credit. The children in the inn's beer garden sometimes walk the few yards over to the slide and the swing, with which at any rate they can catapult themselves straight onto the compost heap-where the hens are scratching and the cucumbers and pumpkins, too, are still only in their infancy-if they're skillful enough and want to drive their parents to commercial TV and then to the washing machine, but they always come back pretty quickly. They've had more than enough of such parents, pressed flat, brightly colored and always cheerful, who are incessantly washing, know them better than their own, who don't have much time for it, but then they don't need any with these washing powders and liquids, it all happens in the twinkling of an eye, just like that. The TV is also nearby, it's in the kitchen-living room. Perhaps the parents have only forbidden their children to cross the main road by themselves because
they would have to do that to reach the lake. No, not a chance, I'm sticking to it, there's something that I simply don't understand about this mighty lake, well, it's not really so big, in fact it's rather small compared to Lake Baikal, but it isn't what it was either. The parents could go along, and they would certainly not be so hard-hearted as to refuse the children the boat trip, it's very cheap and in the course of time has even become a little cheaper. There's a solution to everything, though I personally don't know one for the lake, it's a mineral solution, but no one knows the details. Not a nice sight, the lake. At first everyone was pleased that now there's something like that here too, so mysterious and beautiful, so splendid, that'll attract the tourists and does them a constant service and sometimes a last honor-but then its health began to fail, and suddenly no one was pleased anymore. And why does no one pour in the tried and tested good algicides? Conjecture: then the algae would certainly be finished, but the lake would have to swallow the weed killer as well, when it was already unable to hold anything because of its weak stomach: the water would remain deader than dead. Even artificial aeration, if we could afford it, would only produce short-term success, because once the water begins to breathe, then it wants to keep on breathing more and more, until it believes it's a human being. The water is so presumptuous, there's nothing to be done. That's why it's better to leave it to its imbalance, isn't it? If the lake's dead, we can make a new one beside it, exactly, right beside it, no, over there's better. Now what does that look like? Many will be against it. And further upriver there's the big dam for the local electricity plant, nothing's happening there anymore. The water has to work and has no time for fun and games. And we're not going to blast another hole in the world just for fun, are we?

  Strange for a piece of water, which induces most people almost involuntarily to come and look, since it could cause one difficulties of every kind, I need only think of the landslides and floods which last week we could keep track of in every detail on our screens and now still on the broken off roadside, after the catastrophes for their part had tracked down whole villages and parking lots and were even successfully after a whole inn, gulp, in which the beds were already waiting patiently, almost unprofitably, like open savings bank books, because the season was about to begin. So one thing follows another. But one could also think of sporting variety, when one sees the water, one could get out, take the surfboard from the roof of the car, and we're already there. We do exactly the same with the roads and the wheels, we make ourselves masters of our sports equipment, and nature is slowly getting nervous as a result, it gets us in its sights, takes careful aim, its finger is already itching on the trigger, but because we move so fast, it's constantly losing us. Lucky for us, but ultimately it is we who always have to be moving on. Well, but now, unfortunately, it has found us after all, nature. Every corner, every patch of this piece of water has left something deep down in the mountain and now cannot find its way back. It's possible that something has been catapulted from the red iron-bearing rock of Styria that did not want to be filled up again, because it would like to enjoy the view itself for once, and if it had to be filled up, then not with water, but with wine or beer please, don't take it so seriously! We'll just bore a completely new hole in a completely different place to tunnel under the whole Semmering, but there, too, the water that was there before, and has older rights, is already coming towards us. It doesn't encourage us to stay, and right away there are some who now no longer want the hole. Water in the rock, next time if you please just leave it out, God! Just put the water in this pan, we can do with it there! The nature conservationists play their jolly comedians' roles, and at some point they, too, will disappear from the surface of the earth, beneath which everything will be churned up again by animals, laboriously, they're so small, they're so small.

  So no caressing or scolding voices reach us from this piece of water, I would even prefer the nagging of a father, the complaints of an overworked mother, the whining of a child whose face has been smacked to this eerie soul of the water, these eyes of the water, which stare at me, these lips of the water, which want to devour me, well, they'll be taking on a bit much there! I weigh a hundred thirty-three pounds now.

  It's dark now and has grown even colder, the grit left over from winter rises in a cloud when someone drives over it, and it's no longer enough for anyone to be present, he would like to get into the warmth of kitchens and barrooms. People have come out of the open air and fled into the enclosure of their families as if they had no other shelter. Food is dished up, the skates and skateboards and climbing boots have to stay outside or in the cellar. With choice listlessness the fathers cut a piece from the roast, which, a last desperate remedy, is supposed to animate them again, supported by an almighty double glass of wine, a miracle that they don't lose all hope. Nature, which treats us so sternly, also takes a break. That's what we call everything that has to stay outside, and nature has been baked into a block of darkness, cold, mountain wind, mountain stream and regularity (yesyes, the plants in their predetermined vegetation units, one can almost set one's clock by them!) and eaten by us and other animals. That successful sampler nature, what could I not describe now if I reassembled old descriptions, no matter what, it always sounds good, doesn't it? Gome right in, you cute comparison of mountain lake with diamond set among the mountains, how well I know you, just lie down there! no, but not on my toes! The strawberry slopes and the river squadrons of fish, the thicket of the pine plantation, where all the lower branches have unfortunately died off, mutants donated by the tourist board, so that the excursionists are better able to see the mushrooms on the ground, but they aren't there anymore either, because they've been suffocated under eighteen inches of needles like Salome under the shields of the soldiers. Also probably an experience with far-reaching consequences, but not something I would want. By the lake meanwhile, because we are not in it, we do not see the following: the surface level, that is, where the water level runs in its trough, the wood piles, because none were driven into the earth to strengthen the shore, instead this shore is lovelessly made up of boulders, dumped down just as they were blasted out of the rock after the soil flesh had been picked clean; a screen of reeds has at least been placed in front of it, or it has itself taken the trouble to get here, a walking wood and further: the stone's throw, that's just these quarry stones, a ton weight some of them, spilled down and crudely dressed, which the reed bank with its green pencil bodies masks. What lives under the water? Let's take a look. Nothing lives under the water anymore. No need to pour in anything else that's dead!

  With a terrified expression, as if in the middle of the darkness he were also seeing the end of the world before him, a single figure (male, 54) stands on the shore. All remaining figures in the area have withdrawn to personally protect the species in front of the program Austria Today or even to maintain the species, no matter, in any case into their little houses. Until now, so it seems to me, the figure has proceeded in a very purposeful manner, unlike nature, which takes what it can get and gives whatever it has. Only giving and taking are one and the same thing with it. This time the figure has set itself the goal of not looking its deeds in the face, I'm telling you that because I already know everything about the figure. That's the nice thing about my job. The man has wrapped his deed, not very carefully, because he was in such a hurry, in a green plastic sheet of the kind that are used to cover the freshly hewn wounds of building sites, so that no water can ruin the damp, expensive concrete, but the things are never quite watertight. And in any case now the opposite of what it is usually supposed to do is being demanded of the tarpaulin: Water, please, come on in! The packet is supposed to get heavy very quickly, not like the earth which is supposed to get very light for one. As far as color and shape are concerned, it is impossible to tell what the packet contains. It doesn't appear to be anything big, but it's not small either. So, now you know exactly as much as I do, that is, everything, but that's entirely thanks to me: because I've attached a
couple of pennants, bells, horns and flashing lights to this packet, so that now really everyone knows what's inside. But how else should one say it in a proudly inflated life's work, which one would like to trot ahead of and impetuously toss the feathers in the headdress before the wind does so and there's nothing more one can do about it. At all events one should be able to say it better, much better. The package is heavy. The man has quite a job shoving, pushing, and pulling. The water is at last supposed to do its destructive work on the parcel or it can do whatever it likes, just eat away for all I care, it really makes no difference to this man here either. I think his behavior is so unutterably fearless, as if he wanted, indeed dearly wished: This package should be found again as soon as possible! But then why is he hiding it at all? He could put it down right next to the highway, the effect would be the same. No. Modern tyrants who have long ago won the right of self-determination for themselves and their refuse compete relentlessly to dump rubbish there. So perhaps the effect would have been the opposite, since no one ever clears anything away. The package could still be lying there in three years' time. It wouldn't be down to us. Why is the man not smiling full of anticipation? Inside the plastic sheet there, I'm saying so, although there's no need at all to emphasize it, there's a nice piece of body, belonging to a woman. Just a moment, I'll take another look, that's right, it's not a man, it's exactly what I've thought up. A woman. A man would be heavier. One would need accomplices and a cheeky little river, which, after one was finished with the body, would carry it away. I once knew someone personally who with someone else drowned someone in a real river. The cock of the man, whom you see here, is still erect, it's like that nearly all the time, fantastic!, almost like a skier at the bend, which threatens to carry him off the track, but he counteracts it, so his cock stands up straight to the end and refuses to get any smaller, what else is the man going to do with it? He's already done everything with it that was possible. It was no use. He even tried to build on it, but this foundation might perhaps give way unexpectedly and on the way down to the cellar one might at least once briefly have to look a human being in the face instead of the ass or the breasts or the legs. For which one would first of all have had to find the necessary peace and quiet. No one should be there to observe one scaring oneself to death. The hearts of women are often of a cheerful spaciousness, so that it is also possible to go into reverse in them if one wants to get away again, yet in a car, which is often the most important thing in a relationship, even inserted as obligatory by senior citizens in their Lonely Hearts advertisements, one never quite gets there, it always has to stay outside unfortunately, the car, unless one is in the woods, then one has to park first; but hardly has this man stolen into one of these hearts, which he has been looking for, than he is completely indifferent, even cold again, forever unimpressed by sights or events. Beauty does not touch him because everything he finds beautiful absolutely must be dead. How I could have laughed about him, if only I had wanted to! I could have been afraid. This man rarely laughs. If he ever looks in the mirror, it's as if he can't remember what he looks like, perhaps because he longs for nothing so much as material goods, so that as if as punishment he first of all has to visualize himself. And in his greed for property he then forgets himself, sometimes quite suddenly, but he never forgets what he wants. If asked, he replies, correctly even intelligently, indeed quick-wittedly then again obligingly smiles, the question even stays in his brain for a while, so that he can look at it very carefully or change his mind before giving an answer or evading it. Perhaps he can after all draw some advantage from the ever-repeated question of his wife about eternal values-life or death, kitchen bench or chairs, couch or easy chairs-please, Kurt! Perhaps he'll finally say something, he has already been asked so many times (well, we don't have a digger to clear the old kitchen furniture away, that's expensive, more than new stuff!). So that for once his dark soul, like ours after the cinema, which was the last time it came to life, may rise up and stretch its legs. Even plants feel more than he does, I swear to you, e.g., they respond to music, as it says in this magazine which this man's wife, who grows flowers, brought home yesterday, pure waste of money. There's much that he does quite correctly, some things are also wrong, he sleeps, he gets up, an overgrown child, that has learned nothing yet, not even children's tricks, but he doesn't pick up on stories or songs, at most on instructions for use and building plans and bank statements, which show him that his money unfortunately has been recently withdrawn and the rent for the last three months is still owed. I see something there, it's true, but don't say anything yet for the time being, something about his work, which he does really well, even if always with one foot on the wrong side of the law, which in his job is very practical (you get to know villains and part-time villains) and is actually quite usual. Nothing that went beyond the everyday duties. He is what he is, no, he lacks something. He completely lacks a whole dimension, that is, the dimension that there are other people apart from himself. It's as if you knew what time it is, but not which year, which month, which day, these are units, which even if strange, distasteful, have our life terms in their hands. We request them to be considerate. They are superior units, which can indeed be made a little more refined by the addition of the spice of life, but we can't quite get rid of the bitter taste. The man is completely normal as far as I can see, but he speaks as if with a child's voice roaring out from deep inside, and always only to himself (long ago, as a child, he had still felt something, it had been nice then, everything OK with his scooter, his bike, his ball, the sweets, over a hundred times, such a spoiled, a pretty child, no little Mister Guilty or Mister Ugly, quite the opposite! Golden haired. Good as gold, to get used to the inevitable, that is: gold makes the world go around), whose vocabulary is very limited. It doesn't matter, the man always knows what he wants to say to himself. Or, let's see the picture, where have I put it, oh yes, there it is: as if it were a paper cut-out, onto which one can clip his clothes, uniform, jeans, the good suit for his own funeral, the braided gray Styrian suit for Sundays or the Country Police Carnival Ball, the track-suit for nothing, but no one has ever thought that one can also pin feelings to people or that the sweetheart can carefully pin her eyes, but she's not going to be doing any sewing again, is she? Shouldn't her dear eyes open at all anymore? This man doesn't have room, it doesn't matter what for. He needs space, it doesn't matter where. He wouldn't know on whom he should waste anything. Odd, that people are never suspicious of him and, on the contrary, often immediately expose their innermost secrets to him, perhaps because they suspect that otherwise he would be gone again, before they can even take their clothes off, lie down on the couch and display themselves to him without anything on. I correct myself: He does have dreams, the man, they are, however, nailed to one or more houses or owner-occupied apartments and so not at all times freely disposable. Well, one house, a little house, he already has, his wife brought it into the marriage, that's also why he keeps the wife who belongs to it, despite the cost. Ah yes, I see, other houses have now come more within his reach, his son, e.g., pays a small life annuity for his, smaller than the life of a certain old woman, her body meanwhile almost wasted away because of alcohol. Fortunately the person will die, but the walls within which she hid away will still stand.