Greed (17 page)

Far, on the other hand, far away from me, something soft, like food, if you insist, I can have it prepared for you immediately: Whatever's lying there, it's not a boat, but we wouldn't need a boat now either, perhaps a shopping cart. The morning smiles, it hasn't read the newspaper yet. The mother, a cigarette bobbing nervously in the corner of her mouth, talks on the phone to her daughter's boyfriend. Both display growing disquiet: If it were really true, that Gabi has gone away, which is what it looks like? Consider the good mood, which disappeared the moment that these two people almost simultaneously picked up the phone, fortunately not the same one, but they wanted to talk to one another. What good does it do? Talking is like walking up and down on a small island. It's soon over again, because one has noticed that one can't get anywhere by talking. So does technology intervene ever more frequently in life, we didn't teach it to be constantly ringing as the signal for a good conversation, which we value more this time, because it costs something, indeed technology intervenes in the shape of Elise or Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, yes, I've heard them myself. And it spits us out again, pale and shocked, ready for the presentiment of a telephone bill. It's printed here: It must be right, we are dust! Except dust cannot rise up against such an injustice, that we are supposed to pay just for talking. Unless one were to blow into it with one's own breath, which we wanted to use for this talking, until we all turn blue, our consciousness expands and we see things that aren't there. The dust is in our bad books, it's fled: under the furniture, the carpet, our feet. Who has given technology the right to spread news, which is then perhaps not even true? Communications technology has done it, this revolution, somebody had to do it. It won't be anything important. Again it won't be this telephone with Gabi on the other end because she had a breakdown; with whom she had the breakdown, that's secondary for now, the main thing is, she's still alive. Come home, Gabi, all is forgiven, forwards and no forgetting, and how can we forget something that we don't even know yet. Perhaps Gabi spent the night with a girlfriend, which one could it be? She never told much at home, probably there wasn't much worth telling about, not a trace of problems. Let's ask her former schoolmates, one is by chance, no, not by chance, employed by the same company, likewise in the office. Commercial training, that lends a feeling of dignity in the face of a society in which only property counts, then at least one knows who has it and why, and so one also learns exactly why one doesn't have any oneself. The uninformed have it much easier in this respect than the already affluent. The uninformed, whom one can also call the unscrupulous, they don't back the banks, they get on the backs of people and suck them dry. Weil thanks, it wasn't much, but now I need another one, one for the road, I hardly felt the last one, it was just enough, that's all. The sick can even threaten the sick, and people like to say this society is sick. No idea what's wrong with it. Usually not much. Why pay interest? It's possible to get by without it. It's also possible to get by without the nominal wage or whatever it's called, which one has before some people or other deduct such and such an amount from what one never had in the first place. If one had something, it's bound to have been less afterwards, but less is sometimes more! No, not this time. Until suddenly the mountain comes down to hit us, and to check whether it can be true, that it got twelve head of people, as punishment, because it's been completely hollowed out inside. Because of the mine, which did not fertilize (but nevertheless fed many), but rather did the opposite: This mountain, thanks to the mining, which undermined it (see job description!), this mountain is hereby wound up. The mountain is closed. No, you cannot take your animals with you, they stay, yes, the pigs, too. The mountain has to eat something after all. He doesn't forever want to be the loser and is now bringing in his harvest, and taking it down to the valley, where it was never allowed to go before, although the inn is there. You'd be better off getting yourself to safety as quickly as possible, the mountain is heavier than you are! Take only the essentials, your savings bank book, check card, documents, cash and the photos of relatives, so that one knows what they used to look like, since now one has to move in with them, be thrown together with them in a heap, a pack, and get along, which one's never done before. And that for so long, until the relatives, after life's long journey, which we have to squash into three weeks, will have aged prematurely and look almost unrecognizable. The boat is full, no, not this one. There's no one in it. Plants don't need to absorb any complex chemical combinations such as vitamins or amino acids, which are a must for human beings. In human beings the chemistry has to be right, otherwise they can't produce the glue for their bodies, to enrich their bases and to attract sexual partners with interferon, I mean, with pheromones. By and large people simply want to be rich, they don't want anything more than that. Women, on the other hand, want love, for that more than a dozen chemical elements are required, which then don't work, because one has swallowed too much of all of them. Not even a simple cake could succeed like that. Women in general, they often want to live in a monoculture, that is always allow just one person to cultivate their little field, and so it's always only the same thing that grows there, and that's never enough for the chosen one. Or he doesn't want it, he feels cramped, he wants something else from someone else. Oh all right, here you have the other thing, luckily we had it in stock. On the other hand, there's also the woman. Isn't she as pretty as a picture? Yes. Impossible to touch her. One particular person would be enough for her, but she can't find him. She thinks this one good and this one, but he doesn't want to. We women waver still, uncertain, which one we should pick. I'll let out the secret: It absolutely must be Mr. Right. No one else will do. That can't be so hard, in the lottery you have to get six right at once. And not one number less in the weekly last judgement, the draw on Saturday afternoon. With people the choice is infinitely large, there must be someone there for you, surely? Well, just take him, it doesn't matter, does it, if you become unhappy one way or another, your kind isn't dying out, believe you me. The loins of the foreigners from the Balkans not least will make sure of that, says the former Federal Chancellor. Let's hope he's right. It can't be healthy to have thousands of possibilities, and only one of them is suitable. The train has departed, no one tells us that over the loudspeaker, a scarf pressed to their face, otherwise one would recognize it and its voice, which in reality, however, belong to a certain Mrs. Chris Lohner, present a thousand times over, one can hear her in all the railway stations of the land. But who hears us? Other objections? Good, I object: A fresh plot contains everything, all the nutrients, in sufficient amounts, and if there's a house on it, that's a whole lot more. Very desirable. Before it slips into the hole. It's only a question of time and company-family planning, whether a new mine is opened up right next door, a new hole is dug, oh no, too near the surface once again, we're in any case already reproaching ourselves for having exposed the people here to such danger, so that we could almost bite their feet from below. There are also voices now, a little a cappella chorus, which says, the terminal moraine, a peripheral disturbance, has caved in and caused the catastrophe, which was in the making for millions of years, even before a drill came anywhere near the mountain. Yes, miners, time also has its questions, although it already knows all the answers. It knows what it means when something goes simultaneously forwards and backwards, because time is nailed down in space and instead people always have to travel around so much. It knows what it means when, the moraine misbehaving, huge quantities of water and mud flow into the underground workings of a mine and crush the people there like flies in amber, unfortunately without making them less perishable. The process is a different one. Amber is like a tin can. Mud is, well, just dirt, not made for people to stay in, unless voluntarily, nose up, to check if there's a little air present, which has usually clothed one so wonderfully well.

Earlier it was quite a different day wasn't it, could I have got the date wrong? Gabi's boyfriend washed his car, while Gabi watched him. She was not allowed for example to get up and go away or do something else, after all one doesn't see something so interesting every day, today is an opportunity for a whole car to be soaped and then get a decent shower. Usually it's something reserved for living people. If I sit next to you, I'm very close to you, thinks Gabi's boyfriend about her, who knows her much more closely than that, but otherwise always likes to have her close, and dips in the sponge once again, tirelessly. Only he who knows longing, knows what we suffer, when we see a faster car. But at least ours has to glitter and flash, even without wanting to take a turn. The Governor of Carinthia, Mr. Haider, has a real Porsche, but unfortunately it's not here in Styria, where feelings have to put in an appearance in person in order to overwhelm one. People don't keep their feelings to themselves, but importune others with them.

The mountain does something quite similar. If a person is hollowed out inside, one often doesn't notice it right away, with the mountain one also only notices when ton-weight bits of debris are buzzing about one's ears like flies, or one starts to fly oneself, when one's hardly learned to walk. One's feet slip out from under one, together with every good ground, which is why the mountain should have remained where it was. It stood perfectly well there. It didn't bother anyone, at least not me. More silent than silence, the mountain didn't say a word, except when the tourists fluttered around its slopes, but now it seems to want company and comes right into our dreary house, immediately going off with it as its new chum. Whoever wants to, can leave, I already said so, but not to the mountain. It can leave, too, as it pleases, or did we give it cause to? We would never have suspected it beforehand, otherwise we would have left it in peace. But where has Gabi gone today, who, in principle, likes to go out, not always with her steady boyfriend, but usually nevertheless, and if not with him, then he feels second best. Admittedly then he's got his car, which is neat and tidy, but he has to sit in it alone. Where did Gabi always get to, when no one saw her? Quite an amount of time, if we add it all up. She can't have disappeared into another dimension and have returned to us unrecognizable, our Gabi, no, she can't have. She has disappeared, trust me on this point at least, even if I once claimed something else. The disco is a temptation, and outside, in the dark, one has to watch out, in case someone grabs the crack between one's legs, someone who is so drunk that he can no longer tell top from bottom, never mind. The woman wants to be free to dispose of herself, so she doesn't let him. And yet, even on the borders of consciousness, the drunk does find a certain spot, always, he whacks the woman on the head, at the same time ridding her of itchy vermin, that's his calling. Him of all people. He's the best thing that could happen to her, he thinks, if he examines himself and her without prejudice. If he's already on the spot, he might as well kill her, because she could have recognized him, who, apart from her, would begrudge him the pleasure. Everything is pleasure, says the television, and this woman in any case loved her figure and her hairstyle more than any human being. But ultimately she was made and nourished for just one man, whom by chance she has already found. Am I not right? This boyfriend is exactly right for her. In future her mother will forbid Gabi to go out without saying where she's going, she must tell her or her boyfriend, that's what she resolves in the course of this very nervously eaten breakfast, in which she pays attention not only to her stomach but also to her inner mother's voice. Later she'll cycle to her shift, sew brassieres in a factory, which lies in no-man's land, or already on enemy territory (the conflicting emotions of women: child or work, enmity or servitude, fried eggs or scrambled eggs. It is certainly hard to decide. Fried or scrambled, one wouldn't like to be either, but that's something for the television, where people pour out their being and then don't want to wipe it up afterwards. They wouldn't even have any time to do so, because someone is already sobbing and throwing their arms around one's neck and begging for forgiveness in front of millions of people for something or nothing at all. Well. We're already in the picture. It isn't reality, in it we would still feel the hand that tears us from this life, whereas on TV one just sees everything, it doesn't hurt) between two small towns, a small town and a village to be precise. In the latter there's only a bus stop, nothing else that could attract people, who in turn should attract other people with foundation garments, corsets, and bras. Things like that always come in handy so that humankind doesn't die out, because that's what women have their bodies for, usually square-built like a honeycomb, and the bees have finally gone. How does one put a shape into a body again? The last but one model can be had at giveaway prices and so already sold out. No, we don't have your cup size. Perhaps you can roll around the floor until you're flat, then cup B will fit you. But this line is also finished, I've just noticed. Ask again in half an hour. So now women are supposed to worry about the underfloor protection, no, the floor protection, as well, so that their body parts can be decently presented. We've got several sizes on offer and recently even in-between sizes. Until the very new sizes arrive and the cutting out machines have been converted. Throughout Europe people are now to be remeasured, because their bodies have changed in recent years. That encourages me, like many writers I'm all too hasty in considering the business of creation as settled, and wanted to devote myself to it in peace and quiet. And now I have to look at it anew again! What a bore. The women working here aren't the dregs, on the contrary, this is sought after, well paid work, plenty of overtime. Mommy is a business and looks at her children. Why are her children so beautiful? Because they are who they've always been, only earlier they didn't know that one can make oneself beautiful, they believed that beauty is not something made but something one receives from nature. That would be fine, we would then only have to persuade nature to come over here as well and do its work on us. But it doesn't do it. No wonder that its stones smash us to pieces, if we give it such insoluble tasks: Making people and then making them beautiful on top of that. Everyone else has to go to the perfume department, so why do we make such a fuss. In every small-town self-service drugstore you can find more beauty than a film star can use up in a lifetime. Nature tries to settle down, but it can't always be the setting for a diamond ring of at least half a karat.