Greed (20 page)

The father did well by his son, yet it was always as if he remained in a dazzling, far-off other place, blurred, and that's the way it should be. The child should look gratefully at a photograph of the father to discover his whereabouts: We've moved. New address-Row 14, plot 9. Then we don't need the child for one or two years, because his father is with God. It would be an unheard of event to be able to climb up a ladder for a piece of cheesecake or some other effeminate confection, for a man that's normally a trifling task, a trivial matter. By that I mean to say no more than, and why didn't I say it right away: Every child wants to admire his father, no matter for what, but one doesn't even get business support, no matter for what. The mother has to take care of the rest, that's more than I or anyone else could otherwise ever forget. In the case which unfortunately we have to deal with here (because it won't become healthy of its own accord, now I'll just try a root treatment), the mother was a secret red wine drinker, like so many women in this area. Where the waters don't simply briskly come marching along, but are always plunging down, as I already said, it's not so easy to catch hold of them, then there the wine is allowed to flow freely. The cheapest kind. So, we'll just keep this double measure in the kitchen bench, and then sit down. If we need it and can still stand up, we've got it right away, we just have to raise the lid. Surely our mother will still be capable of rifling her own supplies! The cupboard is big and full enough, particularly if one's seeing double, to open up, so that the whole wine in its bottle-green dress, like a lizard, can slip into her hands and in a flowing movement disappear into a mouth, always the same one. What distinguishes the mother-son relationship? A close relationship would be distinguished by warm-heartedness, understanding and other positive aspects, if such a relationship could be established. Now I have to step back a little, because ignorant as I am I only know about mother-daughter relations, and they, too, are not exactly caressed by the rising sun. At any rate they don't give me rosy cheeks. As a side-dish for everything, except unfortunately all too rarely above us: the sky of an indescribable blue, with sharply defined clouds moving across it and reflected in open, dragonfly-like, gleaming window leaves. A moment ago maternal nodding off drew streaks across the panes, although it's some years ago; stop, there's someone still moving there! I don't believe it! Mommy, you've wet yourself and made your body dirty while you were bedridden, says her son more or less to himself. He had meant not to think about it. To really look for something like it, he hadn't meant to do that either. And, because he seems to need to, he continues: I hope life will one day carry me on to someone who's worth it, someone who is at least as precious as the beautiful women coming from nowhere in the l'Oreal advertisements. Then again some women are not like mommy. They are more like climbing plants, which cover the wall of a house, hopefully their own, and if one only asks them firmly enough and fertilizes them decently, then they yield a crop, and I stand underneath and catch all the fruit, thinks the country policeman.

His father had then removed his mother's soiled underwear, he had shaken his mother out of her panties like refuse out of a bag, the chicken bones are sticking out in all directions-the bag can be used again, not the refuse. Stop, the other way round, away with the urine, the shit, and as always everything that stinks is between the legs. Can they not find another resting place, those two, which would let us, at their center, be cozily all human, because there at least we would be allowed to be so? That's how it was. And then his mother got clipped round the ears again because she was constantly shitting herself. The flourishing of this woman, the wife of a police colonel, don't forget, seems for an eternity before her actual end to have consisted of dying, and unfortunately God/father, very much against his will, should have put an end much earlier to the lying there in bed above me. You try living on a dunghill and doing exercises at the same time! No one in the village suspected anything of the drinking campaign of the country policeman's mother against herself. Or everyone knew it, because they all do it themselves, and if they haven't got the time for it, their closest family members have to do it for them. I know nothing, but say it anyway. I can still see her now, forcing her tiny great-grandson to get into the pedal boat with her, yes, exactly, Patrick, I've just remembered his name again: all alone with his bawling great-granny, screeching abuse, who at this moment also starts to rock the boat like mad. Something terrible could have happened on another, deeper lake, Lake Erlauf, which would have hardly felt this little burden, but swallowed it nevertheless, it hardly bears thinking about, so I'll spare myself the thought, too. Nothing happened, did it: An elderly woman, a child, and how quickly they're gone again! Yes, this stretch of water, this favorite place close to the Mariazell Mother of God, where one can learn sailing and even diving, wanted to do something itself for once and swallow a little boat as well as a whole lot of pee. It's surrounded by the High Alps and the high mountain springs, and in return it's allowed to eat something from time to time, I just made that up, and the lake would perhaps contradict me if it could. After the victims had been recovered, the lake would still look beautiful in the newspaper photo, twinkle playfully at us and immediately tempt new strangers, who are supposed to become friends.

In between, however, she always really pulled herself together, she tried to at least, the mother of Kurt Janisch, I have to admit that, one has to be fair. And that's something God would never be; on the desolate plain, in the deep fir forest, on the mountain peaks and in the valley bottoms they all drink, why only the men? No, the women do it, too, but one wouldn't so readily believe it of them. Well. Ever since, all these years, Kurt, the son, wants to build his own paradise, for safety's sake here on earth. It's true that one can save oneself from awkward situations by swimming, assuming one can and just happens to be in the water, yes, swimming, if you have to, but one can't get very far ahead on life's hard path with it. And only what one does oneself is a job well done. In principle he's always been a teetotaller, the country policeman. But once doesn't count, and so this principle should no longer apply to him. And when it happened, that another well-known local drinker chum (yes indeed, in the school of life she sat right next to the mother of Kurt Janisch, take a look, there in the last row but one! And the other rows are almost all occupied by her friends) in the final stages of a liver value-decline lent out her house for a life annuity, and did so to a Mr. Ernst Janisch, whom she knew personally-I really can't remember ever having heard a single cry for help from her since her fiance failed to return from the last war, and that really is very long ago. So country policeman Kurt Janisch, who helped this crooked deal along a bit on the quiet, stuffed his son together with the latter's little clan, three people in total, into this old lady's padded envelope of a house, stuffed them in with a woman who, stamping like a whole herd of animals, walked and still walks, night after night, and anywhere in the house, whenever she happened to think it necessary to control all kinds of evil living creatures, and does so right up to the present day, yes indeed, she's still alive, she just keeps going! Is it getting too complicated for you with all these old ladies? Don't worry! If you know one, you know them all. Their husbands hammered away till their hearts came to a stop, and the wives boozed, till their reason came to a stop, because it had trickled out of them. In any case no further inquiries may be made about the life annuitant, so that she doesn't end up in a home and her own home at the last moment ends up in the hands of strangers. But the creatures she's looking for always reliably disappear as soon as they've been caught, that is, of course, only when the old dear pours water, flour, sugar or fat or whatever onto the glowing cooker. Only the spilled and buried memories should never be awoken, those we gladly abandon each time to the fire, when they rise up and want to cook something, an ancient passion, for example, which has long ago ceased to be true. Fire gets rid of everything quickly and cleanly, even things which are not there at all. Only our relatives should stay a while, although only in our memory, and then the worms and maggots, who are allowed to gnaw the bones in peace in the endless mine underground, get them. The relatives in their friendly earthen shell, into which they have been thrown, are somehow not quite as dead as all those burnt almost without trace, don't you think? I think that's the way Christ wanted it, and then he founded our state so that the people there can be dead while they're still living, which makes him especially happy, all things, all people belong to him, before and after. They already want to have their death in life. Jesus believes it's all a performance just for him alone, what a fabulous event! In fact there's only one who's truly and madly for him, an archbishop by the name of Krenn. God promises eternal life, and of course the people here go on living every day as if it were forever. That's why they've stashed their savings bank books. Well done. Soon they'll all have to bear names, the dear books, nothing at all can be done anonymously anymore. Well done. That too.

The men in the country policeman's family, including the half portion, our Patrick, are on top of it, no flies on them. They still remember all the fun and games from great-granny, but of course when she joined the family the son's wife naturally first had to get used to creatures appearing to a person outside of wood, meadow and TV, real beasts that aren't there at all. But they weren't on TV yesterday either, so where are they coming from?. In future I'll say nothing about great-grandson Patrick, one less!, because he's already got headphones in his ears, a TV tuned into a space channel in front of his eyes and the door locked. Soon he's going to hear, know, and understand better music, and follow it until the car, in which he's allowed to take a lift, will have wrapped itself around a roadside tree. Today sadly he's still too young for that. To accompany all that the old lady wears, in all the abundance of her house, a not exactly impressive negligee. She doesn't need to. Because only in a house is one really protected, outside one can go for a walk naked and be chased back inside again, for arms and legs and the rest aren't nice enough to be presented to the public; only for the price of a house does one voluntarily face such a sight. So, the rolling thunder, the piercing flash of lighting are on no account allowed to drive in here and stay, as if this were their garage. That is, if one has a lightning conductor, which one should please no longer connect to the water pipe, I don't know why either. It's not allowed.

Now at last it's today again, that's how I want it. Can't you hear?, now one only feels the water's soft approach, like that of the mother who delivers a blow unexpectedly, while one still has one's hand in her purse or one's own fly, a game that one really wanted to play all by oneself; yes, the water's almost noiseless soles, they absolutely don't need to be the latest model from the shop window, with bold streamlining letting fly, they're always on the move, tirelessly!, the main thing is, downhill, but it doesn't see the light of day anymore, the water. It remains hidden from our eyes. There are also tiny offsprings for the hikers and their water bottles, clumsily feeding into little metal pipes, under which was shoved, lovelessly and with no sense of proportion, a hollowed-out trunk of unprecedented ugliness. Tired trickling, two little corpses, wood and spring, which flow into one another and into the bottles or straight into mouths. Let us not be a fearful band, let us be strong, proud, yes of course, it's my pleasure, right away!, whom one must involuntarily follow, as this animal, a fox, follows the call of the wild. But one cannot also expect the animal to clean up its wilderness itself. That or something like it is what the country policeman's daughter-in-law might be thinking, as she scrubs the hotplate and screws the diapers tight around the old woman, so that the woman doesn't immediately pull them off again. There's a strong smell of burning, of urine and of shit, the dear old sisters whom we know already, they're my favorite relatives. As proof of his inability to do small and unimportant things, the man presents his wife as his partner, who is supposed, if you please, to deal with all of that quickly and odor-free, what else is she and the drugstore there for. The partner should already consider what and how much we're going to have later on, namely the whole little house, plus land, that's how it's put down in the good books at the notary in town, and in the beginning was the word, fortunately not mine, you should be thankful for that. Now that would have been something! Now I've characterized love, I think, as well as I could, love, in which women always think they have to do all the talking. I've got nothing more to say about it now. This time, in a solemn ceremony, I'm going to skip all that sighing and complaining that goes along with love and that I bought especially, no one else is going to give me a break. I'd prefer if something as complicated as love doesn't come near me again, let it come to the beautiful and the young. It's only fifteen years or so since it called, please, not again!, I've got nothing in the house. What I know about it really is enough, and it'll be enough for you, too, if you stretch out your arms, to ward off the brutes, whom no one has cut down to size yet (or who have come to nothing), who want to enter you at the wrong end, from art, from piano playing, from the CD player. I and another woman were always so hard working and then that happened. Now we're both older than then, when we were young. Who wants to blame someone if first he wants a house to get to know himself and find out what he's actually capable of, of murder, of roughcasting walls, of sanding down floors, of painting kitchen cupboards or putting up new wallpaper. As if one had to shake bones instead of plums from a fruit tree, which is theoretically and practically impossible, so day after day one has to exert oneself in vain before finally reaping the fruits of one's actions. But one mustn't go too close either, otherwise it falls on one's head. But one has to go up close nevertheless, otherwise one doesn't get anything. Property is the only thing that counts, we are so happy that we got to know it in good time, and that, even if not entirely of its own accord, it has promised to stay with us. But we do have to feed it decently. Property, I know, I know: There are some who don't like the food, and they want to go away again, or the neighborhood doesn't suit them. Sometimes we lose our heads at the mere sight of property, we're quite beside ourselves, how beautiful this house is and the one over there, too, we'd like it even more, and soon we ourselves don't count anymore, we only count it, PROPERTY.