Greed (31 page)

Please permit me to say the following once again, because it is important to me and because I can't now find the passage where I said it once before: If your vegetables are enriched by high dosages of nitrates, then you must on no account eat them! It's a sign that thanks to excessive use of fertilizers the ecological balance of the water has become upset, and with it of course your vegetables. It is therefore excessive and damage to health may result (if this has not already occurred), if the very good water, that we have, is polluted. What we douse our food in, we should even keep particularly pure so that it does not dose us. Natural bodies of water: superabundant plant growth. Yuck. How this body of water must feel, I'd rather not try to imagine. The water wants to be as hard-working and decent as the people who drink it, but the people don't help it, they don't give it a hand. Animals would be paralyzed with shock if they could read that. They have to drink water, too, after all. Aquatic plants would die off, excuse me, I can explain that: Instead of ceasing to absorb oxygen, like those of us who have died, they now really start, just as the rest of Austria, full of love and greed, receives the tourists, our dear guests who visit us, unless the government doesn't suit them. It doesn't suit me either. So I'm a stranger here myself. As already mentioned, excessive use of poison causes the whole orchestra of nature to strike up all at once, and even Bruckner wouldn't have wanted that. There is too much too much too much of everything. We have enough too. More than enough. We've had enough.

If you are contemplating wallowing in excess: You're better off taking the whipped cream and leaving the oxygen! Besides my little bit of water here, in this machine, is also overloaded with poison. Instead of answering genteelly when I'm asked, I tip my whole life, which is itself long dead, into this dead water zone, but deader than dead, that can't be. It would be a good thing if for once a decent flow got going into this zone, if the water at last got a decent employment policy, so that its trophic level finally improves. Otherwise we always only remain what we were-trophies of history, displayed as a warning to other countries. And what we grabbed we couldn't take with us, or could we? No, we're not going to give this Klimt painting back now. We must have got something out of it, for making all that effort, until almost no one escaped with their lives. How we would rather have more turbulent times again, how we would like to profit from the movement of the river, until the last particle of water in us, our upright little Austrian homebody souls, is carried along (that's how coarsely our bodies of water are spoken about, I swear it), in addition to the main movement (acquisition of property), by the dear little secondary movements, the belief in God, the heavenly Father, whom we have soft-soaped for so long for our own entertainment, until he finally gave us back to ourselves, newly redecorated, as good as new, no, better!, and we had nothing more urgent to do than hand ourselves over to a new leader, voluntarily, as if we were one and a half years old, at the outside, and couldn't understand what he's saying to us. As if nothing had ever happened. There are some who still can't get enough, we've already described them and now only have to clear away our own refuse. It resembles the leguminous plants, tenacious, yielding, slimy, but in this water, in the lake, it can't be done away with, at least not for a while. This refuse consists of owner-occupied houses, of which one always provides security for the other, until the banks, exhausted, raise a small white flag and decline. The banks are asexual, that is, they do not allow themselves to be mollified either by men or by women. They are not oriented towards propagation and regeneration like the plants of the earth, they are programmed for concentration, so, now they've caught someone again, who thought up some dirty trick with the interest redemption, he won't get far with that. If he were richer, they wouldn't have got him. They even caught the fraudulent chicken farmer and his brother, but not his powerful backers. The Freedom Party Building Society has been wound up, a pity really. They're also feeling the country policeman's collar, but he always removes his jacket very quickly, and the banks can once again take a walk. Yes, that's completely true, he is a person, a truth, a work, a property, yet in reality nothing belongs to him. Gather round me, if you want to hear once again, how many people this country has killed, no doubt you're asking yourselves why then I'm always only talking about the one person. He's not that important, after all. No, you're not asking yourselves that, and I can understand that. No one asks me about anything whatsoever. I have already described what you will find in this standing water, which has urgent need of a second leg to stand on, but now it's finally going to be found, the relic, the victim, that's quite different from just talking about it. On the other hand one imagines it to be worse than it is, finding a corpse; and I have hesitated so long to describe it, until I almost didn't feel like it, here, on the low shore of my resolves. Please throw the first stone now, but in such a way that it can hop around on the surface of the water a couple of times, as happy as a new federal chancellor.

The spoilsport, Gabi's corpse, who was searched for as a living person and so could of course never be found, not even with all the photos on the masts, almost the whole way up to the Semmering Pass, pops up now as a dead woman, although the dead are of course inactive and don't respond to anything anymore. In the deep water of our mountain lakes there are places where one never finds them, the dead, doesn't matter, we have enough of them, I mean there are plenty of them. There in the mountain lakes, the shores drop almost vertically, these lakes can be 600 feet deep or more. There are holes in the lakes. They have the power to make people disappear without trace forever, at the Last Judgement there will then be great astonishment, when the prettily packaged women all bob up from the bottom in order to avenge themselves for their discontent in the water's cold hell. How great will be their disappointment, when others, the hosts of angels in their fast four wheel drives, which have been acquired for them so that they can get everywhere on that day when the trumpets shall sound without pause, will first of all want to take revenge on them. Because, going by the book, the misdeeds of the living are not erased by the death of others. But the business with Gabi affects me so badly nevertheless, I really don't know what to say now, but simply can't let it out like cigarette smoke, quickly, as if in passing; description is difficult of course, if one has never seen a real dead person. A film is only a weak substitute, a little bench in Shudderwood Station. So horror turns up today, weighs me down unusually heavily, and yet I can't look away, although actually I wanted to read the newspaper. Two men who, after a big meal at the inn, wanted to stretch their legs a bit (they will soon have to be unhappy that on this occasion they couldn't stretch their legs under the table), their wives have remained sitting and gossip away, this time without making use of the corrosive rage at their families, which so often overcomes, e.g., me, now walk down to the lake on a cold, soon to be green path, which is already depressed at the thought of all the police boots which will shortly be tramping around on it. So. I now read, because I'm used to reading, from the two men's faces, what they're thinking when, close to the shore, they discover, re-emerging as unexpectedly as it disappeared, first of all just bobbing up and down, a man-sized roll of green shiny tarpaulin, such as is used, fairly pointlessly, because it's never quite waterproof (I can tell you a thing or two about that, since I had to bail out water from my balcony three times) as covering on building sites. The tarpaulin is tied up with wire. What's that? It is at any rate first of all curious. Because something is as big as a human being doesn't mean that it has to be one. But anyone seeing this roll imagines this plastic cover has been made the size it is so that exactly one human being or four square yards of soil or a five foot three inch tree trunk fit underneath, the one has no protection anymore, the other would have been very much in need of more protection, the tree trunk has no more wishes except for the nice damp earth, which it will never see or feel again. The circle of readers stands up to get a better view, the tarpaulin hides something, which for days seemed to have been swallowed by the earth, but the earth was unjustly accused. The water had the human roll the whole time and was playing yoyo with it, but the string was a wire tightly wound, and so the water was soon fed up with the game. It didn't work, there's nothing one can do with this packet and, whatever is inside it, we can't unpack it. We just have to pick up our textbook again, which tells us what killed us, who are all of us waters, in such a way that we consist almost only of water-nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and organic stuff, we got a fresh load of the latter three days ago, but don't know what to do with it yet. Apart from that, like many children, we are basically glutted, for which there are good reasons. These are the words of the water to us and to the two men, who don't understand its language. But the language of this plastic roll they understand instinctively and take a step backwards and are suddenly silent. What's that. The two men have already eaten, that's a good thing, because at this moment their appetite would have disappeared, if they hadn't earlier on arrested it in good time and taken advantage of it for their own ends. The lake is not deep, nowhere, and yet no one has made the effort to coax this roll a little further out. There it is now, a possible covering for a human being, but not a good one.

At first the two men try to pull the flotsam ashore with the help of a broken-off long stick, but they can't reach far enough. It's as if the roll is not for them. The men say to themselves: Today of all days, it's not our day. Birds circle over them screeching, it's still cold. Too cold for the time of year, even here. We imagined angels differently, as we were fleetingly brushed by thoughts of reprisal and wanted to kill someone, but then refrained from doing so after all. These are black angels. Inside this plastic sheet rests a human face and a human body, that's what it looks like to me, this sheet. The men think, it can't be what it looks like. The men know that what it looks like is probably what it will be. Soon we will know exactly, says the law of reality. They squat down and strain to look under the water, which is especially dark and opaque, but the sheet encloses something they can recognize exactly and with terrible certainty they understand whom they are dealing with, with death, this always cocked weapon, which is playfully turning in a circle, staring first at one, then the other, a nervous finger pointing at their cold bodies, whose turn is it today. I would like to be the first to know: Perhaps already the two men on the way home? They really shouldn't have drunk that third glass, this walk was supposed to serve, not least, as a sobering up. Well, that's exactly what it's doing. And as if with one blow of a hammer drill four eyes drill into the sight of the water-foam roll. It's a simple package, yet what will it not set in motion! In the future, 82 detectives of the regional force, of which 20 will be assigned solely to this one case.

Cell phone on, call out, horrors already prepared, packed, frozen, and discovered by two persons. Please come immediately, we see what's been hidden and would so like to know what's inside. Their wives are always merely covered up by quilts and these always reveal what's familiar, which grows more rancid with every day and which, furthermore, in order to get some pleasure out of it has to be flattered for hours. The things one has in mind, one never ever gets. It would be a good thing to remove this covering, that would bring us considerably closer to our bobbing, restless goal. We hear a frightful voice speaking, accompanied by a blue light and, as if that were not enough, a siren. We hear how the voice is trying to tell us something: You're dealing with death here, be quiet, perhaps it's still there and is going to fetch you. Oh, how exciting. Well, it won't be as bad as all that, says another voice from an extra-small telephone, which can be snapped open so that it looks bigger, and which may well appear more eerie than this manifestation under water, which is observed by birds not by fish, because there are no fish in this special element I'm thinking of. The Country Police force is at liberty to come, in fact, they must, and they do. Mr. Kurt Janisch is not on duty today, the man has the luck of the devil. Otherwise he would have had to take acting lessons in good time, and that too he has been able to save himself, in addition to his many other savings, which unfortunately are always gone when he needs them. He has only negative savings, that is, debts. More than hairs on his head. He wishes someone would take them off him. But instead houses are supposed to come and stay. Fortunately these are ponderous, stationary fellows, they are supposed to pour in sometime nevertheless, to serve as security for further houses. So something comes of nothing, no, a something comes of a nothing. But nothing, nothing at all comes of it. Not yet, but our prospects are good. Two men rise to their feet on the shore of the lake, who have done their duty as citizens, and no doubt they will sooner or later stand up impatiendy to the authorities, that is their human duty, that's why everyone does it. They only agree with the authorities, the people, when someone, who doesn't belong to us, is to be carefully deported. So now the authorities come jolting and bumping down what is no more than a track and will detain these men unnecessarily for hours. This track is the only one on which the Country Police can get here, if they don't want to go on foot, which would break a few points from their uniform epaulettes, which they will certainly still need on our eastern borders and that with Slovenia, quite close to here, in order to establish their authority. These officers after all have to patrol 90 miles of border in Styria in super uniforms, with parkas and peaked caps. The whole Spielfeld district is already quaking at their steps. The training in the annex of the Bad Radkersburg Police School lasted six months, that must have paid off at some point, because then they can protect the riches of the natives really very effectively and accompany the latter, once they have enjoyed it all in peace and quiet, with a raised signal disc into the Kingdom of God (which belongs to them alone in any case), so that no one can put a spoke in their wheel. So. Here it is, exactly in the water. Take a look. Do you see it? What is it. We'll need the boat. After some back and forth and pushing and now heave and crossing the dead water zone, in which simply nothing stirs, the load is dragged by boat into the microscopically small harbor and pulled out. Divers aren't needed. At the top there's hair, that's already: the first thing we see. But now we already know everything and lose our self-control. Jesus, hair, must be real! One of the men throws up on God and his friend and the feet of the policemen, who manage to jump back in time, but are already talking into their radios and have to listen to the din and crackle that breaks out of them like game out of the undergrowth. Soon the place will simply be swarming with men in uniform (and later also with the high-ranking civilians). A bit of smooth forehead under the saturated hair can also be seen, which didn't go under the plastic sheet, or not enough of an effort was made to tuck it in. Here someone perhaps wanted too much to own a human being and instead took this human being away from themselves, if you follow me. Perhaps this human being was simply thrown away, because someone had no more use for her anymore. Once again: The killer did not take the human being away from himself (that would not have bothered the killer, he evidently had no more use for his prey) but the victim from themselves. This person would miss themselves, if they were still conscious. No idea why. The eyes literally get stuck into the roll, but cannot take it over all on their own. Impossible. We can't grasp it. The birds are disappointed, the lake, however, is relieved it's rid of the responsibility, and it doesn't, on top of everything else, have to absorb even more fertilizers. Photographers, the search for clues, indescribable excitement in a short time overfertilizes the village as well and sweeps it along, heavy with all the stored up shit, which one will get to hear there, as in a spring avalanche, which in a swelling torrent, out of which poke our sins like trees and lumps of concrete, surges down the pedestrianized former high street. People who a moment ago were crouching out of sight, so that no one would see them answering the call of nature, now resolve never to do such a thing again. Someone can be lurking behind every bush, and in conclusion one ends up in the lake. Someone who has wrapped someone up and thrown them in will then also mendaciously maintain not to have known someone beforehand at all. We don't need that. To be denied in death like Jesus by his disciples, let yourself be killed, then you'll get the surprise of your life, what people will broadcast about you. But the people here are rather taciturn. You don't get anything out of them so easily. After the first photos the roll is opened and a body and a face of great charm are unpacked. Body and face still bear their delicate peaceful beauty, the face of the young woman looks as if she's sleeping, but in truth everything about her has long been divested of life. Someone has stirred up life against her, and so it went off in a huff. Not with her anymore! The black ankle boots aren't there, but there is the denim jacket with the long shawl collar, which we'd already missed, but not the handbag (where is it? It's never found!). The policemen see immediately who it is, they've had the young missing person on their computer screens and now they see her
in natura,
in this nature which takes offense at them. Let them sleep, the dead, there are too many for one to know something even of even one strand of their hair.