Greed (6 page)

The country policeman would never apologize, why does one make something of oneself? The slim ones, who have worked hard for their figure, go a step further and climb up the mountains every day or climb the walls at home, because one man, one man in particular, hasn't called them. The country policeman only has to take advantage of the opportunity, because in their own car everyone makes a mistake once; anyone who believes no one has seen him is making a mistake. Women like to be conquered by the country policeman. For a long time they've been regretfully gazing after their disappearing good looks, which now, without having asked beforehand, another, younger woman has taken, wearing them quite without inhibition, as if they belonged to her. Something has just appeared to me, I think it was the Virgin Mary, but unfortunately I was someone quite different. Oh dear, now because of it I've run over this stop sign, which has been planted here for twenty years. Because I turned round to look at my rival. Every woman forgets herself sometimes. Besides there isn't much, of which one should take note. One should never let a man, even a murderer, off the leash once one has caught him, and one has to hold the end of the leash very tightly. That's why in general women like murderers of women so much. Because they have specialized in women. They look at the walls in prison and during this time can't be looking at other women. But there are certainly other reasons. For the time being at any rate they're harmless, the murderers. After someone has unscrewed their fuse and they're in custody. Now they have all the time and leisure in the world to look for cozy women pen pals, who will soon turn up to see them in person, because they think they've been invited. The conduct of the detained culprit, who cannot practice his profession at present, will then be pure fun, the way a lamb likes to have fun with a wolf. Thank God I'm not responsible for these women. They in turn are responsible for their children, whom the murderer can kill at any time, if he wants to and has the opportunity, because he will have got that fatal parole. It would have been better if he hadn't got it. But it was so nice, nicer than anything! I and this woman, we swear, the next time he wouldn't have done it anymore. As it is, he has unfortunately won a free game with the knife again, it's your fault, Mr. Prison Chaplain and Mrs. Prison Governor and Mr. Prison Psychiatrist. I would never have expected it of this completely cured murderer! The man has always been an exception. Women don't much like to see the murderer out of doors. The temptations would be too great there. Good thing that the man is inside here now. A thirteen-year-old has just reached out for the light switch, a long smeared trail of blood leads directly to the floor, where he will be stabbed more than twenty times. But the mother would rather weep for the killer than her boy, that way the weeping makes her happier. After all, she has more children, all exactly like this one, if in different age groups. One hardly notices if one is missing. The murderer is shot trying to escape because he wanted to kill a nun in a chapel as well. They got the wrong man, the woman who loved him now weeps inconsolably. I could still have children, but I'll never ever have such a man again. There are so few like him, and that's exactly why I liked him so much. There's a popular belief that someone has to be imprisoned so that at least he pays attention from inside his cage. He has nothing else to give, so we'd better just forgive him. But we digress to these touch-me-not flowers who absolutely want to be broken, and fate alone would not have managed it for fifty years. I ask you, what did the man actually do? Seventeen years ago he chopped up a young woman teacher with a knife, nothing more, there are more women teachers than there are murderers, who are a rare timid kind of wild beast, and still really wild. Not something that eats from the trough and shyly rolls its eyes, where the other troughs stand in the forest, beside the pool, or in the cellar next to the fitness equipment. To demonstrate his long-standing non-aggressive gentle nature, in prison the man preferred to wear pantyhose, perhaps so that in future he is better able to put himself in the position of women, this gentleman who is dead now. If he has relatives who believe in him and who are fond of him, then unfortunately it's my turn.

The women stick out in their fragrant soft-rinsed wool, as if they were the main thing and had nothing but success with men, when they, nicely garnished with pullovers, T-shirts and scarf, success guaranteed, serve themselves up free of charge. In fact they are at best the dessert, if there's still room for it in the gentleman's stomach. That's something they don't know. Why do they feed the murderers like that? In their place at table I wouldn't have done it, I would rather have bought myself a dog, given how grateful animals are, more grateful than a man we know. I don't understand any of it. I imagine: Murderers exert a gentle hypnosis, some investigate and analyze their future victim for months. They take the trouble to attach concrete rings to them, and sink ring and victim in the nearest river. A human being is only absorbant cotton, a vacuum. If he's lucky the murderer gets a new notion of the essence of human beings, an advantage for him, which we writers will find difficult to catch up with. They are sand, human beings, there are as many as there are grains of sand on the shore. Well, I don't know… Hardly has he killed someone than new victims come running up, they even come shooting over from neighboring countries. (There are whores in Vienna, Lower Austria, Burgenland, the Czech Republic, and California, and everywhere they are throttled in a singular way with their own underwear. Mr. U., a man with whom I personally have corresponded on human and political questions, prompted it and, when he saw that he was the only man within a considerable radius and women were nothing but dirt, well then he took care of them himself, affronted by their glances because they weren't aristocrats, who would have made a better match for him. How could I have known that? Nevertheless, he didn't charm my soul, in contrast to the souls of others.) Here comes another one, I can hardly follow her, she's twenty years older than young Mr. L., a quite different case, an envious type who's a bodybuilder today and in this way has at last created an entirely new body for himself, has become another in the truest sense of the word, so Mr. L., exactly, he shot his cousin, girlfriend and her mommy full in the face with his pump-action gun, but they didn't need their faces after that anyway. Mr. L. couldn't build himself a new face, he's only grown older, as we all have. Where will it end? And now here comes a woman from Germany, who could be a substitute mother for the culprit, but would rather be his only lover, because there aren't so many places where there are no possibilities of comparison, and here she has found just such a place. It's the prison, it's the special penitentiary for almost broken lawbreakers. That's how the women imagine it: for once a man whom it's worth lifting up to themselves! And then careful you don't drop him! I fear you'll rupture yourself like that. First of all, however, thoroughly martyred by the culprit's ability to stay cool. How one longs for the rare tender moments when the core mantle melts and the sweet center of marzipan and nougat is revealed: highly explosive, I can tell you! Try a Mozartkugel, you'll soon see the difference. At least this motherly woman, with whom truth to tell the young man finds it a bit dull sometimes, is still alive. A close shave, he's still inside, safe inside. Basically this woman never talks about anything except herself, and the one listening to her can for his part talk to no one else, apart from ninety-five other women pen pals, about whom, however, the woman knows nothing. The murderer only wants to get out, which surprises no one, who knows the culprit a bit and the women who are always visiting him. Outside he would be safe from them. Only this woman, still talking about herself, wants to go in the opposite direction, pushing against the crowds at the desk, and even here inside, behind bars which mean the world, be seen by this wild young man, a figure who is at stake and goes on risking his stake and perhaps if possible be touched by his hands and admired as someone, whom one has never even seen before and yet has always known. What does that mean? That means the woman will become the outside. A place for which she is not destined, unless she were really presentable. She's from Bottrop, in the Ruhr, and has taken up residence in Austria for the time being, in order to trump younger women, abandoning everything, even her home town, where she was an executive secretary, that was just a town, which never made free with her hot glances. That was her last trick, now she hasn't got anymore. I swear I'm never going to mention the woman again! She was an example of nothing at all. So, now I've taken my revenge on her, only I don't know what for. The prisoner pockets all the profit. They all like to get close to him, the dear ladies of the Lord, whom they have chosen all on their own (whereas God was already there before, always already there, from the beginning). Even if the lord and master is twenty, thirty years younger, then they really storm the prisons. They literally board them with their freshly painted talons, which would break like glass if firmly gripped. Not in order to resolve to be better people and likewise to improve the culprit, but to be for him, who hasn't got a choice, first mother, then lover and then: everything else as well. After getting to know him better. Of course. Mother is altogether the best thing of all (women don't seem to know that, because they obstinately don't want to be mothers). At least not until their head is cut off and displayed in the window of their little lingerie boutique. As long as there are inquisitive people in the world, they'll stop in front of shop windows and believe in love, which would be even more beautiful in this pretty lace combination, I could imagine. And then that! A decapitated head right in the middle! Incidentally do you have any idea why matricides so often cut off their mothers' heads afterwards? They could also cut open the stomachs and pull out the wombs from which they, the sons, came, and give them a close inspection for once, couldn't they? I don't understand it. They could be content with the killing itself, but they go to the trouble of sawing off the head like Salome, who didn't, however, have to get her own fingers dirty. Sometimes they even stick the Gorgon in the blender, if they have one, which only demonstrates their lack of technical talent. They've never had the opportunity to study, otherwise they would have known that. But wait, back to the beginning, this one has studied at university, economics (but didn't have a clue about solid-state physics!), now he's doing it again, I've heard, studying. Fortunately he's quite healthy again, it's been at least a year since the murder. But I feel so happy for him, that he's out again and now he can until further notice (until he has a girlfriend who looks like his mama) be built up again and find out how far he can get with boldness. Into the newspaper! Oh, that would be nice, to get as far as that!

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.