Greed (7 page)

One has to know the secret of how to get a good grip on women. One doesn't absolutely have to be a doctor in order to slit people open, but it would be better if one were, if one wants to find the serpent in the stomach, which once led us astray, the evil one, where else should it be: as a man one would like to be doctor, psychiatrist, surgeon and anaesthetist all at once. Even if one had nothing else to do it with but this fairly long, powerful organ, the scalpel, which doesn't have to take time twisting and scraping when it wants to get in, it's not a spiral drill after all. The drill imposes itself without even glancing once or twice up an empty dead end in case anyone is coming down it at the wrong moment. Courage grows with appetite. The screaming woman beside her car which has got a dent in its tin roof suddenly falls silent and stares at the man in a uniform, as if she were looking at a live man for the first time. The mascara is running down her more than fifty-year-old face, it doesn't really matter. The face shouldn't stand for so much food, because it looks a little puffy, but that doesn't matter either. Down below, on the valley side of the lake shore, beside the woman and the country policeman, the landscape spreads out alongside the highway. The landslide has finally been cleared away, also the hair, which strangely enough they found in it, these thick tufts of hair, no one could work out what they were doing there. Ultimately it makes no difference, who or what one embraces, the important thing is that one can grab hold of it when the time comes.

There are lights on in some houses where widows and other single persons are living. Their faces are like unentered rooms, which are waiting for someone to switch on the light so that they don't have to do it themselves anymore. Their organs roar. If need be, they would even commit a murder themselves, if only someone would at last come to them. Some unfortunately are shaken by the tree of life before their time. To ensure that their passionate feelings don't perish unused, they get into their cars and drive off in order to get to know someone. To be finally brought in as harvest, by the traffic or its guardians. Don't get killed and don't drive too fast. Just don't make a mistake now! Fifty years with a clean record are soon used up! Someone simply has to make this country policeman rich, otherwise the needle will stick. No sooner does one lay one's hand on a woman's neck or throat as gently as a hypnotist than they throw back their heads like horses, bare their teeth and get so wet that foam squirts from every hole. No one sees them fantasizing about vanished love. Everyone sees them longing for a new one, and here it comes. What a good thing that I got into my car. Oh you pale-colored Japanese mid-range car, which was seen at the scene of the crime! The tongue is displayed in the open mouth and wants to be bludgeoned by another tongue, where's the limit? The lips still want to linger at the place it all happened and exchange further caresses, as if it was just like a Mills amp; Boon novel; tin for gold chains and rings and bracelets, just as gold was given for iron, where's the limit? Where does a body have limits anyway? This longing: women who desperately observe their own state, size up a distance, but cannot get back to dry land again unaided, in order to reach a more pleasant state. Marriage later not excluded. As if they couldn't let themselves out, because they're the only thing they have. But why then give it away so greedily? They can hardly wait to thrust themselves forward in the most complete way, to give themselves up to a stranger's hands, without a female assistant animal keeper on TV having tested the fences of the little house, the barred windows of the apartment (so that the animal cannot fall out onto us), in which they, the people are to land, usually not very gently. No matter where they come down, whether a soft or hard landing, the important thing is that we come, have a little slime rubbed into us, have the Kleenex to hand and hold the stalk tight before the bloom of budding affection has shriveled again. Before it even rose properly. Everything as usual. Precaution is better than after-care, e.g., after a cancer operation. A big opportunity, authoritative entrance, the gun, a uniform which announces the master, because it runs ahead of him with a caliber of approx. 9mm like the obedience which one knows how to produce in a woman. Strange, that others have such problems with it! The curtains with their curtain rail-lubricant (unfortunately he always has to leave, pilots always have to come down again, too) are torn aside, the neck is stretched in order to gaze after him, as he disappears down an alley beside the drug store without looking back. And yet one had embellished one's pink and bluish gleaming interior, which can only be reached though a narrow passageway, but that's the way he, the only one, will come, so nicely with folds, in order to give it a new look, but there was no need for that, one discovered. You, you're fantastic, one clearly heard that, it's only three weeks ago, and one heard it from a mouth above a square jaw, and meanwhile a hand leafed around below and sometimes also climbs higher, where it pinched, scratched and practiced slapping the flesh, just great. Was it true, what one felt then? Afterwards they don't rightly know, are already greedy again, the street door only has to slam shut, and so want to have it again and again, in order afterwards to consider everything in peace and quiet. Is ready cash, jewelry, ownership of real estate available? That, in turn, is more important to the man, and a bath tub now would be nice too, muses the country policeman, who has made himself dirty and furthermore would like to get rid of the smell of perfume. His wife isn't waiting at home to get a smell of the man, because she wouldn't dare do that. This man now belongs to me alone, I can do what I like with him, thinks the victim, for as long as she can still think. For as long as she is still all there. Another man is meanwhile already dead, inside him are the drugs Anafranil and Euglucol, they lower the blood sugar level and improve the mood, but it's no use now. The criminal was female and turned to unfair pharmaceuticals. An athlete doesn't need anything like that. The woman is often like someone dead anyway, because she does not know when and how she should move during sex. The murderer gets on top of her and drives around the place as he pleases, a ghost driver, who's never changed direction. A spook. He's driving around with the dead woman in his car, he's even got on top of her, imagine that! He's filled his car with corpses he's picked up for himself, which he'd rather not make a noise about, they're sleeping so wonderfully beneath and behind him, just don't wake the dead! The murderer can awaken a feeling. He himself must be cold. He dare not be modest.

Kurt Janisch (I always find it embarrassing to name names, don't you think so too? It sounds so silly, but how else should one speak to people?), the country policeman, always already feels the juicy colors all around him when he wakes up in the morning, but they don't mean a thing to him. But it immediately drives him out into the front garden, where the flowers bloom and promise something more, that is, a woman whom one can pick up with flowers. The country policeman likes to wander amidst the greenery of the rural hills and mountains, where even people are allowed to live, although there's not much room for them there. The people are enclosed by the mountains, like a child by his cot. Without fail they settle in the valleys, right up to the hills, where vacation homes have to take leave of the world, when the landslide comes, and everyone throws themselves at everyone else, because the holiday makers want to play away. The sleep of the country policeman is like the paths through the mountains. There are many of them.

Why does it occur to me now: Yesterday Kurt Janisch dreamed of a pair of bears who were once young, a yellowed photo shows them in their young days, they had been intended for a nature reserve in the area, quite near, but then installed in a bear-pit instead and nevertheless delighted the tourists for years, even behind bars. Now the two bears have died at a great age following a long serious illness, one right after the other. That's how one knows that time is passing, when the photos curl at the edges and turn yellow. Death pushes itself imperceptibly over life, the photos of the happy young bears are overlaid by the old tired animals with mangy fur. Oh, the soft hair of human beings, why does it move me so? Their trees grow heavenwards, but the country policeman, the squad commander, comes and cuts them down if they threaten to harm his superiors. Yes, sir, we also conduct security operations, and our dogs recently received yellow blankets for their assignments, so that they're seen immediately and they don't cover any strange dog with impunity, the brutes, the good dogs, along with their good noses. The Dobermans are sick too often. The Belgian shepherd dogs can take a bit more. It's only the poor bears which are dead now.

There lies the gravel pit, a stagnant stretch of water which, like every other, spreads before us forever flat beneath the surface pressure exerted by God, dark and yet open, an opaque quantity. Oh, if only the ecological balance of the water in it had not been upset! Hence, sadly, the lake is not a dark jewel encircled by mountains, which sometimes throw off their nerves, the water varicose veins in the rock and cast them down their own besotted slopes, man and his misdeeds are to blame, yes, yes, the landslides-everything slips down the slopes over their hips, the mountain shorts, the earthen covering, this sodden, doused greenery, which can no longer hold on there. Unfortunately it rained so much this spring. Tracks were buried on which cars were parked oh dear. People can no longer leave their vacation destinations and are left sitting in the locals' trap, the latter have to scale the heights of their best manners in order to bear the visitors for so long. In the winter they had already practiced killing by avalanche, the locals and their native snow, that triune son of water. (Meanwhile the water has assumed another form again.) This living play of nature finishes off everything in a trice. And right away here comes a whole concrete wall of snow, this popular, but inconspicuous (once arrived, it simply lies around everywhere) piece of sports equipment that falls down to earth around the clock and no one, apart from the athletes, really pays attention, unless they haven't got winter tires fitted yet. And this snow is suddenly like stone, like concrete, which has a stomach ache and thus must empty itself over everything. We, too, have to watch it on TV, even though we're more interested in the little football. The lake then. One essential detail's missing, that is, there's no life in it. The trout go strolling in the River Miirz, they avoid the storage lake, they already die before that, hooked by an angler or from the power station sludge if the sluice is opened too quickly, I've already mentioned it somewhere else. I still don't entirely understand the mechanism, but whatever it is, the fish die in the hundreds. It happens in a flash. In every kind of rock and in every kind of terrain there are suitable basins or cavities into which water fits, but then again its composition doesn't suit the fishes. They would have said something about problems beforehand, if they could have spoken.

Why is it that just this stretch of water has swallowed so much and what that caused it so to lose its balance? The water really has to be fed a great deal of unhealthy food to get so fat. If we start with a nutrient supply of 10 mg per annum, but then increase the amount by two percent per annum, then the lake has a nervous breakdown because it believes it will have to cope with even more, and has long since lost its appetite. But at the moment I can't see what nutrition it got at all, yes, in fact what is it subsisting on? Who set the cycle in motion, until something sat up, had a good stretch and then got up and left without making its bed? Nowhere do I see food for the lake, this is not at all an area of extensive agriculture, it is an area of extensive leisure use. If anything, then leisure should lose its balance, not this lake.

The afternoon shadows fall very early across the water, crouching in its tub. It has not been formed by tectonics, volcanic action, erosion or accumulation, rather, someone simply blew a very big hole in the ground, so that he could throw the rubble from road-building into it, and then someone else had another idea and preferred to fill the tub with water. You see, other bodies of water are even produced by the wind, this nothing in the air, ice, too, can melt and thereby make water. This water, however, was poured out, but without a food chain, no, that was not added (that is, the consumers and producers within this biocenosis don't come and go, they simply remain, but see for yourself) there are two, three rowing boats lying there, you can pay at the inn on the other side of the highway, where you will also be handed the paddles that go with them. And then look into the water just once, no one will stop you, but the species garnishing underwater doesn't lie next to juicy fish bodies, snails, microorganisms, this sidedish, rather, is never anything but weeds, weeds, weeds, simply green stuff, you can see that with the naked eye, macrophytes, vegetable organisms; your voice will sound as if muffled by a park of living plant creatures, should you take the plunge, the tongues of foliage will caress you like the branches of trees, but if I were you I would think twice before going in there. If you can't swim, have a last photo of yourself taken beforehand! Well, this water does not look like water at all. Just the way it clutches at your throat, if you want to do some water sports nevertheless! This water is simply not as close to nature as you. Even if you avoid it and lean over the side of the boat, the impression you get is of jelly, gelatin, ton upon ton of water plants, nodes, rhizomes, I ask myself, how can they even aspire to photosynthesis if light cannot penetrate the water at all? Look at the snapped off twig floating over there. It is already half submerged, as if it were petrified and too heavy for the water, which treats it severely and swiftly draws it down. These plants, they shouldn't really be here at all, and in healthier water they wouldn't be, at least not in such gigantic quantities. Did the nasty climate do it? Did something rise up which climbed to the surface, odd given the youth of this stretch of water, whose chemical properties suggest something much older? Upper layer not very permeable, eh? Of special significance to the dynamics of the depth ground water due to extended stay below the surface? What, no depth ground water at all? The tasteless juice simply poured in from above and then the hose thrown away?

There's a boat floating on the water at the moment, as love floats around in humans and makes no progress nor gets beyond itself. It's even possible to get out of any village, after all. The boat has sought out its humans and now glides forth without splishing or splashing, it is no longer surprised at anything, for it is used to this water, which just seems to have this special density, a different specific gravity from normal water. It is almost as if it were solid, which would be the opposite of water, a copy from an original water block, but they'll never manage to get the original quite like that again, what did I really mean by that? It doesn't matter, I'd rather not say, because I would need pages for that, which I will certainly miss in my life, that is, the nicer back pages. So it's simply water, but it doesn't look like it and doesn't feel like it. If you want to swim, you're better off driving to Kapellen, which has got a pond for swimming, I'm telling you, it's friendliness personified, with its caravans, its squealing children taking off into the blue sky with their water wings, everywhere the multicolored joys of discovery. OK, it's still too early in the year for swimming, the water is far too cold. I would say the lake can hardly be discovered because it's so hard to get there in order to discover it. It doesn't impose itself, this almost black filling, which was supposed to set a water cycle in motion, yet even precipitation does not visibly appear to strike it. As if there were a brake on its fall, as onto a sponge. It's simply a dark surface next to the highway, just before the bypass, where at last, since a couple of years ago, there's no need to brake anymore. I also brake for animals, says this car, which cannot do anything on its own. They first took the material for the road away from the ground and then gave back cheap water in return. Even you wouldn't put up with that. Imagine you've got a corridor where you could put up cupboards, and instead all of a sudden the full bathtub comes towards you and buries you under its watery hollowness. The bus drives a little way into the village, but the old B road then continues unhurriedly on foot, the bus turns round again, it has to pay attention to the federal highway. Now one can send five-year-olds to the grocer's, they could at most be run over by a baby stroller. And here's the little bus shelter, crudely rustic, as if knocked together from gingerbread, not unlike a feeding rack for game, so that it's not so conspicuous in the landscape, a piece of furniture, yet in the open air, but then again not a piece of garden furniture; I wouldn't go so far as to sit myself down comfortably there, under the inquisitive glances of the neighboring residents, and hold my face to the sun. Doesn't matter, it wouldn't make the face any better. The little house with its little bench is more a piece of working furniture, which takes in people for a limited period, principally student drivers, apprentices, and old people, who have no car and have to go to the surrounding towns, on one side as far as Mariazell, on the other to Murzzuschlag, I haven't been able to free myself of this area for ages which, like myself, is inconspicuousness personified, but yet also a fetter nevertheless. It sticks to me like I would myself to a beloved person, if I had one and a suitable opportunity.

The question is, how is it possible to describe such a water landscape, like that of the lake, without really knowing its language? I am wary of the innocuousness with which this stretch of water appears before the public, but it doesn't do me any good, it acts as if it could not disturb its own surface, and it really doesn't disturb me. This numbly paralyzed water, yielding nothingness, into which the skillful oars dip, yet on touching the surface their skillfulness at once deserts them, they become clumsy, shy away from dipping in again, which nevertheless could take them further, well I don't understand it. As if they would get goose pimples from it, they can hardly move in this aspic, in this gelatin, cannot turn, want to come to a standstill and submit to the always ice cold water cake in which they're stuck like the gateau knife, guided by the clumsy hand of an invisible, noisy peasant bride and groom-the women, chrysalises, sticking out of tons of petticoats beneath which simultaneously clayey, clumping feet emerge and will deal out kicks. Yet even these will be smothered in the thick reed beds of the shore, and the foot in the shoe breaks while green trees try to caress its pain. But the water won't allow that. It won't have anything nicer to tell you than I, that's for sure! Why did they put water of all things in this gravel hollow? Even this water here drowns in itself without a single cry. This stretch of water is not a dynamic member of the environmental movement, it is a piece of water standing there absolutely silent and stupid.

On the other side of the road, as if shielded from every terror by a beautiful pair of hands: the inn, adorned with a geranium dirndl blouse and the garden that goes along with it, so friendly! From here the path to the lake seems further than it is, it is a path from the light into the dark, cold, damp, where it's such an effort to draw breath, as if one had to buy it specially; and children's pleas for a boat trip are almost always refused. I would say, and I'll repeat it again and again, because perhaps then one can imagine something altogether definite: The water is dark green to black, at most green, at least black. The hair of the vegetation moves beneath the surface, dead undergrowth is dragged along, the green drowned weeds yield to an invisible current, the expanse lies open there and yet displays no kind of openness at all. On the side opposite the inn a rocky slope rises up, the young birches, larches, firs, the maple on this steep shore (no setting posts, although it would have been sensible to put them up so that the whole thing doesn't one day slip down into the water without knowing what to expect, stupid and usually unconscious but first of all fundamentally evil, just the way nature is) cannot be reflected. But really, why not? Because that side is simply always in the shade. This lake is not in the sunlight zone, that is its and the tourists' misfortune, yet the trees on the slope really should be able to reflect themselves. Why don't they? Why are they so lazy? Gut into the rock a little path on which hikers are often to be seen. They can't escape us, the song goes like this: forwards or backwards or be forgotten. These people are not walking around in the opaque world of the rich. Often they're families with small children who cannot be accommodated in a hotel, because they would immediately tear it down. But usually they're retirees, the evening of whose life grants them the full TV program, because they don't have to get up early in the morning. The few boarding houses here are really good value, the food is good, too, and is locally grown, yes indeed, this landscape has been vigorously cultivated, more abundant organic joy has been wrung from it, so that the naturally fertilized fruit and veg., the specially produced animal shit is coming out of its ears, does not have to be bought as an extra. The animals themselves are available, too, bred on the farm, and they are killed here, a maximum of six at a time, in the little district abattoir. It's not like in the big slaughterhouses, where ten Poles pitilessly hack at a living thing, break it down, for, measured by their own life, the animals here have a super time, and anyway most of it is all the same to man or beast. The main thing is to eat one's fill once more beforehand, before the knife slips into the hand and out of it again, stick it in, under the skin and into the flesh heave ho! Do you have the talent to be happy? Then on no account waste it here!

Look, there go two people again, no, three, in hiking clothes and climbing boots, equipped with sticks, walking on this narrow little path, on which if need be one could even walk in high heels, because the terrain presents no difficulties at all. But, professionally equipped for the unrefined mountains, it's just more fun and doesn't even cost much more. These are people who would dress appropriately and comfortably even in their coffin (so that they can frequently turn around in it), yet nevertheless economically for heaven, so as to be let in at all. They look down on the lake, which swallows up the sun as if a life-long eclipse prevailed there, and think the dark expanse is like a country road at night on which one encounters someone. Others would prefer not to encounter anyone. I can understand that, I would probably be one of the latter. So, now the people are gone again, because I can't see them anymore. The water is so cold, if one pulled it out of its dripping bed, one would immediately throw it back again, hardly taking a second look at what one had caught hold of. This water would never fall to the surface of the earth as precipitation, it would rather precipitate downright dejection in someone who for at least a week had been hoping for better weather. Coldness pure and simple, in peculiarly amorphous form. If the water had any agility it would clamber out of here of its own accord. The whole thing isn't very deep, but the creepers, the hussies, would simply pull one down to the bottom, a place which I would rather not imagine. It must be indescribably muddy, dark, icy, dreary there, the point, as it were, at which the body of water is unconscious, but nevertheless unceasingly, with a part of its memory, which has not been regulated by the Alpine Convention, which encourages the harmful substances not to be unloaded here, with a part, which is lying in wait, presumably lying in wait for its own terrible awakening. Not even on its surface have I ever seen ducks, it would rip the fat from their rumps, and they would be drawn below the surface quacking wretchedly, that's how I imagine it, because I love animals and wouldn't want them to have unpleasant experiences. Well, obviously they wouldn't like that either. It seems to me that they never alight on this stretch of water, which appears to be stiff with fright, because it has been poured out here and not over there, where it would get the whole sun, on the other side of the road, where the inn is, too, and even there, no matter how sunny it is, it grows cool early because of the mountains all around, and cardigans and jackets are taken out. There the ducks are then on the plates. A little jetty, but what for? If no one walks along it. Well, who could have known that beforehand, when assiduous voices were ordered and oars handed out and perseverance practiced, when losses were made during the early months. Sometimes one sees and hears children here who suddenly fall silent, however, and stare at the water, which is so different from what they had been promised, a face which on closer inspection turns out to be a hideous grimace, a web, in which one will become entangled. Not the place for cheerfully colored bathing suits, beach balls, inflatable animals, rubber dinghies; none of that is granted this lake, there's no change in it and so it doesn't make for a change. It cannot put on any surging robes of foam, because this metal water can neither bestir itself nor be stirred. It seems to me too simple to blame the absence of any of the sun's rays. The tanning studios, at any rate, have any amount of them, but human beings don't get any better as a result. Only such people go there, to lie down in the wonderfully gleaming coffins, who themselves want at least to change the color of their skin. They secretly suspect, after all, that they must always remain the way they are created. Whoever ends up in the water here-no thanks, as Franz Fuchs, the bomb maker and quadruple Gypsy murderer from Gralla, that's forty miles from here, would say loud and clear, so that he can thereby spare himself the well-deserved trial and enjoy the time in peace and quiet in his cell. He can't shout louder than his bombs. I can't hear him anyway, and now he's dead as well. He hanged himself. This water is soaked in itself, that sounds paradoxical, but it's true, so far as anything can be true. It is, so to speak, water twice over and for that reason solid again, no small success for an element that is eager to learn and would like to continue its education, although granted only limited opportunities to do so. With a bit of effort one can always make more of oneself, but at the same time always keep one's feet on the ground, which is nearly always horizontal. The level, which does not want to stand and only measures what's lying down, knows that, too, oh dear, that's not right, one can also measure the perpendicular with it. I think this water has an acid temper (but can also be alkaline), because no one is exactly scrambling to be a suitable partner for it, in play and sport and fun. It's rejected, so it retires offended to its room. Even the mother of this water, a rather low, newly built retaining wall, from where I'm standing it's on my right, on which the usual small plants are not yet growing, wild birch shoots, small willows, grass together with dandelions, any amount of wild fennel and coltsfoot and cow-parsnip (or is that the same thing?), is only allowed after repeated knocking to enter this water, in which terrible things are evidently produced and which in the shape of tough untearable creepers and drifting plants and algae destroy all other life. Only lifeless life is permitted here. Who with his wings parts the heavens for me? And here we have the first candidates for the room, crows, they're just everywhere, but not on the shore of this stretch of water. Hence nothing else is allowed to live here either. An enormous insignificance-and who can bear that? What on earth is to be discovered in something like that? Perhaps there are, after all, three thousand different varieties of aquatic plants in there, but I don't know them, verticillate, indestructible life, therefore, I wouldn't want to have to count them, the species, then I would have to bend over this water or spontaneously, thoughtlessly completely give myself up to it, and I've never done something like that before.