Greed (8 page)

Oh, how nice, the sun is just taking a final brief walk on the steep shore! So brief, that the darkness, with which I am to be punished immediately afterwards, seems even darker to me. Beyond the lake the windows of the inn flare up for a moment, so it must be about five o'clock, the time at which the sun, at this time of year, graceless as a sleeping infant, but it just doesn't know any better, stands up, pays and begins to leave the garden of the inn, a beginning which also already leaves one behind. Most are in any case sitting inside, because after all it is still very cool outside. It's no different for the highway, which is pleased to make the acquaintance, even if only fleetingly, of the vehicle tires; briefly they snuggle up, could be friends, and then they're gone again, next please, so that rubber can rub off and rub out. They always leave just a whiff of themselves behind, the tires, or somebody dead, they get right on top, dead animals, too, cats, snakes, hedgehogs, hares, even deer and stags, which are then hurled to the edge of the road and left lying on the shoulder, left for the ants and worms to eat. Soon the sun will be gone completely. Wind rises. The water in the lake (here I am, as I see, tireless in my urge to describe!) is hardly ruffled, where are they, the graceful waves, they could certainly be a bit more full of themselves. Are they stiff with fear? Fallen silent at the sight of themselves, because they have no tender, sweet face, which they could raise to look at and assess one another? I would so like to know more about the inn, but I would not so much like to see the kitchen before I eat, and still less afterwards. Tourists are always strolling past it, cyclists are flashing signals in the sun with the mysterious, rare metals of which their sports equipment is made, their backsides cannot arouse any desires for assessment, they flash by too quickly and are gone again. What else? Over there's the path to the Alpine springs (fifteen minutes by bike, on foot it all depends), which were enclosed for the Vienna Mountain Spring Water Supply, a sight which would be worth visiting, but which one can no longer see. Before enclosure it was a nice destination for an excursion, now unfortunately the water always stays at home and, in accordance with its demands, the home is built of stone and concrete and what do I know, ceramic pipes?, and like everything that's always sitting at home, no longer interesting to the beholder. One can hear it frothing, one can hear it murmuring or whatever it does, but here, too, one no longer sees any reflection, no bubbling merriness, no little clouds of foam spraying rainbow mist, no cheerful rushing over stones, no roaring gushing forth from the earth, there's no sitting in a concrete home and throwing foam around. The water is located, properly enclosed, inside a pipe, and in the city it ends up in our glasses and pots, why then do I feel that something's not right? I would be the first to complain if instead I had to knock back the ground water from the Mitterndorfer bore with all its nutritious nitrates!

Well. The families are slowly setting out for home. Small children are stuffed into strollers, hands are shaken, parking places found and, to the patter of spattering gravel, abandoned again, whatever's alive, which is anyway only held together with difficulty, is finally pulling away in different directions. Those who are allowed to stay together tie themselves into little bundles of rods, which will soon hit out at one another again, they can hardly wait, the couples, the passers-by, the relatives sort each other out and lie down voluntarily on their jigsaw underlays, where they are to be properly fitted together along with their often quite unusual hobbies. Swimming, tennis, skiing, hiking. They have looked at the area or even live entirely in it and hence only have short distances to go, usually by bike, in order to get back home. But the bikes of the natives, whose customs consist in always being customers for something the vacationers already have, these boneshaker bikes are different. They are plain objects, which don't trumpet any kind of sporting ambitions, they can't keep up anyway. The mountain bikes and their handsome owners in their handsome clothing, they're like the fingers of a hand being moved, one moves and the others join in. They are many and quick, to us whom they leave standing they say farewell even before they've seen us. What should the people here begin, when they began to look for stuff like that in the department store in the county town, at first among the special offers? But the children of the villagers have steadfastly cut imitations of racing bikes out of their parents' living bodies and are beaten for it (more often than the city children), because so much has been spent on them. The bodies on the adults' bikes are wrapped up in exemplary manner, sometimes still even in a dirndl, clean, although ever more frequently one sees shorts and jogging pants on the bodies of mountain folk. Undignified times, to what do you drive your occupants and why do you drive them on when there is no place to which they could drive? But don't be deceived, even if I constantly attempt such deceptions, so as to make things simpler for myself, many also drive to distant lands, to places where I've never been. I, however, have really never been anywhere yet, not because some sins or other could wrap themselves around me there, but because I'd rather sin at home, where God even announces the weather to me in advance on TV, slowly, so that I can write it down in case it's worth the proper guilt. Sinning is enough, there's no need for surprises as well.

So the children are decked out with spoils, which their relatives have forced on them or which they have cadged for themselves. If someone has lost his self-control with them, then their bawling can be heard as far away as the lake, but no further, the lake is the limit. It swallows everything. I've already said so, but it's on my mind nevertheless in a curiously insistent way: Usually children like to gather on the shores of bodies of water, they splash about, splash each other, pick up small stones and throw them at one anothers' heads, get onto air mattresses or air mattresses which have disguised themselves as animals and, as if spellbound, they stare into the distance, where such animals sometimes sink without a sound, or where boats have fled as the only way to get away from them, in order to do a few exercises on the waves. They beg to go out in a boat, the children, best of all in a pedal boat, which can never ever capsize, there are three of them here, but they don't look as if they're ever used. Some water is sloshing about in them, cloudy, muddy, sluggish, how did it get there? It's too little for a leak, for the free and easy games of boisterous water fanatics too much. The boats are definitely neglected, I can see that, but why maintain and look after them if no one wants to go in them? Presumably it squeaks, when one, what do you call it, the thing you step on, like when you play the harmonium, it's not a bellows, it'll be a kind of plastic paddlewheel or something like it, so when one operates these things, and the boat moves jerkily and haltingly forward, how about greasing the bearings for once? There's even a steering wheel and one can imagine oneself at the helm of a speedboat in which one could have an accident. That has already happened to world-famous people, spouses, fathers. One can put the fear of death into younger siblings with malicious words if one pretends that the boat is certain to sink now, because it's not going to stay upright much longer, luckily I can swim, but you can't, tough. These are all things one can talk about, but no one talks about them here, it would be superfluous. One doesn't talk about things which normally can only be written, but neither are the people who live here in life's good books. They'd rather pay on credit. The children in the inn's beer garden sometimes walk the few yards over to the slide and the swing, with which at any rate they can catapult themselves straight onto the compost heap-where the hens are scratching and the cucumbers and pumpkins, too, are still only in their infancy-if they're skillful enough and want to drive their parents to commercial TV and then to the washing machine, but they always come back pretty quickly. They've had more than enough of such parents, pressed flat, brightly colored and always cheerful, who are incessantly washing, know them better than their own, who don't have much time for it, but then they don't need any with these washing powders and liquids, it all happens in the twinkling of an eye, just like that. The TV is also nearby, it's in the kitchen-living room. Perhaps the parents have only forbidden their children to cross the main road by themselves because they would have to do that to reach the lake. No, not a chance, I'm sticking to it, there's something that I simply don't understand about this mighty lake, well, it's not really so big, in fact it's rather small compared to Lake Baikal, but it isn't what it was either. The parents could go along, and they would certainly not be so hard-hearted as to refuse the children the boat trip, it's very cheap and in the course of time has even become a little cheaper. There's a solution to everything, though I personally don't know one for the lake, it's a mineral solution, but no one knows the details. Not a nice sight, the lake. At first everyone was pleased that now there's something like that here too, so mysterious and beautiful, so splendid, that'll attract the tourists and does them a constant service and sometimes a last honor-but then its health began to fail, and suddenly no one was pleased anymore. And why does no one pour in the tried and tested good algicides? Conjecture: then the algae would certainly be finished, but the lake would have to swallow the weed killer as well, when it was already unable to hold anything because of its weak stomach: the water would remain deader than dead. Even artificial aeration, if we could afford it, would only produce short-term success, because once the water begins to breathe, then it wants to keep on breathing more and more, until it believes it's a human being. The water is so presumptuous, there's nothing to be done. That's why it's better to leave it to its imbalance, isn't it? If the lake's dead, we can make a new one beside it, exactly, right beside it, no, over there's better. Now what does that look like? Many will be against it. And further upriver there's the big dam for the local electricity plant, nothing's happening there anymore. The water has to work and has no time for fun and games. And we're not going to blast another hole in the world just for fun, are we?

Strange for a piece of water, which induces most people almost involuntarily to come and look, since it could cause one difficulties of every kind, I need only think of the landslides and floods which last week we could keep track of in every detail on our screens and now still on the broken off roadside, after the catastrophes for their part had tracked down whole villages and parking lots and were even successfully after a whole inn, gulp, in which the beds were already waiting patiently, almost unprofitably, like open savings bank books, because the season was about to begin. So one thing follows another. But one could also think of sporting variety, when one sees the water, one could get out, take the surfboard from the roof of the car, and we're already there. We do exactly the same with the roads and the wheels, we make ourselves masters of our sports equipment, and nature is slowly getting nervous as a result, it gets us in its sights, takes careful aim, its finger is already itching on the trigger, but because we move so fast, it's constantly losing us. Lucky for us, but ultimately it is we who always have to be moving on. Well, but now, unfortunately, it has found us after all, nature. Every corner, every patch of this piece of water has left something deep down in the mountain and now cannot find its way back. It's possible that something has been catapulted from the red iron-bearing rock of Styria that did not want to be filled up again, because it would like to enjoy the view itself for once, and if it had to be filled up, then not with water, but with wine or beer please, don't take it so seriously! We'll just bore a completely new hole in a completely different place to tunnel under the whole Semmering, but there, too, the water that was there before, and has older rights, is already coming towards us. It doesn't encourage us to stay, and right away there are some who now no longer want the hole. Water in the rock, next time if you please just leave it out, God! Just put the water in this pan, we can do with it there! The nature conservationists play their jolly comedians' roles, and at some point they, too, will disappear from the surface of the earth, beneath which everything will be churned up again by animals, laboriously, they're so small, they're so small.

So no caressing or scolding voices reach us from this piece of water, I would even prefer the nagging of a father, the complaints of an overworked mother, the whining of a child whose face has been smacked to this eerie soul of the water, these eyes of the water, which stare at me, these lips of the water, which want to devour me, well, they'll be taking on a bit much there! I weigh a hundred thirty-three pounds now.

It's dark now and has grown even colder, the grit left over from winter rises in a cloud when someone drives over it, and it's no longer enough for anyone to be present, he would like to get into the warmth of kitchens and barrooms. People have come out of the open air and fled into the enclosure of their families as if they had no other shelter. Food is dished up, the skates and skateboards and climbing boots have to stay outside or in the cellar. With choice listlessness the fathers cut a piece from the roast, which, a last desperate remedy, is supposed to animate them again, supported by an almighty double glass of wine, a miracle that they don't lose all hope. Nature, which treats us so sternly, also takes a break. That's what we call everything that has to stay outside, and nature has been baked into a block of darkness, cold, mountain wind, mountain stream and regularity (yesyes, the plants in their predetermined vegetation units, one can almost set one's clock by them!) and eaten by us and other animals. That successful sampler nature, what could I not describe now if I reassembled old descriptions, no matter what, it always sounds good, doesn't it? Gome right in, you cute comparison of mountain lake with diamond set among the mountains, how well I know you, just lie down there! no, but not on my toes! The strawberry slopes and the river squadrons of fish, the thicket of the pine plantation, where all the lower branches have unfortunately died off, mutants donated by the tourist board, so that the excursionists are better able to see the mushrooms on the ground, but they aren't there anymore either, because they've been suffocated under eighteen inches of needles like Salome under the shields of the soldiers. Also probably an experience with far-reaching consequences, but not something I would want. By the lake meanwhile, because we are not in it, we do not see the following: the surface level, that is, where the water level runs in its trough, the wood piles, because none were driven into the earth to strengthen the shore, instead this shore is lovelessly made up of boulders, dumped down just as they were blasted out of the rock after the soil flesh had been picked clean; a screen of reeds has at least been placed in front of it, or it has itself taken the trouble to get here, a walking wood and further: the stone's throw, that's just these quarry stones, a ton weight some of them, spilled down and crudely dressed, which the reed bank with its green pencil bodies masks. What lives under the water? Let's take a look. Nothing lives under the water anymore. No need to pour in anything else that's dead!