Elfriede Jelinek - Wonderful Wonderful Times

The paste-bucket bearers are silent. They have to be going now anyway. Outside the downpour is easing off but it is still shaking the panes to the foundations. No doubt a similar downpour is lashing Sophie's window and making the birch trees in the garden tremble, it may as well bear a message of love to her while it's about it. Without a shadow of a doubt, Sophie will be sitting in the lamplight doing her homework, how Hans would like to be doing that too, but he doesn't have a school to go to, nor any work worthy of the name.

So aren't you coming then, say the two poster-pasters, and they get up. Why not go along too, suggests Mother. In that pissy weather, no thank you, but even if the weather was fine I wouldn't go because that would be just right for tennis.

You always enjoyed your work. Your work is what's really made you a member of the working class, one of the unbroken line of human beings stretching out before and behind you, the people who will forge the new era (Mother).

You must be joking. Enjoyed it? Manual labour is a primitive stage of employment which will come to an end altogether one day, says Rainer. He, Anna and Sophie say that human culture did not even start to develop till people learnt to distinguish between manual work and methods of doing the same work with tools and other aids. Without the work the mind does, there would never have been any culture. Which is the most important thing of all.

Mother says she must be going crazy, and the two pasters say that they must too. We don't think we'll get through to him just now, Frau Sepp. Goodbye, then. We're going to leave this mate of ours, they've got to him, maybe he'll see the light but on the whole we rather doubt it. We're seeing more and more cases like his these days.

Mother says: Please stop by again when you can stay longer. We'll convince him, you'll see. But you have to be going now.

The gusts of wind outside take their cue, open their arms wide, and swallow up the two youths plus their bucket. Let's hope they don't swallow the posters too. The posters are paper and that means they are defenceless against the wet. They are protected by makeshift plastic sheeting. Anyway, the storm has abated, the walls of houses stand out wetly, the asphalt is gleaming again the way that wet asphalt gleamed in the film. After all, it was this asphalt's fellow-asphalt that played the part in the film.

Mother says: If your dead father knew, your father who sacrificed himself for the cause.

He didn't sacrifice himself, they killed him. If they hadn't he'd be alive today. Where did it get him. I'm sure I won't be sacrificing myself. If I read Rainer's books about pain it's more real than if I think about my father's pain in the deathcamp at Mauthausen.

Are you going out later, Hans?

In this lousy weather? Right now it's impossible to see fifteen feet ahead on horseback, which is where all earthly happiness is, and out in the country the evening mists are drawing in, reducing visibility further. On horseback the open country is different from when I visit Auntie Mali on the farm. Later on I may go to a jazz club.

When I look at you I feel as if I may have lived my life in vain and your father may have died in vain. But when I look at the two comrades who were here just now I know there was a meaning in it after all, a meaning my own son can't afford me.

Death's good for nothing anyway, it costs nothing, nothing but your life, giggles Hans wittily.

He is uninterested in strangers on principle, because he is only interested in himself and Sophie.

Go on, eat me, there may be worse times ahead, admonishes the spurned slice of bread and margarine. But Hans believes in a better future and does not eat it.

IT WAS NOT so very long ago that Rainer strayed and quit his predestined path as one of God's children. In the past the Catholic faith served him for many things which he now hopes to recover by violent means. Recently his sister Anna has been tending with ever greater frequency to be a mute in the midst of this jettisoned detritus. Still, at times it all bursts forth out of her and washes away almost everything that gets in her way. Today they are both lying on Anna's bed, holding each other tightly in their arms; they have diverted the wind of Reality to the dining-kitchen (done up in a farmhouse style) and in here they let the wind of the Past blow. Rainer is possibly going to break a taboo in here, the taboo on incest, to see if anything comes of it. But in the event he doesn't break it after all. So other dams have to break. The adolescent knocks them down himself because this degenerate home's door will stay shut if ever freer morals come knocking. Say the worthy progenitors.

Along with other misdeeds, Rainer used to be an altar boy at church. Nowadays this is a source of abhorrence that memory cannot cope with. Papa used to say: Off you go to mass. And off he went. Father's blows hurt worse than the cold tiles under his raw knees. That icy winter cold at 6 a.m. and the priest's slaps, though at least he didn't use aids such as coat-hangers or crutches, whack, yet another clip round the ear because Rainer got his Latin muddled and answered back cheekily a time or two, though no one had asked him anything, he'd been given an order. And then wearing these white lace-trimmed vestments with black collars that drag and make you look like a girl. And then the pictures, mostly of God and the Virgin Mary, in sundry styles and materials. The majority are rounded in shape because they were made in the Baroque era. And the giggling groups of youngsters, the Flock of Catholic Youth, bleating, shoving into the Catholic Youth hostel to play table tennis, serious songs issuing from the student throats of the older ones, and that pride when a child becomes a member of the Flock of Catholic Youth. Of late they have been able to watch TV, and do so, all the time. The Church always has the latest gadgets, and uses them against its members, too. Golden banners and flags with portraits of the Blessed Virgin, girls in navy blue pleated skirts: it all happens in the unloved Piarist Church. At choir they often say that God summons young folk, and lo, there they are, the moment they're summoned. Because young folk are proud of their Christianity. Which takes courage in a world grown thoughtless and heathen. Rainer is also a constituent part of Youth. Unfortunately he is the poorest component, and shows his wear and tear particularly clearly. He goes forth unto God, but he does so reluctantly, albeit he of all people has been summoned the most, because God knows his weakness and his reluctance, that is why he summons him especially loudly: Rainer! Rainer! He'll be throwing up on the tiles any moment. If he went to the high-class Piarist Grammar School, God would doubtless be well pleased with him, but his parents can't afford the fees. His rich fellow altar boys are never clipped round the ear. Naturally this fact struck the enlightened Rainer immediately. He always notices things like that rather than immersing himself all the more profoundly in prayer and ignoring the outside world. The Church takes whatever it can get and keeps hold of it. The Church never passes it on to where it's needed. Rainer needs love, not blows. God supposedly loves him, but the fact has never struck him, he's only been struck by the priest.

Nonetheless, Father kicks him into the sacristy every Sunday, with his one remaining foot, to get dressed up and show off his talents to his auntie and grandma in the choir of bright and cheery youngsters. God especially loves the choir because it sounds so hale and fresh. Rainer's auntie and grandma are diligent churchgoers, and in May and in Lent they do extra shifts and now and then fork out funds in recognition of his pious duties at the altar, so that he can buy himself a pair of those fashionable shoes with the sharp points or a pullover some time. These funds, alas, are the whole point of the exercise as far as this superficial lad is concerned, but he will learn to search within himself. Right inside. And then the scratching and scraping of feet in outsize interiors that are just about suitable to the greatness of the Lord God, you can't see Him, true, but then He needs an awful lot of room. Boys on the left, the young servants of the Lord. On the right the girls, the young handmaids of the Lord. The dean's words go smack down the middle, to the effect that Our Lord has suffered the little children to come unto Him, even though they probably had something better planned at the time. The altar boys sit resting during the sermon, most of them thinking of some kind of mischief, filth, or school affairs of no consequence, which does not bother God since He is even acquainted with the concerns of infants and His ear is ever open to hear them. But Rainer thinks of God, in person, in order to confide his worries to Him. For a short while, God is even his last hope because nothing whatsoever is working out any more and Jesus (of course) will fix it, but before that can happen you not only have to pray, you also have to make sacrifices, and Rainer prefers not to invest. It's too uncertain. Anyway, why does the fellow have to be up there and not down here, down where your prick is, which, if Jesus is to be believed, you mustn't rub or squeeze, not your own and (of course) not anybody else's either.