Elfriede Jelinek - Lust

In the mountain stream there are no chemicals learning to swim at this upper reach, just the occasional human faeces. The stream tosses restlessly in its bed beside the woman. The slopes are steeper now. Over there, round the bend, the sundered landscape is growing back together again. The wind is growing colder. The woman doubles over. Her husband has already kick-started her t wice today. Then at last his battery seemed to be flat. So off he drove to the factory, taking the hurdles on the way in massive voracious leaps, leaving them under his tyres. The ground crunches underfoot, a grinding sound, but It's not the grinding of teeth, they're hidden underneath. At this height there's little but rocks and mud off the scree. The woman has long since lost all feeling in her feet. This path can't be leading anywhere but a small sawmill at best, the grinding of teeth has ceased there too, it's silent most of the time, how can you say anything anyway without your teeth in. We are on our own. The occasional crofts and cottages by the wayside are equal, they have similarities. Old smoke rises from the rooftops. The occupants are drying out their floods of tears by the stove. Garbage is heaped by the outside toilets. Battered enamel buckets that have served for fifty weary years or more. Stacks of wood. Old crates. Rabbit hutches from which run rivers of blood. If Man can kill, so too can the wolf and the fox, his great role models. Slyly they slink by the chicken runs. Nighttime visitors. Domestic pets get rabies from them and pass it on to Man, their lordandmaster. Eat and be eaten. Take a good hard look. Like what you see?

There she is, tiny when seen from our vantage point: the woman, at the end of the path, passing by, like time. Already the sun is very low. Clumsily it is sinking towards the crags. The child's heart is beating elsewhere.

For sport. This Son of Man, this woman's child, is a coward, to tell the truth. Away onto the flat he steers his toboggan and he's out of earshot. Now, at the latest, the woman ought to turn back. Up ahead there is only some character on a cross, magnificently out-suffering all who have ever suffered since. Given this beautiful view it's hard to decide if we should have this moment last forever, and forgo the rest of the time that we're entitled to. Photographs often record this dilemma; but afterwards we're glad we're still alive and can look at the photos. It's not as if we could send in that remainder of time and receive a free gift in return. Still, we always want things to be beginning and never ending. Out into Nature go the people, hoping to return with an impression which their weary feet have made on the earth. Even the children want only to exist. As quickly as possible. On the slope with the ski lift. The moment they've tumbled out of the car. And we take a deep and innocent breath.

This woman's child still can't see further than the end of his nose. His parents have to do that, they even have to clean the nose, and they offer prayers unto heaven that their offspring will beat everyone else's by a nose. Wetly, he sometimes offers his mother his mouth, his face half free of its halter, the horse collar of the violin already off. And as for his father. In the hotel bars of the county town he talks of his wife's body as he might talk of the founding of an association sponsored by his factory, though soon he'll be relegated to a lower division. The words that come from Father's lips have a pungent odour. You wouldn't find them in a book. To leave a living human being dog-eared and tattered like that and not even read her! Centuries will come and centuries will go and still this Man will bounce back. Jesus: you can't keep a good man down.

This morning the woman was in a waking dream, a waiting dream, at the house, aimless, waiting for her husband, waiting on her husband, orange juice or grapefruit juice? So that he would catch her scent. Lick her off. Angrily, on the wing, he points at the jam. For it is written that she shall wait for him till evening when he cometh to bed down in her lap. Every day he uses his appliance as he has done for many a year. And what an impressive score he's run up. Men like scoring, one way or another. They're born with a target in their breast, their fathers send them over the hills and far away, just to shoot at other men's targets.

The ice is thick on the ground. The grit lies scattered carelessly as if someone had emptied his pockets. The municipal authorities grit the roads so that vehicles don't break their tyres. The pavements for people aren't gritted. The idleness of the unemployed is a burden on the budget, but as they idle by they do not burden the mow. Their fate is in the hands of someone who already has his hands full with a wine glass and plateful from the simple buffet of cold cuts. The politicians have to wear their big and bursting hearts on their tongues. The woman gets a firm footing on the verge. Here, the law of the catalytic converter rules: unless money is thrown at it, the environment won't react to us ambitious wanderers. And even the wood would have to die. Open the window and let feeling in! Then Woman will show" that disease afflicts the Man's world.

Flailing helplessly, Gerti stands on the ice. Offering herself. Her dressing-gown flapping about her. She claws at thin air. Crows caw. Her limbs fling forward as if she had sown a whirlwind and couldn't grasp the soughing and blowing on Mother's Day or the slurping of the Man at her trough when he appears below the table to lick the cream from her bowl. Woman is forever earthbound, they compare her with the earth, so she will open up and receive the Man's member. Perhaps lie down in the snow for a while? You wouldn't believe how many pairs of shoes this woman has at home! And who is it that's always egging her on to buy more clothes? For the Direktor, people count simply because they're people and can be used or else can be made into consumers who use things. That is how the unemployed of the area are addressed, who are in line to be eaten up by the factory when all they want is something to eat themselves. For the Direktor, they count doubly if they can sing for their supper. Or play the accordion or fool. Time passes, but we want it to say something to us. Not a moment of peace and quiet. The stereo drones eternal: listen, if patience and not the violin is what you play, what you have, oh sainted ones! The room is uplifted, a ray of light falls upon us, the beatitudes of sport and leisure cost the earth, and on the operating tables we re-enter the peaceable kingdom, resurrected, whole again.

THE SUPERMARKETS ARE bursting with captivating goods, people are their captives. On Saturday the Man is* supposed to be a partner, helping take in the catch in the nets. The fishermen sing. It is a simple tune and by now the Man has managed to learn it. Without saying a word he stands among the women who are counting their loose change and fighting starvation. How are two human beings supposed to become one if humankind cannot even join hands in a chain for peace? The woman is accompanied, the packages and bags are carried, no fuss, no noise. The Direktor is expensively showy in public, taking up the space that is other people's, checking to see what they're buying, though that is really a matter for his housekeeper. He is a god, scurrying to and fro among his creatures, who are less than children and collapse beneath temptations vaster than the ocean. He looks in other people's baskets and down cleavages, where undesirable colds are revealed and hot desires are concealed by neck-scarves. The houses tend to be cold and damp, so close to the stream. His wife's hand is rummaging among dead cellophane-wrapped creatures in the freezer, and when he looks at her, the paltriness of her meat, her fine clothes, he is beset by terrible impatience to let her partake of his own ample meat, his dong, his wonderful shlong. He wants to see it stir at the feeble touch of her fingers like a creature roused by the sun. He wants to see that little animal of his awake at the touch of her varnished talons and bed down again to sleep inside the woman. She'd better make an effort, in her silk blouse, so that he doesn't always have to do all the troublesome work himself, manhandling her breasts out and placing them on the plate of his hands. Why can't she serve herself up, be a little obliging, so he doesn't have to waste half an hour picking the fruit from the tree first. In vain. He pauses before the check-out to survey the gaping emptiness of his property, before which the goods are sitting up and begging, good boy. A number of supermarket employees are dancing attendance on him, who has taken their children away, some for his factory, others because they are having to move or become alcoholics. He is their lordandmaster and even lords it over time.