Elfriede Jelinek - Lust

The factory has gone to the wood. But it has long since been pining for somewhere else, somewhere that production costs are lower. The divine hoardings that line the arterial roads set the hordes dreaming and steaming off on their toy train sets. But the points all point to nowhere. And even the Herr Direktor is in the hands of the powers that be. Gobbling public money. Opaque are the policies of the owners, whom no one knows. At five in the morning people fall asleep at traffic lights on their hundred-kilometre drive to the factory At the very last crossroads, at the very last holy red light that toys with them, they fail and are killed, failing to slam on the brakes, failing to break off their dreams of the last grand slam Saturday night. Those TV caresses, which for years have nourished their pawing and panting, they'll never see again.

And so they all cause their women to sound forth once more, that they might not hear the last trumpet at least till next pay day. The trumpet call of rumour never falls silent in this place. Those who have been dropped by the banks sit chirruping in the furrows, eating their last crumbs of bread. Behind them a wife wanting her housekeeping money and new books and exercise books for the children. All of them are dependent on the Direktor. That big kid with the mildest of tempers. Though his temper can snap round with a crash, like a sail, and then we're all in the same boat. And promptly fall out on the vast, wild side. The side we flung ourselves across to at the very last moment. Because we don't know how to strike up our thousand-voiced siren song to better effect. Even in our anger we are forgotten. But our running sore is hurting. And we run wild.

THE WOMAN GROPES HER way along a fence by an old volunteer fire brigade station, failing in her confused state to find the emergency exit from her memories. There she goes, not even on a lead. The dirty washing-up waiting to be done is clean gone from her mind. Already she has ceased to hear the familiar jingling of the bells on her bridle. Speechless, she licks up like a flame, like sparks. She's left them both behind, her practical-minded husband who is a great sport and is still growing, regardless of the flames shooting from his genitals, and her child, all gut and screech like his violin playing. Let them drone and howl together. Ahead of her is only the cold tempestuous wind off the mountain. The terrain is threaded by a few paths leading into the woods. Dusk. In their cells, the housewives bleed from the brain, from the sex they all belong to. What they have bred they must now tend and rear and keep alive and cradle, in arms already laden down with hopes.

The woman moves towards the icy channel in the cleft of the valley. Awkwardly she wanders across the frozen clods. Now and then animals are revealed through an open stable door, then there is nothing. The rear quarters of the animals, pulsing craters of mud, are turned to face her. The farmer isn't exactly in a hurry to clean the shit off their hind parts. In the large livestock sheds in wealthy regions, the animals are given an electric shock through the yoke about the head if they crap at the wrong time: cattle training. Beside the cottages, wood is stacked, wretchedly snuggling up to the wall. The least you might say of Man and Beast, their common denominator as it were, is that both are tucked fast in their beggarly beds by the snow. Sparse plant life, tough leafage, is still straining for the light. Iced-over twigs play with the water. To be stranded here of all places, on this ice-tight bank where even echoes founder! Nature presupposes sheer scale: anything of a smaller size could never excite us or entice us, tempt us to buy a dirndl dress or a hunting outfit. Just like cars approaching a distant country, so we too, like stars, are nearing this unceasing landscape. We simply can't stay at home. Someone's put a country inn there, just for us, to put an end to our rambling. And Nature is put where it belongs, with a preserve for domesticated deer or a path through the woods with every tree labelled for our instruction. In no time, we know all there is to know about it. There are no mountainsides to cast us wrathfully down; quite the contrary, we gaze at the bank strewn with empty milk cartons and tin cans and we recognize the limits Nature has placed upon our consumption. In springtime all will be revealed. The sun, a pale patch in the sky, and only a handful of species remaining on earth. The air is very dry. The woman's breath freezes as it leaves her lips, and she holds a corner of her pink nylon dressing-gown to her mouth. In principle, life has ample opportunities for everyone.

The wind forces a frozen cry from her lips. An involuntary and none too savage cry, a mute sound squeezed out of her lungs. Helpless as the child, a field tilled and ploughed and beaten till it's used to the treatment. She cannot take her beloved child's side against his father, because after all it was Father who filled in the order form for extras such as music or holidays. It's all behind her now. Her boisterous son is probably tearing downhill into the dusky valley at this very moment, like an upturned plastic ladybird in his plastic moulded sledge. Soon everyone will be at home. Fating. The terror of the day still pounding in their hearts. If the child doesn't have pieces of shell stuck wet behind his ears! Such filth. That children are here today and gone tomorrow, like time, is the responsibility of women, who stuff food into their own or Father's images and show where things come out again. And, wielding his sting. Father drives his sons out onto the piste, where he can be lordandmaster of the leaderless mob.

The fist knocks the woman senseless against the railing. She has left the last of the cottages far behind now. The children's babble told clearly of how wonderful life is if you let circumstances pull the wool over your eyes. With eyes wide open, the woman always has to go walking on other paths, she's always been squeezed from the tube of her house into the open. Quite often she's gone astray. She's lost her way a time or two and ended up at the police station. Where the officers opened their arms wide and welcomed her in, offering a place to rest. The poor folk who spend too long at the pub get a different welcome. Now Gerti is silent. Amid the elements. Which soon will lie wide open beneath the stars. The child who has been singled by Fate as her surviving next of kin is boisterously tobogganing down the tracks left by others, shooting a breeze of his own creation. Those who have some notion of what's what prefer not to cross his path, not to cross him. But Mother, impelled on her travels by his will, travails from valley to valley to buy him something. Now she is like a sleepwalker. Gone. The villagers stroke her image behind the panes and try to meet her so that she will put in a good word. The Orff courses for infants, which the little ones try hard and often to get out of, guarantee their fathers work at the factory. The children are left as a deposit. They rattle and bash their drums and cymbals and recorders. Why? Because the goodly hand of their caring lordandmaster who owns the factory, a sheltering place for one and all, has staked them out as bait. At times the Direktor stops by and dandles the little girls in his lap. He toys with the hems of their skirts, ahem, and plays with their dolly tea-cosy dresses, isn't this cosy, but doesn't dare wade any deeper in their waters. Still, everything happens under his guardian hand. The children clatter away on the air holes of their musical instruments. And lower down, where there are openings in their bodies, a terrible finger comes out softly into the clearing, as if in its sleep. And not till an hour later will the children, be safe in the breath of their mothers. Suffer the children to come, so that the family can take their supper in a merry atmosphere in the sunshine in the glow of gleaming classical records. And the teacher, as soon as the children crowd into the room, sits totally silent in her compartment, beyond the window of which the station-master goes on moving his lips till her train has left.