Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

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.