Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

So here, on the cold stairs, a former foreign correspondence clerk and business translator and part-time pianist from the formerly big bad wild city, holds her head in her hands and blubbers. She knows, in how many languages one can plead and in what tones, she knows many of them, but she should also know that tones are no use if there's someone who doesn't want to hear and feel or has no receiver for them, not even in a dental filling with detector capabilities. This woman simply cannot be understood. That's the way it is. It's all no use. The question, which we have meanwhile almost forgotten, although it's often been asked, goes: Why is the door to the apartment suddenly shut, locked from inside, just where the key is in the lock? And why doesn't the spare key open it up? Because you can't get it in? No. Because it's outside the house under the door mat, where we can't get at it. Anyway, it wouldn't open up at all if a colleague is sticking in the lock on the other side. Can't it be put more simply? Well, I can't do it. And why is the woman still waiting and has now forced her body to wait with her? For whom is she doing it? Let us free the body from its constraints and let us be quite frank ourselves: Of course I understand, that the beloved man can't go home to where his wife is with the girl, after all I've read enough novels about that and similar unpleasant matters. Please, come and visit me and bring me something nice, that's what I said to him, almost cheeky, wasn't I?, after he had examined my documents on the country road, as if he had personally picked up copies of the laws and brought them with him, in order to throw the book at people. It was all as if carved in stone. He had thought for a long time beneath his crash helmet. As far as I was concerned he could right away have taken a cane in one hand and my ass in the other, because I really had behaved very badly on the road, it's true (disregarded right of way of the country road, but really nothing came along, from any direction, and the one who did come I didn't even glance at). The country policeman hesitated, stared at me as if his eyes were halters, oh yes, that's how a relationship begins, even if only to one's own body, but which one didn't have beforehand either. And then he gripped my arm, he gripped me by the arm. In an intense conversation with me he absent-mindedly held my upper arm with one hand. But then I was already waiting for the other hand, so please, when is it finally going to come? So I said, what can you bring me, when you come to visit me, that is above all, you! Yes, always remain yourself. I think you're good the way you are. You are the man of my dreams. Tall, strong, blond, blue-eyed and you look like a Viking, only a little smaller. You have a powerful erotic effect on me. In addition you are the tower of strength I have always longed for, exactly, that's what it says here and as far as I'm concerned it can stay. How lucky that I picked you up on the road first of all, then accepted my punishment, and, already with a firm date with you, on the spot, where I stood with lowered eyes, which were right below my modern short haircut in Caucasian blonde, so already with a date arranged, met you again in an outdoor restaurant in the county town, quite by chance as far as the other customers were concerned and so also found you at last, for my part forever. So, I catch my breath a little, now I want to decide my price per cubic meter. It's to be expected that I set the tone, after all I've seen almost the whole world and understood most of it, too. But I didn't expect that you would pay no attention at all to my tones. You brought a measuring tape with you, what's that for? It's high time to mark out the remaining space, it's the space that I need before your ass can touch my oak trunk (the bed is made of that precisely without any use of iron the healthiest thing possible and brand new and no nails!) for the first time. Why don't you follow me? Further occasions are to follow, until I start feeling better. One last spark of reason has stayed with me, now it arouses my anger, a smoldering fire develops, which eats away my views and opinions at breakneck speed. I know, I know, I should keep up with all the fresh cut flower girls, this year's harvest, hardly out of their leading strings, but I can't do it. You're already a grandfather. Valentine's Day is already definitely past for this year, on which you didn't bring me any flowers. Perhaps there's nothing like experience? Well, perhaps like mine. When it comes to women any amount of experience can in five minutes effortlessly be canceled out by youth. Yet you're not so young yourself anymore. On the other hand: If I want something, a whole peace studies research institute could not get me out of a war with myself, which I would start immediately. I can fight, bloody hell, are you talking to me, then you'll soon see. I shouldn't love him, this man, but I do. So time passes. It's the bloody truth. No letter, no postcard, no phone call, no divorce, no decision at all, no engagement, there's nothing without him, only the naked, grinning nothingness of death, and that comes ever closer instead of keeping its distance. But I still have a lot of time, perhaps the best of times. Statistically speaking at my age the safe distance from death is 38 years or perhaps a little less. I beg to be allowed to write to him, but his wife has never seen a letter which someone might have written to him except the bank. His wife, suspicious that some repayment date had been missed again, would immediately tear open the letter and disembowel it. And if I press him, then he just goes, he really did go once before, that is, he knows how to play the game. Disillusionment will come to me and stay. I want to come myself a few times before that and go again, in order to make things cozy once again where I am. Now more than ever. So who am I?

I mean well by myself, if I love him, but, for me at least, there's a limit to everything. He simply stays away after I have asked him to be allowed to be his wife one day. My panic leads to ever greater states of exhaustion. After three weeks he comes again, at a loss I try to teach him English or French(!), which he may find useful in future, when foreign women drivers would like to ask him something. But he just wants to have a pleasant rest without thinking, can only be induced to make the most essential movement, down to his fly, which he can do in his sleep, like a young dog, except a dog doesn't need one. I think it is this combination of sleepiness and alertness that attracts me so much to him, as if an innocent, unselfconscious writer were repeatedly to force himself to write me dirty letters. Apart from the physical he does absolutely nothing here, the man, no repairs, although in my house there is a constant lack of physical energies, to carry such things out. But then he does listen to me, when it's almost too late, when I tell him, as if I were the only girl in the world, and then he always grips my arm or my shoulder or my hips and looks at me, and I allow myself to be carried away again. Until the tide goes out again, because I never ask questions nor ever question anything else and have already lent him money again. I don't ask him anything either. Ask a stupid question and the postmaster of love replies: host not known. I run hot and cold by turns, if he reaches out to me in a particular way, which I could describe if it were not indescribably beautiful. The next day my description would already be askew as worn-down heels, because then he would do something quite different that I hadn't expected, and which would be much more beautiful. He is sometimes tender and attentive, for which I've been waiting for weeks, but then I'm over-nervous and have to take a sedative. But when he grabs my arm, he could immediately apply to make someone my guardian, it doesn't matter who, I would let him right away. Another time, if he feels like it, my hero drags me by the hair, bleached by coloring and anyway no longer of the strongest, through the apartment, although it should be the turn of my poor arm to be gently held. That's how we always begin. As we go on. One day this man completely tears the gusset of my trousers, although I'm feeling in need of some tenderness and sweetness, and plays around quite roughly with me down there. I fit in entirely with what he wants, but in doing so I at least want my dignity as a human being to be respected. If he doesn't grab me I immediately long for violations. I prefer it the other way, but I don't dare say so, otherwise he'll want a side-dish as well. It all takes place while one, as I do, trusts in love, as all people must. One should rub oneself well with lotion beforehand, otherwise one will burn in this sun. Sometimes he's like a naughty child, he burrows around in my female organism, in which all my organs, I hope, will keep their place into old age, but one can never know in advance. Hanging loose, gaping quietly and bobbing against each other, please, may I present my organs to you, they are entitled to everything, even to take your driver's licence or to fill up an organ donor form, so when he's there, I can't even say it-with him they stand up right away, the organs, without even knowing what's wanted of them, they at any rate are ready. Maybe I'm not yet, who's asking me. Like every child in school used to do when called out, when a teacher still had authority, there they stand. Like the number one. They're already gaping and they've hardly been touched by him, only by him, the lips of my vulva, although I already wanted to slam them shut behind me, but before the world, these little trap-doors with their very own feelings. They only feel something with this man. I don't understand them. I don't understand why. I don't understand myself either. Nevertheless: At least my body is talking to me again, a good thing, that it's not too late yet, a good thing that you have to remain silent while reading. Please tell that to your radio and the other pieces of equipment as well, phew, they're already quite exhausted, it would be a good idea for them, too! How precipitate of the man to go now, when he's only just come, he hasn't even looked at me properly yet. Apart from my hole he hasn't seen much of me yet, the eternal cave tourist. And if he had thought a bit longer, he would perhaps have had something quite different to say to me than what he actually did say. Drain in the bathroom, hot water tap in the kitchen, there's something wrong with the boiler, too, there's something wrong with all of them, there's something wrong with me as well, which would be worth investigating or leaving alone. I have my longing. I'm sure he could repair everything, DIY is his hobby. He doesn't do it. First of all I'm supposed to sign the whole house over to him, then we'll see. That's asking a bit much, don't you think, but I don't have any children and won't have any now. I'm alone.