Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

No grave should be made of me, thinks country policeman Kurt Janisch. That would be the worst thing for me. To end up in a small container. No. Preferably in a large one!

The girl on the other hand. Her body still belongs to her, passing its time like a song bird, hopping from branch to branch, until she hits the ground below, but by then she has long ceased to have herself in her hand. So please, what's she getting up to now, she's banged into something with her pointed tits, which she can keep for all I care and whose production in the nearby district hospital is still evident. The man cannot even take Gabi properly in hand for his almost dreamy, yet precisely directed hand manipulations, she slips through his fingers every time, which doesn't, however, annoy him very much. But it would certainly be no big problem for him. Standing on the shore as the life-saver of a small child or a car, he would like that better. He would jump into the waters without hesitation. His penis nods when it's squeezed, but also of its own accord. How the girl has to laugh when she sees that. She asks especially for this movement, which he wrests from an implacable life and from a body which is deaf to entreaties. Women are mud and that holds onto everything. Slime. Something can be drawn out, a sledge, a wheelbarrow, and before one can pull the cart out of the dirt, it's already disappeared again. The mud has it. Only occasionally, during a thunderstorm, do women voluntarily part with something, rushing in fear out of their emergency accommodation with their families, which they must be ready to leave at any time. For once the mud has time to spread, calmly and deliberately, I mean with deliberation. Then there come the women, a whole flood, stir everything up, themselves most of all, because they are so in love, and then they lose themselves, in their own mud, because their partner has suddenly gone, for no reason. What, already? So soon? That's a gloomy prospect! We can't see any reason! Perhaps the mountain will come after all? For the time being its stones are coming down. It can take a while before it comes itself.

I don't know, there's something different about the girl this time, the country policeman is still thinking, as her blissful gaze at him is suddenly as if extinguished. So. Yet another veil over her pupils. Finished. The man's peace of mind is gone. Now he has thrown the older woman, in whom he places some hopes, out of her own living room, just because of the girl. She had become quite unbearable with her constant demands for more, without even knowing everything she's got. She doesn't even have all her wits about her, one is always missing. She should for once go and rub her gusset herself, with her own hands, so she sees what that's like. But when she's supposed to whack off in front of him, then it only makes her all the greedier for him, precisely because he wants to watch her. It is one of many variants of the heightening of pleasure, all of which she would like to get to know later at her leisure. Eager for knowledge she listed them all, the variations on her flesh. She even gives the man orders, because she's waited so long for it. She has a right. He'll take that from her. He has a method for that. He's already dreading it. He knows: As soon as he opens his shop, she's already running in, and he's the one who's supposed to be directing the traffic. He hardly has time to start his engine, and she's already trying to throttle it. He thinks, she wants nothing else except to feel number one in his books. Can't she hear her expiration date, even if she can't read it? Doesn't she hear, on the other side of the door, the moaning of an adolescent still under sweet sixteen? Well, that's a different tune, isn't it? As fresh as a folk song, as resolute as the federal anthem, but one doesn't know the words. All the notes the older woman has mastered, the man knew long ago. Because he reads them from her red, sweating, enraptured, blissful face, which she puts on when she sees him. And the tune she strikes up underneath him is false, he thinks it is even deliberately faked. It is a strange whimpering, which begins to turn into an almost practiced groaning, hardly has he touched her. He wouldn't have believed it, if he hadn't heard it with his own ears. This woman doesn't have anymore devotees than her house. In reality an unpropertied property-owner, that's what she is, who believes she resides in the realm of the untrue but beautiful. That's love. Jealousy upsets whole goods trains, it upsets me too, but the goods are what count. Get your doll out of my house and do it this minute. Oh no. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be so rude, please, don't leave me. I didn't want to order you to do something, which could be terribly painful for you, but even more so for me. I haven't once doubted your love or entertained the least suspicion, even if behind this door you're ramming this little girl into my ground. I love and sacrifice, and I don't draw back from that, because I see that you could never deceive or exploit me. Go now and get rid off her! Before anything else happens.

Such blubbering or something like it, often heard, often seen on the display, but never read, heard, or copied, now emerges from the handfuls of hair flowing down, which gently drape a glans which has already turned blue. We are in the car again, which is standing there, something else is standing too, only the heater is running. Afterwards the man will have to pick strands of hair from his mouth, pull them like fishbones between his teeth, which right away, you never know where you have to be first, it's like the homebound traffic jam at the junction with the Federal Highway to Mariazell on a weekday at five, so he'll need to feign kisses, which would actually have turned into angry bites, if the tongue had only joined in. But it has taken cover in time, sticking to the side of his mouth, so that nothing happens to it; he's already dreading, even before he opens his mouth to let in her aquatic bird of passage, one of many, and in addition all the flaps and nozzles of flesh, all of it, all the flesh won from impenetrable swamps! As if it's disappeared. He must force it, the tongue, well now, somewhat belatedly, it is joining in our aerobics exercise after all, after it had briefly withdrawn behind the barrier of the teeth for a rest. The tongue would fit very easily at the edge of the lake, but it is the slow-flowing rivers of a woman which are squeezed out through the sweet fingers of love. Juice shop. Have your glass ready nevertheless, you won't get anything else. If you place this glass on a tea light, the light will never flicker and go out. Because it cannot get away.

We are now on a parking lot, which isn't one at all. It is, freshwater life-forms can confirm it at any time, almost a bog, thick, juicy fennel stalks everywhere, though not until summer, now fresh weeds are just beginning to grow rampant and swamp the place, foul, stagnant, vegetable, right next to it the winter refuges of birds, it doesn't matter which. The vegetation is not yet fully developed, that's still to come. Rome wasn't built in a day either, but on swampland nevertheless.

We just have to watch that the wheels don't sink in, so that we can get away from here again, but there's plenty of brushwood, it can be put under the wheels if need be. So that we have the necessary friction and the peace and quiet for a young woman called Gabi, who at this moment is likewise rather naughty, to make a face and give this man a blow job. She has mastered that like an older woman, but she hasn't mastered herself. That's something they can all do, women: be bad, until one has to smack them on their raised butts, yes, turn it around to me, whispers the man in her ear, at least she didn't suffocate earlier on, Gabi. She's recovered again. A reason to be cheerful, but only one of many. So now she's ended up here, on this human island anchored in the lake, swamp island, this is exactly where, later on, it's already settled, he has to open up the salty face down there once again and give it a good licking, she won't give him any peace until then. Otherwise he'll drive straight back to the other one after all. Earlier we didn't get to where we wanted, she stopped us right to the end, the other one. Swamps only exist where there is very high precipitation, but Gabi is still very wet, from what, from that. Please, just let me drive Gabi home at least, the country policeman said a couple of minutes ago to Gerti, let me, I'll just quickly drive her home, and then I'll come straight back to you. I'll take her away, and come back as quickly as possible, right away, but you'll have to give me ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, you'll get something in return. No, nothing will get in the way, not this time, it did other times, but nothing will get in the way today, I promise you. For today, even I've had enough. I know: you haven't. This man may have enough, yes, even of himself. Nevertheless best of all he likes to do it with himself, which he conceals from all the people close to him: For him that is the equality on which our civilization is based-to avoid as far as possible being measured against others! He reflects, condemned to making advances: all the women, and so many all alone!, but most of all he is attached to himself and his dreams. They are all dreams of bodies, and they are sometimes even better than the dreams of houses. It is a pleasure at last to have people in front of one, and without the small difference between one another and what they have between their legs, that's not so very important in his opinion. He's had enough of women, he's never fed up with property, but the bodies, they befall him and overwhelm him. Nor does he see anyone he knows in front of him but faceless people in indeterminate positions. How nice. Children, whether boys or girls, get their chance just like adults. The age of the children is unimportant, they can be almost sixteen like Gabi, they can also be infants, it doesn't matter which month. And they all open up just for him, like suns.