Elfriede Jelinek: Greed

None of all the promising properties of which there are expectations, there are considerably more than I was able to enumerate here, is at the moment completely paid off or has paid off or is even really in prospect, with the exception of the old woman's share, who, if nothing out of the ordinary occurs and the Lord works a miracle, seems to be declining into eternity and otherwise. The country policeman's daughter-in-law has anyhow made a nice down payment on this eternal bliss, in the shape of a son, who is still a child, especially pleasing to God. God scrubs his soul in confession, the priest scrutinizes it for dirty thoughts and tells the son, after he himself has had a good wank in the darkness of his soul, his favorite place, to join the line of little children at the back, where it's easy to get at him; the line, which the priest receives for children's mass once a week, snakes round there, hissing and scuffling and, making use of the flat of his hand, if someone chatters or passes on unpleasant truths, he sends them home again. Are these personal belongings not perhaps burdens on the development of a still young man, who would urgently need a few mortgages in order to unburden himself a little? To him even curtains are already a revolutionary decision, he's always saying he only needs the bare minimum, and that's the ownership of house and real estate. Otherwise he's stingy, the mechanic, the engineer, and his father even more so. His wife has to embellish the front garden with cuttings which, as if something like that were not constantly happening in the world on a grand scale and as a warning to us, she secretly plucks out from the pots at the nursery. Does this son of man perhaps want to keep the little house but get rid of wife and child? Can all his faithfulness so quickly be over and done with? He hasn't had the family so very long yet! Perhaps there'll be more children! We shall find out or again maybe not, depending on whether I can express myself intelligibly or not and don't mix up the dramatis personae all the time, at the moment it doesn't look as if that's going to happen. Why on earth did I start off with three generations, in fact there are even four? Oh well, they're not all present at the same time after all, and anyway they're all the same. Are we all going to get into the same boat, what do you think? Who wouldn't like to have at least one little house for themselves alone? He could drive under the bridges or drive along the motorways up above, but the house would stay patiently at home and wait for him.

The son of the present country policeman is employed by the Post Office as a telephone maintenance man and mender of faults, he attended a technical secondary school, whose graduates call themselves engineers and are everywhere much sought after, in particular by the telephone companies, shooting up everywhere, soon there'll be just one, hot for our voices. In order to consolidate and shield his permanent job, the son goes every week without fail to his bank on the main square, as if his determination would bring in somewhat more than his securities justify, horns lowered in anticipation of contradiction, inflexible, immovable, his hands, however, pleading, raised almost hesitantly, off he goes to the bank, which gives him credit, until he will have lost every security and finally will only be able to dumbly, imploringly hold out his hands, they stay where they are. To be rich depends on a precise knowledge of what one has and what one could still get. Why does the Church do so little for its own, who fill its buildings so assiduously with flesh? The church doesn't care whether people come or not, it's nearly always locked up anyway, except during mass, when the holy Eucharist listlessly does its duty in its cubbyhole. It should be possible, for example, that pious vergeresses like the young daughter-in-law of the country policeman, in the course of selfless activity in the service of the parish, could spy out little houses becoming vacant more quickly than others, why not, and why then don't they inherit? Why then does a nephew from Linz inherit, who has never even seen a church or his aunt's little house from inside for years? And why are we not all wealthy film stars, who go home and wipe off our desires with our make-up, in order to have bigger, more beautiful ones the next day and particularly in order to have a good night's sleep, so that you can't tell our lives by looking at us and we can all candidly display ourselves in the magazine? Luckily crimes of violence only rarely occur around here. You won't believe just how few people there are who have no relatives at all anymore! Then there are others again, who disguise themselves as widows with perms, and who turn out to have a faraway son after all, who slunk off in good time, but who, at the crucial moment, changes the course of events, which most of the time were themselves slinking along. What a bore! There comes this son, from Linz or what do I know, from Recklinghausen, Germany, or Canada, where he had been thought to have gone missing in the smelting house of a steelworks or underneath a gigantic stack of wood, and the fatted calf together with the house are already waiting for him, without him having done a thing for it. The will is now challenged with a heavy sword, just wait a moment, thwack, and the air's out of it. Perhaps the Church only exists to knock reason into the old folks who have to die soon anyway, to ensure they step into its marquee in good time and to prettily illustrate the dark abyss of hell. Heaven is always other people, when they benevolently take our property off our hands. Hell is in us. The Church itself prefers to inherit, instead of its half-witted employees getting anything.

The son of the country policeman remains sitting immobile in the customer's easy chair of the branch manager, afraid of inadvertently betraying through the language of his body, which even he doesn't quite understand, anything, even the tiniest bit about his true and presumptive properties which the bank doesn't absolutely have to know about. What do you need this scrap of paper for? What's on this bit of paper doesn't interest me in the least. Only the signature counts, and what's printed above it. Only then is the truth also legally binding. Today the bank is to be informed of the prospective salary rise, which was notified in an informal letter. Of course all this is merely a provisional state of affairs for this employee, because soon his properties will be more numerous than the grains of sand on the vegetables freshly pulled from the garden, with which you can save money shopping. The wife pulls it right out of her heart, in which no one lives anymore, because her husband moved out years ago. Yes, this house is yours to hold, says God, and means the body of a human being, even several houses together wouldn't make a knight out of me, thinks the country policeman, who knows about such a tin man from a book of tales from this area. His son is already as zealously greedy as his father and he would stop at nothing, if people didn't voluntarily die beforehand, sometimes admittedly pretty late in the day. If the dear lord knew to whom they raise up houses, instead of him having to steal them as his children do, who even have to take care of that themselves.

The rage, which is sometimes hidden behind a cheerful smile, may then suddenly but all the more powerfully shoot out, if the old body, which goes along with every pension, shows itself unasked in the hall next to the toilet door, where it doesn't belong, it belongs once and for all up in the attic. This old woman has a pretty thick skull, but a plastic screwdriver handle, which has many smaller, interchangeable heads, its changelings so to speak, is after all not made of cotton wool. It's good and hard, even if not fatal. Saints sometimes yield and concede something, but not this head. If you please, here however we have a corresponding bruise on the temple. Why does the old dear have to keep on falling down! Gome a bit closer again, you old heap of shit, then we'll show you how wretchedly you can bleed behind the bright and cheerful geraniums on the window sill, which are on the outside so that no one can see in. The people in the bank yesterday irritated this man impermissibly with their glances, and he has a very violent temper, aha, he's got another appointment with the branch manager, he must be short again this month! He must've taken on too much with all those mortgages and bills of exchange and foreign exchange credits! Janisch Jr. feels their looks like branches prodding the wild beast of prey inside him. But if it really came out, they would be the first to run away screaming. He says to the branch manager: It'll break my wife's heart, if it's not possible for her to open a knitted goods boutique downstairs in the basement. For this purpose the cellar requires large-scale reconstruction, damp coursing and internal and external fittings, all depending on the available cash, which you and your bank will hand over to me today, otherwise I'll be even less successful with my repayments than before, and then you can forget about the total amount, because then you'll get nothing. Yes, Frau Eichholzer is still alive and we hope for a long time to come, my wife's looking after her and the Church isn't going to come to my wife and take a look because of an incontinent old woman. My wife sees the inside of the church every day anyway. Smile, smile, my wife would be like an open book for the Dear Lord, if he needed to read it, but he wrote the Book of Books, so from one eternity to the next he doesn't need another one. But he knows everything anyway. Smirk! And: No need to worry, for all that, we've already got an eye on the house after the next one, although we will already have taken on too much with the last one and its renovation. The land it's on will provide enough security for the mortgages on the first. We can acquire a whole string of houses, one always secures the next (they'll be real castles, when we're finished with them) even if not quite legitimately and if we only knew which. We already know what we'll use for the back-up copy, the money from the bank, your money, a sweet mixed community of several mortgage, discount and other loan providers, yes indeed, we will get houses and homes, and we'll rent or lease shops in them, we'll paint windows, we'll seal floors, we'll agree on built-in cupboards, we'll mislay tiles or trample on them in a rage, because they don't make up the desired pattern, one way or another. The point of these little houses inhabited by organisms will be, that each preceding model can be taken as security for the subsequent one, well, isn't that a good idea to stimulate our economy and remove superfluous living beings? With people with a weak heart it's even possible to use bulbs, e.g,. of the pretty lily of the valley, we already said so, really everyone knows that, and the patient will have such a delighted look on her face, when we mix it with the wild garlic curd and spread it on her slice of bread. Snigger. Snigger. Thank you very much, now I'll go again, to hurry along the building work. You'll see how nice it'll be when it's finished, after all, it'll still belong to you for a while, dear bank, trust is good, supervision can hardly be better. You'll surely understand, once I've laid the foundation stones for the extension of this home right up to the attic! Often things that happen nearby have an effect far away. If you don't believe me, then just place a small coin in the bulb socket and turn the light on!