Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

So far so good. Without pumping the water drops through brick conduits and galleries to the city, where it is forced into the bunker, I mean the reservoir. We've given our promise, but the reservoir has to keep it without reservation. How should we talk about someone who kills himself or others or no one at all out of love, or for some other reason, which I, because I have to speak, jump after, like an angler with his net when his catch threatens to slip off the hook and escape. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be carried along by happiness, rather by the air under an airplane or of course by our dear water, please, there it is already, fulfilling its duties, answering the call of nature which it itself is. Water, of which I ceaselessly talk and sing, that glittering whirling mass, which after a few lines is already so close to our hearts, furthermore water has more solid properties than our feelings. Our feelings say, if you really love me, then you will do that and that and that as well. No talking back.

Without much huffing and puffing, the fit country policeman, at the moment not on duty, otherwise he wouldn't be here, continues to set his sinewy legs in front of him, always one after the other, and the forward body always goes a little way ahead, uphill, where one's feet never like to rush ahead. They can't because the body doesn't want it, it has its own sense of rhythm. Every person has to follow his own body after all, which is his guiding star in the darkness. He appears on his own stage, the country policeman, but he's so quick that he's hardly appeared before he's disappeared again and has turned up somewhere else, two feet, two-and-a-half feet, three feet further on, not much further, hurrying almost involuntarily as if this subterranean water was carrying him away on its shoulders. That it can do so, we know, indeed, this very water here, in this catchment prison, which rumbles underground and once fumed and foamed above ground, when someone threw something in, which didn't belong there. Nevertheless, it was immediately carried away by the tireless force of nature, constantly making unscheduled reappearances, and when we see it, it's as if it had never been gone at all. We always only see it for brief periods of time. Now one only sees, built into the rock, the water's little house, in which it, unfortunately enslaved, yet full of energy, romps around and which it wants to get out of, no not out, it wants, as always, to go downhill, otherwise we would need a pump. And we humans have exploited this quality of plunging water as we exploit everyone and everything we lay our hands on. Now it has a reason to perform its duty, soon it will admire on TV the plates and cups of the good-looking neighbor, which were washed up with it plus a very special liquid, blessed be its name. One spent so long persuading it, yes, still the water, of its usefulness, and now it really does believe in it and, in order to make a career for itself, abstains from loud roaring, rushing, and foaming. These three words are good, I think, we'll hold on to them as long as we can and then recycle them when possible. We mustn't repeat them too often, otherwise we'll be reproached with that, too. And if we say it's intended to make all the hard things we have to experience go down smoothly, that it's for an inner creature that in a certain way also has quite a hard time of it, because every time it wants to kill, it gets a pailful over the head or the turned up garden hose in the face, then once again no one believes us.

For his age, but then again he isn't so old, he's in the prime of life, Kurt Janisch is in very good condition. After all he trains to stay that way, he's already done his stretches today, he usually does that at home in front of the mirror in his parents' bedroom, perhaps to check whether he's still there in the mirror which is firmly fitted into the wardrobe which already belonged to his parents. There has to be a mirror in every house, and if it's too small for our height, then a bigger one simply has to be put in. Strange, such a good-looking man, married, R.G., and then he doesn't like to do his stretches in public, although people would like looking at him, no one would be biased against him. At home, there he likes to look at himself, sometimes endlessly it seems; so where does this aversion to the unknown, but even more to the people he knows, come from? He always does his running in more out of the way places, all of which he knows in his sleep, he grew up here after all. Glances turn to follow him, involuntarily, of men and women, under the firs and pines and larches, often glances of strangers, who are on holiday here and among whom ill-humor because of the weather and the people, with whom one can't have a conversation, but who are fitter than oneself, who only has three weeks in the year to make a proper go of it, is at all times very much in fashion. But at a table with a decent mid-afternoon bacon snack and a large wine and a couple of glasses of rowanberry schnapps good sense soon evaporates and is replaced by senselessness. One can also knock it back at home with a roof over one's head, above all if one's a teetotaller, but, as already mentioned, the country policeman doesn't like the glances of strangers, which he easily takes to be disparaging. To him they're like slaps in the face, which really he should be dealing out, glances, which make his body inwardly devour itself as if of its own accord in a kind of shame, yes, that does occur to me repeatedly: devour. It's really true, what the poet said: Shame always outlives one, no matter whether one's inclined to it or not, and inclination's always downhill anyway. There's someone who only wants to be away, cleared away, and yet does everything in order to be there. Someone who wants to plant his house-signs in the landscape like totem poles. They are supposed to stand and speak for him, because he doesn't like to do it himself, although women in particular are constantly demanding it of him. Their wish is that through speaking their interesting personality becomes even more interesting, that it will be interwoven as if by a glittering lurex ribbon. Something flashes, what is it? Oh, I see. It's the pullover, not the gold filling. They first want to go through many mouths, women, conduct amusing verbal skirmishes, but then again they want to be stilled, when, e.g., someone takes the lips of their vulva in his mouth, sucks them briefly and then bites them as well, which wouldn't have been at all necess-ary, but one liked it nevertheless. Yes, please, once again, please, next week as well and the week after, until nothing more is left of us, that's just what makes it so especially good. That's love. The country policeman would now rather look for a roof, under which he would like to go up and downstairs. And the car, it stands on the parking place that goes along with it or in the garage. The country policeman has covered a large part of the garden in cement for his car, although his wife would have liked to grow flowers there too. Now only a teeny weeny patch is left for something so superfluous. The rest is paved over for eternity, even if the mother earth below has long been healthy again and would quite like to breathe again. So the country policeman's wife only has this narrow strip left for the flowers, but boy, there the double-blooming garden plants throng together, deluxe models only, it's something she has achieved by her obstinacy, the patch of garden is her hobby. At the garden center the grower has all the plants looking three times as thick as they would normally be produced in nature, only in the garden catalog do they turn out like that, creations of God, notorious for putting a gloss on things; I would not have thought that a civilian, who is not God, can bring forth such plants, but I see it's possible, nature really puts up with it. Yes, I could love such plants, but they only exist twice, once in the catalog and once again in the front garden fragment here, so that people can see them, yes, that's part of it, what do you mean see?, but of course!, through the gaps between the fence posts or over them. A woman is different. A different woman would be different again. This woman wants her work to be admired, she is not the secretive type like her husband, quite the reverse. She's happy that she can make a fuss about her garden, which her women friends admire, which, however, she is not allowed to have, she only has neighbors. Her husband doesn't like to see her gossiping with them, nor does he like to see what others see or have, precisely because they have it and he doesn't. He prefers to see, if it's true, that this woman is clinging to her possibility of existence, or whether perhaps she would let go if one talked her into it. He doesn't want the consequences; he's so mistrustful he doesn't even trust the sunbeams, which descend on his wife's garden like an army, one that doesn't destroy, but brings fruitfulness. Yes, that's where it rises, the dear sun, over there, go on, take a look, it's free, but put on tinted glasses first. Not a speck of weed between the larkspurs and the columbines, which both equally look as if it isn't really them. To me they look like rare orchids. How does the woman do it? She could win prizes, but she wouldn't be allowed to, unless they were paid out cash. This garden is like a wonderful silk cloth, preciously woven in the most marvelous colors, so beautiful, just fantastic. In front of it a solid gate, at the sight of which one would prefer to get lost, in order to be saved by it. Others would like to be transparent, so as to be able to ooze through the fence and have time to read the notices, which were stuck into the ground beside the plants, where on earth did Mrs. Janisch buy them? With the husband nothing would be any use. Although: He's not really shy. It is as if his body were a language, which he himself has first of all laboriously to learn, while others already know it. There are others who sometimes even speak themselves as a foreign language, and then they don't understand themselves anymore. But it doesn't bother them, because occasionally they like to find out something new about themselves, and regret that it will never be in the papers. They say to themselves: How could I have married this or that woman. They wake up between the legs of someone whom they've only just met, these brave people. Today they are in charge. Yes indeed, these decent, hardworking, and competent people have become a power in the land nowadays, and I wouldn't like to get in their way if I were you (I think I might be able to do it!), unless you were sitting in a shiny Jaguar, like the one which the new Minister of Justice would like, and I would like too, gone all gone! The minister is already gone, too, and a new one took his place. The country is called: Austria. Get to know it properly or get lost! The country policeman at any rate always knows where, but not who, he is. Instead women want to get to know him better and even better. He wouldn't care, their building plan would be enough for him. Then nothing would be unfamiliar to him anymore. Nothing would have to be fought against anymore, one could offend everyone, and one wouldn't even make enemies. Everyone would be like us. Like us. The country policeman thinks little or a great deal, depending on whether it's necessary. But he doesn't say much, and if he does then his mouth moves as if held in place by a steel bracket, that's how greatly he restrains himself when speaking. He can hardly get his mouth open, not even for a greeting. Can it be, that women find something like that really so interesting? Because they don't listen properly to what he says, and in no time at all he can rise to be their hero (and not a zero, well it's a rhyme, if not a good one), because heroes never have to say anything and can just hit one in the mouth? Perhaps. They know how to speak at any rate, that's something that women can already do, they don't need any previous knowledge for that. They manage it, even if they've never gone to the university of life, which one begrudged them, because they had one or more brothers, who in turn would have died in the hell of dissatisfaction if they hadn't been allowed to study. They never finished it off. Studying. But look, this woman here managed it under her own steam. How peacefully she carried on her modest dealings for decades! Playing the piano, what do I know. She had already conquered heaven before she showed up here, and brought heaven with her, to fit it into the jigsaw of the mountains, in exactly the right place, well, here it also has fresh air right down to those lying at the foot of the mountains as well, who all wear sturdy Goiserer boots, which, as the name suggests, come from Bad Goisern as do only a few of the chosen of this world. It's a small place, we can't all come from there. Only Little Jorg H., he can. Back to heaven. First, this woman had been looking for heaven for a long time, probably she mislaid it, but that's precisely what it isn't: a floor. And now, hardly has she found it, she has immediately invested it in a certain person. Unfortunately he, too, has meanwhile got lost, without the woman having noticed. This man and in a way world peace and in many ways music as well and reading: her hobby, these things had all been the stuff of her life. Now it is nothing but this man alone. Patience, I'm running too far ahead. I'm not going to reveal my whole army to you already, it stands on clay feet anyway, but not in China. What does patience mean, everyone's already gone to sleep. Why did I start sticking the twigs and flowers on it, which were caught by chance in my camouflage net? So that you wouldn't see everything at once, which you've seen coming, and now you've turned me off. A flick of the wrist was enough. Before I could get around to the business with the apprentice and Miirzzuschlag, and you could talk and smile about my many earlier remarks, which today I bitterly regret.