Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

No, not quite yet, I can hardly believe it: His cock is almost sticking out of his fly again like an inquisitive child, if he only thinks about it. About all the women and what it's done with them, and what it still wants to do. It seems to have liked it, it wants to know what became of this girl, by whom it was mischievously, almost shamelessly handled. But it knows. This man is incorrigible, no efficient planning and decision-making structure applies to him when he follows his cock, which would like to harden and attach itself in someone, but doesn't have its own hook. At some point the women fall away, and then he falls out of them. Every night, as he falls asleep next to his wife, lonely and alone, he shakes his penis, his maypole, which is allowed to remain standing all year long, and there's still something hanging at the top, astonishing. To the man, it's as if this shaking passes over into his sleep, it must be so, because at some point there's peace, when sleep at last also condescends to catch sight of the tireless ones. Now we've painted such a nicely deviant pattern of behavior on the wall. I can't bear to part from it. One can collect as much information about people as one likes, but the police, the investigators, see principally what they get their hands on, but never more than the surface. The rest is for the refuse collection. The police psychologist with his lopsided profile of the criminal really should go back to art school and produce a new one. The outcome of the search, the dead woman we've found, wait a moment, we don't have her yet, but we'll soon bring her in, yet the core fantasy that triggers the killing, unfortunately we can't find that, because we don't know where at all we should look for it. This man is wild but left to his own devices, others have a room with sport and hobby apparatus instead and are also content with that. It's no wonder that the psychologist can paint this room for us at any time, the room really needs it, too. Here's a man who since childhood has been engrossed above all else in his feces, but understandably he doesn't make a show of it in public, he's not a dog after all, and so we can't observe him live. No camera would stay with it, and they are simply there always and everywhere. A pity, we've never seen anything like that. But soon we'll have a new TV program instead, in which the murderers will be allowed to have their say. Then a childhood is marked by the death of an alcoholic mother, the interpretation is risky, however, since everyone here boozes, though not all with the same consequences, but the son's skin, stamped blue all over by this creeping death, will never be found again. Only slipperiness will be found and cold and rejection and hunger, but after something else, no idea what, and a sticky rag will be found, not, however, what was lying underneath it. The big roll of plastic will fit one woman like a glove, as if she had been poured into it. It seems the forest floor alone was under the unimmaculate cloth. Nothing else. You know, something terrible happened! And already the memory of a dead woman is linked to weeping which never ends, with fear of darkness, and right next door a woman has died again, not quite voluntarily, not of love, but nevertheless. It wasn't her fault, but she had become party to the invisible struggle of a furiously nail-biting consciousness against its owner, who is likewise a kind of anxiety-biter. He snaps before there's even any need. So that later on nothing else can happen to him. The nipples and labia of several women know all about that, they can make a discordant song of it, but they don't necessarily sing it at the choral society, but off the marked piste, and so one knows nothing of the other. It seems to me that as a result this man I'm talking about is all the more concrete, also more alive to the women he meets. They think they know where they are with him, they have felt love's hot breath, the desire of hot teeth, and this crescent-shaped bite proves it to them in case they've forgotten, my God, how it hurts now, earlier I didn't know yet that it was going to hurt so much, when I tenderly permitted, no, asked for it. Except these women appear to confuse the house of their body with something that is decidedly more permanent: solid stone or made of the more dainty insulation bricks. Not bad either. They can't compete with that. A matter of taste. So they have to hand over their little house oven-ready, so that it can be done up at last, so that washing can flutter outside, but not their washing, flutter as cheerily as a song that can go round the world all by itself, one only needs to turn up the radio. One would rather be turned on oneself. The wounds have to be disinfected and cooled down with bags of ice. That's what happens when one holds the head of someone desperate to one's breast: Either he cries until he gets terribly on one's nerves, or he right away bites you. Someone who owns nothing will at least be interested in their property if in nothing else, think these women, and how gladly they would immediately like to give away themselves and all their property as well, so that they will very soon awake in the light, in the wonderful light of love, that pours from a person who has swallowed, no, not a pot plant, but a pocket lamp. And he is now her sun. For the man they would be the filling in the Swiss roll, so to speak, so light, so fine, with their property wrapped around them, and in which they have wrapped the man, hm, tasty! That's how they imagine it. Until the women no longer know where they are at all, and they suddenly have to dispatch themselves to a lawyer to have it explained to them and to see who or what, if anything at all, comes back to them after a while, after, attested by a notary, they have surrendered their property to someone who will not have been worth it. Doesn't matter, it was worth the property. Now they are. No one. Alone. Now the lawyer is supposed to rescue them, no no, that he can never do, the signature is already standing there and absent-mindedly filing his nails. Yes, anyone who takes offense at the pleasures of others puts himself at the mercy of a bad mood, my dear Mme. Piano Teacher! And there it is already, the rotten mood.

The country policeman knows how to treat women, my God. This person, alone on the dusty road, in the window frame of a rented apartment, she should really be quite herself in her yawning impatient disgruntlement, so, she's been stewing long enough now, now the telephone really should be ringing. Oh it's you. How nice. Where are you. The whole time she's been looking for herself, but actually for someone else, who understands her, and then she'll know who she is. A ton of books with signposts right next to her bed, where will we set them all up, and so now she's found herself at last. No wonder mat it took so long, because she has found herself of all things in another, where she had not expected herself to be at all. That's how one becomes important. Ringadingding, now show me the golden ring, says the alarm clock. Time to get up! High time! Life is here now and is about to kick down your door. You've signed the request form for life at the notary, Gerti, Andrea, Karin. Good. So. Now the women know again what's supposed to be in their petition, worked out down to the smallest detail, which they will soon withdraw again. It should have worked one way or another, but it didn't work out. For years there have been rumors, even in the county town, that one time or another the country policeman is supposed to have tried something on the side and then on the other side, but who's going to check up on it, one doesn't check up on colleagues, even if one doesn't really like them. He can't have had much success, if one looks at his debts. Why does he have to buy so many plots of land, he's already got one, his wife's. A name is mentioned, I don't know which, and where a meeting could take place, at which this name was mentioned. A rock is a resistance, which it's no effort to climb. But the lack of resistance of these women, no, I don't believe it, they even leave their garden gate open, which is only two-and-a-half feet high anyway, just so that at last they can begin to love. Every day they are the latest special offers again, simply because they are something quite special. Anybody who didn't want to spend too much money would grab them right away. But what they promised at the beginning was already the end. As if love could not have climbed over, if it had really wanted to get in. The women have lost their appetite now. Today they have again summoned so much spirit out of the bottle, and now they want to be carried off on the spot. As a bloom is caressed by the sun, as softly, and the main thing is, as quickly. Best of all immediately. We have to beat the sun to it. It always goes away, just when the flower is feeling happiest. They want to look for food themselves, the women, an ancient male privilege. But they shouldn't do themselves harm, the silly things, whose personal best time so often appears to be achieved only in death, when one or two people stand around their bed and don't know what they're supposed to do. Yes, the sun shines, too, mat's their aim, that's what they're working towards. The more strength the women put into their lives, the more strength they will lack later, in the care home in Majorca, where meanwhile of course their language, the language of money, would be spoken, if they had been able to keep any of it. Of the money. Their searching is like silently getting up and going home. But they stay a little longer, dust furniture, knick-knacks, pretty little somethings. All superfluous, it all slips through their fingers. But now they really don't need anything but love anymore. Because they don't have anything else. I ask you: Do you need anything? And this was how you answered me. With finding oneself is how they answered me. They must have lost themselves somewhere, where could it have been, in order for them to be able to pull themselves triumphantly together and throw themselves into someone's jaws again. Some sauce, please. Why should we interfere with their goals? After thousands of years women in general have at last grown up and make their own choice from the menu, and they choose, well what, they choose themselves, and that in someone quite different whom they don't really know at all. He's like me, they think, he's not like Walter or Gerhard, who meant nothing to me. Then they might as well have just held onto themselves. But this attitude will really never be able to tempt women into moving somewhat more prudently. But it isn't necessary, they know where their purses are kept. Here I can see all the more clearly, fearfully, that something is going to happen. I see it before my eyes, in my little workshop, where my work is being wrought now, and without any heat, I manage without warmth, it's all alone and so very small, I can't throw it into the fire yet. I have already hinted to what class of people this man belongs, that is, he belongs in no class at all, he belongs back in the kindergarten of humanity, where he, like us, should actually have been brought up, but his teacher was baffled by him, there sits a schoolboy who doesn't say anything, although he's been asked a question. A smack in the face, quickly, the way one chops wood, so that something comes out at last, but nothing comes out, only a creature briefly flutters up, because it has been disturbed, but it right away settles down again. The lad still refuses to learn, although we've advised him how he could do better, because we're sorry for him and add: Well, that's another fine mess, we really wouldn't like to know what's going to become of him. But now we know, whether we want to or not: a country policeman. A childhood memory suddenly rose and immediately fell again, we'll first have to digest this memory.