Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

Now the country policeman walks briskly ahead of a woman, trotting lightly like a wolf, across the mats, where hayricks will soon stand. He can write more than just his name, he can draw something up so that a notary can make a fair copy of it, whereas I have an unfinished manuscript on a screen in front of me, which glows it's true, but only illuminates a small part of my brain at once. The country policeman, however, has the overview and keeps it in mind, too. He always keeps everything. The name of this person counts more or less. That is, where it stands at the moment, on the promissory note he has issued, all he can do is keep his fingers crossed. But the man knows where he can get something. There's hope yet. If there isn't, then I could stop at last, you've said it. Don't you see it, this body I can see in front of me, I could almost take an interest in it myself, my eyes want to see something indecent, and my hands want to attack something indecent and play around with it, and then unfortunately I always want to say something unmentionable, how embarrassing, even if only for me. Not so fast, my room has to be tidied up first, I can't let anyone see it. Yes, this body, which we're going to keep running with, this arrow taut against the desolate sinews of the landscape, and he, he is supposed to have become the prize of this woman? No, personally I don't believe it. I thought it was she who had become the prize? One day she'll eventually wake up, and then bingo, but she doesn't win anything. At some point, one day it's payday, when the bank statements drop as deep as the unfathomable ocean, except with a balance one can fathom why it is so low at present. It won't be her day, thinks a woman, but her time will nevertheless have come. Then he'll get a divorce and marry her in order to get the remainder from her as well. She believes it, she is imbued with this conviction. She wants to give him a very affectionate answer, very softly in his ear, for this party of her lifetime, but he isn't there. At last he'll listen to her for once. Yes, the time has come: Her answer isn't enough for him, it's not concrete enough for him, not adult. He tells her loudly. Do grow up. In a moment he'll be raging noisily on the street again, because the door will be locked, but not seriously. To the woman, it's as if he's always sending her back into the corner, although she even had years of musical instrument tuition and, perhaps out of revenge, even gave some herself. But she is unable to play this instrument. The greater her love for him, the smaller and more insignificant she feels. Often, when she catches sight of herself in a mirror or reflected in a shop window, she finds it impossible to grasp that he is with her and that it is her. I, another? Don't I hear pounding live beats as an accompaniment there? Please not! Do I have to listen to them as well, even though I only know the classical music of life, like the woman I'm talking about, and who likewise loves only classical music? Unfortunately it doesn't mean anything to the country policeman. In a self-analysis he would say, if he could: This woman is completely fascinated by me. I radiate an inner strength, which she has always longed for. How nice for me, it's a real gold mine. No, this man is like no other I know. Perhaps he's like the sea or the mountains, I know them too, but only superficially, the mountains a little better, one can at least build on them, if they don't throw themselves away first. Here building has been forbidden by the countryside commission and two hundred other organizations. One is only allowed to trample around on the mountain soil if one is a summer sportsman or a winter sportsman or an all-weather sportsman. The mountains simply belong to everyone. Only in heaven will we conquer them. The country policeman belongs to this educated and charming and attractive and active woman alone, as she hopes. She wants at last to find an inner home and shelter. That's crazy.

She can throw him alive into boiling water, for all I care, and jump in after him, and once he's heated up, eat him up inclusive of core and stalk, or whatever it is she wants to do with him. I've held her back long enough, in order to adopt her cause, let her gobble him up and in return present him with all the dishes and the house that goes with them. She will be digested by him and disappear without trace. I can see that already. He turns to her, as he always does, it takes quite an effort on his part, he tends always to turn away from a person. As a child only bed-wetting, and he didn't really want that either, accompanied him for a long time, like an annoying pet that won't go away. Wait a minute, where has the woman got to now, she hasn't gone to make another coffee, has she? Doesn't she know what to do with her time? He quietly follows her and studies her like a schoolboy, as if she were a text, which one has to learn in order to make the grade, and that is always property property property. The party he supports says so too, it tells its supporters that they clearly stand out from the others and deserve everything and more of what they have and still want. Except the members of parliament shouldn't earn more than 60,000 schillings a month, but that no longer applies now either. Property can become a nice hobby, but one has to train really hard with the tax office in order to keep some of it. This man here should be properly acknowledged by me, as a student, main subject: Live, but don't let live. As student of the university of life, if you like, because he knows what matters, the quiet values. Property. Or have you ever heard a house speak, except through party noise and TV from an open window? What appears easiest to us, this man finds difficult: to be a human being, so say the poets, who have understood nothing but want to talk all the time themselves. Well. The High Commission of Curtains is closed now, so that one doesn't notice right away that official business is being conducted here. This man, therefore, is a fellow student, but one who doesn't really want to learn anything, nothing, from nobody. That one can buy dolls in a sex shop, whose bodies look in a way unappetizing, well, the head's OK, that while masturbating one can pull a plastic bag over one's head and tighten it at the throat, till one almost pops off, and then one pops up again, the bag abruptly, suddenly open!, please, don't forget that!, and there's our orgasm, which we once had and have missed for some time now, there it is again, stronger than ever before, stronger than with any woman, stronger than any arm. We had begun to believe we won't get one at all anymore. But the shelves are full. Every poor man wants to be rich, that is just as natural a phenomenon as the fact that one can introduce all kinds of things into one's asshole, both small and surprisingly large objects. That, however, one has to do with the other hand, one hand is supposed to tighten the bag. So one hand always knows what the other's doing.

He goes to the hairdresser once a month, the country policeman, to get a haircut, today is not that day. A conviction abruptly pervades him, unexpectedly, he then wanders through the territories of idleness, nothing, he wanders through the territories of his job, there he has often struck lucky. While driving, women make mistakes out of carelessness, absent-mindedness, or incompetence, and already the country policeman has them by the skirt and doesn't let go again, if they're to his taste and he has got hold of their address. How quickly they consent and more as soon as he has unpacked them. It was the handy packaging with the thread, pull here, which opens even the most buttoned-up. He stirs up a fire in them. The bodies can be thrown away, the heads one would keep, so that one can make sure that they don't talk incessantly, the women. They're real gold mines. They immediately offer him traveling expenses, gifts, then themselves, then the rest as well. In return they want to build on him. The same thing he has in mind with them. Except that he also wants to get hold of what they've already built. What appears difficult to us, to destroy someone and obtain a cement collar, in order to reliably sink the booty to the bottom, this man takes all that for granted, if you please. That's what he's there for, and he wants to put himself in every other place as well, which at the moment, unfortunately, is still occupied by another body: one or more rooms in one or more houses. Squeezing into the bodies of strangers, that's good too, then only oneself is left over, a bird, which hoarsely, hoarsely crying, scrambles around on a corpse and doesn't know where the eyes are now, which it wanted to pick at first, so that the dead, with whatever senses, could no longer distinguish him. He wants to remain unobserved, the man. It didn't, unfortunately, work with his dead mother, he must still succeed. But then he would like to get into everywhere else as well, squeeze in, in order not to let go of himself, to be by himself and to stay that way, when he inflicts his wounds, of which others with small twitching body parts always die, after they have watched anxiously for a month, for years, what is to become of this child. If someone looks at him like that, the country policeman would rather eat himself up, so that nothing, not even himself, is left to be seen, only a house, another house, and another house, house-proud. Then at least he would be: gone. What kind of man can he be? He is like an angel with inner eyes, no, not an angel looking backwards in case someone is standing behind him with a stone. His muscles and sinews don't know why they are inserted into a thin but firm nylon skin, which can contain simply every body shape no matter where it leads. But not for long. In a moment it will clutch a tuft of hair again and pull everything attached to it to the ground. Exactly the same thing will happen to this suit, there was a very similar one in the advertisements for holidays in Austria, encoded however, otherwise no one would have put up with it, the suit-here we are shown the population in the dress of the country, and all the things it gets up to: Sport, please take over! But the whole population has been locked up in its clothing so that it can't get out and do any harm, as so often, our population, oh dear, too late, now it's out, now it's out-an endless mountain panorama in the background, which is supposed to represent the boundlessness of this in fact rather small plump land. We've meanwhile given up this goal again. People don't want to visit us anymore. But yesterday on TV they showed us the new ski suits for the world championships, and we were all annoyed at the way they looked; I saw nothing but shininess and lightning flashes. My eyes were dazzled. In history: boundless crimes. In the present: boundless pleasure on the high crags, to which the paths lead, so that we can look down on the others, paths on which we sportswomen and sportsmen can roll or slide around. We are the party, which is the only one to let us join. We are the party, which we have already joined, because: We are who we are. And not anyone else.