Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

Please permit me to say the following once again, because it is important to me and because I can't now find the passage where I said it once before: If your vegetables are enriched by high dosages of nitrates, then you must on no account eat them! It's a sign that thanks to excessive use of fertilizers the ecological balance of the water has become upset, and with it of course your vegetables. It is therefore excessive and damage to health may result (if this has not already occurred), if the very good water, that we have, is polluted. What we douse our food in, we should even keep particularly pure so that it does not dose us. Natural bodies of water: superabundant plant growth. Yuck. How this body of water must feel, I'd rather not try to imagine. The water wants to be as hard-working and decent as the people who drink it, but the people don't help it, they don't give it a hand. Animals would be paralyzed with shock if they could read that. They have to drink water, too, after all. Aquatic plants would die off, excuse me, I can explain that: Instead of ceasing to absorb oxygen, like those of us who have died, they now really start, just as the rest of Austria, full of love and greed, receives the tourists, our dear guests who visit us, unless the government doesn't suit them. It doesn't suit me either. So I'm a stranger here myself. As already mentioned, excessive use of poison causes the whole orchestra of nature to strike up all at once, and even Bruckner wouldn't have wanted that. There is too much too much too much of everything. We have enough too. More than enough. We've had enough.

If you are contemplating wallowing in excess: You're better off taking the whipped cream and leaving the oxygen! Besides my little bit of water here, in this machine, is also overloaded with poison. Instead of answering genteelly when I'm asked, I tip my whole life, which is itself long dead, into this dead water zone, but deader than dead, that can't be. It would be a good thing if for once a decent flow got going into this zone, if the water at last got a decent employment policy, so that its trophic level finally improves. Otherwise we always only remain what we were-trophies of history, displayed as a warning to other countries. And what we grabbed we couldn't take with us, or could we? No, we're not going to give this Klimt painting back now. We must have got something out of it, for making all that effort, until almost no one escaped with their lives. How we would rather have more turbulent times again, how we would like to profit from the movement of the river, until the last particle of water in us, our upright little Austrian homebody souls, is carried along (that's how coarsely our bodies of water are spoken about, I swear it), in addition to the main movement (acquisition of property), by the dear little secondary movements, the belief in God, the heavenly Father, whom we have soft-soaped for so long for our own entertainment, until he finally gave us back to ourselves, newly redecorated, as good as new, no, better!, and we had nothing more urgent to do than hand ourselves over to a new leader, voluntarily, as if we were one and a half years old, at the outside, and couldn't understand what he's saying to us. As if nothing had ever happened. There are some who still can't get enough, we've already described them and now only have to clear away our own refuse. It resembles the leguminous plants, tenacious, yielding, slimy, but in this water, in the lake, it can't be done away with, at least not for a while. This refuse consists of owner-occupied houses, of which one always provides security for the other, until the banks, exhausted, raise a small white flag and decline. The banks are asexual, that is, they do not allow themselves to be mollified either by men or by women. They are not oriented towards propagation and regeneration like the plants of the earth, they are programmed for concentration, so, now they've caught someone again, who thought up some dirty trick with the interest redemption, he won't get far with that. If he were richer, they wouldn't have got him. They even caught the fraudulent chicken farmer and his brother, but not his powerful backers. The Freedom Party Building Society has been wound up, a pity really. They're also feeling the country policeman's collar, but he always removes his jacket very quickly, and the banks can once again take a walk. Yes, that's completely true, he is a person, a truth, a work, a property, yet in reality nothing belongs to him. Gather round me, if you want to hear once again, how many people this country has killed, no doubt you're asking yourselves why then I'm always only talking about the one person. He's not that important, after all. No, you're not asking yourselves that, and I can understand that. No one asks me about anything whatsoever. I have already described what you will find in this standing water, which has urgent need of a second leg to stand on, but now it's finally going to be found, the relic, the victim, that's quite different from just talking about it. On the other hand one imagines it to be worse than it is, finding a corpse; and I have hesitated so long to describe it, until I almost didn't feel like it, here, on the low shore of my resolves. Please throw the first stone now, but in such a way that it can hop around on the surface of the water a couple of times, as happy as a new federal chancellor.

The spoilsport, Gabi's corpse, who was searched for as a living person and so could of course never be found, not even with all the photos on the masts, almost the whole way up to the Semmering Pass, pops up now as a dead woman, although the dead are of course inactive and don't respond to anything anymore. In the deep water of our mountain lakes there are places where one never finds them, the dead, doesn't matter, we have enough of them, I mean there are plenty of them. There in the mountain lakes, the shores drop almost vertically, these lakes can be 600 feet deep or more. There are holes in the lakes. They have the power to make people disappear without trace forever, at the Last Judgement there will then be great astonishment, when the prettily packaged women all bob up from the bottom in order to avenge themselves for their discontent in the water's cold hell. How great will be their disappointment, when others, the hosts of angels in their fast four wheel drives, which have been acquired for them so that they can get everywhere on that day when the trumpets shall sound without pause, will first of all want to take revenge on them. Because, going by the book, the misdeeds of the living are not erased by the death of others. But the business with Gabi affects me so badly nevertheless, I really don't know what to say now, but simply can't let it out like cigarette smoke, quickly, as if in passing; description is difficult of course, if one has never seen a real dead person. A film is only a weak substitute, a little bench in Shudderwood Station. So horror turns up today, weighs me down unusually heavily, and yet I can't look away, although actually I wanted to read the newspaper. Two men who, after a big meal at the inn, wanted to stretch their legs a bit (they will soon have to be unhappy that on this occasion they couldn't stretch their legs under the table), their wives have remained sitting and gossip away, this time without making use of the corrosive rage at their families, which so often overcomes, e.g., me, now walk down to the lake on a cold, soon to be green path, which is already depressed at the thought of all the police boots which will shortly be tramping around on it. So. I now read, because I'm used to reading, from the two men's faces, what they're thinking when, close to the shore, they discover, re-emerging as unexpectedly as it disappeared, first of all just bobbing up and down, a man-sized roll of green shiny tarpaulin, such as is used, fairly pointlessly, because it's never quite waterproof (I can tell you a thing or two about that, since I had to bail out water from my balcony three times) as covering on building sites. The tarpaulin is tied up with wire. What's that? It is at any rate first of all curious. Because something is as big as a human being doesn't mean that it has to be one. But anyone seeing this roll imagines this plastic cover has been made the size it is so that exactly one human being or four square yards of soil or a five foot three inch tree trunk fit underneath, the one has no protection anymore, the other would have been very much in need of more protection, the tree trunk has no more wishes except for the nice damp earth, which it will never see or feel again. The circle of readers stands up to get a better view, the tarpaulin hides something, which for days seemed to have been swallowed by the earth, but the earth was unjustly accused. The water had the human roll the whole time and was playing yoyo with it, but the string was a wire tightly wound, and so the water was soon fed up with the game. It didn't work, there's nothing one can do with this packet and, whatever is inside it, we can't unpack it. We just have to pick up our textbook again, which tells us what killed us, who are all of us waters, in such a way that we consist almost only of water-nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and organic stuff, we got a fresh load of the latter three days ago, but don't know what to do with it yet. Apart from that, like many children, we are basically glutted, for which there are good reasons. These are the words of the water to us and to the two men, who don't understand its language. But the language of this plastic roll they understand instinctively and take a step backwards and are suddenly silent. What's that. The two men have already eaten, that's a good thing, because at this moment their appetite would have disappeared, if they hadn't earlier on arrested it in good time and taken advantage of it for their own ends. The lake is not deep, nowhere, and yet no one has made the effort to coax this roll a little further out. There it is now, a possible covering for a human being, but not a good one.