Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

Since no person can cope with his life, he should really wish to get to the end of it. But no, this uncertainty of existence is supposed to go on endlessly, and precisely in the shape of the person as whom one lived. Death only breaks off what in any case was never going to finish. The great unknown, the murderer, the phantom, who tore and garotted Gabi where the arteries divide at the neck, why search for him who put an end to a certain young woman? She must have been at a certain place at a certain time, unfortunately we only know her final address, the lake, the water, the watery dump, yet her whole life passed at a certain time and in a certain, rather small place. Her death doesn't mean that now she is everywhere and nowhere, there and gone, but her death has put an end to her having lived at a certain time in this village in the Alpine foothills. Strange how much people like to think of death as an entrance to eternity. I prefer to stick with the corpse, that's something that's there, for a while, the finality is superfluous, when one knows: It is the case that this body decomposes, till it, too, has liquefied and at some point disappeared, washed away, dissolved. I stick with this body, not in the posture of a mourner, as dogs do it, but more out of interest. No matter how insignificant this dead girl may have been, something of her is there nevertheless, which we can hold onto, she is such and such, and she is simultaneously not at all. Matter tied up in a plastic sheet, from which hair is floating at the top and socks are sticking out at the bottom. The shoes are gone. I cannot say anything about this bound spirit, nothing good, nothing bad. I can't see it, after all. I assume it is finally freed from its finiteness, but I fear it has not become infinite as a result. A puzzle, that the Country Police neither want to nor can solve. They want to find the murderer and what inspired him to snuff out the spark of another soul and perhaps other souls besides, because: Where are all the women who have disappeared? In retrospect on their photos they have such an odd expression on their face, we'll make a photocopy right away, so that we'll know, if we see one: That's one of the missing. For the times of the lifts Gabi got this much is known: There was no time for love. From the well-substantiated departure and arrival times of the very punctual girl it emerges that at these times the two never had more than twenty minutes free time together at most. Probably the time gained on the short stretch was just about ten minutes. What can you do in ten minutes? Briefly place the weight of your own body on another one, in order to keep the latter quiet as if with a dummy, to pacify it at least for a little while, until it cries out again? Take in one's mouth a very precious body part, which doesn't belong to one, anxious, but curious every time as to the taste (not everything comes in bags, otherwise it could easily be taken with one on every errand, but one could leave it standing somewhere), and whether something comes out and if so, what does it smell like? Lodge in Gabi's cunt as in a kind of institute, from which one is released having given an undertaking and with at first dark, later pale spots on one's trousers, but only so as to be able to return at any time? Simply a man who wants to talk to a girl about something? I don't believe that. Gabi never went out without her mother, her boyfriend, her girlfriends, says her mother, says her boyfriend, say the girlfriends. They also say that in newspaper interviews right after Gabi's disappearance. If that's true-then why did the girl make such a secret of these lifts she got? Presumably because the man had something to lose, perhaps because he was a close neighbor of Gabi and didn't want to be recognized, although or because everyone would have known him anyway. They just didn't know that it was him. It was no stranger. One can have a scrap with father and mother, a stranger dumps one like a piece of scrap, somewhere, such people have no environmental consciousness. Someone familiar won't manage that, because he knew the girl's purpose in life and never wanted to meet her again! Just don't turn into a purpose in life! He preferred to clear the girl out of the way for his own safety, the murderer, rather that than become his all and all, which yields nothing. So, now we'd rather put the body into this long-prepared green plastic refuse bag, which comes from a building site, because building sites are my whole life, to say nothing of the houses in the making, that's something one can hold on to, yes, the bones, the hair, the finger and toenails can stay too, but not as long as a house that was well built in a good mood. For all eternity, where the believer will be able to meet all these houses, or they meet him, boom!, a negation of the negation, because the perpetrator isn't building a house and probably won't get one as a present anymore. The concepts of finiteness fall out of my hand like the builder's hammer at five o'clock in the afternoon. Finally I don't know what to say anymore. I just say, there must still be this one minute left: Nothing is left. Death is natural, yet this was no natural death. Do you think Gabi wanted to own somebody who already belonged to somebody else? I don't believe that. I'm not a believer, that's why I always cut myself so badly when I come up against the limits of my existence. Then I believe that things go on, I so much want to follow the believers to where they're going. But it's not possible, and at the borders you can't go any further either. As if I were a foreigner from outside the wonderful Schengen states. Is there someone there. No, no one's there, because everyone wants to amuse themselves and hence at present and for all time to come are not and will not be at home. One can only amuse oneself outside, our European house is almost always too small for that, and now it's also too small for Austria, the model child, which never did anything and never will do anything. But neither do we want to allow others, since we are no longer welcome anywhere, to be at home with us, the inhabitants of Austria (then we would have to evacuate our common house! Anyone could come!). Anyone else there, who in return would perhaps like to see me happy? He wouldn't have to watch, because he wouldn't be at home when I came? Who, if I cried, would hear me? No one? Perhaps because no one has noticed me yet? And the perpetrator of this murder evidently didn't want to be noticed either, which doesn't surprise me. If he carried away any wounds of his existence, then they can't be seen at any rate. Otherwise we would immediately have him by the collar, as he runs bleeding through the estate, while something bigger looms up over his figure, the Beast, panting, which has lost its parking space and will never stop in its search for a new one. And if it has found one, then it would already always be too small, it would have to be a whole house at least. If a human being has to die of himself, why should he not be capable of creating a simple house with his own hands and the partly foreign capital of the building society? But its launches put out to sea, laden with interest, compound interest and gallons of our blood and our tears, and one never gets the interest, because so far the agreement always had to be renegotiated prematurely each time. With a pension fund that wouldn't have been so easy to manage, they are a work of the Devil. So it's easier to die than to get hold of a house. In death one still hangs around for a bit, with building work the ground gives way beneath one's feet, because it's already been secured with another plot, which was already heavily burdened or was insufficient in some other way. Mr. Schneider, the real estate shark, he always bid against himself, so that the prices of his real estate to the banks should go sky high. Who says real estate is fixed property! Against that a dead woman, every dead woman: She only moves when she's thrown into the water, and then she moves gently, very slowly, to the rhythm of the waves, the water moves her, of their own accord the dead don't move, this dead woman doesn't move. The water carries her around, gives her a shove when she weeps, so that she's quiet again. The water is sweet. I wish I would dare to enter it more often and risk entrusting myself to it. And all the purification plants, I wouldn't even see them. Do they want to clean the water? Then no living things could exist in it anymore! I don't want to permit them, these purification plants! Yet without them, things somehow wouldn't work either, we would have bits of shit floating beside us, and we would soon have water where now there's still land, one would have been exchanged for the other, trash and smut for clarity and truth. No, we're not going to do it like that, give oligotrophic and mesotrophic waters in return for eutrophic ones. No, we're not doing that. We're holding on to one lot, and the others can go somewhere else, so that we can send our dirt there and can feel good again here. We don't need anyone else, the water and I. Do we? Perhaps I, too, will be discovered one day, if someone dares to penetrate me. Who knows.