Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

In a ladies' hairdressing salon a country policeman would be even more conspicuous than a king, unless a customer had parked her car wrongly, then all eyes are on her and her hairstyle, a semi-finished product. The country policeman would be generous but just. He arranges a meeting and prepares to obscure the evidence, so that behind the blinds he can fulfil all secret desires, including those which are not kept secret at all. Instead they force themselves upon him like inquisitive dogs, which are immediately sent away again without the stiff retriever stick they're panting for, chased away because they are so wet and unappetizing that one hardly wants to lie down beside them. But there is a stately home to be given away and one says very softly: come! And then he comes. If the women don't get a king for the bedside table, where the magazines with all the color pictures lie, perhaps they'll get the servant of the state, who has to be there for the king at all times. Paper: doesn't blush. In the photograph the king is altogether relaxed and casual and friendly. I would say, this woman is freshly permed but unrelaxed, if I would dare say so and had not forbidden myself to constantly look down from my high horse at what I've made up. The father of the country policeman could still be alive today, the way he looked then. Here lives always come along twice or even many times over. They stand next to one another like houses, one the same as the other, but that doesn't affect me. The lives match one another like clothes, but often they don't match the person to whom they were handed out. They are mostly uneventful, as if too much life had to be distributed among too few people, of whom each receives more than enough of one and the same fate, of which we now carefully pick up the pieces, having had a smashing time. The mother of the present country policeman, for example, it's as if there was another one of her and then another, as if most of the women here were like her, I still know at least one or other of them and can offer them to you to make your choice. But I already know you'll choose something else, but then at least the side-dish will be right. How enthusiastically she used to look at these pictures, Frau Janisch, as if inwardly elevated, incidentally at exactly the same hairdresser on the main square, but then the chairs were green and harder. Later Frau Janisch even bought the magazine, so that she, too, would have something to leave her family. That was when she could still walk upright. Let's act as if it were today: So she looks and looks again, as if the king along with her husband could vanish into thin air before she can even show them off, and all that while her hair is being wrapped around thin rods, oiled and then heated up, the very fine roast, smelled long before it's ready (and again every time one's hair is washed! All of life is chemistry and smells accordingly…), and she tries to jut out of her dress, the country policeman's wife, as if it were made of exactly the same dotted silk as that of the queen and not for example done in an anonymous workshop under the backcombed hair, which please must look exactly the same as her majesty's in the photo. Unfortunately that's not possible. Not even we poets can do that. Instead of which the person looking for advice is handed a wire hair net for her head and something completely imperishable and incomparable in Trevira, nylon and other artificial fibers. Not bad either, made for all eternity, unless one sets fire to it, but that's just it: different! Eternity doesn't want it and gives it back cheap, since already used. There's nothing to be done. This queen was a model for many women of the time and unleashed imitative impulses precisely because she was not beautiful, just as we are all not beautiful. But, she too, a very well-groomed and smart woman, there's nothing you can say to that. No criticism on our side is necessary here. Anyone who hasn't got beauty in their account needs clothes and hairdresser all the more badly, in order to be able to imitate beauty as successfully as possible, before one hits the street in this new dress and there immediately shrinks again with all one's shortcomings. On the contrary, often one even has to add something, house and property. No grounds to take in guests as well, whom one then has to feed one's own flesh, because there's nothing else in the house. I personally know one, two widows and single women approaching retirement, who succeeded in going much further in their public appearance than had ever been foreseen for them. And then they were still overtaken by younger women. At the last moment. I strike the gong. Boing. Time's up. Every time is up some time. I've often said it and I'll often say it again, because it's so unjust that time passes, but I always have to stay here. It lasts just as long as one lives, because one's own life is the measure of time. Here comes the next one that is no longer one's own. So already in the course of one's own life it must be taken hold of determinedly. That's as clear and transparent as the soup, which people have dished up once again today behind their freshly cleaned windows. Who's going to eat it all?

Today there's once again something lurking behind the responsibilities and reports of the country policeman-I can't quite see what yet-when he pulls the drunks from the pub tables, hits them, examines his victims briefly and superficially, because you don't see the internal bleeding, and then calls the ambulance, because of course the victim bashed himself and his not very full head. The victim says nothing, because he is unconscious, and doesn't have much to say anyway when he is conscious. You're just not allowed to kill anyone, that would be the condition that's agreed verbally, one's only allowed to put his head together with his ears and the vital nose and the absolutely essential mouth in a plastic bag, in which breathing is impossible. That is its nature. A smoked sausage is also allowed to stop its breath, we've got nothing against that, I assure you, that's its business entirely No one else's. Talk about the miscellaneous brutalities of this country police district has got as far as the county town, where it's mentioned with a laugh and a particular, knowing expression. Nothing can ever be proved. Although killing involves a profound emotion, an inner importance which allows one utterly to forget oneself, because one has thrown oneself entirely upon another human being. Just ask a murderer, he won't tell you! That one was allowed to kill, above all: one could do it, for that women think you unique, because otherwise they don't know anyone up to it. They like to crowd around the violent criminals, the country policeman knows that, he once arrested one, they didn't even let him put on his shoes after he had shot his wife with a revolver and seriously wounded his adolescent son. But something like that, to get someone like that, is like a win in the lottery, even if not the big prize, because in the country people enjoy killing, they practice on animals after all, but quietly, there are houses, you find five bodies early in the morning and don't know why. These people don't get much variety (the examining magistrate, when informed, that the culprit has a firearm and was able to make use of it, immediately passed on this infernal information, he already knew his man's number from other cases, the latter was never just a number and had among other things also fired on the Kobra special duty unit of the Country Police force. It's not healthy). Mostly the murderer does end up in prison and is defused, his family is disconnected, the murderer however has not been devalued as a result, along with his tormented heart, which he now displays openly. Indeed, I see: Some women are already writing him beautiful love letters. The country policeman has had them weeping and wailing in front of his duty desk two or three times, the women, while he, nervous, because he's got too few fingers had typed up a report. Some perpetrators do nothing but cry, the whole time, but they never ever express regret. Perhaps this house provider, in whose little home this perpetrator will soon, in about fifteen years, be sitting at table on parole, will give him a helping hand. He will pitch in, he promises her, he will crush his conscience in his bare hands till the juice runs out. The only silly thing is that he was caught. Then at the trial, with his final words, the murderer apologized as kindly, as good-naturedly as possible to his victim, but by then the victim was long buried and no longer heard anything. That was an interesting man, one should try to learn from him. From others one can only learn that there are no longer any hidden Nazi printing plates in Lake Toplitz and one can drown if one looks for them nevertheless. Yet the area around the lake is to be cordoned off as a prohibited area. The Country Police can do that. Using an underwater TV camera, it's possible, with a bit of luck, to find another corpse after three or four years. Like the eighteen-year-old schoolgirl, unfortunately as a skeleton, in the forest, or the apprentice who wasn't even sixteen yet, unfortunately in shallow water and hence still intact, in the lake, in the lake. We're sure to come back to it.