Greed (5 page)

Hair everywhere, even sticking to the palm of the dead woman's hand with traces of blood, I would say, these are the remains, steeped in synthetic hair dyes and permanent waves, of a human being of the female gender, and this female was allowed to see and experience a great deal before she died. Perhaps the telephone expert and his policeman father have a built-in war vent, well, I think they both like to get into fights but have to restrain themselves a bit in public, one as a servant of the state, the other as a salaried employee. But it has to come out somewhere, the beast, and in a woman it usually has too little space to run around. Afterwards one puts in an extra run. There are some with whom one is even hungrier afterwards, you embrace, you give each other a good licking, but the pupils are already flickering restlessly over a head, which is practicing inexcusable behavior and is perhaps even a little embarrassed about what it's doing, glances after all precede a human being. They're already wagging their tail before anyone can pull out the appropriate white stick. By the way. Am I looking too serious now? Oh no, that's the last thing I wanted! Good and hard into the woolly hair every time, which can't really check the blows. Take a look, quick, at the past, there you could see a serious man, likewise the head of a family, bellowing without any inhibition at living people who would now have been almost dead, had their way of driving had consequences, because they did something wrong in traffic, wellwell, car drivers in the days when they were still somebody and films were made about them, always the car drivers! Sometimes the cyclists, too, who, however, are already kicked enough by merely existing. Lonely women, well-groomed, but no longer young, they snatch at everything that moves and wears trousers, which after all they do themselves. But that's not enough for them, and they sometimes get given an extra titbit, meat, which they had given up reckoning on, and which now draws them into its reckoning. Hmm, is the apartment completely paid off? A very well groomed woman is already going to the hairdresser for the second time this week and having her nails painted fine as silk, something like that gets noticed; better than a poet could say it, her body says with these signs, that it is full of longing and at last knows, who for.

There next follows an imperious knocking during the round around the junction by the savings bank, that's where the pharmacist is, and we live right above it, and the next moment the door has to be opened naked, although there's hardly been time to dress, in order to provocatively cover all the curves, which are required nowadays. If need be oil has to be applied to their form after bathing or they have to be remolded in the event of an accident. It doesn't really matter, when even engines get tweaked and whole chassis are lowered. Today the cheerful colors again glow from face, hands and toenails, it's quite a sight. We, too, are someone, we always said that at the top of our voices, until we were nothing and no one anymore and no one was thinking of us anymore.

A country policeman observes himself, how and whom he hits with his ball-point and his block. He has a feeling for how one could get this woman to proclaim her satisfaction with loud panting and groaning. With a woman with whom he's clicked, he first of all steps aside a little and permits himself expressions which are unambiguous, and only two days later the lady, although the situation was so unambiguous and the telephone number unambiguously changed owners, is walking restlessly back and forward between the windows, smelling under her arm pit to make sure it still smells of scent and rubbing herself with lotions. He must come today, otherwise at this time we would already be sitting on the train to Vienna, to visit an old friend! It's on her mind from one moment to the next, she can't help thinking her life might not yet be at an end, because someone still wants into her end, whoever it is. Death comes soon enough. An address is taken down, where the country policeman also takes down the car numbers and their fines, we'll take time to look at that in the next few days. Wherever there is a small chamber, it can be opened up. Above all the single, disappointed ladies in their middle years immediately give the key to themselves to anyone, without looking at him closely, they know: If someone opens them up, there's not much going on inside anymore, but through determined sweeping out, something, which the woman herself does not even know yet, could be whirled up inside her and turned into something magnificent. This gentleman is experienced and is in practice, even if not in household matters, but if one could get a house for it, then one gladly does it. Then one even embraces a wooden shed and rubs oneself against it until it weeps resinous tears. What does he see in me, when he's so attractive, that he could see even more of in younger, more beautiful women? Why not in fact? Why not in fact me? Come right in with the inquiry, here's the waste paper basket in the hall along with the little bunch of herbs and the little clipboard where we can make a note of our shopping!

In other cases, since the car driver wants to please the police, one only has to hold out one's hand, and already the notes come flying in one after the other. In return the driving license is allowed to stay at home. Signal discs can be raised and people directed by merely pointing, almost like a murderer. Simply unique on earth. It's the best job in the world. Let's adopt an inquisitive expression and put on spectacles as well! Take a look: The grandfather is still saluting in the photograph, which he'll probably never get out of now, just as he never got out of this area when he was alive, look how well he does it in the photo, yes, the gentleman on the left, not the one on the right, that's the king, well, does time stand still? No. No one keeps still. But now, let's get away, into the open air! As if grandad had known that his picture is being taken, but of course he will have known that, we can see it now, we see him in the ice cream chill of the moment, the concentrated gaze of obedience, sweetened, enhanced!, that's him, grandad, look, here, in front of the king, he's standing to attention in front of the monarch, whom he'll never get to know any better, as we know today, although it might have been interesting, who knows which person would have something to say to which other, unfortunately often in a foreign language? No one knows. I believe that this sentence, although I wrote it myself, is not right. I for example have nothing to say faced with the figures I create, bring on the stock phrases and some more, and another and another, until they squirm beneath me with pain or perhaps also because they've too little space. They should never have pulled out this language nerve without an anaesthetic! The king doesn't look like anyone one knows. A king is always somone one will not get to know. He may be kindhearted, conscientious, whereas others don't even need a conscience. They can't afford it, and we can't afford anything cheaper either. A slim man in a dark suit, the king, always stays properly in the picture, no he doesn't need that, he's already in too many pictures!, and in his day, in the 1970s, was often and with pleasure pictured beside his slim Latin-looking wife in the magazines of the ladies' hairdressing salon of the village. A good place in which to make an impression on the fancies of women, who like to fancy themselves, especially when they sit on these white upholstered chairs and think it makes them more beautiful, and to implant longings in rose-pink or petunia pink. Those that fancy themselves are even easier to get, who quietly fancy themselves and look down on others, but secretly, when they're all alone, then they tolerate no moderation, and their bodies run immoderately out of control if someone caps one of their thin little stalks with which they desperately cling to their property. And which puts them into the horizontal position for life, which they can lose at any time. But by then they will have lost themselves long ago and no longer know who they are and how much they still have in the bank. Not as much as before.

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.