Authors: Elfriede Jelinek
tast-offs for a little small change. For a change. It would be something different, naughty, unexpected. Afterwards you could drape a flimsy cloak of talk about the encounter. His fellows at the fraternity have long sirice bagged their first quarries, and the fleeces, once combed and cared for by loving mothers, are hung about their shoulders. Now at last one's own wishes, straining impatiently at the leash, can be tossed something nourishing to eat, meat cut out of another. So that those wishes grow big and strong. And one day have big fishes in the ocean of the top management floors dancing attendance. Yes, Nature means business. And happily we chain her up, to score against her will if need be. Futile for the elements to roar. We are already in the waves!
7
ALL AROUND, OPPRESSED people are falling, cascades of water, down steps and ornate porches into the uncertain consciences of their oppressors. Tame-spirited creatures that they are, they don't overshoot the mark. Every morning the boisterous radio bawls that it's time to get up, wakey wakey. And instantly the warmth of love is yanked away from under their feet and their sweat-soaked sheet taken from them. They grope about their wives, they dirty their precious belongings. Time breezes gently by. People have to fulfil their pensum before they can draw a pension. Before they are paid off. And have themselves paid off the things they believed — their whole lives long, with eyes tight shut — they owned. Just because they were tolerated among those things as visitors. While their wives, by using them constantly, coaxed the things into life. Only women are really at home. The men loaf oafishly in the undergrowth at night. Or leap about the dance floor. The paper mill. The mill spews people out, after they've been of use for years. But first they go to the top floor to collect their papers.
The Frau Direktor dwells in their midst. Quiet. White. Not even a good roast will set her up to go on living as it does with you and me. The children are brought to her to learn to rattle and prattle. Till the sustaining sound of music falls silent and the howl of the factory is upraised across the mountaintops. Early in the mornings the fathers sleepily splash their jets into the toilet, while apprentices are more rudely awakened, with music dinned into them the moment their alarms go off. The half-naked bodies grow in front of the mirrors in the newly-tiled bathrooms. The chains gleam. The little cocks crow merrily from the flies, the warm waters are passed. Perhaps this toilet is a mirror image of you. So
LUST 81
please leave it in the same condition that you would like to be left in!
A car is parked in front of the Direktor's wife. An animal gazes out from within itself and bounds into the wood, where it has its peace and quiet. True: in summer, the heavily-laden rafts of life float there. People off to unload in Nature. To relieve themselves. The car is warm, suddenly the sky seems much lower down. Time is tending to a close and people get close and grow tender. In the wood, the deer, who have an even worse time of it in winter than we do, stretch. The woman cries, leaning on the dashboard, and fumbles in the glove compartment for a handkerchief to dry her misery. The car starts. Questions are scattered around like gifts. Right away, the woman throws open the door of the car as it's moving off and plunges into the wood. She is full to the brim with her feelings, fit to burst, and she has to give vent to her instincts, like steam escaping through a vent, hiss, boo hiss, boo hoo, boo his, boo whose? That is what the books say; because you value yourself, you can buy one of these cheap books and read all about it. As if she'd run into a swarm of gnats or some other unfamiliar mob, the woman waves her arms about, trips over a root, cuts her face on hard old snow and vanishes into the darker part of the wood. No, there she goes! Stumbling over the twisted black branches. Whereupon she returns of her own free will to the leash and strap, gets into the car, and is bedded down into the leisurely depth of the seat. Within herself she grows. And is at her own service. She can hear her feelings rumbling closer like thunder. Racing like an express through the station of her body. Even the station-master's slender signal baton is almost too much for her. She is obeying her own command. And no one else's. The powerful current that charges these creatures of feeling shocks them like divine intervention. How wonderful are the people with enough time to acquire a pilot's licence for their own rudderless, drifting
feelings, so they can fly hither and thither within themselves!
In the midst of her life, this woman often likes to think she has to get out of her alignment alongside other women with sagging breasts and hopes who have docked beside her. Get out and away to a sumptuous land where tears are dried with greater caTe. She is fond of herself to the point of idolatry. A package tourist in the country of circumspect passions. Fixing assignations with herself wherever she chooses. And fleeing herself at the same time, because somewhere else she might enjoy an even more thrilling rendezvous with her inner self. Some-where that you can sit on a cloud and quaff even more deeply from the golden goblets of your own emotion. She is as volatile as a compound that will dissolve at any moment.
Likewise with art and what we feel about it. Everyone feels differently. Most people feel nothing at all. And yet we're agreed on scraping the bottom of our barrel and serving up what we find, only half done, for the others to devour. The flames roar from our little stoves, you'd think we were getting on like a house on fire. Down we go, in all too rapid pursuit of our desires, as if we were on ice. The sun shines, and the rooms where we stew in our lust for life are well heated too. Everything is hot, and the spirit, warmed by licking flames, rises high above us for others to see. Sooner or later we take a tumble because we don't have our feet on the ground any more, we're in love and the demands we make on our partners are groundless. How happy we are to go romping about the mountains, as infinitely various as creation, till we lose our pointed caps.
On his high and mightily expensive horse, the student lends an ear as the woman places herself in his hands. A once-only occasion has led her into the hallway of her
sensibility. The silence is steamy with feverish talk, like a hot-house. Bundled into words, the days of her childhood and the lies of her adulthood shoot shuddering from the woman. The student is led down the slope of her thoughts. The woman goes on talking to make herself more important, and her words part company with truth at the very moment when the truth dawns on her and seems bright as day. Whoever listens, anyway, when a housewife heads into the interior because the child is screaming or the food has caught light. The more the woman talks and talks, the more she wishes that she and this man could remain unknown quantities for each other, just interesting enough to afford each other a little rest along the way, so that they didn't have to leap to their feet and instantly be up and running again.
But who can rival the senses for feeling pain? In rattling pots, with the steam lifting the lid to sing out, we cook our emotions. But what of those battered by the threat of redundancy? They bang their heads against the wall of the paper mill, which the mother company may have to write off because it isn't turning any profits. And in any case it pollutes the stream, and there are now a fair number, clumsily sharpening their claws, who listen to the voice of Nature. Nature having finally learnt the language of her children. These people, bred at institutes of higher education, understand what Nature is saying and what goes on in her air and waters. When they argue, a smile spreads across their faces, because they are in the right. Nature, like their feelings, is entirely of their opinion. Samples of ill-bred, loutish water are carefully tended and nurtured by environmentalists, but somewhere or other a new wound will gash wide open in Nature and they'll have to go hurrying off to it. After a while the human waste comes shooting out at both ends. It was already muck when it went in. That's it: with local help, the mill has created paper, our very own fertilizer, on which, creasing bloody wrinkles into the sofas where
we lie, we can even write down our thoughts. Whatever we have to say to each other — the sweet nothings and sweet nights of love with which we hope to grow monstrous specimens of ourselves on the manure of our loved ones — whatever we have to say, it makes no impression on our partner, who is occupied with other thoughts that have to be rinsed out and filled up every day anew.
The more profound people's happiness, the less they speak of it in these parts, so that they don't lose their way in it and the neighbours aren't envious. Those who are cast out by the factory have to cast about for somewhere they can get credit from those on whose largesse and mercy they cast themselves. In the darkness dwell their lordsandmasters, the eagles, who can change their prey's fate with a single nod of the ballpoint. But the lusty sons of the Alps stride out fearlessly across the flimsy bridges that span ravines, off they go to visit their relatives, striding out fearlessly to the wimps and bitches, coffee and ice cream, coffin and I scream, the horror. Fearful stuff, but they don't notice what they feel and don't listen if it's explained to them.
The young man leans across to the woman, who has withdrawn a little to natter with her nearest and dearest, her secret dreams and longings. From her big eyes the tears well up and fall into her lap. Where desire abides, biding its time, clipping its nails. We're not animals, after all. Things don't always have to happen right away. First we ponder whether he's a suitable partner for us and we wonder what he can afford before we spurn him. Now our cup floweth over, we are all there, though it's taken all these years. You just have to remember to swim on the surface of the water, so that you can watch the other boats in the distance and see who they've invited and incited, while they for their part watch at leisure as you go under. In a swimsuit, what's more, from which pert
parts of your body, parts that would best be kept hidden, peek cheekily out. No one knows his body, his house, his many mansions, better than the owner does. But that doesn't mean you can go inviting people in. Why should another man not love us? And why, then, does he not do so?
The young man slips the dressing-gown off Gerti's shoulder. The woman cannot come to terms, she squirms, she worms about on her seat as if she needed more space. Tenderly though her inmost self is calling from her cleavage, it wants to stay in, where it is,, and maybe take a stroll out where the trees are (what else). Gerti has barely escaped the safety belt of her house but this young man of law wants to grope in her glove box. To think how many cavities there are in a healthy body! And, heavens, in an unhealthy one! The woman bares her soul and her bosom with words. And the student will get his chance to pinion her with opinions and shove his love into her. At last, Michael has stopped his car at an enclosure where you can feed the game. She's game. The powers that be and their forestry workers like to lay out these enclosures, each a manmade paradise where Nature, clumsy, all thumbs, can enter in. And women are promised paradise if only they will create it on this earth for their husbands and children and season it properly. And the seasons go by without a moment's respite, to torment them.
From the woman, hopes the young man, a stream of longing and desire will flow. Lying contentedly on his stomach, he pokes the ants out of their hill with his stick. The tiny creatures are fast, they're coaxed out and scatter in every direction. They're hard to catch, but at times they come of their own accord, like dreams. Then you can add an extra load, even your big log. Bodies have to be kept alight. We use everything we've got to make sure they are. Just to keep our members atremble and
our genitals at-it-againital. We can't let it be, we always have to be setting fire to things with our lighter. Trunks that used to seem safe have to be felled too, purely so that we can spread our arms open wide and cook and gobble life again, which we have been given as a gift in any case. And the dribs and drabs of women's lives, the rivulets that presently run dry, are always looking for some other torrent, as mighty as can be, to flow along in. Signals of love, a whole corps of them, flags run up poles. And troughs where animals dip their tongues or are done out of their own fluids by electrical gadgetry.
The stuff that Gerti's dreams are made on is torn from her shoulders and crumpled on the floor. She spills out her ruined life over this Son of Man, who only wants to feel her up and fill her up as fast as he can. Stubbornly she stays stuck in the nest of light the car provides. And tries to stand up again. Hop off into the life she's just come in from. On the roof that affords shelter for their bodies, skis are securely strapped in place on a rack. And she is insecurely on a rack. Here they are, two lovers, together, forever ready and willing to take a tumble off the ladder of emotion if something in their partner's beatific eyes isn't what they ordered off the menu. In a while they'll be getting better acquainted. And they'll be better at balancing platefuls of fate.
In the car it is so pleasantly warm that the blood shimmers in their bodies. By now, Nature is a gaping emptiness. In the distance, no children are screaming to their hearts' content. Right now they are screaming to their hearts' discontent in the punitive rooms of cottages where the hail of their fathers falls suddenly upon them. It's dark early and the women get their husband's full pay packet in their hands, here, cOp a hold of this. Outside, your breath freezes on your chin. This mother is already being sought by her nearest and f earest. Her Almighty, the mill Direktor, that horse of immense physique, still
steaming with roast, wants to wrap his arms and legs about her. Peel her fruit impatiently. Lick the juice. Before he rams his ever-ready in. His battering ram. Salt and battery, very tasty, the woman's good enough to eat. He could go for her lower half, he'd wolf her down, still steaming, with some of his own sauce to taste. Between his thighs his member waits, not stupid, this one. His bag hangs heavy, not long and he'll be unloading into her bowed head. One woman may even be enough for the Man, tumescent though he be with greed. He wants to go knocking his giblets at her nether regions to see if anyone's home. Reluctantly her lips will part, they definitely will part, and he'll compare them with other similar lips he knew once upon a time. In any case, this man prefers oral and anal sex. What can you do but cool off, remove your cap, shake out your locks, and dive in cheerfully? No one goes astray. And there are no dying echoes.