Lust

Heave ho. Now the woman's sitting properly on the bench again. Another glass, in which the alcohol is rapidly growing old, is shoved across. She swipes it away with a sweeping gesture. The trouser-wearers who bought it her yell in fury and shake the woman by the arm. The barwoman sends a girl to fetch a rag. Gerti gets up and sends her purse flying on the floor, and people instantly start to rummage in it, their sweaty faces clouding at the sight of the money. The poor crowd in the back room and remember their work, which once spread its legs to them unforced. But now they no longer have any access. Oh, if only they had! Now they are at home all day long, busy with the dishes. And the others in the pub? All they crave is good weather and wicked snow. Tomorrow in the mountains they will lead dashing lives again, or else merely splashing lives if the temperatures rise steeply as the forecast said and it rains. The barwoman gently followeth the path of righteousness. With Gerti tucked under her arm, it is as if she were walking on the water, across the scummy froth of day-trippers floating on the surface. Just see with what certainty these travellers, born of the void, load themselves with gifts acquired at sports trade fairs and go off to their deaths in the mountains. A national anthem is thumped out, without any trace of embarrassment. The singers have but little in common with sirens: maybe the sound, but not the looks. But they go on and on singing, let 'em haye it! Local people who ca

In a state such as this one really ought not to drive, alone or even in groups, otherwise one won't be safe from oneself as long as one lives! But Gerti cuts her coat to fit the cloth of her modest privates, and pushes off from the bank. She puts her back into it and belts up. Free and easily she indulges in her feelings. Michael: now we'll go and fetch him out of his house before he goes cold. Presently this woman, impelled by her senses, will be howling outside a strange house because no one's at home. Let's move on. Switching on the lights is quickly done. In the number in which we usually remain, one, solo, single, but never mind, she drives after her quarry, the other drivers on the roads. As if by a protracted miracle, nothing happens. Wearing their homeshirts, the lordsandmasters rumble and grumble because they're kept waiting for their di

14

THE DROPS OF GRAVEL spray up in front of the house, the dogs leap at our throats, and the door is opened. The woman even takes a few steps further, towards the balmy light that plays radiantly about her warm, waiting husband. The children have long since been sent home without the comforts of music and rhythm, and now they are half emerging from their lairs, beaten by their fathers. Relieved at seeing the springs of art dry up at the lips, and cheerful as in family photographs, the children have already attacked each other on the forest path, tearing each other's bodies and clothing to shreds. One oughtn't to get the neighbours together too often, all they do is make a nuisance of themselves! Everything the Herr Direktor wanted, he now has again, his word is our command. The kisses crash from his mouth. He holds his spoonful of distraught senses under the light, but nothing becomes heated. He kisses his wife like a mother licking her calf, his tongue even wants to get into her armpits. Automatically he warms at the sight of her, but for the time being his moist figure remains closed. He is built like a mountain, and streams have already coursed across his brow, though there's no comparison to what his workers are cursed with when, the mark of their health vacation upon them (insult and injury added to their lives), they receive the letter in the blue envelope. Not one of them, though, would see his wife as this inflated Direktor, who wants to cha

Which of us would not gladly be forgotten on the meadows of life, only to re-appear suddenly in the rubble of his clothing (all of it small and standard size like terraced houses, though we wouldn't want to change, not even with a king)? To give oneself over entirely to another who comes by at just the right speed to make our passing acquaintance! To be singled out of the crowd, the tracks that lead to money! To fall upon the child who has made his blessed appearance at last is more than a mere thought to the woman – yes, the heavenly hosts want to celebrate now, a holiday amid vultures and fiddlers! Off to Vie

The Direktor already has his hand in his trouser pocket and is stroking his truncheon through the cloth. Very soon his generous beam will jet upon the woman. And the boy is beaming too. It is not simple with them, the child is already crumbling like petfood under Mother's cutting edge, slicing sternly into his flesh. Mother giggles, her hair in the dust on the floor, which the woman of the house does not concern herself with. The child would like to tell of the rotten things his playmates did to him. But Father hasn't got as much time to love children as you have. Helpless, he kneels over his family, over the one small item amid the huge entirety of his creation. They all laugh heartily. They are tickled by Father, first the one and then the other, as if he were out to shake the life out of them. All of them go on laughing, the Man is less and less touched. What does he care about the kid! He'd rather take aim at Mother's lap, he wouldn't mind sitting there himself. To the child, neither good fortune nor ill matters much, there must be something to be done about that. Time the boy learnt a little discipline, or better still, time he went and tidied up his room! In times of illness Mother is always the one who does the soothing. And women even have to preserve the Man within themselves, lay him out in the chapel of rest, safe from the fire storm which throws bodies out into the night like dogs, to do their business and sleep well afterwards. Opulent Christmas decorations are hung on spindly twigs. The main thing is to have lived, to have been brightly inscribed in the tablets, and as for what one has eaten, from one end of the sacramental menu to the other -! No, here on this wallpaper there's nothing but Taste! Our son, our audience, is already familiar with body-wrestling and finger-painting from many an occasion in the past. He extorts a promise from Father in which sport, his god and idol, plays the principal part. Alluring promises will call upon him. He will be summoned forth by carpets of exciting snow laid out upon the remotest mountaintops. I mean, it will be exciting to see all those skiers racing across the ground to the centre of the world. The child is promised an experience, for Father is expecting a good deal of Mother's body and its ramifications stretching out into the night: this landscape ca