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As for A
No matter. These four depraved young characters contrast sharply with the cheerful people out on the town, looking for a fun night out and generally not finding it because this isn't the city for it. Of course fresh vitality is normally the hallmark of youth. But not of these four. And if youngsters deliberately reject freshness there is nothing to be done about it. These four are not looking for fun any more because they have already had theirs. Presently, so as not to be conspicuous, they stop ru
Shit (Hans). What he means by this vulgar expression is that he has torn his shirt. There'll be hell to pay with the old woman again. We'll find some dark hallway and divvy up in a minute, says A
Rainer hates his parents but is afraid of them too. They were his progenitors and now they provide his keep, while he keeps himself occupied with poetry. Fear is a component of hatred (thus A
I hate nothing, says Sophie, because there is nothing in my life that's worth hating. But the one and only feeling you do have is your love of me, says Rainer. If both of us jab our fingers into a victim's eyes, the bond between us is firmer than marriage could ever be. We're against marriage.
I've got to go now, says Sophie, who always has to be going somewhere or other.
You can't leave me alone now because I need someone now to explain everything to, says Rainer. You've got two others anyway, says Sophie, unmoved by this outburst, you can explain it all to them. I have to go home now. What about your share? You can give it to me in school tomorrow. Hans is already reaching his claws out towards the money, a thread of saliva at the corner of his mouth discreetly suggesting greed. To which Rainer responds: Take it easy.
You look real good when you're beating someone up, A
I think you're great (A
With the tension ebbing away, the twins walk home to the eighth district, where many petits bourgeois live, mostly white-collar workers and pensioners. These two are themselves as much a part of the lower middle class as the core is a part of an apple, and they feel at home in it. This is their home, and they climb the stairs of the gloomy tenement building, without touching anything (to avoid being contaminated by the squalor). Soon they have reached the summit: that is to say, the fourth floor. They have arrived. And as their unfriendly home appears before them, so too does weariness, and reluctantly it opens the door to the tension, because that tension still has a thing or two pla
THERE IT IS. The apartment. And there are the parents too. A uniform tranquillity prevails before and after the assaults. Imperceptibly the children have slipped out of the child's role into the role of an adult with responsibilities. Neither of them fulfils those responsibilities.
All around the shabby old apartment tower the i
From time to time a genius will flourish in their midst. The soil that nourishes this genius will frequently be filth, and madness will mark the bounds. The genius will want to escape the filth at all costs, but will not always succeed in eluding the madness. The Witkowskis have no notion that their oppressive fug has already brought forth a genius: Rainer. He has already got clear as far as his hips of his native mire and is now trying to haul one leg free and establish a tentative footing, though in the process he repeatedly sinks back in again, like a rhinoceros stuck in the mud. He saw that once on TV in The Living Desert. The head where the unlovely worm of his literary talent has taken up residence is up in the air, at any rate, gazing across a sea of fusty old underpants, battered furniture, tattered newspapers, dog-eared books, piled-up detergent boxes, dishcloths with coffee grounds with a growth of mould, dishcloth with coffee grounds without the mould, tea-cups with some unidentifiable encrustation, breadcrumbs, pencil stubs, grubby eraser rubbings, filled-in crossword puzzles and sweaty socks, gazing involuntarily across into the realm of Art, the one realm that is wide open to you as long as you have a little luck.
Today, though, Rainer and A
Herr Witkowski returned from the War with one leg, but erect. In the War he was more of a man than now, that is to say, he was intact, two-legged, and in the SS. Nowadays he is as firm about his hobby as he was then about his choice of profession. There are no bounds to his hobby, which is art photography. His one-time enemies got away through the chimneys and crematoria of Auschwitz and Treblinka or littered Slavic earth. Nowadays Rainer's father crosses the petty frontiers of today's Germany anew whenever he takes his artistic photographs. Only a philistine recognises those frontiers in his private life. In photography, the bounds are fixed by clothing. And Witkowski senior bursts the narrow confines of clothing and morality. Mother knew right away who her son was taking after in his artistic leanings: Father. Father had the eye of the amateur artist. Get undressed, Margarethe, we'll take a nude picture or two! There you go again, get undressed, it always occurs to you when I'm busy doing the cleaning. Who's the breadwi