Greed

by Elfriede Jelinek

  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.

  The country policeman would never apologize, why does one make something of oneself? The slim ones, who have worked hard for their figure, go a step further and climb up the mountains every day or climb the walls at home, because one man, one man in particular, hasn't called them. The country policeman only has to take advantage of the opportunity, because in their own car everyone makes a mistake once; anyone who believes no one has seen him is making a mistake. Women like to be conquered by the country policeman. For a long time they've been regretfully gazing after their disappearing good looks, which now, without having asked beforehand, another, younger woman has taken, wearing them quite without inhibition, as if they belonged to her. Something has just appeared to me, I think it was the Virgin Mary, but unfortunately I was someone quite different. Oh dear, now because of it I've run over this stop sign, which has been planted here for twenty years. Because I turned round to look at my rival. Every woman forgets herself sometimes. Besides there isn't much, of which one should take note. One should never let a man, even a murderer, off the leash once one has caught him, and one has to hold the end of the leash very tightly. That's why in general women like murderers of women so much. Because they have specialized in women. They look at the walls in prison and during this time can't be looking at other women. But there are certainly other reasons. For the time being at any rate they're harmless, the murderers. After someone has unscrewed their fuse and they're in custody. Now they have all the time and leisure in the world to look for cozy women pen pals, who will soon turn up to see them in person, because they think they've been invited. The conduct of the detained culprit, who cannot practice his profession at present, will then be pure fun, the way a lamb likes to have fun with a wolf. Thank God I'm not responsible for these women. They in turn are responsible for their children, whom the murderer can kill at any time, if he wants to and has the opportunity, because he will have got that fatal parole. It would have been better if he hadn't got it. But it was so nice, nicer than anything! I and this woman, we swear, the next time he wouldn't have done it anymore. As it is, he has unfortunately won a free game with the knife again, it's your fault, Mr. Prison Chaplain and Mrs. Prison Governor and Mr. Prison Psychiatrist. I would never have expected it of this completely cured murderer! The man has always been an exception. Women don't much like to see the murderer out of doors. The temptations would be too great there. Good thing that the man is inside here now. A thirteen-year-old has just reached out for the light switch, a long smeared trail of blood leads directly to the floor, where he will be stabbed more than twenty times. But the mother would rather weep for the killer than her boy, that way the weeping makes her happier. After all, she has more children, all exactly like this one, if in different age groups. One hardly notices if one is missing. The murderer is shot trying to escape because he wanted to kill a nun in a chapel as well. They got the wrong man, the woman who loved him now weeps inconsolably. I could still have children, but I'll never ever have such a man again. There are so few like him, and that's exactly why I liked him so much. There's a popular belief that someone has to be imprisoned so that at least he pays attention from inside his cage. He has nothing else to give, so we'd better just forgive him. But we digress to these touch-me-not flowers who absolutely want to be broken, and fate alone would not have managed it for fifty years. I ask you, what did the man actually do? Seventeen years ago he chopped up a young woman teacher with a knife, nothing more, there are more women teachers than there are murderers, who are a rare timid kind of wild beast, and still really wild. Not something that eats from the trough and shyly rolls its eyes, where the other troughs stand in the forest, beside the pool, or in the cellar next to the fitness equipment. To demonstrate his long-standing non-aggressive gentle nature, in prison the man preferred to wear pantyhose, perhaps so that in future he is better able to put himself in the position of women, this gentleman who is dead now. If he has relatives who believe in him and who are fond of him, then unfortunately it's my turn.

  The women stick out in their fragrant soft-rinsed wool, as if they were the main thing and had nothing but success with men, when they, nicely garnished with pullovers, T-shirts and scarf, success guaranteed, serve themselves up free of charge. In fact they are at best the dessert, if there's still room for it in the gentleman's stomach. That's something they don't know. Why do they feed the murderers like that? In their place at table I wouldn't have done it, I would rather have bought myself a dog, given how grateful animals are, more grateful than a man we know. I don't understand any of it. I imagine: Murderers exert a gentle hypnosis, some investigate and analyze their future victim for months. They take the trouble to attach concrete rings to them, and sink ring and victim in the nearest river. A human being is only absorbant cotton, a vacuum. If he's lucky the murderer gets a new notion of the essence of human being
s, an advantage for him, which we writers will find difficult to catch up with. They are sand, human beings, there are as many as there are grains of sand on the shore. Well, I don't know… Hardly has he killed someone than new victims come running up, they even come shooting over from neighboring countries. (There are whores in Vienna, Lower Austria, Burgenland, the Czech Republic, and California, and everywhere they are throttled in a singular way with their own underwear. Mr. U., a man with whom I personally have corresponded on human and political questions, prompted it and, when he saw that he was the only man within a considerable radius and women were nothing but dirt, well then he took care of them himself, affronted by their glances because they weren't aristocrats, who would have made a better match for him. How could I have known that? Nevertheless, he didn't charm my soul, in contrast to the souls of others.) Here comes another one, I can hardly follow her, she's twenty years older than young Mr. L., a quite different case, an envious type who's a bodybuilder today and in this way has at last created an entirely new body for himself, has become another in the truest sense of the word, so Mr. L., exactly, he shot his cousin, girlfriend and her mommy full in the face with his pump-action gun, but they didn't need their faces after that anyway. Mr. L. couldn't build himself a new face, he's only grown older, as we all have. Where will it end? And now here comes a woman from Germany, who could be a substitute mother for the culprit, but would rather be his only lover, because there aren't so many places where there are no possibilities of comparison, and here she has found just such a place. It's the prison, it's the special penitentiary for almost broken lawbreakers. That's how the women imagine it: for once a man whom it's worth lifting up to themselves! And then careful you don't drop him! I fear you'll rupture yourself like that. First of all, however, thoroughly martyred by the culprit's ability to stay cool. How one longs for the rare tender moments when the core mantle melts and the sweet center of marzipan and nougat is revealed: highly explosive, I can tell you! Try a Mozartkugel, you'll soon see the difference. At least this motherly woman, with whom truth to tell the young man finds it a bit dull sometimes, is still alive. A close shave, he's still inside, safe inside. Basically this woman never talks about anything except herself, and the one listening to her can for his part talk to no one else, apart from ninety-five other women pen pals, about whom, however, the woman knows nothing. The murderer only wants to get out, which surprises no one, who knows the culprit a bit and the women who are always visiting him. Outside he would be safe from them. Only this woman, still talking about herself, wants to go in the opposite direction, pushing against the crowds at the desk, and even here inside, behind bars which mean the world, be seen by this wild young man, a figure who is at stake and goes on risking his stake and perhaps if possible be touched by his hands and admired as someone, whom one has never even seen before and yet has always known. What does that mean? That means the woman will become the outside. A place for which she is not destined, unless she were really presentable. She's from Bottrop, in the Ruhr, and has taken up residence in Austria for the time being, in order to trump younger women, abandoning everything, even her home town, where she was an executive secretary, that was just a town, which never made free with her hot glances. That was her last trick, now she hasn't got anymore. I swear I'm never going to mention the woman again! She was an example of nothing at all. So, now I've taken my revenge on her, only I don't know what for. The prisoner pockets all the profit. They all like to get close to him, the dear ladies of the Lord, whom they have chosen all on their own (whereas God was already there before, always already there, from the beginning). Even if the lord and master is twenty, thirty years younger, then they really storm the prisons. They literally board them with their freshly painted talons, which would break like glass if firmly gripped. Not in order to resolve to be better people and likewise to improve the culprit, but to be for him, who hasn't got a choice, first mother, then lover and then: everything else as well. After getting to know him better. Of course. Mother is altogether the best thing of all (women don't seem to know that, because they obstinately don't want to be mothers). At least not until their head is cut off and displayed in the window of their little lingerie boutique. As long as there are inquisitive people in the world, they'll stop in front of shop windows and believe in love, which would be even more beautiful in this pretty lace combination, I could imagine. And then that! A decapitated head right in the middle! Incidentally do you have any idea why matricides so often cut off their mothers' heads afterwards? They could also cut open the stomachs and pull out the wombs from which they, the sons, came, and give them a close inspection for once, couldn't they? I don't understand it. They could be content with the killing itself, but they go to the trouble of sawing off the head like Salome, who didn't, however, have to get her own fingers dirty. Sometimes they even stick the Gorgon in the blender, if they have one, which only demonstrates their lack of technical talent. They've never had the opportunity to study, otherwise they would have known that. But wait, back to the beginning, this one has studied at university, economics (but didn't have a clue about solid-state physics!), now he's doing it again, I've heard, studying. Fortunately he's quite healthy again, it's been at least a year since the murder. But I feel so happy for him, that he's out again and now he can until further notice (until he has a girlfriend who looks like his mama) be built up again and find out how far he can get with boldness. Into the newspaper! Oh, that would be nice, to get as far as that!