Greed

by Elfriede Jelinek

  I hear music, it's like my wasted life, one hears it from far off, the music of life, and a moment later it's faded away again. I can't do any better unfortunately. At least be quiet when you get up, and go home, any book lying there will be able to do it better.

  They often cling to him, women to the country policeman, like the members of a society which has a code of honor: stick at it! But he always makes a particular preselection, this man, before there's real fun and games with the women beneath the foaming clouds, before a thunderstorm, behind the dance floor, up on the rocky slope, where the last fruit trees are almost lost amidst the boulders and, startled by the first frost, shed their fruit before it could ripen. The women who have left their cars on the windswept lower mountain parking lot (here there's a panoramic view, and further up another one, where in the wind the flags crackle) and throw themselves into the mountain wind, who crouch down among the dwarf pines to answer nature's call, except when they can hear someone, at the same time panting in fits and starts because they're not used to such a gradient, in short, these women have become ripe for love, without yet having found the pleasure of harvest, which is what they themselves are, these red-cheeked commanders who have lost their whole army, on their way ahead, doggedly, to the peak. They nod to every passing hiker, a little shyly, almost embarrassed, and no one notices that there's only one whom they mean to see, who has sent them a special summons for today. Now they want to comply with it, so that he can look important, which appears neither advisable nor necessary to me because ultimately they will lose everything, instead of getting even one bouquet. There's no doubt about it, there's one man they particularly like, but they don't admit it, the women. He's a country policeman by profession. They shouldn't do it, commit themselves to this person's charge, of all people, and sign on the bottom line as well, so that they may be bound accordingly at any time in an oath of disclosure, by which they swear Jesus appeared to them and told them that they will certainly find happiness with this man. With him. They only have to renounce all others. Such men have already arrested mothers of small children at red lights and simply abandoned the children to the traffic and nothingness, the rattle of the salvoes of headlights on the wet asphalt. And if they throw themselves into his arms, although I've warned them, the women, then they should at least finish it before the glue is dry, but in his place now, the wall, on which they wanted to hang his picture, is vanished, simply gone. Their affection should turn to disaffection, I think, while they still have time. Unfortunately it's again and again enough for the women that they're given a feeling, afterwards they can no longer tell whom they showed it to. In any case, suddenly it was gone, who had it last? Unfortunately I can't remember that anymore now. No matter, the relationship carries on, the tensions with the family also grow, one is called unstable and doesn't know why, because he's the one, as sure as night follows day. One doesn't doubt a love and doesn't entertain a suspicion. There is someone who reads her and doesn't even have to turn her over, because he already knew her inside out. One day it could be too late, how often have I written this sentence, and it's still good. It's indestructible, the sentence. Unfortunately I always have to say when it's too late. This time I can't say so yet, but I have a bad feeling. Well and good. Here's my clock, right in front of me. Writing, that's taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Silly cows, women. All of them. Above all, the educated ones (at least I'm not one of them), as a man I once met who specialized in deceitful promises of marriage personally assured me. But they squander themselves precisely because they think it's all too late for them. Who would promise marriage if he could also get on the train without it and get away with other people's anonymous savings bank books, you see, and these are people for whom the train would even wait! Not the other way round. Instead of women in their maturity beginning to save and to be economical. Every decent liter of wine knows that it improves with age and roughly how much it will cost. Do you know what a care home will take off you? You, and everything you own as well, and your children have to pay the rest, who will be up in arms that they have to raise so much money. What, you didn't know that? One can't really say squander with respect to these women. They rashly expend themselves, but at the same time want to hold onto themselves and even pocket a juicy profit, because they've still got a couple of things to take care of in future, intimate care included. Things which they believe someone needs. First locked up then cared for by staff in white coats. That's what we needed.

  The country policeman is always all ears for himself, he has nothing and no one else. He needs no one. Everyone gets what they deserve. But you say stubbornly, they're not getting what they deserve, just feel for a moment, or listen! Not even money is so self-seeking that it could simultaneously expend and hold onto itself. It casts out a little beyond itself, what is it?, like a fishing-line, is that not a goldfish on the line, still as agile and amusing as in the old film of the same name?, never mind, whirring and unreeling itself it races across the countryside, this female self, yes, now I see that it's a proper self, which only in recent years, since there's been a special ministry for it, now unfortunately done away with, has been used to making decisions of its own, and was even encouraged to do so by the newspapers. And then it does catch on and decides in favor of one who's caught its eye, where it's an irritation and causes tears to flow, and bit by bit he destroys everything again. He doesn't even need an argument to do that. It's enough for him to be there. I'm fighting to get you, says the woman. No thanks, that would hardly have been necessary, says the man. He's someone who quietly makes his contacts: houses, property, gardens, apartments. He's not been very successful so far, but in a very short time he will perhaps nevertheless rise to be the hero of a whole fleet of houses. On his steamer, there he'll be admiral. Traces of blood in the stairwells? We'll wipe them away, what does it matter. Traces of sperm in pubic hair that belongs to a dead woman? Oh dear. We should have thought of that beforehand! It would have been a good idea, when we squeezed quite lightly on the nerve center (situated at the bend of the river of the carotid arteries) of a desperate girl, what if we left behind usable DNA material, like the single hair in the case of the notorious pencil murder of St. Polten, which perfectly matched a particular person? No, because we no longer know how the hair found its way into the files. Since this time no intercourse took place, we needn't have any worries in that respect, this time only her mouth and his hand moved, slowly, over her throat. Several women have already disappeared in this area, I just wanted to say that, no one knows where they got to, a new age is starting, and once these women, too, made a new start, going somewhere, hitchhikers, mountain walkers from other countries, a widow who lived alone, I've no idea where they all are now. Once a skeleton was found in the forest, which had a woman's stocking wrapped around its neck, a lot of it had been dragged off by animals, there was too little left for the forensic doctor. The hair on the skeleton's head, traces of it, like the faded color of a lioness, no idea to whom the hair belonged. A human being is kept upright by energy, and in this case or another one, that has now been switched off. Wasn't hard at all. But before that, only three days before, then, e.g., this desperate women, her head thrown back, had her cunt clamped round a cock, as if she never wanted to let it out again. What did it lead to? Ultimately it led out again. Such a feeling of love, she had really got hold of a mousetrap there, this young woman, the man under her couldn't get out of his car seat. He almost got into a panic. First she gently guided him into her, and then he thought he wasn't going to get out again. As if she wanted to clutch at a strange, quite new possibility of existence, that's how furiously that evening she threw herself on him, who is in reality inviolable, and sat herself on that thing, which as ever with him was standing straight up. No chance of resistance. The woman launched herself at him, pulled out his cock without further ado and used it as a guiding thread inside her. Yet when it was inside: yawning emptiness. Where can a person find his personality, if he doesn't have one, to fill the gap? Th
en strangers often have to fill the gap and pay a high price for doing so. And if these strangers don't want to pay, then one has to add on something oneself. You can die doing it! That is the law of pornography, even if one can't read: Out and in, and after a couple inches it's curtains again. It doesn't go any further. It could possibly go better. Every door can do it with me, every pencil in my breast pocket, so why shouldn't the two of them not manage it with one another? With the man it didn't perhaps happen quite voluntarily, he didn't have any great expectations, I think, but young flesh is a party, which cannot be so easily ignored, as when for example it puts in a noisy appearance, in crowds, for Mr. Haider, and it wants to have music, too. Most, however, play their music against this gentleman and have fun that way. Later we wiped out the young woman's vagina with a rag from the trunk, and this rag will surely have left behind fiber traces, we simply threw it into the bushes, but a couple of miles further on, no unfortunately we dropped it, where we happened to be standing, oh, if only we could remember! If only we hadn't been so lazy, to get rid of the rag, that would have been better, so that no impression of the indescribable stupidity of the wrongdoer would arise. There are already a whole number of Tempo handkerchiefs lying around there, which are quite stiff from everything they've already had to swallow in their lives. But the most important piece of evidence in this tangle of pubic hair would certainly be these stupid fibers. What use are they, when the cloth that goes along with them cannot be matched with a human being that goes with them? They are of use, when the sperm adhering to them can lead to an arrest, if, after mass screenings, it can be assigned to a particular man. And with the secretions, which are adhering right next to it, one can then also lay hands on the woman, who was firmly tied up in her plastic sheet, wait, no, we've got the woman, it's only her murderer we haven't got yet. Well, I think they'll know immediately who the woman was, her photo is still pinned to the poles everywhere. Apart from which, everyone here knows her. The man, therefore, must go back to the scene of past pleasure, if possible even before shop-closing time and the body being found, and search the bushes. The rag has to be disposed of somewhat further away, and, who knows, perhaps there are older traces, on paper, which point to him, to manual use by the country policeman. It's no fun. The man will have to root around there in the dirt, pick up the rag and get rid of it. Otherwise his colleagues would take this rag to the laboratory. The man is tired. He's run out of juice.

  No, not quite yet, I can hardly believe it: His cock is almost sticking out of his fly again like an inquisitive child, if he only thinks about it. About all the women and what it's done with them, and what it still wants to do. It seems to have liked it, it wants to know what became of this girl, by whom it was mischievously, almost shamelessly handled. But it knows. This man is incorrigible, no efficient planning and decision-making structure applies to him when he follows his cock, which would like to harden and attach itself in someone, but doesn't have its own hook. At some point the women fall away, and then he falls out of them. Every night, as he falls asleep next to his wife, lonely and alone, he shakes his penis, his maypole, which is allowed to remain standing all year long, and there's still something hanging at the top, astonishing. To the man, it's as if this shaking passes over into his sleep, it must be so, because at some point there's peace, when sleep at last also condescends to catch sight of the tireless ones. Now we've painted such a nicely deviant pattern of behavior on the wall. I can't bear to part from it. One can collect as much information about people as one likes, but the police, the investigators, see principally what they get their hands on, but never more than the surface. The rest is for the refuse collection. The police psychologist with his lopsided profile of the criminal really should go back to art school and produce a new one. The outcome of the search, the dead woman we've found, wait a moment, we don't have her yet, but we'll soon bring her in, yet the core fantasy that triggers the killing, unfortunately we can't find that, because we don't know where at all we should look for it. This man is wild but left to his own devices, others have a room with sport and hobby apparatus instead and are also content with that. It's no wonder that the psychologist can paint this room for us at any time, the room really needs it, too. Here's a man who since childhood has been engrossed above all else in his feces, but understandably he doesn't make a show of it in public, he's not a dog after all, and so we can't observe him live. No camera would stay with it, and they are simply there always and everywhere. A pity, we've never seen anything like that. But soon we'll have a new TV program instead, in which the murderers will be allowed to have their say. Then a childhood is marked by the death of an alcoholic mother, the interpretation is risky, however, since everyone here boozes, though not all with the same consequences, but the son's skin, stamped blue all over by this creeping death, will never be found again. Only slipperiness will be found and cold and rejection and hunger, but after something else, no idea what, and a sticky rag will be found, not, however, what was lying underneath it. The big roll of plastic will fit one woman like a glove, as if she had been poured into it. It seems the forest floor alone was under the unimmaculate cloth. Nothing else. You know, something terrible happened! And already the memory of a dead woman is linked to weeping which never ends, with fear of darkness, and right next door a woman has died again, not quite voluntarily, not of love, but nevertheless. It wasn't her fault, but she had become party to the invisible struggle of a furiously nail-biting consciousness against its owner, who is likewise a kind of anxiety-biter. He snaps before there's even any need. So that later on nothing else can happen to him. The nipples and labia of several women know all about that, they can make a discordant song of it, but they don't necessarily sing it at the choral society, but off the marked piste, and so one knows nothing of the other. It seems to me that as a result this man I'm talking about is all the more concrete, also more alive to the women he meets. They think they know where they are with him, they have felt love's hot breath, the desire of hot teeth, and this crescent-shaped bite proves it to them in case they've forgotten, my God, how it hurts now, earlier I didn't know yet that it was going to hurt so much, when I tenderly permitted, no, asked for it. Except these women appear to confuse the house of their body with something that is decidedly more permanent: solid stone or made of the more dainty insulation bricks. Not bad either. They can't compete with that. A matter of taste. So they have to hand over their little house oven-ready, so that it can be done up at last, so that washing can flutter outside, but not their washing, flutter as cheerily as a song that can go round the world all by itself, one only needs to turn up the radio. One would rather be turned on oneself. The wounds have to be disinfected and cooled down with bags of ice. That's what happens when one holds the head of someone desperate to one's breast: Either he cries until he gets terribly on one's nerves, or he right away bites you. Someone who owns nothing will at least be interested in their property if in nothing else, think these women, and how gladly they would immediately like to give away themselves and all their property as well, so that they will very soon awake in the light, in the wonderful light of love, that pours from a person who has swallowed, no, not a pot plant, but a pocket lamp. And he is now her sun. For the man they would be the filling in the Swiss roll, so to speak, so light, so fine, with their property wrapped around them, and in which they have wrapped the man, hm, tasty! That's how they imagine it. Until the women no longer know where they are at all, and they suddenly have to dispatch themselves to a lawyer to have it explained to them and to see who or what, if anything at all, comes back to them after a while, after, attested by a notary, they have surrendered their property to someone who will not have been worth it. Doesn't matter, it was worth the property. Now they are. No one. Alone. Now the lawyer is supposed to rescue them, no no, that he can never do, the signature is already standing there and absent-mindedly filing his nails. Yes, anyone who takes offense at the pleasures of others puts himself at the mercy of a bad mood, my dear Mme. Piano Teac
her! And there it is already, the rotten mood.