Help! (Anna.) (What they hear is: croak, croak.)
Take some chocolate with you, chimes Sophie, with certain undertones and overtones. No, we won't take any chocolate, Sophie, because that's sadism, says Rainer, on the safe ground of his own field. Passion, dryness and grim determination. Dryness because you get sadism when desire has become free and unclouded, as Jean-Paul Sartre says.
Hans, on the other hand, explains that he is really an animal, not a human being, and that is why his manner is distinctly animal. He once read this in a thriller. Hans has read things, but they were the wrong things, simply the kind of stuff you find lying around in a workers' home that has had the pleasure of a workerseducationmovement. But he has read enough to know where the way to the top and the way to the bottom are. The world of books was the only way out. And in a workerseducationhome there are always books. But there is no other world. Only your own. His parents were workers with awareness. Which got them nowhere, seeing that one is dead and the other practically dead.
Rainer bickers. He is more unscrupulous than Hans because he has more to lose than Hans (who does not play the game), that is to say: a future career in the academic and literary world. Hans only stands to gain, and Sophie is even giving him her support! Hans is an unconscious ball tossed about by the elements and by Sophie. Rainer is not a ball in anybody's game. He acts of his own accord.
But still he is obliged to leave and take Anna with him. Please go, both of you. The siblings, pickled in hatred, shuffle out onto the English-style lawn, where they deliberately trample several costly blossoms and grasses and leaves underfoot, beneath soles paper-thin, because the shape of fashionable winklepickers would be spoilt by re-soling. Then they walk to the bus stop, with Rainer holding forth on why he left of his own free will and is therefore stronger than Hans, who stayed behind against his will. Thank heaven that at least his sister doesn't make any stupid objections or interjections.
Anna is silent, appalled at having to leave her Hans behind in an enemy house. Rainer's and Anna's love has been meanly spurned today, which has torn a rift in them both, which will be difficult to patch up or glue together again.
The pain does its job and swells to full proportions as the tram, reeking of unloved average people, takes the two of them back into its body again, it is a womb that the infant always wants to quit as fast as possible. One really ought to have a Porsche. But one hasn't got one, even if one says at school that some non-existent relative or other owns a luxury automobile of that kind.
In Sophie's room a record has been put on, and Sophie demands that Hans sit in that armchair over there and get undressed, yes, completely, and masturbate in front of her eyes, she wants to watch, just the way he always does it at home on his bed-sofa. Hans says he can't do it with her watching. Sophie says she wants him to do it with her watching. Hans flushes red as a tomato, he becomes agitated and stresses the reasons why he can't. He'd better, says Sophie, or else he can go right away and never come back.
Clumsily, Hans undresses. More clumsily than at the WAT when he goes to play basketball. But in the end he does manage to unbutton his shirt. He swears he almost certainly won't manage it, it's too embarrassing, he simply can't do it. It's supposed to be, says Sophie. As embarrassing as possible. That's why I want you to do it.
Hans says he'll do anything she wants and she knows it, but she shouldn't abuse that, it's unfair.
But I like abusing it. You have to take your socks off too, of course, what does it look like if you're naked but still have your socks on, it ruins the overall impression. Hans takes off his socks, revealing his dirty feet.
Sophie perches in a corner, scrutinises the rims of muck between the toes, and says she wants his freedom to submit qua freedom. She knows she is causing him pain, but she is coercing that freedom by torturing him, as it were, into identifying of his own free will with the flesh that suffers the pain, that is freedom, d'you understand? She rolls up into a sort of ball and chews off one fingernail after another.
Sophie says he can always beg her to let him off. If I put pressure on you, your fear and pleas are free, they're there of your own accord. It's your decision and yours alone, got it?
Hans says he'll do it because he secretly loves her. Which is no secret any more now. He eyes his cock with little favour. He'll never get a hard-on. That's for sure.
Now you have to stroke yourself, go on, says Sophie. For the first time she looks neither pale nor tanned but has red blotches on her cheekbones and almost looks alive. She says she wants to see everything, she wants a good view of all of him, she wants him to sit so that she can see and if necessary switch on the electric light, which he knows all about.
I'm doing it just for love, says Hans, and begins an unskilled tugging and pulling, rubbing and squeezing at his prick, which his anxiety has shrivelled with anxiety to the size of a twopenny banger.
It is a conflict of diverse forces, with Hans in the middle, making a rather powerless, indeed impotent impression just now.
Is that it, asks Sophie. No, that's not it, I can do a lot more, grinds Hans, who is working himself to a slow rage. He looks at Sophie, and instantly the fresh vitality of Youth and Fitness triumph and his member rises as it's supposed to. Youth and Health have won out over Age and Infirmity.
Sophie practically chews a knuckle off.
When he announces for the fifth time that he's doing it for love, Sophie says she doesn't give a toss why he's doing it just as long as he does do it, and she lays the palms of her hands on her throat to cool it off.
Hans works away at himself as if he were trying to jerk a wire through a wall, though all he's jerking off is himself. Sophie wants him to squirt and tells him so.
Hans doesn't want to mess the brocade of the armchair with his seed. Sophie says he can go right ahead because after all it's her armchair. Well all right then, I'll soil the armchair, puffs Hans in a regretful tone, and he goes ahead and soils it. Pretty soon there'll be sperm stinking of fish all over the room, thinks Sophie, and she gets rid of Hans in a hurry.
FOR ONCE HANS is wearing work overalls when the wages he has earned are paid out to him. He has a book tucked under his arm, a book that never used to be tucked there. For all to see. It is not a worker's book; but then, this worker has already ceased to be one. In his case things do not go as far as in Rainer's. Rainer wants to establish a whole new culture himself. Hans plans to work his way up economically rather than culturally. The economy is more to his taste. Right now he is already a tiny wheel in the machinery. Trotsky addresses him from the pages of this book, which Anna has lent him. Trotsky confides that in a society where worries about one's daily bread have become a thing of the past, where the children (all of them well-nourished) are cheerfully receptive to Science and to Art too, and where even the immense power of the ego will be trying to make the world a better place, Culture will have a far more forceful effect than it ever used to. This doesn't exactly knock Hans's socks off. What knocks Hans's socks off is Sophie's leather armchair. He plans to buy himself one just like it.
Today as always the Kochgasse knocks his optimism for six the moment he sets eyes on it. Any moment, enthusiasm for sport will replace this inappropriate optimism, and set Hans soaring high at basketball. Not long ago Sophie came and watched him play. Not a single loud or nasty word was spoken, the prevailing tone was one of relaxed politeness. Sophie seems a will-o'-the-wisp to him because one moment she's here and the next she's somewhere entirely different, cheering on the team she supports. Should he take her flowers or would an expensive perfume be better or maybe an extra-large bonbonniere? The best thing to do is to ask a woman, since she'll understand another woman's heart's desire better. Anna, in other words. He has to study later too, so that Sophie can be married and the armchair bought. Sophie is very complicated. The cause of this is her idiosyncratic nature. If you want to be complicated you have to be familiar with all the possible ways.
Rainer, the braggart weakling, has to get lost
, hissing and frothing like Coca Cola, whenever Sophie says: Hans, you stay! It is a fresh pleasure for Hans every time the self-appointed leader has to beat a retreat. Rainer (the liar, the bigmouth) said he always goes on purpose so that he can test the tool of his imagination (the bonehead) on him and Sophie, patiently and calmly, as a locksmith tries a key. Rainer said he wants to make a tool of his flesh and Sophie's.
Hans muscles his way through Schonborn Park, behind the Ethnological Museum, swinging the briefcase containing his thermos flask and lunchbox to and fro, high spirits personified. He is not under any pressure right now because Sophie never strays into this area. It would be terrific if the girl stroked him just once or touched him in some other intimate way. But she doesn't. Because her pride is highly developed. Hans for his part no longer kisses women who are not that proud. His interest in Anna is dwindling in proportion to his love of Sophie. Already it has almost disappeared. Nowadays he only gives her hurried kisses by way of a thankyou for sex, which Sophie doesn't yet want to perform. The mental world Hans inhabits is inexact, as are the ideas of Life and values of the fellow-workers surging homeward in front of him, beside him and behind him. Three plane trees are swaying rhythmically in the wind and creaking because they are old and legally protected. Hans wants to protect Sophie for the rest of her life and be out in the open, in the fresh air a good deal. Soon the ice cream parlour will be opening its doors and admitting the surrounding Youth. Hans is already looking forward to licking away at a raspberry cornet and buying Sophie one. Soon summer will have arrived and it'll perhaps, correction: definitely be possible to get an eyeful of Sophie in a tiny bikini, the steamy mists of the water in the foreground, the steamy vapours of dewy forests in the background, and between them the steamy embrace of two bodies. Hans breaks into a bit of a run. He is running on ahead of himself, filled with a prospect of perhaps getting properly to grips with Sophie next time. If he imagines the place between Sophie's thighs he gets an instant hard-on and can't run or jump so well. No doubt her body is whiter and softer than Anna's, which is darker and harder. But he will never despise Anna in times to come. No, he will be understanding. Once he is studying he will give serious attention to her problems, and will be able to advise and help her, too. From time to time, he and Sophie will take Anna along on an outing in the car and try hard to teach her some sport so that she gets more out of life and develops a more positive attitude. Soon the chestnut blossom will be out, old people take greater delight in that than young people do because young people will see chestnut trees in blossom many more times whereas for old people the time is running out. A young man takes greater delight in it than a girl because he'll be kissing the girl's mouth beneath the chestnut tree and the girl will have to defend herself.
The city has a city smell. It is better than the countryside, which we have fled from. The city smells of adventure, jazz, cafes and exhaust fumes. Hans swings the briefcase round in a circle and this evening he'll swing Sophie round on the dancefloor the same way. The thermos flask is in danger of being broken, Life is good but in a moment his mother will be souring it for him once more with her talk of politics, cramming the embitterment into her rustling stacks of envelopes. Next month she may be getting a better-paid office job, as a full-time assistant in the accounts department.
There she is. Mother. Dealing the typewriter hammer-blows. Badmouthing the petite bourgeoisie, who cheered Hitler the loudest. Her son ought to stay away from them. Politically unaware, they enriched their petty profit-mongering egoism at the expense of minorities.
Hans tosses everything onto the kitchen bench in an untidy heap and flings off his shoes. The picture of his dead father goggles at the history-making power of the workers, with misplaced optimism and misplaced trust, from out of the frame where he will remain (as long as there is anyone at all to spare a thought for him), unable to go class-struggling. And serve him right. Morbid altruist. So he crumbled unto dust, with the flames helping along a little, and not even the whereabouts of the grave is known. And if report can be believed, millions of others crumbled along with him and vanished from the face of the earth, without trace, and still their places are being taken by new generations who will disappear in turn because their very existence is of no consequence. No one notes them down or counts them. Hans won't disappear. Hans will achieve his full status and potential at night school. Often Hans will pick up a tennis racket in his leisure time. Sport gives you a particularly strong sense of being alive, which his unknown Papa can no longer experience because he no longer is. Perhaps his Papa would have sent him to grammar school straight off, without approaching it in a roundabout way, if he'd been in a position to do so. Later on, Hans will be a big boss in the financial empire of Sophie's father. Because he'll be marrying the daughter. And he'll earn his advance laurels to the full, so that the father doesn't regret having taken him as a son-in-law. He will have to work hard, but then he will be accepted. Their initial sceptical attitude will have been forgiven once the first child is born, at the very latest.
Not to freeze underground with the millions who were exterminated. But to warm yourself at the fire of eager sportsmanship and bebop.
At irregular intervals, Hans tosses off articles of clothing, and tells his mother, who is holding forth about the War and the fact that a Wall Street company in America financed the SS, that jeans and every kind of hot music come from America, and that he is going to make a career for himself on the lines of an American-style manager. Still he won't deny his feelings and become an ice-cool careerist.
On the stove, something cheap and evil-smelling is cooking loudly away. The typewriter pauses in horror. Then comes to a full stop.
Hans tells Mother that Man has to achieve his liberation and rebel, and afterwards a life free of obligations can begin, as Rainer is forever saying. Some things he says are spot on, you've got to hand it to him. Then later, when you're older, business life starts exacting its obligations. In business you can discreetly lead the masses. All men are not equal, people differ in colour, shape and size.
Mother says that that concept of freedom is wishy-washy, nobody lives in a vacuum, we are determined by society. She ladles some indefinable slop that looks suspiciously like semolina into a bowl and accuses sundry Socialist Party men of treachery. Principally she accuses the notorious Socialist Home Secretary Helmer, who had shop-stewards arrested in the fifties and was responsible for other dirty deeds as well. The past of this shady character is obscured by a thick haze that not even the police could dispel. But Socialist functionaries Waldbrunner (Minister of Energy and informer), Tschadek (Minister of Justice and enemy of the workers) and many other leading trade unionists who dumped shit on their party and its tradition come in for Mother's violent abuse too, without any regard for their status, rank or personal qualities. Not to mention Olah, the secret agent.
Hans says that he is above the vacuum of the petite bourgeoisie, where you can suffocate if you don't watch out.
Mother saws off bread, wedges thick as doorstops, needless to say, nothing dainty about them, and tells her son, who has somehow or other not turned out quite right, to consider that that very attitude declares him one of the bourgeoisie. Even as you appear to adopt a position above their system of values, you recognise that system. It renders you blind to poverty. The mere fact that you speak of 'Man' is a crime. There is no such thing as the universal 'Man', never has been and never will be, there is the worker and there's the one who exploits the worker and those who abet him.
Hans says that Rainer says that it's appalling to imagine yourself a part of a whole. Because you must always remain an individual, completely on your own, and quite unmistakably distinctive. Which is a fortifying thought.
Mummy howls out loud. Not because she has cut herself but because her son is taking the wrong path. Turn back! You are trampling on the wishes and needs of your class, Hans. Nothing is universal. Instead of the unity and strength of your class, you want it split into individual molecules, ever
y one of them isolated from the rest. Mother is like a hornet. Any moment she'll be sploshing semolina around the place and pointing for the fifty-thousandth time to murdered Papa, who did it better. You can see for yourself where it got him. And first he had to undergo inconceivable suffering, which is not to Hans's taste. After all, he wants to be inconceivably happy with Sophie.
Mother says it wasn't her that taught her son this egoism. Nor would his father have taught it him either. And out comes the motherfinger as usual, pointing to the well-loved but now almost forgotten features of that face. Hans says (it's all right if Papa hears this) that Love, to be exact: his love of Sophie, is a better way of tearing down barriers, whatever kind of barriers they may be, than fighting, no matter who the enemy may be, because his love knows no barriers or bounds.
Mother says she'd like to know why Love always crosses these famous barriers to go up and never to go down. Would he like a fruit yoghurt for afters? There's one left, standing all alone on the window sill, keeping its cool. No, Hans doesn't want a fruit yoghurt such as he ate in his early years, Hans wants a whisky or a cognac. Already he can hear the clink of ice, already he can see a white female hand, which is not a ghost's but quite specifically his Sophie's. It is specific yet unreal, like the concept of the working class. Unreal, like exploitation, which you can free yourself of at any time, after all, if you have the will to do so. It's all up to the individual.
Mother longs for the words, deeds and works of her dead husband, whom she'd still like to have with her in bed at times and whom she'd always like to have around, to help her get her bearings in bringing up her only son. Things aren't easy nowadays, Hansi (that was his name). Your poor maltreated bones have no idea that there are other crosses to bear besides the physical one. No doubt it hurt to die. You poor thing. I think such a lot about our cycling tours and all the things we shared. It was the last time you laughed. Those nights spent in barns, in the biting cold, squeezing up close together. Country milk and country butter from a farmer. Washing in the trough at the well. Discussions in backrooms of pubs with a tobacco haze in the air. And the ones who were going to continue the tradition but our son is not continuing anything, and what has become of the others? They are not in our old party any more. And then the shock, which must have been terrible. Having the life crushed out of your body, which wasn't ready for it. Though perhaps it had been prepared by the frightful pain beforehand, which one would rather endure dead than alive.
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