Wonderful Wonderful Times

by Elfriede Jelinek

  What I did in the gym (Sophie) was more of an event than courtship. Dynamite. Rainer says that no doubt she doesn't want to go away from him and she's just talking. And by way of proof that he trusts her entirely he is now going to confide a few ideas towards an interpretation of The Plague by Camus, because that is the next book they're going to read together. She mustn't tell anyone.

  Sophie coolly moves him aside with her fingertips and says hello to her dancing partner's parents, who know her and enquire after her plans for the future, whereupon they too are told about Lausanne. They consider this good, likewise the opportunities for sports there.

  Anna blows air down Sophie's neck where there is blonde down. Now she wants to say something about her own character for once. She hasn't said this much in a long time. Anna says that her character is one of blind hatred of the whole world. She wants Hans to pick her up like he picked Sophie up back then. Hans tells Anni to go fetch him some bread and wurst. Whereupon she promptly rockets off.

  By now Rainer and Hans are each hanging on to one of Sophie's shoulders, listing the reasons why she should leave this dreary school party with them to have a discussion. Rainer hurriedly explains modern music, which is coming from the tape recorder. Sophie shouldn't go to French Switzerland. Hans doesn't say Switzerland till he's been told where Lausanne is.

  Sophie slips out of the arms of both. They mean well but grip poorly. She slips out like an evil carnivorous plant that uses a sticky substance to kill insects, and says she won't have them bothering her in any way at all. She's going away so that she doesn't have to see the pair of them any more.

  Are those your little admirers, Sophie, smiles the dancingpartnermother, have fun then, dear Sophie.

  Anna comes home with the bread and wurst. Hans wolfs the salami, nervously, plucks off the little gherkin, and leaves Anna to polish off the remains of the sandwich. At his invitation. Anna eats and heads off purposefully to the toilet to throw up, hoping it isn't engaged.

  Rainer says he may kill himself. This is sure to get Sophie's attention. Otherwise he'll slip through the net and be gone. The world is gently indifferent, says Camus. One has to put its hostility behind one, says Camus. Once one's hope has been taken away, one has the Present in one's hand, whole, one is Reality oneself and all the rest are extras. Which they are in any case.

  You never say anything that someone else didn't say before you, breathes Sophie.

  Because I already know everything that can be said, see. If Life has expired, Evening is like a melancholy ceasefire, as Camus assures us.

  Hans hammers his fist at his skull as hard as he can, making a hollow sound. Nothing witty comes out, just the usual stuff, the foreman's words, to the effect that he has done some wiring wrong and is about to get a kick up the backside.

  The disabled father clambers across on his crutches and tells Sophie that she plainly must be his son's little girlfriend, that's lovely, she's a trim little filly, the kind he used to have quite a lot of in the old days and only has occasionally now because with a job you don't have much time. He could show his son Rainer a thing or two in that line, too.

  Anna and Rainer's mother devours the cut of Sophie's cocktail dress with her eyes. Could she run up a chiffon miracle like that on her sewing machine? Or is it organdie? It's not synthetic.

  Anna clamps hold of her mother's arm like a pair of pliers. She hasn't taken hold of that arm for months. For a moment the two women are St Mary and St Martha, of necessity, since Mary only had a son, no daughter.

  Hans swallows. His Adam's apple bobs. So much saliva and he hasn't even had a beer.

  Sophie shakes everything off and absolutely and irrevocably departs.

  Sophie leaves two voids behind, one in Hans and one in Rainer, but she does not feel them.

  Often a girl in a summer holiday resort will say when her boyfriend has gone back to town: You're leaving, but a great deal remains. A great deal that he has left. But in this case not a great deal remains to profit from. In fact there is nothing left.

  Frau Witkowski uses two hands, which is all she has, to cover the nakedness of the velvet bow and the pinned-on flower, but both of them peep out indiscreetly from between her fingers, making a bad impression. Herr Witkowski makes one of these too.

  Anna also leaves, unnoticed by anyone, by anyone at all. She doesn't even leave the tiny dent of a metal stiletto heel in the parquet flooring. She leaves nothing whatsoever.

  HANS COMES OUT of the works gate and Anna, who is outside, goes up to him. She wants to say something sensible so that he'll see she can be different. She is planning to say that it's good I can't go to America because now we can study for your night school classes this summer. But as so often she says nothing at all, she simply wails stupidly. In front of all these strangers who have been working all day and so have a right to some peace and quiet in the evening, Anna roars out loud and puts her soul, which is almost completely eaten away, into her bawling, ultimately showing that there's good in her. Only those who are not yet totally hardened can cry. Her mouth and face are distorted and ugly. A woman never benefits from this kind of facial expression, she loses. Nonetheless, a perverse kind of pity seizes upon Hans when he discovers this in Anna. Perhaps it isn't pity. Perhaps it is more of a male reflex to protect weak things. This reflex operates when a man sees a woman weeping. He places his arm around this particular weeping woman and leads her away in a hurry so that fellow-workers won't snoop. He says: What's up, Anni? What are you crying for? Come on, there! Anna says she is in despair and lets a whole lot of things burst out of her untidily, mainly fear, hatred, and at the root a touch of envy of Sophie. Hans says that envying someone who ended up on the right side of the tracks through no fault of her own is not nice. Do you begrudge it Sophie? Anna blubs an octave higher. Come on, I'll see you home, we live more or less next door to each other as it is. He tells her to calm down, and gradually she does calm down. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she sees Hans in a completely new light, with the eyes of a love that realises it is the real thing. Hans sees Anna in a completely different light, with the eyes of the male protector who is stronger. Maybe it is also the feeling of friendship likewise realising it is the real thing. It means that you will see it through with your friend, through thick and thin and other rough times.

  Through thick and thin Hans walks Anna home. What's up with Annidear, he says time after time, he can't think of anything else to say. Nothing, it's all right, she says. Want to come to supper?

  No, says Hans promptly, because he can't stand Anna's parents. But he says it'll soon be Sunday and perhaps they could do something together.

  Various worries leave Anna, and an unaccustomed cheerfulness takes hold of her, a mood that even extends to supper, which will doubtless taste revolting. In the very near future there will be a Sunday cycling trip with Hans. Perhaps the trip will represent a new start, on a new basis. The basis does not always have to be material things. Money can sometimes be irrelevant. Feelings are independent of it.

  In the Witkowski flat, dinner is being served. Father is grumbling away, without pausing for breath. You're so used to it that you don't even take it in any more. He threatens Mother with sundry appalling kinds of torture that he proposes practising upon her. Mother is flicking through a mail order catalogue, where she comes across a dress that hurts her eyes. It hurts and hurts. It hurts particularly badly because dresswise she disgraced herself so awfully at school yesterday and within herself is still smarting from the blow.

  Father asks Rainer if he'll play chess with him afterwards. Rainer says yes, and will in fact play. For supper there's bread and wurst.Plus potatoes in some dreadful sauce. Then the chess match is played. The disabled man utters misleading warnings and advice concerning Rainer's mental state or Rainer himself. Rainer seems not to be concentrating and loses. Father is insanely pleased, seeing that recently he's been beating his lordship the stuck-up grammar school boy with his airs and graces only rarely. Nevertheless he tells Rainer he'll
give him a good wallop if he doesn't make more of an effort when he plays chess with his father. Rainer says that winning is pointless and is dealt the aforementioned wallop.

  There is something soft in Anna's features that was not in them this morning. Where has it come from? She is even drying the dishes.

  Mother escapes from her failure as a mother into the role of martyr and beseeches Father not to use a prop tonight, it hurts. Father says wittily that he'll think about it (but in the event he hits her more, if anything, not less). Then they go to bed.

  Anna eats an apple before she goes to sleep.

  Rainer also eats an apple before he goes to sleep, reading Camus on absurdity and obsession.

  Lights out. They sleep.

  At half past six Rainer wakes suddenly. Unusually, both his hands are damp with sweat. He doesn't weigh up any of the pros and cons. He can hear Mother in the bathroom. He gets up, goes into the hall and fetches the key of the pistol case from Father's bunch of keys, which is dangling from the front door. The case is 8 cm deep, 30 cm long and 15 cm wide, and made of iron. The wallet is lying on it and has to be moved first. The flat is silent, apart from the disagreeable bathroom noises made by Mother, who is always the first to get up. Rainer opens the pistol case to take out the 6.35 mm calibre Steyr-Kipplauf pistol. There are photographs under the pistol, showing his mother's genitals. These genitals make no perceptible impression on him, though it was through them that he first entered the world.

  Taking the pistol, Rainer goes over to his sister, who has been sleeping right beside him all night beyond the thin partition wall and is still doing so, trustingly. He shoots Anna in the head, at point-blank range. The shot shatters her frontal bone but merely renders her unconscious, immediately. A few scraps of sound from Schonberg's op. 33a plus the Berg sonata (only half of which she has committed to memory) quaver through Anna's brain in shock and then, hesitantly, reluctantly, disappear for ever. No more music, ever again.

  After firing this shot, Rainer goes out into the hall, where Mother comes towards him, not speaking or making any kind of utterance at all. He knows he has to kill the whole family now so that there will be no witnesses to betray him to the police. Instantly Rainer shoots his mother, also in the head. She collapses without a sound. Her upper jaw is completely smashed but she is not yet dead. Mother lies in a heap on the hall linoleum, her death rattle gurgling. One can't tell if her brain is still functioning or not, probably not. The pistol is now no longer loaded and Rainer puts it aside and fetches the axe from the toilet. It is honed razor-sharp and weighs 1.095 kg. The blade is 11.2 cm long. Oddly enough, Father has been sitting quietly in the living room throughout the murders, wearing a cardigan over his pyjamas. Rainer goes in to his father, with the axe. Father expresses silent astonishment. Rainer wields the axe and strikes out without thinking anything at all. Aiming at the head. Rainer's progenitor instantly caves in beneath the fearful axe blows, bleeding heavily. Bones break, knuckles splinter, tendons tear, veins are severed beyond repair. Rainer aims mainly at the head and neck, which is quite enough. He keeps on wielding his blows till Father has been totally cut to pieces. Then Rainer picks up the axe and goes over to his mother. A parcel of humanity lying gurgling and frothing in the hall. He strikes at her too. He is still not weighing up the pros and cons, or anything at all. He wants to inflict mortal injury, and he does. When he fired that last shot he knew already that he'd go over to the axe to finish the job. Nobody says anything or screams. Mother is lying on her stomach, and in that position she is dealt the death blow. She dies. The whole time, Rainer does not budge a single millimetre. Things lie where they have fallen.

  Once she's dead, Rainer goes over to his sister, whom he has already shot in the head (because that was the only part of her body exposed above the blanket), and hacks away at Anna's head just as he hacked at Father's and Mother's heads. Anna's head is smashed to a pulp of bones, blood, tendons and brain matter, with stray teeth showing up palely out of it and a single eye, almost detached. Some time, soon, Anna will die too. And then all three will be dead.

  Most of the cuts have been dealt to their heads and necks. Now Rainer goes to the cardboard suitcase and fetches the bayonet out from amongst the heap of toys, the slide projector and the felt. With this bayonet he quite needlessly jabs at the three corpses. In doing so he is methodical, taking one body after another. First Father is stabbed in the neck, chest and navel with the bayonet. Then his dead mother is stabbed violently, mainly in the abdomen. Next he stabs his dead sister with all his might. Now, at last, he is through. The bleeding heaps of humanity are not making a sound. Nor can they be told apart any more. After all, Death the Leveller annihilates all distinctions. The sexes of the bodies can still be just about made out, but nothing else. You have to take your bearings from that if you want to decide which corpse is whose.

  Through this absurd action, Rainer is out to preserve his narcissistic belief that he has achieved something extraordinary.

  Now he tries to hide his father's body so that it won't be spotted the moment people come in. Panting, he drags the parcel of flesh, dribbling blood, across to the big farmhouse chest, from which he has first had to remove a load of useless junk so that the corpse will fit. There is such a terrible lot of blood that he is unable to hide the other carcasses. His nerves won't take it any more. And Rainer fails in his task.

  He takes off his blood-soaked pyjamas and takes a shower. Then he stows the weapons in a briefcase and leaves the house at an early hour, to establish an alibi. He takes his pyjamas along too. He drives over to a schoolmate's to revise for the exams together and borrow money for petrol from him. He is planning to throw the murder weapons off a bridge, into the Danube, but doesn't dare because there are so many passers-by near the river, quite pointlessly so early in the day. So the arsenal ends up in the boot, together with his pyjamas, which go under the spare tyre.

  After revising for the exams and borrowing 500 schillings out of a cigar box, he drives off with his schoolmate to Ketlassbrunn in Lower Austria. There they call on a priest who used to be the school catechist.

  Here they are, already in Ketlassbrunn. The priest is surprised and pleased to see them. He invites the two young students to lunch at an inn, where they eat roast pork and dumplings. Afterwards at the Catholic youth hostel there is a seminar with a professor from Vienna, on the subject 'Man as Cosmos', and 'Crime and Punishment'. As always, Rainer tries to show off by asking questions on these subjects. When they take their leave, the priest shakes their hands and gives them some pastries. Then the schoolmate is taken home. It's been an eventful day, he says, and he enters his flat, which smells of vanilla sauce.

  Once again Rainer drives out to the mighty Danube, that great symbol. It is now 7 p.m. He drops the murder weapons into the river near Berger's, the seafood restaurant. The bloody pyjamas are left in the car.

  Then, from a public call-box, Rainer phones a girl he hasn't seen for months. She works as an au-pair for a couple who are both doctors, downtown. Their parents met in her home town out in the woods. Renate, the girl, is invited to go dancing at the Picasso Bar. She does in fact dance with Rainer at the Picasso Bar. Rainer drinks two Campari and sodas, Renate drinks a Martini and a Fanta lemonade. Rainer gives a rambling explanation of the structure of the modern music which is coming from the loudspeakers. Then he stops explaining and takes Renate home.

  Next, Rainer drives to the parental flat, where his mother (with forty serious and countless lesser injuries), his sister (with twenty-six sharp-edged deadly injuries, not counting the smaller ones) and also his father (completely pulped, in the carved farmhouse chest) have been decaying the whole time. The three bodies received way over eighty axe wounds, all told, not counting the stab wounds. The heads have been totally smashed in. He used both hands to strike, so the blows would be forceful. Rainer can't spend the night along with this frightful carrion. It gives him the creeps.

  He enters his home, which is no longer a home, and switch
es on the light for a moment, so that people will think the terrible sight is a shock to him. He switches the light off again right away and goes to the police station, where he announces that his mother is lying in the hall, murdered, come and help me find the killer. One policeman runs back with him immediately. Such indescribable amazement, to find two corpses, which you can't tell apart at first, so mutilated that you don't know which is the mother and which the daughter.

  The policemen are staggered. Rainer is lying on a stretcher, pale and half unconscious. The doctor gives him a sedative. But his pulse is astoundingly regular, considering the shock, thinks the doctor.

  Where are your pyjamas, and where is your father? asks the inspector. My pyjamas must be around somewhere, 1 took them off this morning and left the house early. I've no idea where my father is.

  The bodies are totally unrecognisable with brutal injuries like these, says the policeman, nauseated, although he has seen a thing or two in his line of business. The corpses of the mother and the sister have not been moved. Now the sight of them moves the soul.

  But soon the question is raised: where are Rainer's pyjamas and where is Herr Witkowski. Both of these bodies are female.

  Was the father the one who did it, maybe? But presently the bloodstained fatherremains are retrieved from the chest. Remnants of his brain that weren't put in the chest are on the floor beside it.

  Now the only mystery left is the pyjamas. The question is asked again. This time with a hard-edged suspicion behind it.

  When the inspector asks where are your pyjamas for the hundredth time, they must be some-where, Herr Witkowski, Rainer finally answers: They're stained with blood and you'll find them under the spare tyre in the boot of the car.

  Now you know everything. I am at your disposal.