The Direktor is so vast that you couldn't get around him in a day. He is open to anything, especially the rain and snow that come from up above. There is no one above him, except the parent company, that is, but there is no protection against it. When it's a matter of his wife's sharp edge, though, it's no problem opening up the tap and letting it spurt out. The woman twitches like a fish. Her hands being bound. While the Man tickles and prickles her a little with pins. He pricks an ear at the store of feelings he's hoarded deep within. Words fall from the video screen like leaves, they fall to the floor, floored by this one-man win in the human race. At a loss, the woman casts a protective glance at a dying plant on the window sill. Now the Man is saying something. Words as meaty as steak. He doesn't mince them. As his blood and juices gather, he talks incessantly of what he will do and what he won't be able to help doing, and he uses his savage claws and tame teeth to gain access to his objective, to add mustard to his sausage. His wife's sex is a wood from which an angry echo returns to him.
Recently he forebade his wife Gerti to wash. For her nmell too belongs to him entirely. He ransacks his little woodland, heaves the weighty heel of his loaf into her bread bin, a nuisance that she is often so swollen, damn it! Ever since his guts failed him and he stopped the small-ad search for strangers desirous of swopping wives, he's preferred it to be the gusts of his own desire that search out his wife. Lifting her skirts. He wants her trailing a banner of sweat, piss and shit scents. "And he checks that the stream is flowing in its own bed where it belongs. A living heap of garbage. Where worms and rats go burrowing. With a bellow he takes the plunge, he gets a move on, quickly reaching the far end where his home is and hell be cosy again and now and then he'll toss one back or simply watch the fishes jump. He reads the papers. He drags the woman from the swamp of her cushion and cracks her open. And there on the sofa yet again he has his nice little toy complete with tits to play with, trembling at what his veins have done with his member.
He likes to have this woman, the best-dressed woman in the village, going about the house in her own dirt. Angrily he hits her about the head. In their transubstan-tiation he has had her body rebuilt to his specifications. It is a vessel designed for copious giving. He too is replenished nightly, his self-service store, his toy grocer's where it's perfectly okay to set a little something aside. The front door key confers the right to today's special, clit served any way you want it, or you can slam the toilet door; the Roman Catholic homeland is flexible, but it allows people to go to pregnancy counselling or the altar. The house has to send out SOS signals while the woman is being utilized. Later a choice bottle of wine will be uncorked and the screen will show other bottles being uncorked, pop! and the choice bodies will examine each other's genitals, rattle at the handle and cast their seed on stony ground. How greedy we are to watch them. But others are watching us. Crunching salted snacks, nibbling the gentlemen's sausages or the ladies' titbits.
The boy will perhaps stay at the neighbours' tomorrow.
They have an exactly identical house, only less of it. The Man wants to drive his savage cart into the woman's dirt. Who practises breath control and has to dive to one side to escape his prick as it crashes into the undergrowth of her panties. His body has had an overpowering effect on all kinds of people, thanks to music and song, they have been packaged up in portions and deep-frozen for later when they will be needed on the job market or to sing in the choir of market forces. The moon is shining, oh look, the stars are shining too, and the Man's machine comes crashing and roaring home from afar, ploughs up the furrow she has cleared with her teeth, sets the cut grass flying like spray, and pumps the woman full to the brim.
4
THE WOMAN, HER BODY flailing awkwardly, strikes out into the wind. She has been made flesh and has dwelt among us. Her off-sales service has ministered to the hungry in every way: she has been worn out by the Man and by the child, sweetest of bridles and reins. Caught in the net, she tries to catch her breath for once. Throwing on her dressing-gown, she sets out trudging down the snowed-up path in her slippers.
First, in case of emergency, she has to put the cups and kitchen utensils away in the cupboards. Under the flowing water she scrubs the traces of her family off the china. And so the woman preserves herself in the very accessories that she is made of. She arranges everything, even her own clothing, according to size. Ashamed, she laughs at the fact. But it's no joke. Orderly arrangement is added to the blessings she already enjoys. She herself is left with nothing. Of the bloody bird feathers on the path there is little to be seen now, for even animals must eat. A sooty layer coats the snow, it took just a few hours.
In his office, the Man reaches contentedly under the lampshade of his waistband and lets a little air in. He talks of his wife, of her figure, without troubling to indicate that it's his turn to speak. Be quiet, now his works are speaking for him, there is a choir of many voices for that specific purpose. No, he is not afraid of the future. His purse is full, and the more he spends, the more he gets!
The woman senses the snow gradually invading time and space. Springtime is still a long way off. Not even today can Nature manage to look freshly painted. The trees are grimed with muck. A dog hobbles past her in a hurry. Women come along the path, looking as if they'd been stored in cardboard boxes for years. As if they had awoken in a fine house, the women inspect this other odd one out, who keeps herself to herself. The factory provides many of their husbands with work, what else? Unconscious before their time, they'd rather spend their time wih a bottle of wine than their family. The woman glides past them into the gloom, she hasn't even put on shoes to go out in the snow! Meanwhile the child is out and about somewhere, romping with more of the same. He refused the food she'd cooked, refused with words that tore great gaping gashes in his mother, and went off with a wurst sandwich instead. For much of the morning. Mother had been straining carrots through a sieve, for the boy's eyes. She cooked the lad's food herself. And then, a bent stalk of humanity, she gobbled up the boy's helping herself, standing by the bin. When all's said and done, she did produce the child from out of her own self. Her sense of humour has not grown, though. From the fence by the stream hang icicles, the capital is not far away as the car drives. It is a broad valley, and not many are employed in it. The rest, since everybody has to be somewhere, are at their onerous places of employment: they go to work at the paper mill every day, while others commute even further afield, much further! Up there on the mountain is where I love to be, with my flock. The woman's mouth freezes as tiny as a marble. She clings to the iced-up wood of the railing. The stream is bridged from both banks, the ice is slapping its back, Creation is groaning under the fetters of natural law. There's a faint gurrgling sound. Just as the that will melt all the barriers in this good life we all lead, levelling us so that there are no distinctions any more, so too Death may be the reductio ad absurdum of this woman's world. But let's not be personal. The wheels of a small car crunch and bite through the tightly-packed snow. Wherever it comes from, it's more at home there than its owner is. What would the commuter be without it? A dung heap.
Because when he's pitchforked into a carriageful of humanity he's simply dirt, that's how his parliamentary representatives see it. It's a question of crowds, of masses: they're what prevent our economy from collapsing, bunched inside our factories, propping them up from within. And as for the unemployed! A shadowy army of nothings, who do not need to be feared because all of them vote for Christian Social Democrats notwithstanding. Herr Direktor is flesh and blood and eats his full share thereof as well because ladies in aprons serve it to him.