You are advised not to drive in this weather if you can avoid it. On the other hand, you are expected to be at your place of work on time. To this tune, the trucks are out, gritting the streets, leaving their wares. All the woman has to offer is herself. Oh, and one more thing: don't call out the emergency services unless it's absolutely essential! The poor creatures. You wouldn't like it either.
The children howl down the well-ironed snow into the valley in their plastic birthday shells which stick to their skin or fly past their ears. Sullenly the older ones turn away, their chair-lift tickets dangling at their padded rotundities. Speed is not magic. They roar like railway stations. The woman is frightened of them. Alarmed, she cowers in the cornices of snow left by the snow plough. Grinding and crunching, cars loaded with families, whole cargoes of miserable beatings, trundle past her. On the roof racks the skis are at full stretch to restrain the hatred of the passengers. The skiing tackle stares down belligerently like machine guns. They plough through the many other containers of humanity because they merit a better place. So thinks everyone. And shows it by making endearingly filthy gestures out of the window.
Sport! The fortress of the common man! From which he can do his shooting.
Believe me, everybody, but everybody, cart afford to break a foot or both arms! Still, you can't help feeling that these people are dependants, up the hill they go and then come gliding down it and even feel good doing it. but dependent on what? On their own images. And, as if they themselves were no more than mid wives of reality, the images are screened anew every day, but bigger, better, faster. And thus, kicked down from the television watershed, they tumble to the other side, where the ordinary people mill on the hill of idiots. Ouch. In discussions they never get a word in edgeways. And if they do they are instantly interrupted by someone who ranks as an expert, who doesn't share their worries about rank. And the Supreme Being, who has studied the rankings, is deaf to their whining for a home of their Own, which they say they need so that they won't have to sally forth – they can sully sport, that silly Aunt Sally of an Olympian idea, on their very own doorsteps.
The woman slips and slides at every step she takes. In the car windows laughing faces appear, soundless. The driver comes within a whisker of death. The snow falls amply on one and all. But they all ski differently, just as no two human beings are alike. Some are better than others, and others want to be best of all. Where is the lift slope for every degree of difficulty so that there will quickly be more of us? What was slack and limp in its house just now is firmed up when it emerges into the air. But it looks all the smaller. Thanks to the sturdy Alps!
The woman emerges from the cover of her circumstances. Out of humour, she hugs her dressing-gown tightly to herself. Flails her arms about. Some of the children she hears yelling from afar have been torn from their weekly dance and rhythm class. These children were bred as this woman's hobby. After all, we've got enough room and love for the child to set him clapping rhythmically. That will help him to nod his head in time at school or stand up when it's time for prayers. There her son is, in the midst of them, demonstrating with every step he takes that he is a grubby finger above them all, poised to smudge them. He has to take first bite of every wurst sandwich. For every child has a father. And every father has to earn money. On his junior skis, the boy terrorizes the little kids on their toboggans. He is the latest edition of a bright star that has the gall to appear every day, always wearing different clothes. None of the others rebel. Though his back has to put up with a lot of covert and wasted gestures. Already he sees himself as a phrase expressed by his father. The woman isn't wrong, vaguely she raises a hand to wave at her distant son, whom she has recognized by his voice. He barks the other kids to attention, the way he wants them, and his words cut them down to dirty heaps as does winter the landscape.
The woman writes characters in the air with her hand. She does not have to earn her living, she is kept by her husband. When he returns home at the end of the day he has earned the right to set his signature to life. That child was no accident. The boy is his! Now he no longer sees death ahead.
With pent-up love she seeks out her son in the troupe of children. He bawls and bawls and still he doesn't tire. Was he like that when he crept from her ground floor, the womb of Mother Earth? Or, as his heavenly father would put it, was he first led astray, were the arts of life at work on him, carving him into something he was not, that no boy at this age ever was or ever shall be? The child claims rights of those who think differently, rights as inclusive as the treaties signed by nations. He parrots his father's expressions: you have to grow a little every day! Great! An erection! Men are always a little ahead of themselves so that they can look at themselves whenever they want. And the child, made of a being that has long since, like clinker, fallen down behind him (the bell foundry of his mother), will presently, in a year or so, squirt high as heaven where little ones are welcomed in to have a snack.
The boy goes racing through the midst of comrades and cameras as if through open and welcoming doors.
The cold has stolen into the woman's feet. The soles of her slippers are not worth mentioning, but she herself doesn't say much anyway. The soles barely protect her mortal soul from the ice of the world. She stomps on. Better look out. Slide, don't let the others shove you. But people are forever shoving. What else should it mean when the golden-headed sexes, after a fashion, open up In front of the furniture, sole intimates and witnesses of their talents? What if they were to be slung derisively off the summits of their wishes? The woman is holding onto the railing and making good headway. Foodstuffs are being lugged homeward all around, for meals are the main thing in family life. Rolled oats spray from the women's mouths, I'd say they were worried what the expensive ingredients might get up to in the pan. And the men are there, at their plates, filled with a sense of event. The unemployed, who have deviated from the kind of life intended by God and blessed in the sacrament of matrimony, can just about afford to live, but the good life isn't on the cards: no adventure playground, no casino, no cinema watching a lovely film, no cafe with a lovely woman. The only thing that comes free is the use of their own families. The boundary lines are drawn by sex. Which Nature surely can't have planned, at least not like this. Nature shares the good life with us so that we can eat of her produce and be eaten in turn by the owners of factories and banks. Interest would have the shirt off our back. But no one can say what water does. It's plain to see what is done to the water, though, with the cellulose plant pumping its waste into the stream, which is in no hurry to get anywhere. Let it pump its poison somewhere else, where people like their streams to supply dead fish to eat. The women examine the shopping bags which they used to get rid of the dole money. Consumers are well advised in the stores, where special offers are announced over the public address. Special offers are what they themselves were, once! And their men were chosen according to their means. But now they are treated as the meanest of creatures at the labour exchange. Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer and playing cards, a dog's life. But not even a dog would be so patient, kept on its lead outside the wonderful stores filled with fine wares that mock us.
Nothing is ever lost. The state is at work with what we don't see. Where does our money go, once we have finally got rid of it? We burn to be done with it, the notes are hot in our hands, the coins melt in our fists. Yes, we must part. Time shall stand still on payday so that we can stop and take a good look at our stinking and steaming heap of money, still warm from our labours, before we transfer it to our accounts. One day we'll be in clover. What we'd like best of all would be to lie back and rest amid our hot golden nuggets of dung. But love, ever restless, is already looking around to see where there's something better than what we've already got. The people who live where skiing originated, people who once grew here like grass (the world's most famous skiing museum is at Murzzuschlag, Styria!) are familiar with it only by sight. They are stooped so far forward over the cold ground that they cannot find the trail. Continually others are passing them, to do their business in the woods.