The ice is thick on the ground. The grit lies scattered carelessly as if someone had emptied his pockets. The municipal authorities grit the roads so that vehicles don't break their tyres. The pavements for people aren't gritted. The idleness of the unemployed is a burden on the budget, but as they idle by they do not burden the mow. Their fate is in the hands of someone who already has his hands full with a wine glass and plateful from the simple buffet of cold cuts. The politicians have to wear their big and bursting hearts on their tongues. The woman gets a firm footing on the verge. Here, the law of the catalytic converter rules: unless money is thrown at it, the environment won't react to us ambitious wanderers. And even the wood would have to die. Open the window and let feeling in! Then Woman will show" that disease afflicts the Man's world.

Flailing helplessly, Gerti stands on the ice. Offering herself. Her dressing-gown flapping about her. She claws at thin air. Crows caw. Her limbs fling forward as if she had sown a whirlwind and couldn't grasp the soughing and blowing on Mother's Day or the slurping of the Man at her trough when he appears below the table to lick the cream from her bowl. Woman is forever earthbound, they compare her with the earth, so she will open up and receive the Man's member. Perhaps lie down in the snow for a while? You wouldn't believe how many pairs of shoes this woman has at home! And who is it that's always egging her on to buy more clothes? For the Direktor, people count simply because they're people and can be used or else can be made into consumers who use things. That is how the unemployed of the area are addressed, who are in line to be eaten up by the factory when all they want is something to eat themselves. For the Direktor, they count doubly if they can sing for their supper. Or play the accordion or fool. Time passes, but we want it to say something to us. Not a moment of peace and quiet. The stereo drones eternal: listen, if patience and not the violin is what you play, what you have, oh sainted ones! The room is uplifted, a ray of light falls upon us, the beatitudes of sport and leisure cost the earth, and on the operating tables we re-enter the peaceable kingdom, resurrected, whole again.

5

THE SUPERMARKETS ARE bursting with captivating goods, people are their captives. On Saturday the Man is* supposed to be a partner, helping take in the catch in the nets. The fishermen sing. It is a simple tune and by now the Man has managed to learn it. Without saying a word he stands among the women who are counting their loose change and fighting starvation. How are two human beings supposed to become one if humankind cannot even join hands in a chain for peace? The woman is accompanied, the packages and bags are carried, no fuss, no noise. The Direktor is expensively showy in public, taking up the space that is other people's, checking to see what they're buying, though that is really a matter for his housekeeper. He is a god, scurrying to and fro among his creatures, who are less than children and collapse beneath temptations vaster than the ocean. He looks in other people's baskets and down cleavages, where undesirable colds are revealed and hot desires are concealed by neck-scarves. The houses tend to be cold and damp, so close to the stream. His wife's hand is rummaging among dead cellophane-wrapped creatures in the freezer, and when he looks at her, the paltriness of her meat, her fine clothes, he is beset by terrible impatience to let her partake of his own ample meat, his dong, his wonderful shlong. He wants to see it stir at the feeble touch of her fingers like a creature roused by the sun. He wants to see that little animal of his awake at the touch of her varnished talons and bed down again to sleep inside the woman. She'd better make an effort, in her silk blouse, so that he doesn't always have to do all the troublesome work himself, manhandling her breasts out and placing them on the plate of his hands. Why can't she serve herself up, be a little obliging, so he doesn't have to waste half an hour picking the fruit from the tree first. In vain. He pauses before the check-out to survey the gaping emptiness of his property, before which the goods are sitting up and begging, good boy. A number of supermarket employees are dancing attendance on him, who has taken their children away, some for his factory, others because they are having to move or become alcoholics. He is their lordandmaster and even lords it over time.

The shopping bags have done what was required of them, they rustle and bustle through the hall, helped on their way by a kick from the Direktor. From time to time he tramples on the food in a temper, so that it squirts in the air. Then he tosses the woman in amongst the other goods to complete the picture, and she is allowed to breathe his air and lick his penis and anus. With a practised hand he catches her tits as they fall from her dress, they are already sagging and wilting but he gathers them into bunches like balloons with a firm grip. He seizes the woman by the nape and bends over her as if he meant to pick her up and stuff her in a sack. The furniture is glimpsed fleetingly as if it were on a flying visit. Clothes are scattered. You wouldn't say these two were exactly attached to each other, but in a moment they are well and truly attached to each other; funny, that. This particular patch has been used for grazing for years. The Direktor yanks out his product, which isn't paper, it's altogether harder, these are hard times after all. People like showing what they have hidden about them to each other as a sign that they have nothing to hide, that everything they say to their inexhaustibly flowing partners is true. They send out their members, the only messengers that always return to them. You can't say the same of money, for instance. Though it is loved more dearly than the hooves and horns of the loved one, already gnawed at by dogs. The products are produced, to the accompaniment of shrieking and thrashing, the tiny body factories grind and crunch, and the modest property, burdened down only by the happiness babbling forth from the lonely TV set, pours into a lonely pool of sleep where one can dream of bigger commodities and more expensive products. And humanity flourishes on the bank.

The woman lies wide open, open wide, on the floor, slippy slithery eatables slopped upon her. Stock still. Only her husband is permitted to deal in her stocks and bonds. An honest broker. He falls from himself into the furnished emptiness of the room. Only his own body comes anywhere near doing justice to him. At sports, if required, he can hear himself sound and echo. The woman has to crook and angle her legs like a frog so that her husband, the examining magistrate, can look into the matter closely. A court of no appeal. She is flooded and shat full him, she has to get up and the last of her clothes fall on the floor and she fetches a sponge to clean the Man, that irreconcilable enemy of her sex, of himself and the slime that she has caused him to emit. He sticks his right forefinger up her arsehole and, tits dangling, she kneels above him and scrubs. Hair in her eyes and mouth. Perspiration on her brow. Another person's saliva at the base of her throat. The pale killer whale there before her till the friendly light dies, night comes, and the animal can begin to lash her with his tail again.

They are usually silent as they return from the supermarket. Some of them, trying out their horsepower, hurry on by, and are unforgivingly preserved in memory. The milk churns by the wayside, the atoms breathing terribly in and out of them, stand waiting for collection. The farming co-operatives are at each other's throats, all of them competing; they cannot for very long bear the scrutiny of even the smallest holder, who cannot supply much milk and who cannot even be allowed to bleed dry. The woman is cloaked in the darkness of silence. But then she laughs, laughs till it seems she will never stop, to humiliate her husband. The pedantic patriarch. Such notions, keeping such a close eye on the girl at the check-out. Like so many of the wives of the unemployed, she mustn't make even the slightest mistake. The Direktor steals up beside her, she has to enter all the items again to make sure there isn't a single one too many. It's almost the same as in his factory. Except that the people here are smaller and wear women's clothing, from out of which they look about, finding that the family fits tightly and pinches. The Direktor has been known to pinch too. They fold in their wings, and from their bodies the children shoot forth, and the fathers zap their flashing lightning into the kiddies' newly-opened eyes. Disorganized flocks of women shoppers, intent on their shopping, shove past the ones who are enchanted by the goods, trying to make it to the grave as soon as they can. Their heads rise sheer as cliffs at the special offers. There are no freebies for this lot, quite the contrary, they are relieved of a part of their earnings from the paper mill. Horrified they stare at the boss, whom they hadn't expected to see here and of whom, to be plain, they were hardly thinking at all. Often we open our doors only to be confronted with people we hadn't been expecting at all, and then we're supposed to feed them. Salted sticks and potato snacks are all we can come up with to overshadow them.