Just as with agricultural products, which don't poison you till they're off the shelf and in your guts.
The woman has to stop. It has been snowing day and night. The mountain air hurts. The rays that fell through the trees have vanished now. The young man brakes so abruptly that a number of books that have long since turned against him fall upon him. They tumble into the legroom in front of the passenger seat. The woman peeks in at the window and sees a head that was legless last night, a skull that got a skinful like the hopeless folk around here under whose feet the earth is steaming. They know each other slightly by sight but neither has ever taken mental note of the other. The student reels off various expensive names she ought to know. The lofty peaks about them glisten in their caps of snow, the snow reaches the whole way down, to the workshop depths where humanity is busy crafting wishes for a new set of skis.
Meanwhile the Direktor is waiting in his office, and won't be any help to us if we go pounding at his door. The farm lads' dads have thrashed them black and blue, the cows at home are black and white and that's how they see the world, and here they are, braving a first step into the poorest-paid group of industrial workers. Soon they become aware of women. They bark and woof when they see women in cars varnishing their nails at a red light. They are the unimportant guests at the set table, invited so that they will see in good time just how unwelcome their intrusion into the yielding fabric of society is. From where they sit they can't even see all the social burdens that are heaped on the groaning table. There they sit, on the seats of their leather shorts, yawping to find their member of parliament already sitting there, wanting to drink their life juice concentrate straight from the can. Sons of the earth, they seem. Made to love and suffer. But a mere year later all they want to do is drive fast, be it a moped or a used Volkswagen, so the hair flies about their heads. And the river flows jauntily along beside them, finally to receive them with no questions asked.
The woman is so tired. As if she, complete with her still passable figure, which is usually covered by her husband, were about to topple over forward. The eyes of the world are upon her, at every step that she takes. She is buried among her possessions, which heave high aloft, foaming with conditioner, from one lowly horizon to the next. Then along come the busybody villagers and their valiant dogs, scraping and scratching at her doings till a thousand conversations have dug her up. Scarcely one of them could say what she looks like. As for what she's wearing, though! If only all those voices were uplifted on Sunday in church! A thousand little voices, flames flickering heavenward from the dusky workshop where the daily papers have done the preparation and fashioned people into clay vessels. The Direktor is cock of the walk. The women of the village are merely side-dishes to go with their husbands' meat. No, I do not envy you. And the men, like chaff, like dry hay, fall upon the computer-printed slips which record their fates plus the overtime they have to work if they're to strike up the happier tunes of life. No time to have fun with the kids after work. The newspapers turn like weathervanes in the wind, whether the employees of the paper mill sing or not it's all in vain. Back at school they all did well, I can't figure it out. They must forget it all later when they become figures in the business, commercial or industrial statistics, or black holes in the sporting universe. Word is passed to them of the games young people play the whole world over, but by the time it reaches them it's too late and they're slithering down the gentle slope outside their house, not that it takes them anywhere but another icy path to the tobacconist's on the corner where they find out who won. They watch it all on TV. They want to be bottled as deliciously as that too. Sport is their holy of holies, the holiest thing they can lay their fettered hands on. It's like the dining car on a train, not an absolute necessity but a way of combining the useless with the unpleasant. And, after all, you're getting somewhere.
The Direktor's wife is expected to get in out of the dark, into this car, so that she doesn't catch cold. She is not expected to make a fuss. Nor to carry on the way women like to carry on, when they first serve up dinner to their families and then spoil it for them with their nagging. All day long a man lives off the beautiful image of his wife, only to have her nag all evening. From the private boxes of their battlemented windows, where window boxes of flowers and plants form a spiky defence against the world, they look down at others who draw the bow too tight and relax their own longings out of sheer exhaustion. They put on their party best, cook for three days ahead, leave the house, and throw themselves, as you make your bed so you must lie on it, into the nearest reservoir or river.
The student notices the woman is wearing slippers. Helping others is his job. There she stands on her paper-thin soles. One of the legion of henpeckers who spend their lives eating leftovers spurned by the family. She takes a swig from a pocket edition of a bottle which is held to her lips. She and the village women and all of us, there we stand, dripping and thawing, facing the kitchen stove and counting the tablespoonfuls in which we dole ourselves out. The woman whispers something to the young man, she's picked a right one here, a right wing one at that, who's often fraternized till he was drunk in a heap on the floor. He returns her gaze. At the slightest stir of feeling, her sleepy head is already resting on his shoulder. The car tyres rasp, wanting to be off. An animal stands up, hearing its cue, and the young man too wouldn't be averse to rummaging in this woman's tast-offs for a little small change. For a change. It would be something different, naughty, unexpected. Afterwards you could drape a flimsy cloak of talk about the encounter. His fellows at the fraternity have long sirice bagged their first quarries, and the fleeces, once combed and cared for by loving mothers, are hung about their shoulders. Now at last one's own wishes, straining impatiently at the leash, can be tossed something nourishing to eat, meat cut out of another. So that those wishes grow big and strong. And one day have big fishes in the ocean of the top management floors dancing attendance. Yes, Nature means business. And happily we chain her up, to score against her will if need be. Futile for the elements to roar. We are already in the waves!
7
ALL AROUND, OPPRESSED people are falling, cascades of water, down steps and ornate porches into the uncertain consciences of their oppressors. Tame-spirited creatures that they are, they don't overshoot the mark. Every morning the boisterous radio bawls that it's time to get up, wakey wakey. And instantly the warmth of love is yanked away from under their feet and their sweat-soaked sheet taken from them. They grope about their wives, they dirty their precious belongings. Time breezes gently by. People have to fulfil their pensum before they can draw a pension. Before they are paid off. And have themselves paid off the things they believed – their whole lives long, with eyes tight shut – they owned. Just because they were tolerated among those things as visitors. While their wives, by using them constantly, coaxed the things into life. Only women are really at home. The men loaf oafishly in the undergrowth at night. Or leap about the dance floor. The paper mill. The mill spews people out, after they've been of use for years. But first they go to the top floor to collect their papers.
The Frau Direktor dwells in their midst. Quiet. White. Not even a good roast will set her up to go on living as it does with you and me. The children are brought to her to learn to rattle and prattle. Till the sustaining sound of music falls silent and the howl of the factory is upraised across the mountaintops. Early in the mornings the fathers sleepily splash their jets into the toilet, while apprentices are more rudely awakened, with music dinned into them the moment their alarms go off. The half-naked bodies grow in front of the mirrors in the newly-tiled bathrooms. The chains gleam. The little cocks crow merrily from the flies, the warm waters are passed. Perhaps this toilet is a mirror image of you. So please leave it in the same condition that you would like to be left in!