The Frau Direktor kickstarts her car and drives cumber-somely off to catch up Michael, who can be heard on the piste by now. Laughing and yelling like a policeman, he whizzes past his friends, or crashes into them, a jolly jape. Even at night, his memory keeps all the places he goes to logged away. That and only that is what's meant when people say they're meeting others on the same wave-length, the permanent wave a terribly fashionable hairdresser has created. But watch out: don't miss the next wave of fashion. Often we may shake our heads first, but then it does go with us for a while after all. Look at my head, and don't be afraid to give something new a try. Free trial offer. We carry ourselves round in a printed bag from a sports shop. We don't have to mind how we go; the road we go on would be better advised to mind us, since we could easily ruin the vegetation for the next five hundred years. This Michael would not crack the earth open if he were to fall, as we less skilful ones would. We are not flowers, but still we want to shove our heads through the wall of Nature! Michael, though, will only be splitting his companions' sides: the whole time he's been telling them, laughing, about the funny thing that happened with this woman he reeled in yesterday and threw back again. The burden of failure lies like a load of firewood upon other shoulders, many of them, so that we can lie warm abed. We only need to set it alight. And in love a mouth encounters breath where something has just been boiled. The woman is no longer completely bright and bushy-tailed. She drags her fingers through her hair, ruining the work of other people under whose drying hoods she trembled. Right now, a bunch of children may be waiting outside her house, members of a music group sent out under threat, but so what, it's only a hobby anyway. The sons and daughters of those who groan beneath their poverty. Those who even have to spit in their hands if they're to summon the energy to be fired. Already the woman has forgotten them. And herself. And drives to the foot of the piste, where the right of the speedier is demonstrated. Where tourists, put down and put up with, unshackle their gear, or, two by two like patient animals? heave their heavy rear ends marked by the ne'er-to-be-mended tumbles of Life into the chairlift once again.
Forwards, ever forwards. We don't want to look back, after all we haven't got eyes in the back of our head. The woman's high and mighty heels dig a hole in the ground. Astounded, the winter holidaymakers float like boats across this poster landscape where everything is in tune and only one person is disinclined to join in the chorus. The torrent of people pours incessantly down the slope. Let us be more appetizing! More digestible! Lord, these tourists. Eternally cemented into their uniforms, straying every summer from the mountain to the beach, and, the moment they're beached, finding it's winter again and wanting to be up on top, where they hope to find their bliss: being there is all that counts! And a loftier, more conspicuous, more pleasurable overflow into the valley below. Though they'd rather be invisible when the boss flares up in front of them and roars like a propane stove. Isn't it lovely, that light blue jump suit with the fur-lined hood and a pullover red as a clipped ear peeping out! We might be tempted to forget that nothing we're wearing matches, nothing about our persons goes together, the upper and lower parts, heads and feet: it's as if every one of us were made of parts of different people. (Let's face it, that's how we maturer women are built, somewhere along the line we lose our shape, and then no one will love our shape any more.) And all those different people are different in terrible ways known only to the martyred lower classes. So here we all are, martyred on our crosses but wearing our best clothes. Doesn't it look priceless!
They stand around in groups, smirking and smoking and drinking themselves empty, the disciples of sport. They have little of each other to declare as they bob at anchor at the valley terminal, smiling. The peak of their experience is: eating to live! They talk about it. Their ignition sparks light up the land more brightly than those who have to build on it. Ah yes, the tourist trade is very profitable! Now they are collecting their belongings, while the branches sag heavily under the weight of snow and daring light, barely sensed on their nylon apparel, clears a way through the beautiful snow, which lies placidly on what was once a meadow drinking water. Soon the water will no longer be able to seep down into the ground. We'll have boarded up the earth and lacquered it with tracks. Every one of them has private suspicions that he or she's the best skier on the slopes. So all of that has ended well too. In winter, when the land is supposed to be asleep, it is woken up good and proper. Noise pours from faces. In seconds people cross distances that have been measured out and reach out for parts where there is no ceiling above them and no ground beneath them. Blameless children fall by the wayside. Let's not be packed away again in our original box, let's not splay our legs unnecessarily if we've learnt how to do a perfect parallel swerve now. We can ski world champions into the ground. And that goes for our cars too, in their classes. What a day. The young people bare their heads. Snow falls on them, but they need not be afraid, it won't stick. The Austrian Winter Sports Association does not tremble before our souls: it takes a tight hold on our limbs, wounded in their pride, and pulls us down head over heels. It bandages our thighs, and next year we'll be coming again. And getting on. Let's hope that next year lack of snow won't leave us being shoo'd about like insects!
Like sand in the clockwork of the world we drift into the valley. Our skis, our sharp edges which others are forever trying to smooth off, bite hard into the firn, the snow marked with signs: every man for himself on this white festive garb on which we are tumbled like refuse. Most of it belongs to the Austrian forestry commission. The rest, a nectar of hectares, many thousands of hectares, belongs to nobility and others who have taken possession of houses, people who own sawmills and have contracts with the paper mill, long-term contracts signed in blood. Chairs on which things that have been said acquire meaning! Wonderful. We all want change, it is all to the good, and skiing fashions in particular change every year, and get better and better. In haste the earth receives the sportswomen and sportsmen; there is no father to take them in his arms when they are tired, but there is the Frau Direktor from the paper mill. Come over here a little, if you can move fast enough with those things on your feet. The light will soon be coming from her mouth!
Michael laughs, and the sun clings onto him. In the course of decades, the landscape has undergone change so that it will only receive those it finds congenial. The farmers no longer qualify and are sitting watching TV at home. For a long time they were the surly saviours of the land, giving rude replies to the agricultural co-ops, but now those days are over. Change is the garb we wear now. Our neighbours are shaken to the very limit of their understanding. In our colourful clothing we have become something to enjoy when we lie about on our skis in the woods with broken limbs, skis that were once there for wild animals to gnaw at and now merely signify gnawing pain. But we want to be wild ourselves, too! To shout out loud so that people far off hear us and are startled: avalanches that contain us when we feel like spilling over. Getting out of ourselves. Sitting in the lap of mountain crags! And the mountain hurls rockslides at the incautious. Nowadays the land lives off such people and takes pleasure in the fact, and even the pubs positively reek of our taste.