Sometimes the banks keep watching far too long before they withdraw to their uneven path. Until the branch manager loses his post and the debtor, who has to take the penultimate path, has turned into a whimpering wreck, because now he even had to sell the car, which was still whole, his only friend, who always ran decently alongside him, because there wasn't enough money for gasoline anymore. Now the debtor has to try to be a light in his own darkness in order to offer the bank manager a good picture. All of this with his meager talents, so that the extension under which every joint is already groaning will be stretched once more on this rack. And they all watch as one desperately negotiates, as everyday troubles turn into catastrophes and get into the paper if one doesn't keep quiet. While a whole house floats away. The branch manager will have to chuck money at it again, otherwise the whole lot will be gone; usually the auditor checks up on every peanut, which good children have set down, and which mark an ever broader sloping path, at whose end stands the most beautiful of all houses, the witch's gingerbread house. Where plump little fingers probe helplessly in the air, basically long ready to roast, so why hasn't the witch laid the table yet? Because she wanted one more side-dish! Visit the fairy tale world of Police District Murzzuschlag (Styria): Mon. to Fri. 8-12. That's what they look like, don't they, reality and its dreams? Why don't human beings just explode, except with anger? Surely they should have gone to pieces long before. So that's why the term really can't be extended to the twelfth of never, you can be sure of that Mr. Janisch, even if your father is a respected member of whatever the club is, oh yes, of the Country Policemen's Club and of the Country Policemen's Sports Club and the Country Policemen's Canine Sports Club, every one of whose members ended up hanging on the tap at the inn after a dinghy training exercise, I mean, who ended the exercise correctly. When it comes to emergency operations we recently also had the real thing, when that big blaze was raging, as a result of which in the town center of K. a whole number of roof timbers and furnishings with a total loss of more than nearly three million dollars went up the creek, so that's when these men had to carry out their perilous duties, apart from the Country Police more than 29 fire brigades from the whole region, well, is that not something? And all the farms set alight by children and little more than children, well, is that not something, too? Children are stubbornness personified, after all. So that's why, for the sake of your father, we're giving you one last extension, Mr. Janisch Jr., who knows if some day the roof over our own heads won't be burning, we've read that the Fire Investigations Officer of the precinct where your father is stationed finally established that a rusty little stove door was the cause of the fire. Man walks, who counts his steps? No one, there would be no point, whomsoever God wishes to show favor, he drops down a detached house from heaven and makes sure that the new owner is standing right below it. The debts will eat us all up, if we don't turn into beasts beforehand.

And we don't even want to start on about the clearing-up operations after the mudslide last autumn, we really must draw a line under this chapter, although we're still so stuck to it. Even the police cadets spent five days helping out then, to say nothing of the tons of hair in the ground, which no one has yet been able to explain. For that we had to bring in units of the Federal Army, didn't we? After last year's fire the plots of land are once again firmly in the hands of our bank. Those are no grounds to be against the banks or the Jews, although that's a fine tradition hereabouts, there's simply no ground that belongs to anyone else, that's it. Small cause, big effect, as NATO always said about the Kosovo War. Just imagine, there are even people who want to open a DIY superstore in the darkest and most inaccessible hills of the Bucklige Welt in Lower Austria, you wouldn't believe it, while huge loads whizz past them with a whistling slipstream and straight over the southern or eastern border where there are people living whom one despises, whose language one doesn't speak, whose laws one doesn't know, but where everything costs exactly half, which usefully one had already saved up. For dessert one can eat and booze really well and go to the hairdresser for the same money you pay for a couple of rolls here. The people on the other side of the border, who were rotting alive for too long in a gloomy state, don't yet know how one has to do business and our light will take a couple of light years yet until it has reached them. So they do their own business, which is also already quite effective and even fills up gas tanks until they burst. Our bank however already knows it all in advance, it inspects the new house which reminds it of every other one which already exists, except that it's already falling apart while people are still living, and even takes our folks' furniture off the floor. It has to watch out too, that it keeps its feet on the carpet, which the debtor also has to pawn. A pity that it allowed that final loan, that penultimate support, but there's nothing to be done. Now all that good money has been spent and for what? Not for us! We're certainly being spoiled! Nothing's going on here, for which I would even stroke a person's head, to get it.

Well and bad: Son Janisch, himself a father, with a son of his own who already cheerfully changes into his uniform, with banners flying it's time to go to battle on the football field, has already removed a small, but important part of the bank's riches, dropping by with a couple of cases of wine and a couple of nice plump lies for the branch manager, lies which have to be washed down with even more alcohol, we'll see each other at our table in the pub. Together with our sons and heirs, no, our house will never die out, we've founded a party for it and wish everyone else all the worst, while we, gossiping, play our own jokes. All of this is my final argument, which is far too impatient to settle down here and now. They're all sneering at this by now veteran party, but they all vote for it. Now are we sitting comfortably? Kurt Janisch (at present senior director of the company House-grab and Son) is already working himself half to death and has taken on two part time jobs as factory security guard in the small town. His father found them for him in his day. Here, where the generations still properly follow one another, tradition still counts for something. And son Ernst, too, the crown prince, has brought the bank, which anyway has a tendency to ampleness, because it so much likes to clear up and then eat the default interest from other people's Christmas trees, which deceptively were only lit up for a week, something as a chaser: The bank can swallow it or not. Ernst doesn't care. This money, too, was finally drunk up, we're not going back to the house, first we have to have the house to go to-and now the money's gone. And the house is not yet really there, that is, it would be, but it looks so far away as if it was about to disappear and take a coffee break before the interest has properly begun to work. A screaming old dear in a hole under the roof means that one's not exactly acclaimed by public opinion, that has to change. Word must not get round. Otherwise payday would come around after all, the parking lot lit up, where it's all supposed to happen and where the other wrecks are already waiting to be towed away. She mustn't go into an old people's home, she must stay here and show a return, until she's nothing more than a transparent rustling mommy, swinging bags of flour to kill rats dancing at night on the hot plate, because the rats want to attack her and she's got nothing else to hand except this white powder, which she secretly stirs into dough, yesyes, the wine's good.