Kurt Janisch, don't let yourself be interrupted, keep on looking. He searches, all the more avidly the more hopeless it appears, as if he now had to save his own thoughts at least, which threaten to escape him. No, we don't think, we'd rather dig with our bare hands in the frozen dirt of the winter which has hardly passed. Quite pointlessly Kurt Janisch tears at the low branches, shakes them like fists, how can something be lying there or even fall down? Do handkerchiefs grow on trees here? This man likes to surround himself with trees in order to enjoy the feeling of plenty, even when one owns nothing. He is always, in the first instance, after houses, and what has he got so far? Well, now I have to mock: Nature, nothing but nature, whose body he now kicks with his heavy climbing shoes, the tree trunks, in an ever more furious fit of rage. He races around in the wood like a wild animal, throws himself against the fir trees with a crash, though he doesn't get far, the branch work is terribly dense, impenetrable, he scrapes around in the half-frozen mud, which, thawing in the body heat, protrudes from his fingernails, because they can't hold anymore. Now he hits out with his fists as well, again and again, blood is running down his wrists. He resounds like a note running after its own echo, because it hasn't heard it and is entitled to it in the mountains, two copies attached!, into the forest by the river, again and again, it looks as if he wanted to passionately embrace the trees, the country policeman, yet, like many people, the trees confuse hate with love and cuddle up to him, the bad man, clasp him, who is plucking out all their little twigs and kicks their trunks for no reason at all, which after all are only lightly clothed in bark and lichens. They are not dressed sturdily enough. Now he is even scraping away the earth at the roots, our Kurt Janisch. Anyone who sees it will think it odd, perhaps there are even traces of blood, then the country policeman would really have achieved the opposite of what he wanted. This forest promises him only annihilation, and it promises that he, Kurt Janisch, will afterwards be cleanly cleared away. It's not like drowning, no, all the many animals come who also want to eat, and they eat simply everything, but go into the water, no they wouldn't do that. It works the other way round as well: Do you see this trout? The rear end of a mouse is hanging out of its open jaws. How did that happen? How on earth? I don't know how the jaws are supposed to close again. At any rate I'm not going to pull the mouse out. There, everywhere, is a great shepherd, who has left his sheep in the lurch, but he didn't let them go into the water. He is there for them, even if not always, and he stands by the ring, until finally an abandoned lower jaw, you must be joking!, grins at him out of the undergrowth, the upper part plus teeth has long ago been dragged away by other animals, hey, you, I've bitten the dust, my dentist wouldn't have liked that at all. He's even forbidden me to do it. Must have been a deer, if you like a deer above all else then please look the other way now, because this is exactly what it could have been, no, it wasn't, no matter, it threw away its body long ago, perhaps because you didn't love it as much as you thought. So, this flame would have gone out now, the teeth are gone too, the hooves have galloped off. Today another animal was luckier than this one. So it goes. One always wins, the others only lose. The flame of life, before it is blown out by a mouth puckered for a kiss, which was always easily able to deceive one, is indeed a very sensitive little flame, there's not much gas left, it's all used up, and consumption has already been paid for and debited from our account. What's puffing there as if of stronger, higher flames? A scornful night sky, which according to the position of the moon tells us the time and that Our Time in Pictures Part Three will soon begin in this little box here, and then a completely new age will dawn, and if we finally want to see this new age, then we must make our way to a more inviting location with more fashionable furnishings.

And there we have it already, THE LOCATION, LOCATION, a pretty kitchen-living room quite deliberately fitted out in a rustic look and nevertheless sighing with dissatisfaction, since it would rather collect itself into a nice crowd of kitchens by Dan or someone, preferably one for each family member, they wanted to form a kitchen circle, each one in his very own house, for the time being we only have one and a half housing units, because the son's house still belongs to someone. Into this kitchen enter, in their own character, without feeling ashamed, sure of their adventurousness, the TV guests of VERA, the hostess from the beyond, who collects the waste water of human beings and, giving a blessing, sprinkles it on the heads of millions, solemn water, which we crowd around, only in order to see: Others are even more desperate than we are. How fantastic is that, overjoyed I write a whole novel, if necessary. This one. They are not ravaged by hate, the family people in this kitchen, they are delighted with their new property. Patrick, the child, will get a whole room just for his video games. The son's wife will get the whole cellar as a washing and ironing room. The country policeman's wife will perhaps get a conservatory in order to sit quite alone with the television and find out if she wants to be a millionaire or to receive from the television a country barn dance, which will spur her on, quite alone, to laugh heartily, until she herself is locked up in it again. The country policeman's son will get a whole floor to himself in order-the hobby of every other young man-to assemble electronic circuits, which will seem completely beside the point to everyone else, because they already exist. There he can also pursue his second hobby, playing a home organ. But because this hobby is always running too far ahead of him, he's going to give it up again soon. The country policeman himself will simply get everything he wants and will feel unusually burdened by all his property. A sleepwalker, a chiseled body of stone (with a way of speaking for women), who has to bear a whole house, and yet one alone will never be enough for him, although he would not be able to bear anymore. We see: dark heads bent over a building plan, which they have boldly removed from a drawer and even more boldly will alter with their own felt-tips; in this bath they will soon splash, and in this extension with a bay window they will make quite personal gestures to one another, which, another personal present, nothing from a shop!, will be received as slaps in the face. We see eyes, which do not turn away from straight and dotted lines, but complete them or make completely different subdivisions just as they please, according to their own yardstick. My soul tells me that these people are not for a moment thinking of themselves, but only of their descendants, who, in the shape of Patrick, the country policeman's grandson, loaf around in front of the television, let the fate of strangers bounce impudently off them and instead absorb a whole pound of cookies, but only those that they know from the advertisements, which are explicitly and exclusively directed at our young people. The country policeman now turns up at home again, as if by magic, he's wet, rumpled and dirty, but he never has to give explanations anyway. Showers and changes his clothes, while in between what happened with the stag falls from his lips like dried clay. That doesn't particularly upset anyone here, at most, that the stag survived, that's very rare. Fancy that. The things life is capable of! Until now we've only credited death with surmounting such difficulties. Life ultimately does rise above everything, if one has been able to obtain it in the hospital, but the things a skillful mason, a joiner, a carpenter are capable of, if one lets them, that is more than thinking, it is the activity of the industrious and hard-working, of which I have often spoken here, but it has paid off every time. Apart from that, others have done it even more often, haven't they? It's difficult to talk about ordinary things. About the lamplight, which blows away the darkness, the TV, which shoos away melancholy, the conversations at the family dinner table, which snarling chase away the intellect, the clothes, which hide the ill-shaped bodies of people or sometimes also such a compact, home-carved work of art as Kurt Janisch, whom one could exhibit just like that in the museum of local art and culture, if only he were a little more kindly, or finally about a building plan, which subsequently discards its own house, I could talk about it endlessly, oh how beautiful it all is, because one can always work hard at oneself and at others. And how happy I am nevertheless to be allowed to say all that here. Thank you so much for everything.