As long as the conductor doesn't come by now and ask: any more fares. Then you'll have to let go. And it's so good, holding on and being held. Aah, no, I can't go all the way, alas, she checks my underwear for traces of that, along with shit stains and holes that need mending. My job's mending her hole, ha ha.
But now the conductor is indeed coming. In their haste, the twins did not consider that this asshole might not have a ticket yet and would need his wallet. Thank God we're coming to a bend and dropping speed. As the jerk reluctantly reaches for his wallet, the siblings dive from off the rear car with a mighty bound, and the bewildered Hans, who hasn't a clue what's going on, follows close behind, almost too late. They nearly tumble head over heels, regain their balance with an effort, and while the monster in there is searching for his wallet in complete desperation, his money, which was to have magicked forth a birthday present for some nauseating member of the family or other, where on earth can I have lost it, Jesus (then it gradually dawns on him), the young criminals flee like greyhounds into the gloom of an unfamiliar part of town. And soon their hoots and snorts are lost among blocks of flats, not a shopfront in sight, where right now sundry evening meals are being served up and the latest newspaper stories devoured.
And their white, young and very lively silhouettes are lost among the grey concrete facades. White streaks in a glass marble spinning very fast. Ripples in the water, as the stone goes down.
THE TYPEWRITER IS rattling industriously away and beneath its impact black letters form on the envelopes. Hans's mother is making those letters herself. She failed to get work of a better kind because the economic miracle passed her by. Now her son Hans thoughtlessly passes her by as well, tossing his clothes on the floor. You could do with your father's guiding hand, Hans. Good job I only have your hand, I'll be shaking that off soon, too, and taking the hand of the woman I love. Sophie will be the one.
I have the impression you're out to shake off a good many more hands, hands reaching out to you from the darkness of economic misery, the hands of brothers and sisters from your own class who are destined to stay there.
You're right there, I want to get out of this gunge as fast as I can. It's sticking to me. I go to the WAT sports centre and do my training in as many different sports as I can so that I'll see what's what and have the choice of which sport I want to pursue professionally. All I want to do with my hands is a backhand. At tennis. Which my girlfriend Sophie is going to teach me.
Mother is as tired as a dead dog about to be buried. What she does is monotonous. You couldn't call it a job, it's simply work, and it earns her next to nothing. Although it gets her nowhere she is forever urging her son to do this, do that. Such as: Go to the Party youth group as you used to and stick up posters and arouse people's interest. Agitate. He rejects this proposal. I found my way on my own, the others can do the same.
Generally speaking, he will either join a group as its leader or he won't join at all. In a group, the first thing you do is check out the girls, but in this group there are hardly any girls because women are not interested in politics, which are dirty, but in fashion, men and cleanliness. Since he is a man, this means he has to go elsewhere if he's to flirt, laugh and dance. To enjoy his youth. Ideally with Sophie. Anna isn't bad either, in second place, though she's a bit scrawny. Hans is a sporty type. Hans is the big boss.
Mother sinks into a black funnel of silence, on whose smooth, evenly-curved wall the image of her murdered husband sometimes lights up, be brave, if I have to die I shall die for social democracy, for the cause of the workers, they are the same thing, social democracy and the workers' cause, and one day I shall have my reward. They will never forget me, and I shall live on in our son, too. So be calm, quite calm. In a sense I am even dying for all Austria, which you are a tiny though dearly loved part of, Austria, which no one but the Communists even concedes has a right to exist. As if in slow motion, Mother sees the heavy blocks of Mauthausen stone, killing the emaciated prisoners hewing away at them. After the day's work was over they still had to drag the rocks down the path. And Mauthausen's Mother Earth didn't protest, mothers always put up with everything. Though Mother has always taken her stand, all she has to show for it now is piles of paper. They blur before her eyes.
I'll be going to the jazz club later, blares Hans merrily. He wraps himself up in his fashionable late fifties clothes. Protection and camouflage. As far as fashion is concerned, the age has broken with everything the past had come up with, and indeed youth (generally speaking) has to break with everything if it is to be free at last of the various constraints imposed both privately and professionally.
Work is not a constraint. Man's activity provides his true fulfilment, whispers Mama. True fulfilment, however, can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave.
It's a good while since I was anybody's slave, I'm an individual, and I have my way with other individuals, to be exact: with women. I am responsible to myself alone, and the woman I love is also responsible to me alone.
She doesn't care for statements like this, doesn't Mother Sepp. Her son refuses to take a stand against his oppressors. And now in her mind the date February '34 stands out, when she was still little more than a child. She saw them, hosts of her fellow-workers who'd been out to improve the quality of their lives, lying dead and bloody in the street. Fascism brought up the heavy artillery, the howitzers it had at its disposal, and the men who manned the guns were sons of workers as well, like the victims, whom fascism disposed of likewise. The twin tides of sons of the disinherited (seeking their inheritance in the dirt and failing to find it because it had plainly been taken by others) sloshed towards each other. One side- including a great many unemployed who had been forced into the home guard, the Heimwehr-had been armed to the teeth by their State. The army, artillery, tanks. The other side of the flood consisted of the prickly nests of machine-gunners behind the windows of council blocks, in workers' homes. Machine-gun nests. And the curtain of History tears, and divides up like a ripe watermelon. The fabric is one and the same: those who have been stripped of their rights on the one side, and those who have no rights on the other. Those who dispense Justice are far from where the shots are fired, pulling the strings of unemployment and the national wealth, steering the whole lot into the darkness from which it will presently reappear in the form of a world war. They raise and lower the curtain of humanity on ropes of speculation, arms dealing, pay and price manipulation, inflation, racism, and warmongering.
Nothing better occurs to him, Hans, than to slick his gleaming hair with pomade. The brilliantine creates dreaded additional laundry work for Mama, washing greasy stains off the upholstery fabric, stains that are very difficult to remove, every blemish is like that. But he does it so that a more attractive appearance will boost his chances of a more attractive life. The most fabulous girl to be had, one that collects Elvis records like himself. You have to make an investment, that is one of the core tenets of economic life, none of which Hans is acquainted with since he imagines he's just doing it for fun.
On 12 February '34 Hansmother was still quite young and was racing along holding on to her mother's hand, that is to say: Hansgrandma's hand, and her mother was holding on tight to Hansmother's little sister with her other hand. And the words come whistling: Run for it, children, it's nothing more precious than our lives at stake, no more and no less. They've taken all our material possessions from us. Now it's our very existence they're after. No matter how. Our lives are at stake, and we don't have anything else, d'you hear?! A massive yellow sun on the wall of the house. The washpowder ad. The Radion sun. The only sun that's shining on this dismal day. And of course it promptly lodges in the girl's memory. The girl hasn't seen many other suns. The Goethe Hof. It was to be pacified by the forces of the executive powers, as the executive put it. And piles of peaceful corpses were to lend their active assistance in this, and their enforced silence was to set an example to other elements who were still making trouble in that pre-War period. The dead sleep the sleep of the dead. On Stiege 2 a direct hit filled the girl with horrified terror when she saw its effect, instantly Emmy and her little sister pissed themselves as if bidden. (The little sister later died in an air raid, she was still at that time the elder child.) Bus-loads of cops rolled up. Chancellor Dollfuss inspected the scene, taking in the overview and the details with great satisfaction, wearing his plumed cap. The plume of the home guard that denied so many either a home or a guard. The sight of the corpses, shot in the head. Covered with newspaper. A breeze, only marginally gentle, what they call a February wind, lifts the rustling sheets of paper with their headlines: Attempted Putsch. Under them, astounded dead expressions fixed on undernourished faces, who is doing this to me and why, after all I'm one of them, the son of a have-not just like my murderer, threads of blood trickling from the corner of the mouth and from the ears. Threads that History is woven out of. Not the golden threads of the cloaks of the Kaisers of Austria and the Kings of Hungary. I must be dreaming, how can something like this be happening to me, shot by a hand that looks like my own. A hand that bears the traces of labour. A hand that would be better holding a drill, a file or something of that kind than a gun, and would be better off reaping the profits of toil than reaping my life. He who cutteth me down like a tree knoweth not that he has already been cut down and gathered in himself, by people he does not even know (because they are always at the Riviera or at hunting lodges in the mountains). I've got it now, I'm dead, I'll never see my family again. And bad things are in store for that family if things go on like this and no one stops them. And people didn't see the general strike through either, dear God. Nor is it exactly any consolation to know that my murderer will die at the front in 1940 and will then be just as dead as I am.