This woman, enamoured of herself, inebriated, tumbles into pits in the snow of her own digging, and there is no hand to drag her out by her new-waved locks. Dear lady, we are sorrowing for our departed friends, who have had to leave for home already! But we are still there, and the season tickets that will take us over the hills and mountains are at our warm breasts. We don't wish to give offence, but you've set up your safe home in the unsafest of places, so that you might just as well have none at all. The sun screws these youngsters by setting too early, but in the dark they will pair off promptly once again, too. It is our right to scale the mountains, and no rules govern our conduct there but the law of gravity. In amazement we swerve and give way to each other, but at times we take the wrong direction: never gob or slash that way or you'll get your own self straight back.
And what of the others? Just you take the average employee out of his locker! On the ski slopes he comes into his own, the lackey, the creature of obedience, a being insensate yet still with a vote, who imagines he has the right to look right through this woman, laughing. With nothing but the voice of youth he can make fun of her any time he likes. In the office, the young gentlemen have to behave and beware of the boss, but here all their pining is at an end as they fly past the pines, past Nature, as if they were so generous that they'd give themselves away! Immortality! Gold medals will set you free. And anyone who takes a tumble in the slalom as he might take a tumble in the tempests of Life will soon find that no one will shed a single tear for him!
Beneath the ice on the stream there are whole clusters of trout, but in winter they're difficult to make out. Michael's friends are sitting about together, welcoming each other and looking up over their sunglasses. Michael swings down the piste in a spray. Everything's going to be fine, because some very good-looking girls have turned up now, they'll turn in and turn over and then return. They stand there indifferent to us, we who do not blossom like the untouchable snow over there against the rock face. They are still too close to the origins from which they came. All of us take pleasure in new things, but only they look good in them. They are as they are. Remote from the pastures where we fat cattle graze, ashamed of our own thighs. We have lost sight of our own beginnings, they are mantled in a mysterious radiance, hidden far beyond memory, not to be repeated. It's not just in our social positions that we're stuck fast.
But let's return to our human analysis, anatomy, anomaly: the woman rushes from her Christian Social environment and flings herself upon the student. At this precise moment his ski poles are still dangling from his wrists like an afterbirth. See: what was richly rewarded last night with an ejaculation now supposes it can venture into the light of day, looking almost human. We're not used to having the wind blow about us like this, we live in a two-and-a-half room apartment! By these toilsome tracks we'll never make it to the top where the streams come tumbling down and the skiing is top quality. You and I, we'll be seeing each other again at the snack bar, queueing among the multitudes. No home for us at dusk. A time when many are to be avoided but few to be sought out. So that, as rivals, we can lay ourselves like burdens upon each other's shoulders, heavy as weather.
Clumsily the Direktor's wife in her cloak of mink and alcohol casts herself upon her current lordandmaster's breast. She wants to quit this world with him, spit out the pips and start up her own Sunday supplement. She wants to start anew, with Michael breezing lightly about her. But let's see things as they are: this Michael can't take this woman as she is because the problem is the way she is, her years, how she looks. Particularly here, in the bright light, with the tackle of all these sporting folk grinding and creaking in the cold. But the light of love – which goes by our side from the very start, though even our cigarette lighters burn brighter – has fallen upon her. And has cast her on the ground like a sack of garbage that's burst open as it falls. And the locals laugh. Far away the trucks go thundering by. Can you hear them? Mind you step aside a little!
These people barely feel the need of rules. After all, their feelings regulate their lives. The woman doesn't improve from constant use, but if she herself wants to avail herself of a young man, make herself available to a fellow who lives nearby: no, it won't do! The sons of Fate skilfully cover themselves with their hands. The woman blushes scarlet, her face glows, she isn't there. She just doesn't show in this young man's viewfinder. In the eyes of this beholder she isn't beautiful. Youth, like the day, grows and disports itself and does it with each other and then, buckled to its skis, falls into and upon the village enclosure. No matter what, all things present are fine by Youth. Youth is its own performance. Everything belongs to it. And nothing belongs to us, not even the place where we sit in motorway restaurants and the waiter, not deigning to attend to us, carefully fails to register our presence. Gerti clings to Michael but slides off his harassed plastic clothing. As anyone of his age would have been, he was carried away a little by the woman. He's easy-going. He likes it here. People like him are given away in recognition of loyal custom by the local tourist office, who put him in their brochures. Whichever pub he may be in, the air-conditioning breathes silently above him. But we, us extras, we are so difficult to move, we hang leaden upon our catheters, through which our warm waste waters trickle wretchedly away. Even the roads are unfriendly. We mountain hikers, naturally nurtured on the bottle and bottled into Nature's nurture, wolfing down the ham and cheese. Yes, Nature wants a little fun as well when the day comes for us to poison ourselves. Otherwise one dies all the sooner on her steep roads, of her cold products.
Michael has already moved a little way off, quickly. The light shines upon the quick and the dead, but it seems to be particularly fond of him. Our godlike Olympic skiers have already bagged two gold medals which hang about their necks while we contemplate the obverse sides: the glitter of fame like a chandelier hanging from the TV ceiling but never reaching us. Superficial though Michael is, untouched and untouching, he's still having an honest good time yawping with these lads and lasses. The woman reels in the deep snow by the barrier and sits down. The sturdy cable with bales of straw attached to it serves to cordon off the woman and all the rest who do not want to be let out of their byres for some fun and games from the sporty types who live on the boards that are really their coffins, types who taunt the skiers in heroic first place with mock acclaim: Karli Schranz! Karli Schranz, der gehort uns ganz. The woman's body arches into the architecture of longing, to cut the distance between herself and vanished youth. Maybe we can at least go tobogganing with our friends! But no, Michael's group has already been decided. They are constantly in each other's eyes and sometimes they even like staying at home to live in the relevant periodicals and cheer each other on in the pictures. These young men, in whose sheltering embrace the woman would so much like to spend her sleeping hours, aren't playing a game; they're hoping to be washed up to the executive levels soon. Jolly as hunters they go a-wandering in the woods.
The woman gets to her feet, staggers around, and sits down again. No good expecting her to buy the fare, she's brought along a pub of her own in a little bottle. She takes a drink. Michael calls to her, laughing, and another little demi-god who has often scarred his enemies by his mere presence reaches out an arm from his goblet (a can of beer) and tugs at Gerti, laughing, to haul her out of the deep snow. He pulls at her sleeves. Soon he finds it's taking too long. So he just nudges her from the deep end into the shallows where he himself wouldn't care to be and where the kids can be left to their own devices, they'll be back an hour later, out of the sun, roasted. When it's cloudy, animals fall silent. A bad sign. The clouds always draw in when it's time for the slaughter, so that the blood can spray out. Practically without thinking, the woman, she of the freshly gilded head, stares into the light. Now she falls over again and is dragged onward. People paw under her coat. There are children who go on and on tugging at their sex tilfit produces something, oh joy. The woman's new-fangled hair spreads out in the snow. The mink coat flops over Gerti. Outside the simple homes in these parts, children with heavy pails take a fall. The people built their houses by the water because the land was damp and cheap. (Like our dreams of the opposite sex!) Every day they carry up the weight of the cross on the summit in their rucksacks, so that God knows why he took all this upon him.