Выбрать главу

Later one of the woman's neighbours comes to visit, unbidden, uncalled for. The complaints simply pour from her. The abiding weakness of the female sex etc. Which has now awoken and, climbing the stairs, can only break loose out of itself as a complaint. This neighbour is as bothersome as an insect. She shines her light upon the people in the meadows. She confides expressly in the Frau Direktor, and expresses her confidence in the Son of God, who created the people hereabouts out of the earth and transformed their trees into paper, and she hopes He will show favour to her daughter who will soon be finishing her business studies course. Her husband no longer meets her, he meets a twenty-year-old waitress in a station restaurant. The Direktor's wife can think of no more words to say to her visitor. She has no refreshments left to offer her. How lightly she wears her wealth. There she sits, surrounded by furniture and pictures that hadn't a moment's peace till they belonged to her.

Essentially the Man is a big creature of pleasure, a bankable piggy, a citizen singing and gaming. So that his wife's body will be in a state to report for its daily duty, he chooses lingerie for her from a mail order catalogue. And lo, his choice has fallen upon naughty items, so that she can try to be like the models in the photos. But the undies are wasted on her. She leaves them in the drawer, forgotten, and says nothing. No red lace to disturb her peace. But, come to think of it, that's just how he likes it: when his people altogether forget themselves when he uses their love against them. Peacefully they pass like Time in their homes, waiting for him. The child, hungrily stalked by sport. The woman, thirstily compared with photos and films. Families with no dependants and no dependencies simply drive up in their large family car, equipment in the boot: the whips, the birch rods, the fetters, the rubber accessories, all for the big babies whose members are always weeping and wailing and whining for someone bigger than them to come and tame them. Some day their wives will be quiet too and the milk will come. The men even give each other* injections, in goes the needle, so they can stay the course longer when they go dropping their coins in the slots of the collecting boxes their wives beseechingly hold out. So that they themselves will be collected again. Calm. Pull themselves together fast. Pull a fast one on their business partners. Women are standing bowed over bowls of salted snacks, laughing, and presently the gentlemen dive onto the sofas, collapse, wag their tails, and then, as fast as they can, flee the ones they have charmed. How deeply the men desire that their shots should go far, far overshoot the mark, the game (what a game)! The women, stretchmarked by their children's sojourn inside them, have to serve themselve up, naked as the day their bundles of joy were born. The weighty wine glasses totter on the trays: their Lords and Masters embrace them from behind, from in front, from anywhere and everywhere, fingers are inserted and withdrawn, mouths suck between thighs. They break their favourite toys. Aha. Now they're resting after their labours of love, the loved ones and the thunderous horsepower that lay with them. The labours of sundry hairdressers have been ruined. There is garbage for charwomen to clear away once again. And then they all go on, and off, in their cars, in the loving arms of their wives. And who, in truth, will be embarrassed before his own car seats? They don't eat chocolate, mind you. The stains, which are all that remains of what we thought the highest of pleasures, tend not to wash out.

The Man can never simply disappear, all of a sudden. He is so settled in his beautiful house. In the evenings, the house is cloaked in the darkness of the forests and mantled in the gloom of the local people: handsomely turned out! Sympathy would be wasted on the woman. The pores of her child are still so small. The woman reels beneath the heavy burden of her happiness. She is under house arrest, but her sentence may be commuted for good behaviour. Round and round she goes in the same old rut; she mustn't deny her circuit judge his rest and recreation, though. His same old rutting. Barely home and his whistle's wet again. Company outings generally end in wetting the whistle, then out it comes, wanting to be blown, wanting to sound off in the open. Life mostly consists of things not wanting to stay where they are. So be it! All change! It all makes for restlessness, unceasing social intercourse, people go calling on each other but have to carry themselves with them wherever they go. Well-ordered servants, there they stand with the sausages of their sex, banging their cutlery on the table, wanting a hole to be served up fast, a hole to hide away in, only to re-emerge greedier than ever, to offer their hospitable services once again to those who have no need of them. Not even secretaries care to admit that the groping that goes on in their blouses is like a denunciation. They laugh. There are so many of them around here, too many for them all to get enough of their improper nourishment.

The Man appears at daybreak. And stands revealed. The naked truth. He knocks the woman over, slaps her on the backside, he who has travelled from afar. The tubes are already rattling on the bathroom shelf, the slip-on cover is trembling on the toilet, the porcelain is gleaming. You can hear the silence that has prevailed in the Man's rod all night. Then he speaks. Nothing can turn him away. On the level floor stands the woman, weary from her long and toilsome journey through the night, and now her socket's due to receive his plug. She has long since seemed as intimate as a rolling milclass="underline" even to his business associates he brags of her, and in short and powerful bursts the Direktor's dirty sallies talk their way to the top. And his subordinates maintain an embarrassed silence. The Man forces himself, well be hearing from each other. The Direktor reaches into the pocket of this body, which belongs to him. The loved objects are all there. Nothing missing. The Man is fond of easy talk and the woman is always easy. How could he possibly be expected to contain himself any longer, this silent can opener? Like a plant helplessly seeking the light the moment it's switched off. The child plays very nicely to order. How much better will he perform on his fiddle when one day, like his daddy, he's learnt to work the fiddles of manhood and fatherhood and perform the parts! The long and tedious breast-feeding lies in the child's forgotten past, but he still expects his every wish to be as automatically satisfied. For so long the woman gave of herself to the boy – and what has the trying creature learnt? That you have to try try try again, because heaven is a hill you have to climb, and the climbing has its price.

No, the woman is not mistaken. The boy will long since have put her aside by the time he is a man, and then he will be gone. Now Father drags her into the light, with all his strength, to open her dark tunnel for the express train roaring up. Every day the same. Even landscapes change, be it through sheer boredom, by virtue of the seasons. The woman is passive as a toilet, for the man to do his business in. He shoves her head down into the bathtub and, his hand clawing her hair, threatens that as you make your bed, so you must cry on it, that's love. No, cries the woman. She isn't asking for love. Already the Man is busy with his buttons. Her nightie is hoisted and wrapped around her ears. There is a whimpering in her entrails, like the whimpering of captive animals trying to kick a way out of their cage. The cambric nightdress, bright as a pilot light, is stuffed in the woman's mouth, and the Man appears as Nature made him. His innocent water is passed. Right beside the woman the water splashes from the dark smoke of pubic hair into the tub, past her bowed head. The enamel shines like new. How quickly the Man's tail has grown into a fine upstanding fellow in these friendly surroundings. The woman finds she has to cough while her flanks are being prised open. The can opener is pulled out of the terrifying flannel trousers, and presently a milky fluid appears, in just the time it takes to make a grease stain. His member is hauled out far too early from its drawer into the light. The woman, whose arse has been straddled wide open, a shady lane for the Man to go walking, is left standing. He pulls the helm right round and forces her to look at him. In a rage, he addresses himself to her frontage, forcing her to take hold of his dying willie. There. Already it's starting to twitch again. It wants to dwell within thy hallowed halls! He pushes the woman's hair into his come, what's left of it, let her take a good look, the simpleton. No, they do not rest, the heroes, when their labours are done. The woman is smeared full of sperm. Building her a fine house ensures that a wife will not go missing, and outside stand the paltry terraced houses of the poorest and the unemployed, up for sale, for public auction, or to be torched. And what was once a home is now under the hammer of the local lordsandmasters. What once was work is brutally taken away from these dear hearts. The women/though, can recoup it in small coin. Where else should they go, the women, but to those who splash about in the pool of power? Those who splash out with worthless rubbish that flies from them like foam from teeth? The generators create unnecessary products, the generations create unnecessary problems. This time the Direktor has kept his assets to himself till the right moment. Up front he creams the woman's face with his supersensitive lotion, then she gets an eyeful of his supersensitive parts. To drink in his ichor, truly, is not what she wants, but she must, she must, Love says so, she must groom him and lick him clean and dry him off with her hair. Jesus came first, so to speak, in this. He was wiped dry by a woman. In closing the woman is dealt a slap on the ass, time to close down, a crass lordand-master hand rummages in her slit and probes her orifice, his tongue licks at her nape, her hair hangs down into the tub, he tugs at her clit, and her knees give way and her arse snaps out like a folding chair. And lo, many others are obedient unto his command.