Elfriede Jelinek
Wonderful Wonderful Times


Originally published in German in 1980 as Die Ausgesperrten

Translated by Michael Hulse


ONE NIGHT AT the end of the fifties an assault is committedin the Vienna municipal park. The following persons all grab hold of one solitary man out walking: Rainer Maria Witkowski and his twin sister Anna Wit-kowski, Sophie Pachhofen (formerly von Pachhofen), and Hans Sepp. Rainer Maria Witkowski was named after Rainer Maria Rilke. All of them are about eighteen, Hans Sepp is a year or so older than the others, though he too is without a trace of maturity. Of the two girls, Anna is the more ferocious, which can be seen in the fact that she pays most attention to the face of the subject. Particular courage is required if you are to scratch a man's face while he is looking full in your own (though he cannot see much since it is dark) or indeed try to scratch his eyes out. For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise people will suppose the soul is done for.

Anna (of all people) really ought to leave this fellow alone, because his character is better than hers. Because he is a victim. Anna is one of those who perpetrate wrongs. The victim is always better because he is innocent. At this time, of course, there are still a good many innocent perpetrators. With their wartime memories, their souvenirs, they stand gazing into the audience from windows bright with flowers, all friendliness, waving, or else they are in high office. With geraniums. Forgive and forget the whole lot, is what they say, so a completely new start can be made.

Later (when everyone always knows better) it turns out that the victim was an attorney working for a medium-sized company. The victim was a man who felt totally at home in a household that was kept neat and orderly down to the very last detail, which is something Anna reserves a particular contempt for. Cleanliness goes against her grain. By nature she is extremely unclean both within and without.

The youngsters appropriate the man's wallet. This notwithstanding, he is badly beaten up.

Anna bashes away regardless, thinking: How good to find somewhere to get rid of this powerful hatred of mine at last without having to turn it upon myself, which would be quite the wrong place for it. The money is useful too. I hope there's a lot in the wallet (it turned out to be on the average side). Hans also punches away with those fists of his, fists accustomed to manual work. As a man, he keeps to male ways of playing the game of violence: punches and treacherous, pile-driving headbutts. He leaves the universally notorious kick in the shins to Sophie, who avails herself of it time and again. Like two pistons of a complicated machine, thrusting alternately. It looked as if you just didn't want to get your fingers dirty and were leaving it to your feet, Rainer tells her later, taking her tenderly in his arms. Only to recoil promptly with a smothered, poisonous cry when she kicks him in the kneecap. She won't have that kind of thing.

Rainer, who sees himself as Sophie's one and only boyfriend (which was why he took her in his arms, after all), claws at the victim's clothing in quest of the wallet and cannot find it at first (but eventually does). Then he drives his knee into the belly of the man, who is hardly putting up any defence any more, and there is a gurgle and some slobber dribbles from the mouth. There was no blood to be seen because it was too dark.

That's brutal violence against a defenceless person, and quite unnecessary, declares Sophie, and she pulls with an audible tearing sound at the hair of the man lying in an untidy heap on the ground.

What's unnecessary is best of all, says Rainer, who wants to go on fighting. We agreed on that. What's unnecessary-that rather than anything else-is the principle at stake. But I think what's necessary is even better, says Hans, who (oddly enough) loves money, and he eyes the wallet. Money is unimportant, snaps Rainer, spraying the wallet with spittle, what do you think, are those notes hundreds or thousands?

Money isn't our guiding principle, says Sophie in her shimmering fashion. Her parents have a great deal of it, and prosperity has made her wayward.

Hans, the sweat flying from him, is still pounding away at the victim like some mindless machine that destroys the spirit in others. That is how the brother and sister see him: as a machine. Anna has been feeling all along that it's a beautiful machine, and Sophie will soon be thinking so too. There may be a seed of discord in this. Hans's fists thump down like hammers and only draw for further blows. Ouch, groans the victim softly, but hardly has the strength to say even that. And then: Police! But no one's listening. Anna takes this as a reason to kick him in the balls, since she is against the police on principle, as anarchists always are. The man maintains a frightened silence, curls up, and rocks about a little till at last he lies motionless and stays that way. Anyway, they've already got the money.

Anna prises Hans (who is thrashing about wildly) off the attorney and drags him away. It is time to make their getaway. People out for a walk can be heard approaching. What are they doing here at this late hour? The very same thing will happen to them one day.

The mouths of the grammar school kids and the worker are producing whistling sounds as they turn at a trot into Johannesgasse and hurry past the Vienna conservatoire, where a flurry of wind and string can be heard (and where Anna takes piano lessons). Orchestra rehearsals, which are always scheduled late so that people who work can take part are in progress. The Kartnerstrasse will be best now, with its busy multitudes, pants Sophie, so we can hide amidst the crowd of nighttime people that one finds there. There isn't a crowd on earth that we can hide in (Anna), because we stand out from the masses wherever we may be. The point isn't to hide but to do it openly, because that way we assert our principles of random violence to all comers (Rainer). Jerk (Hans).

Anna does not say anything else. Instead she thoughtfully licks salt from the victim's sweat and blood from the scratches scored by the victim in her right hand, the hand that was doing the hitting, and Rainer gives her an approving look, Sophie is mildly revolted, and Hans is impelled to slap her fingers. Scumbag.

There is so much pent-up rage in Anna (probably resulting from problems caused by the generation gap) that what she would like best of all would be to smash the bright windows along Vienna 's shopping boulevard. She would absolutely adore having the things in those shop windows but her pocket money won't run to it. Which is why you have to earn a little extra in this way. She is invariably consumed with envy if one of the other girls at school turns up wearing a new two-piece outfit with a white blouse, or new heels. All she says, however, is: It makes me want to throw up when I see those bints tarted up like that. Look at them in their half-wit togs, superficial, not two thoughts to rub together. She herself only wears dirty jeans and outsize men's pullovers, to make a statement about her attitude. The psychiatrist she has to see on account of a recurring inability to speak (an inability which afflicts her out of the blue and then vanishes without trace) is forever asking: Tell me, my dear girl, why don't you get something nice to wear and have your hair in curls, basically you're a pretty lass and you ought to be taking dancing classes. Just look at you, you give a young lad the creeps.

As for Anna, everything gives her the creeps.

No matter. These four depraved young characters contrast sharply with the cheerful people out on the town, looking for a fun night out and generally not finding it because this isn't the city for it. Of course fresh vitality is normally the hallmark of youth. But not of these four. And if youngsters deliberately reject freshness there is nothing to be done about it. These four are not looking for fun any more because they have already had theirs. Presently, so as not to be conspicuous, they stop running and change to an ostentatiously innocuous saunter. Rainer takes Sophie's arm. Sophie is trying to tidy her hair-do, using the dark window panes to their left and right. She gives the impression of being the most unmoved of the four, which is in fact the case, and indeed she always looks as though she were wearing white gloves. A man finds this provocative and tempting, but it never affords him any satisfaction. That is why you have to think up assaults like this. Because you don't get any satisfaction from Sophie. But there are a lot of other reasons as well. For instance: Rainer inclines to be the brain of the gang, Hans the hands, Sophie tends to be a kind of voyeuse, and Anna is angry at the whole of mankind, which is bad, since it clouds the vision and makes it difficult to get at anything. True, Anna finds it hard to get at the beautiful things you see around anyway, because you need money to buy them. Anna does not know that you cannot buy inner worth. The unfortunate drawback with inner worth is that it is hidden away where no one can see it. Anna wants things that are visible on the outside too, but she won't admit as much. People should not be beaten up for reasons of hatred but for no reason at all, it should be an end in itself, admonishes her brother Rainer. All that counts is beating them up, whether I hate them or not (Anna). You haven't understood a single thing, Rainer tells her in a superior tone.

Shit (Hans). What he means by this vulgar expression is that he has torn his shirt. There'll be hell to pay with the old woman again. We'll find some dark hallway and divvy up in a minute, says Anna, then you can buy a new one tomorrow.

Rainer hates his parents but is afraid of them too. They were his progenitors and now they provide his keep, while he keeps himself occupied with poetry. Fear is a component of hatred (thus Anna, who could write a doctoral thesis on the subject of hate), if one feared nothing there would be no point in hatred, and all that would remain would be empty indifference. It'd be better to be dead. Philistines are unacquainted with hatred of this kind. If we had no powerful feelings we'd be mere objects, or we'd be dead, which we will be soon enough in any case. I love most forms of art.

I hate nothing, says Sophie, because there is nothing in my life that's worth hating. But the one and only feeling you do have is your love of me, says Rainer. If both of us jab our fingers into a victim's eyes, the bond between us is firmer than marriage could ever be. We're against marriage.

I've got to go now, says Sophie, who always has to be going somewhere or other.

You can't leave me alone now because I need someone now to explain everything to, says Rainer. You've got two others anyway, says Sophie, unmoved by this outburst, you can explain it all to them. I have to go home now. What about your share? You can give it to me in school tomorrow. Hans is already reaching his claws out towards the money, a thread of saliva at the corner of his mouth discreetly suggesting greed. To which Rainer responds: Take it easy.

You look real good when you're beating someone up, Anna tells the young worker ingratiatingly, and strokes the muscles of his upper arms. His mother would never stroke his upper arms like that. It wouldn't occur to her to stroke his arms at all. There is a certain suggestiveness about Anna's stroking which makes the gesture mean more than it seems to.

I think you're great (Anna to Hans). Bye (Hans to Rainer and Anna). See you tomorrow.

With the tension ebbing away, the twins walk home to the eighth district, where many petits bourgeois live, mostly white-collar workers and pensioners. These two are themselves as much a part of the lower middle class as the core is a part of an apple, and they feel at home in it. This is their home, and they climb the stairs of the gloomy tenement building, without touching anything (to avoid being contaminated by the squalor). Soon they have reached the summit: that is to say, the fourth floor. They have arrived. And as their unfriendly home appears before them, so too does weariness, and reluctantly it opens the door to the tension, because that tension still has a thing or two planned for today, things it can't use the brother and sister for. The two re-enter their everyday life and lock the door behind them.


THERE IT IS. The apartment. And there are the parents too. A uniform tranquillity prevails before and after the assaults. Imperceptibly the children have slipped out of the child's role into the role of an adult with responsibilities. Neither of them fulfils those responsibilities.

All around the shabby old apartment tower the innumerable substandard dwellings of the old imperial city tower. Ugly and unprepossessing people, many of them old as well, slink about in these blocks, carrying chamber pots and pitchers to the toilets and water pipes in the corridors and back again. This produces a constant to-and-fro without any productive side to it.

From time to time a genius will flourish in their midst. The soil that nourishes this genius will frequently be filth, and madness will mark the bounds. The genius will want to escape the filth at all costs, but will not always succeed in eluding the madness. The Witkowskis have no notion that their oppressive fug has already brought forth a genius: Rainer. He has already got clear as far as his hips of his native mire and is now trying to haul one leg free and establish a tentative footing, though in the process he repeatedly sinks back in again, like a rhinoceros stuck in the mud. He saw that once on TV in The Living Desert. The head where the unlovely worm of his literary talent has taken up residence is up in the air, at any rate, gazing across a sea of fusty old underpants, battered furniture, tattered newspapers, dog-eared books, piled-up detergent boxes, dishcloths with coffee grounds with a growth of mould, dishcloth with coffee grounds without the mould, tea-cups with some unidentifiable encrustation, breadcrumbs, pencil stubs, grubby eraser rubbings, filled-in crossword puzzles and sweaty socks, gazing involuntarily across into the realm of Art, the one realm that is wide open to you as long as you have a little luck.

Today, though, Rainer and Anna are at school, the grammar school which unfortunately they have to go to every day till they take their school-leaving exams.

Herr Witkowski returned from the War with one leg, but erect. In the War he was more of a man than now, that is to say, he was intact, two-legged, and in the SS. Nowadays he is as firm about his hobby as he was then about his choice of profession. There are no bounds to his hobby, which is art photography. His one-time enemies got away through the chimneys and crematoria of Auschwitz and Treblinka or littered Slavic earth. Nowadays Rainer's father crosses the petty frontiers of today's Germany anew whenever he takes his artistic photographs. Only a philistine recognises those frontiers in his private life. In photography, the bounds are fixed by clothing. And Witkowski senior bursts the narrow confines of clothing and morality. Mother knew right away who her son was taking after in his artistic leanings: Father. Father had the eye of the amateur artist. Get undressed, Margarethe, we'll take a nude picture or two! There you go again, get undressed, it always occurs to you when I'm busy doing the cleaning. Who's the breadwinner in this family anyway, demands Herr Witkowski, who draws an invalidity pension and works as a night porter. With this disability, all I have left is my hobby, porn photography. As far as mature people are concerned there is no such thing as pornography. Pornography is for people who need to be led and influenced. And even if my children won't follow me into hobbyland, at least you will, Gretl. Now get on with it, pronto, my camera's waiting to do its duty.

Can't you take photos of me with my clothes on like other people do? No, any amateur can take pictures of people with their clothes on. Anyway, it's a twofold pleasure for me, once when I take the pictures and then secondly when I look at them and evaluate them critically. Between the two stages come the developing and enlarging. That is enjoyable too. Art is always a struggle for the desired result. Your willpower will show in the picture too, Gretl, when you've put your objections behind you. You can see an artist's talent in his eyes, partly, burning deep down within.

Right, let's go. A housewife who is being spied on by a stranger while she's washing in the kitchen tries to cover up but all she has for the purpose is (say) an inadequate ovencloth. Which doesn't even cover her vital parts, her privates, thank God. And the privates are what I want. The housewife, being clumsy into the bargain, covers the wrong part too, instead of the right part. Come on, Gretl, come on.

But now there's a shadow over the privates, you stupid cow. The cunt, I mean. But I'm doing it just the way I did it last time! Well, that's wrong, you have to do it different every time so that the effect is striking and artistic. You have to leave that to me, who's the photography expert anyway, you or me? You, Otto. See?

Mother, who has seen better days (days when SS officers' wives would meet), better days than these days as an artist's wife, tugs and adjusts but if anything she makes matters worse rather than improving things.

You have to look afraid. It's always a terrific feeling to smash down resistance, I smashed resistance quite often myself in the War and liquidated numerous persons all on my own. Nowadays I have this wretched leg to contend with, but back then the women couldn't get enough of me, it was the magical attraction of the uniform that did it. That smart uniform. I remember how we were often up to the ankles of our riding-boots in blood in Polish villages. Look, thrust your pelvis further forward, you slut, where's your pussy got to again? Ah, there it is.

Mother hums one of those melancholy songs by Koschat, which always have a birch seat in them. She is thinking of a field of wheat and a walk in the country, things that you're reluctant to expect a one-legged man to take on, it's hard to ask it of him, he'd only spoil the mood from the very start anyway. Father is thinking of a different field, the field of honour where he didn't fall. Now he keeps a careful watch on the field of family honour, by way of compensation. So his wife, the sow, doesn't have it off with men who are not disabled. You can't keep an eye on her all the time, and what does she do at the grocer's when she goes there?

Frau Witkowski says it's often necessary to have a break. Herr Witkowski says he'll break something of hers in a minute, and throws something hard that hits her shoulder and makes her start. She'll have a bruise there. Ready yet, you whore? Look, it's not too much to ask, now is it? Else I'll knock you down with my crutches. At one time I would have thrown myself on you but now it's out of the question, a man with one leg can't throw himself anywhere (or he'll have problems getting up again). It's like a fish. A fish hasn't got any legs at all but it can swim and dive gracefully. So I'm a perfect photographer. Now get your legs apart!

My hobby photographer's eye tells me that you've not washed your hair. Again. I ordered you to wash your hair. It's supposed to look silky and not like some straggly thornbush. You do nothing but get in the way of my personal fulfilment. I get my fulfilment from nude photography. Whenever you block off my forays into the realm of photography I could bash your skull in.

But I don't block off your forays into the realm of photography, not at all, Otti.


ANNA DESPISES TWO classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop. In her there is nothing whatsoever of a lass with a perm or a bobbing pony-tail listening to a hit in a record store and restlessly tapping her foot because the rhythm gets to her. Everybody but her is on the ice, the smooth, endless ice, and Anna kicks and shoves them in turn as she goes along. Right out to the very edge, which you cannot see but which it's to be hoped is there so that they can all be swept into the deathly-cold water. What she talks about with her brother is of a philosophical or literary nature, but what speaks from within her alone is the language of the sounds produced by the piano.

On a school trip once, the girls in her class took a photo where they were all giving a double-page pic of Peter Kraus in Bravo magazine a kiss. Eight laughing faces, all going mmmm-mmmm with their lips pursed to kiss and smiling into the camera. Anna was the only one who wouldn't purse her lips, and they jeered at her. The real derision followed soon after, when one of the girls said to Anni: Hey, Anni, get in here quick, they've got Bach on the Wurlitzer, sounds like your kind of thing. And dimwit Anna, stupid with sun, blinded by her music studies and rendered a social defective by a crazy mother, dashed in as fast as she could go, wanting her own music that nobody but her would understand and which she could explain. But what was playing on the jukebox? A hit by Elvis, Tuttifrutti, which you have to reject for educational reasons, let alone anything else. The girls rolled about on the cafe floor, their stupid schoolmate Anna imagined you'd get Bach on a Wurlitzer and not what youngsters love.

That is the kind of twisted schoolkid Anna is. Anna, who spends her spare time playing the piano.

In Anna's case it tends to be a sweeping-up job, like a street-cleaning machine. In Rainer's it is more like a flight of steps consisting of living human beings, with the young author standing on the topmost step, picked out by a light, reading out one of his own poems, a poem that embraces the whole of mankind and is mythic in character.

Apart from literature (which anyone who can speak is a master of, none more nor less than another, but which certain people have monopolised, people who can't afford a superior method to elevate them out of their surroundings), Rainer has unfortunately not managed to conquer anything else yet. But literature is well able to meet Rainer's demands.

Whenever (contrary to all expectation) the twins are invited to some wild party, they promptly say no, we don't associate with people like that, that kind of fun is stupid and pointless. But they only say it because they can't dance and can't stand not being better at something than other people. Renunciation is rarely easy for Youth, but Age finds it less of a problem since it has already been practising renunciation the whole time.

Rainer says you can take possession of a person. First of all you have to know more than he does, and then he will recognise your expert status. Hans, for instance, the young worker met at the jazz club. Rainer will explain everything to him, till he is nothing but a tool without a will of his own; this is more difficult than fashioning a literary text, since people are capable of putting up surprising resistance. Which is tiring. But it stretches you.

Art is flexible and tremendously forbearing. People are occasionally refractory, but they are receptive to explanations. Of course they think they know better anyway, but Rainer really does know better.

The kids who go to school with him are a grey flock of lambs, ignorant and immature. They say what they did with girls at the weekend, in the basements (converted for partying) of their parental homes, in their own rooms in comfortable apartments at Hietzing, in the woods while looking for mushrooms, or in a changing cubicle at the swimming baths. The girls say what they allowed to be done to them or how they refused to do it and how the boys begged. But they were adamant because they Want To Stay A Virgin. Everything that's said is a cue for something else. Rainer, have you never done it with a girl? At least when they're talking about intimate subjects like this they don't call him 'Professor' the way they usually do. Rainer promptly explains that lust is a species of ecstasy. (????) You see, in this state of ecstasy, consciousness is merely the consciousness of the body, and therefore a reflexive consciousness of physicality. As in the case of physical pain, in lust there is a kind of reflex which ensures that one is very intensely aware of one's lust. (Huh? I don't get it.)

Anna states that for that reason lust is the death of desire, because it is not only the consummation of desire but also its goal and thus its end. People go in pursuit of lust, yet it remains totally meaningless.

The class desert the show, saying: These two professors don't know what they're talking about. They've never copped hold of a cunt or a prick in their lives.

Sophie Pachhofen goes gazelling about the rooms that pong of chalk, hunting in her purse for money to buy the notorious roll for break and a Coke. Envious, Anna hides her thick wedge of bread and dripping; Mummy spread it for her and put her whole heart into it because Anna is her favourite child (she is a woman, like herself), Rainer is more of a Daddy's boy. Love of Sophie hits Rainer like a karate chop in the neck, and he says to this girl whom he secretly adores: The carnal presence of the other is increasingly lost from sight to the consciousness, which ingurgitates our own carnality instead, this being its ultimate objective. So now you know, Sophie. One must act accordingly.

Rainer digs a fingernail into the palm of his hand. He is so terribly keen to have Sophie. She herself wants it just as badly. She simply won't admit it to herself.

Rainer informs Sophie that he is the beast of prey and she is the prey. Sophie says, I don't get it, what's all this about. Do you fancy coming to play tennis some time? Rainer says he only ever plays on his own court. Sophie's gaze strays beyond him. Rainer says she should take it to heart: the desire to caress becomes the desire to be caressed. One wants to feel one's body blossoming, to the point of nausea. Has Sophie (he speculates) ever felt that? If not, he'll show her what's meant.

Sophie leaves.

Everything gives me the creeps, especially today, says Anna.

As soon as Sophie returns from the grocer's with the salami roll, Rainer will order her to hand it over to him. It will be a trial of wills. There she comes now. Experimentally, adopting a brutal expression, Rainer places a number of fingers on Sophie's jugular. Ouch, are you crazy, there's a whole lot of nerves in the neck that you can kill off unintentionally. Who said anything about unintentionally, says Rainer. I saw it in a French film.

You don't go killing people just because you saw it in a film.

Who knows what I'm capable of, says Rainer. All I know is that I'm capable of inconceivable cruelty and keep a firm grip on myself so that I don't really behave that way.

Anna is lurking in the background, lying in wait for half a roll that's going free. I brought you one too, says Sophie, offering it. With fish and onions, how you like it. Great!

As soon as Anna has gobbled her half roll she goes out to the toilet and sticks a finger down her throat. Out they come again, the fish and onions, yurgh, only in reverse order. Anna contemplates what she has thrown up, then pulls the flush. She feels as if she consisted entirely of filth. No wonder. After all, she unceasingly brings the filth with her from home, like a magnet.

Once, when she was still a child, she watched Mummy in the bathtub. Contrary to her usual bathtime practice, Mother was wearing an old pair of white panties, which billowed out like a sail in the water. There were red stains on them. Revolting. A body such as that is simply an appendage to a person, and one that easily spoils. It isn't the main thing. Even though there is a lot you can buy to put inside the body or drape on it. Whenever Anna sees something white she promptly wants to stain it.

Anna's thoughts turn constantly and compulsively to unpleasant things that slip past the checkpoint in her brain. It's one-way traffic: the barrier's raised to let things in but doesn't let them out. That brain of hers is crammed with unpleasantness, and the emergency exit is nailed shut. Take (for instance) the humiliating memory of how a number of mothers complained about her to the teacher some years ago. Anna's sexuality had been issuing from her lips in the form of gross jokes (just as Rainer's sexuality too is only ever a matter for the mouth). Supposedly Anna's jokes had poisoned the childlike souls of various classmates. That was when Anna's difficulties in speaking first began. More and more often her tongue would say no, I'm not doing anything today.

Right now Anna is once again making stains. What she'd like best would be to see Sophie's surface area grubbied about like this. But it is made of the finest repellent material: the material repels dirt.

Another little example. Anna is fourteen years old. She is sitting naked on the floor, legs apart, trying to deflower herself with the aid of an old shaving mirror and a razor blade, to rid herself of a membrane that is supposedly down there. But she knows nothing about anatomy and cuts into her perinaeum by mistake. Which bleeds fearfully.

When Anna emerges into the open from the reeking school toilet, naturally it's snow-white Sophie who whirls past her first, burying her. Sophie the avalanche. Want to stop by at my place this afternoon? Okay.

Anna pumps away energetically and keeps it up for a long time, but there is no blood (as there was that time back then), no ink, no raspberry juice and no vomit.

Sophie slips nimbly past her and heads outside. Into the light. Where it is so light that Sophie no longer stands out, and disappears without trace.


HANS SEPP'S father was in the labour movement, and was killed at Mauthausen concentration camp. As if it had never witnessed such things, the light of the setting sun breaks brightly upon the Kochgasse windows, burning with a greater intensity than it has on leaving the sun. You have to close your blinded eyes for protection against the violence of Nature. The people who live here have experience in turning a blind eye to things.

Across the road there is a little shop selling knitting and sewing equipment. Brightly-coloured yarns and wools on little crocheted doilies; the pointed needles are inside the store. Touched by the things of everyday life, Hans the natural creature enters the council block where he lives with his mother. Obdurately he looks right through the old lady and her daughter (both of them wearing black work smocks); they are serving ladies who do handicraft work at home. Hans's mother does work at home too. In their untidy home she addresses envelopes. It's paid work, mind you.

There is also something natural about the potatoes and oranges and bananas at the greengrocer's. Anna and Rainer would be certain to compare these things with something they know from the artificial, man-made world of poetry, thinks Hans arrogantly. Nature is much more vitally present to me. I have my finger on the pulse of the age. I let things come and go, in and out of me. In Laudongasse the number 5 tram sets up an almost continuous squealing, approaching the stop by the baker's. I'm not yet spoilt by art and literature, thinks Hans.

His mother also gazes into the reflection of the setting sun. As she does so, her head and heart are occupied with social democracy, which has often been a disappointment to her. If there are many more disappointments she will try the Communists. Where did you get that pullover, Hans? That cashmere wool is a class or two higher than what our budget will run to. Mother sets fire to a thread and can tell from the stench that it's real wool. Hans (returning home from the Elin Union, the firm where he is being trained to be an electrician) promptly informs her that he was given the pullover by his friend Sophie, whose parents are rich. He is still the man and she the woman. And things are going to stay that way. He'll see to that. If you go on like that you'll betray the cause of the workers without realising you're doing it, says Mother. Hans goes into the kitchen, the only room that is heated, and pours a glass of milk so that he will still be able to go in for a lot of sport. He sleeps in a tiny closet, Mother in the cold living room. Screw the working class, long live rock 'n' roll. It's the class you belong to. Not for much longer, if I can help it, I'm going to be a gym teacher or maybe something even better, who knows.

At that moment a fresh swarm of workers pour out of the number 5 that has just arrived, into the side streets. Stale and fuggy stairwells suddenly come alive. The mothers of families dive for apartment doors to welcome their breadwinners home. They snatch their shabby briefcases, battered cooking utensils and thermos flasks away from them; or (in the case of Superior People) relieve them of attache cases plus newspapers, remnants of Superior People's trout, greasy paper, etc. And the homecomers change into the down-at-heel socks they wear at home and which until recently they were still wearing to work. These people know what having to scrimp and save is like, even if they don't all need to. You can't always go buying something new if you still have the old thing. The first clips have been administered to children's ears and their ill-treated voices are uplifted in shrill chorus. No, Karli can't go out again today, I said no. Round the corner, in Beserl Park, dogs go for a leisurely prowl in the grass, and crap a little here and there. War invalids, who at one time were out and about in the streets, watch them with interest, thinking of the time when they were still somebody, on enemy territory in a foreign land, somebody they no longer are.

They crack the leads like whips, which makes no impression on the dogs. No one obeys the one-time soldiers any more, nor do they have anyone whose every word they can themselves obey. Authority is unfortunately a thing of the past.

Hans gobbles up several rounds of bread and margarine and checks his quiff in the old shaving mirror which supposedly belonged to his murdered father. Don't get started on your concentration camp stories again, I've had them up to here.

Across the road, the woman who keeps the knitware shop lets the blind half down. Behind it, bending forward, is a customer, still talking about a new pattern. The era of embroidered pictures on every wall is just dawning and will soon be in full swing. Scarcely have people acquired the hard-won bare essentials than they are already starting to think of the unnecessary luxuries. It'd be best if they didn't even trouble to ponder the necessities of life. If you don't have the cash you get your sunshine from things you don't really need. Or else the daily grind is grey.

You haven't been to the group evenings for four weeks. They could use you just now to stick posters up (Mother to Hans). Piss off (Hans to Mother). She treats him to a long quotation from a book, dry as paper.

Till well into the fifties, the situation of the working people was even worse than at the time of the great economic crisis in 1937. This period is considered part of the notorious post-War phase. Productivity was increased, which was tantamount to aggravating exploitation, but at the same time food was in distinctly short supply. At the time when the action of this novel takes place, though, everyone is already much better off and the way is clear for a wirtschaftswunder (a German notion familiar from numerous films featuring kidney-shaped fifties tables and cocktail cabinets, and from numerous blondes with big busts propped aloft in wired C-cups). Everyone hails it with loud cheers of welcome. There are always some people, though, in whom the way is never clear for anything, let alone wonders. They keep on opening their doors, but all that comes in is the cold from outside. Frau Sepp is one of these unfortunates.

In faltering tones she tells her son about that decisive year, 1950, for the umpteenth time. It gets on his nerves. In 1950 she said goodbye to her next-to-last hopes. (Today's emphasis is on Olah's drunken bands bursting into factories, beating, butting and thumping, forcing the strikers to resume work. Olah, commander of the strikebreaking posse, is in the SPO National Assembly, and so on and so forth, blah blah blah.) Frau Sepp overlooks one point: that her son, in inverse proportion to her own hopes, has for some time been nurturing false hopes, hopes which he himself believes to be realistic. Hans is a young, healthy fellow and relies on his fists, just as those Social Democrat officials Probst, Koci and Wrba relied on theirs when they crushed the strikes. Hans has learnt that you don't have to be an official of the beloved workers' party to bash things down, there's a more straightforward way of doing it, and (above all) you can do it solely for yourself. At some point you'll start accumulating a fortune, a fortune which will go on getting bigger and bigger.

It is lighting-up time and the current is surging into the first street lamps. That current was created by Hans single-handed. Not the Almighty. But you've always liked your work, admonishes Mother. There's better things in life, and I know what they are, too, counters Hans briskly.

To think that that is what your father died for. So what, he didn't have to die on my account (Hans).

Imagine there were just one more person here, Mama, you couldn't swing a cat. But Hans, there are people who have more room than they need to live in. There's a cosy little bench in Helenental, and old villas in the Hietzing part of Vienna. Which is where Sophie lives. One way or another I'm going to get in there too, swears Hans. Tenderly he folds up the expensive cashmere pullover and puts on the mended cardigan he's had since childhood. He's looking after things for later (something you have to learn early, because when you're young there's always a later, but when you're old it's all over), and later he'll be saving for later still, so that he has something for that rainy day which hopefully will never come.

Now, as if at a signal, evening cooking commences all over the building, and smells both nasty and pleasant fill the stairwell, settling into the flaking plaster, where they meet old acquaintances for a chat: cabbage and sauerkraut, potatoes and beans. A second shift of clouted kids howl through the doors. Daddy's tired. His nerves are bad. Psst, be quiet, or else his nervous insulation will tear good and proper.

Hans has a vision of glistening china, silver cutlery, and a prevalent muted atmosphere in both actions and words. In tone and bearing you never make a slip, you'd sooner slip your hand into someone else's pocket. Hans has an ideal because he is an adolescent. Adolescence and ideals go hand in hand. What they produce are resolutions involving love, which is always selfless. For which reason you can help yourself to as much as you can get.

Hans reports that Rainer said that in Nature the strong crush the weak. It's logical, isn't it, which of the two I want to be. Who is this Rainer (Mother's uneasy query). You drive me up the wall with your stupid questions, snaps the son cantankerously, and he pushes off, although he hasn't even had anything decent to eat, which is another need that young people have. As so often, potato goulash was on the menu today.

Mother stands there in the darkened room, her back aching from writing, swaddled in the dark and battered furniture about her. Which is an indication that she has achieved nothing in life. Which is her own fault. All of the guilty are perpetrators and all perpetrators are guilty. She is also swaddled in the human tea-cosy of the murdered, the hanged, the gassed, those who were shot and those who had the gold teeth torn from their mouths. Servus, Hansi, sleep well (that was her husband's name and it is also her son's). Her Hans, who is already a grown lad and thus no longer a Hansi, is just leaving the house. A pity Papa couldn't see him grow up. But strangers always mattered more to him than his own family. Now Mama has to watch out on her own. It's tough for a boy if he doesn't have a father, you read this all the time, it doesn't matter so much to a girl. People cleverer than Hansmother have said that, so it must be true. And the sun does not laugh at this because the sun has just tramped off for good. All that is left of the Kochgasse are the bright circles the lamps carve out of the darkness of the houses. That doesn't mean that what you cannot see does not exist. If it is not over and done with, forgiven and forgotten, it is still there. It is still there, the setting for many fates of no particular interest. To avoid all that, Hans is heading off for a more interesting fate, and is wholly absorbed in it.

Autumn always did have a good deal on its conscience. Especially when someone still young in years is responding sensitively to it. Old people are forever thinking of death, young people do so only in autumn, the season of universal decay in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Rainer maintains that in autumn nights he puts forth the wings of a magic all his own. Then later, bleeding cats on chains lick the caterwauling from their mauled fur. This is a poem. Rainer's mind involuntarily turns to women whenever he thinks of autumnal decay, his mother (for instance) is decaying without let up. A woman always wants to have something shoved into her, either that or she's giving birth to a child, which comes out of her. That is Rainer's image of Woman. There's an effusive stench of light, says Rainer, in the poem about autumn. It's not quite over, but very nearly. As in his mother's case. Father's still a go-getter. But Mother's all no-ever. More than she loves him, Mother loves his sister. Her need is greater (she says) because her soul is in greater danger. His father, on the other hand, prefers him, because he is the Son and Heir and will perpetuate his name.

Using all those senses that are not currently required for the pursuit of poetry, he keeps his ears pricked for the telephone, which will convey Sophie to the house, no effort involved. If he's asked if he's expecting a call he says no, what would I be expecting, but in reality he is waiting for that beloved voice. Which only materialises on rare occasions. You ought not to take the first step on account of your status. Why on earth can't the voice reach him via radio waves instead of this idiotic request programme where idiotic people send messages to others who are even more idiotic, wishing many happy returns of their dreary birthdays or saints' days. It would have been better if these people had never been born, it makes no difference if they're alive or not.

Sophie thinks of sport a lot but very rarely of love. A sporting lass has other things on her mind.

There are too many unbeautiful things within Rainer. These things are a tremendous burden on a child, and an adolescent cannot shrug off the burden so easily. Far too often the boy saw his mother, like the skeleton of an old horse, buckle into a big V beneath the father's blows. Usually old slippers were employed for the purpose, which could be thrown away after use. Apparently the beatings began on the very day the War was lost. Up till then, Father had been beating sundry foreigners. Now only Mother and the children were at his disposal. He had chased people into the marshes, too, where they quickly passed away. He can prove it. It was just his bad luck that others who did the same are now climbing up the ranks once more, whereas he is not. That's Fate. It's an individual thing. Even in that erstwhile elite troop there were failures such as his father, destined to remain unimportant little shits forever. The elite component disappeared and all that remained was a lump of humanity. But he's an honest worker and has nothing to be ashamed of, he says. He has already tried his hand at a variety of jobs, but so far he's always failed at them. He drove to France because he wanted to handle balloon advertising for a French product, but they found someone they thought smarter and assigned the project to him. One more chance passed by. And Father is gradually shrivelling up, naturally, with age.

Mother tells him the children's education is the most important thing. It is a duty. The grammar school affords the opportunity for that education. Father tends to say they should go and start earning, which rather alarms the educated twins. They do not believe this can be expected of them.

From the overgrown corners of the room, the ugly mug of impending poverty (which in fact is no longer impending but has long since been a fact of life) gives a friendly grin and a wink. The twins' jeans, oft altered and reinforced to protect them from wear, drag furrows through the floor's protozoic ooze, Mother has to go cleaning strangers' homes, her own home is neglected. In the homes of those strange people there are strange men. For this reason Father roars like an ox being roasted alive. Mother won't be spared, there's nothing to protect her, constantly she's kicked and knocked about. Furthermore, she does not create that atmosphere of tranquil cosiness which should be the hallmark of the housewife's home. And it really is up to her to create that, since the ex-officer's task is quite different from the promotion of contentment. Wherever he comes across cosiness he destroys it.

Among their acquaintances, who are few in number, Father is considered an oddball who utters bizarre comments and won't accept a single thing he is offered, because he'd just as soon not eat from other people's fleshpots, thank you very much (as he puts it).

Father often thinks of the dark skeletons of people he killed. The white and immaculate snow of Poland turned bloody and maculate. But snow goes on falling, again and again, and by now it bears no trace of those who disappeared there.

Mother, on the other hand, tries to teach her children the principles of humanity. That is the task of a mother. Still, Mother soon has to abandon the attempt because the children are out to be inhuman and do everything they can to look the part as well. Whatever you do is in vain. And revolting. Everything's revolting, but it's never disposed of. Not at all. It's all revolting: the crumpled papers, old cigarette butts on the floor, cheese rind, wurst skins, coffee stains and in particular apple cores and orange pips. They are the worst. They are not cleared away because retching is a delicious feeling. The flat is full of corners and recesses crammed with piled-up garbage. The petit bourgeois always has something to hide, that is what those corners are there for. Chez Witkowski you can view everything the petit bourgeois has to hide because they throw nothing away. And there he stands, the Good Citizen, amidst his corners and recesses, ready to withdraw at the drop of a hat and indulge in unseen piggery.

The twins' unhappiness makes them superior because they have shaken off the shackles and do what they want. Rainer says: people's lives are predetermined in some way or other, but not mine, I'm superior to them on account of my Will. On the other hand, the individual is free if he wants to be. Rainer avails himself of that freedom, graciously: here he is, being awarded his accreditation certificate. There is a certain heroism in him. In this lonely youth. Lonely in the sense that no one sees him, which halves the value of even the prettiest heroism. Still, at least Rainer can look himself in the face when he's alone with his mirror.

From time to time a day will be quite normal, and Father will pick one of the children at random and beat it, bellowing as he does so. Because the child in question doesn't want to do what he wants it to do. At such times the child will flail about helplessly. But the child proper will rise from out of the body to a somewhat higher elevation which affords a better view of the cruel goings-on. Anna and Rainer got into the habit of doing this when they were kids, and now they imagine they are still high up aloft, looking down on the rest. Physically, their development is troublesome and hesitant. But their sense of Higher Things has remained intact. In their heads, something is building up, gathering for an explosion of orange light at some later date.

And the time has already come, now that the twins have left Father behind in terms of knowledge. But nevertheless Father believes he knows more than the children do. Age and experience have made him knowledgeable. In this new era, what sets you free is knowledge, not work. We don't want to work, no, least of all with our hands. Many of these youngsters who only want to dance and listen to jazz are too immature to do anything in their leisure time, which is why they are deprived of it.

Mother came of a superior background, but that was a long time ago. She was a teacher. Then all of a sudden the two halves of the parental couple unexpectedly found themselves fucking on the floor. Anna and Rainer hate their parents, because Youth is often over-hasty and uncompromising. Frequently they behave wickedly towards their detested father, disgustedly aping his every movement, snatching his crutches from him, tripping him (that is, his solitary leg), spitting into his food, and not bringing him the things he wants. Bloody-mindedness! bawls the ageing man. But he can never establish whether they are doing things on purpose. Nonetheless he keeps them at grammar school, so that he can go about saying they go to grammar school. This is how values disintegrate. You can clearly see it happening: the value of authority, the value of paternal rule.

But there's still a wife and mother to take revenge on. By telling her that her body bears an ever-increasing resemblance to a mouldy piece of cheese, or by pinching the housekeeping money from the china mug where it's always kept and accusing her of squandering it on herself. Take today, for instance: Mother seeks solace from her children because he has just maliciously cut up the brand new apron (made of pretty flower-pattern material bought in a sale) which she ran up herself on the hire-purchase sewing machine. She has no talent for sewing, but she did the job with care. Taking pleasure in her own handiwork. Things you make yourself are usually better made and of better quality because you know what's what whereas in the case of bought goods you never do know. Though naturally you suspect that the workmanship is slovenly and substandard, so that the buttons will promptly fall off, and the price is far too high. You can do it cheaper. So Mummy's saved a whole load of money, using her fingers, only to have Papa cut the lot to shreds. Deliberately. Because he was opposed to having a sewing machine in the house. On principle. If Mama runs up a new number for herself, other men, total strangers, might take it into their heads to take a close look at her figure, which is still feminine although she's been losing it. What kind of materials has she been picking, anyway? Right: attractive, bright fabrics, or at least what she finds bright (little mushrooms, bees, beetles, flowers etc.). And what kind of patterns has she been picking? Right: the very ones that emphasise her breasts, hips and ass (insofar as she possesses breasts, hips and an ass). Of all things! Those parts of her anatomy are not supposed to be emphasised. They are there for Daddy alone. And no one else. You're out to pick up a man, eh? Well I may be a cripple but I'm still more of a man than some other fellow with two legs. Want me to prove it? No time like the present. Anywhere will do, the patchwork rug by the bed or the bed itself, which has seen a good deal of suffering and menstrual blood in the past and reeks of it pungently. You can't be busy washing the whole time, you have to relax with a good book now and then. Typical, you buy a sewing machine instead of a washing machine. To think how clean we could all be. But what are we? Dirty. But there you are with your new red apron. Snick-snick go the scissors! All that work, done for, just like that. What a mean thing to do.

Be thankful I'm not doing you bodily harm. I was taught how to. You have to force yourself at first, but then it comes easily, of its own accord. By the way, I've got an idea for a new series of photos, I could make cuts, incisions and little holes in your skin. Or I could use the children's water-colours to get the effect.

I've been baking, I made you an apricot flan, poor Mumsie tells the children ingratiatingly, seeking sympathy and not finding any. She is counting on education, which prepares the way for understanding and sympathy, and on their hearts, but their hearts have long been missing that particular beat. You invest so much in Rainer and Anna, but all you get back is Rainer and Anna, minus the warmth and affection, and nothing more. There is the flan and there are the glass dishes. I'll put it here, with all the books, there's no room for a fresh flan any more, clear this stuff away, can't you!

No. Won't. Those books are worth more than any flan. We're just reading about how this existence of ours is valueless. Get lost, Mama, the twins chorus, sending their mother packing. She's unwelcome everywhere, poor soul. This has catastrophic consequences for her general condition.

Having given their mother a thorough yelling-at, the twins promptly turn to the flan and gobble it all up. This isn't beneath them at all.

Not a single piece is left for Mama, though she would have liked one too.


RAINER BELIEVES IT is tantamount to degradation of a woman if she submits to physical contact. You can see this in the case of Mother, who is frequently to be heard shouting for help in the bedroom. But it is out of the question that abnormal acts are being performed upon her and that that is why she's shouting. Relatives have often noticed that Rainer's look isn't normal, perhaps it is because he has witnessed this bedroom business too many times. But he has never watched. His head has always disappeared instantly under the blanket. You see nothing in there, and all you smell is yourself. On occasion Rainer will only take soup and he'll refuse to eat solid fare in spite of the fact that men usually adore hearty food. Anna sometimes eats nothing whatsoever. This may go on for days. When the siblings get up from table after eating nothing, they lie down together on one of their beds (which have been separated by means of a purpose-built partition wall, he being a boy and she a girl) and screen off the outside world. Rainer writes poems, the better to screen it off. Frequently he sees faces in trees and they inspire him, headcase that he is. He has no friends, only mates, and Rainer, who despises matiness on principle, finds that often they don't behave in maty ways to him. In the case of a writer like Musil, writing is often a graceful act, like a silvery fish leaping; but not with Rainer. In his case it is someone rummaging and then digging his teeth in.

Every moment, Rainer and Anna are aware that thanks to their parents' having moved to the city they were spared places like Ybbsitz, Laa an der Thaya, Laa an der Pielach or sundry St Michaels. They are glad they don't have to live in the kind of wretched provinciality they know from Grandmother's farm. Anything but that. Where screaming alpine choughs, crows and other vermin claw at trees already seared by winter. Where various clouds go whizzing across the dismal sky, deer call, and reeking Volksschule kids and feeble-minded Hauptschule kids pack their flesh into the mail bus. The poverty bacillus is rife amongst them. A steaming mush of woollens handed down by older siblings.

They don't have any fate ahead of them, says Rainer, they're already condemned to death even before they're born, and every one of their heads contains the same picture. The picture inside one head is identical to the picture in the next. And to think that this is in the open country, a free country, though there isn't really the least hint of freedom. Dreary landscape stretches away into the rain, you can't see where it ends but it does end, the limits are in the people's heads. The siblings have discovered narrow-mindedness in the city too. And they rejoice in the discovery, because they themselves went beyond those limits some time ago. They have snatched at the bluish umbilical cord of the places they were meant to stay and bitten it through with their sharp teeth. The trickle of blood is dripping off their chins. A pale pair of tongues, Rainer's tongue and Anna's tongue, are licking at it. Soon there won't be a shred of skin left of the natural bounds of birth. Infinite expanses are revealed, with a cold sun like an unbroken yolk in a bowl of milk.

If anyone's going to do any breaking or hurting around here, it'll be Anna and Rainer.

No more crisp frost on village streets. No more thin-soled Sunday shoes unsuited to weather and wearer alike. No one goes in to see the Western with a spring in his step and (though the only others there are jerks with snotty beaks and hair slicked back with brilliantine) emerges from the cinema a cowboy. No fear of coming home too late or of being hit with hard objects. And then having to lug the heavy bucket of piping pig broth out to the sty. And if you forget to take off your good shoes beforehand they'll stink so badly you'll have to downgrade them for wearing to the sty only.

The twins are not marginal figures. They are the main characters. They are the centre of things, which is not a central point at all but in fact a broad spectrum of people.

What the siblings exude is not joie de vivre such as a youngster listening to a transistor radio exudes but rather anger and revulsion. You give your kids all the love in the world and the way it turns out in the end you might as well not love them at all. They believe that there is a part of every human being that is not pre-determined. Something unforeseen that is outside society's bounds and thus completely free. Only underlings like cake and the music of Elvis, Peter and Conny.

Rainer sups clear chicken broth with unidentifiable things floating in it yet again, things that cloud its clearness after all.

Then you could always tear these new Conny-style skirts apart with your teeth. The skirts are in fashion, recently the grey masses of girls have been eager to wear them because the material is cheap and they're everywhere you look and if the skirt is red it sends a cheerful message and if it's blue it's dramatic.

Destroy the piled-up crow's-nests on the heads of unbelievably ugly girls and dismantle them by pulling out the hairpins. Grind velour pullovers between your teeth for as long as it takes for all trace of the pile to have disappeared, leaving just the floppy smoothness of ordinary pullovers. Rainer bites his lip so the blood flows, seeing them pass him by, saying take me, no, take me instead, they've applied black eyeliner to their eyelids and white lipstick or pale pink lip gloss, they are a grey flock with occasional patches of blossom in their midst. Beneath the underskirts specially starched by Mummy there is an abdominal smell. They have to have a petticoat. But it won't wash itself.

Rainer does not want closer contact with a girl just yet. He wants to pass judgement on them from a distance. He still has time for intimacy, he knows.

Mummy enters abruptly and is justifiably alarmed by her brood, but she says: what's needed rather than this is for our off-spring to have beauty in its thoughts, words and deeds. That is why they go to the grammar school. You learn that there. What they need is to build bridges, not demolish them, one bridge leads to our fellow-man and the next from our fellow-man to us. The twins do not want to build bridges.

Anna: We are ourselves indeed a freedom that chooses, but we do not choose to be free. We are condemned to freedom. If I look at you, Mama, that's plainly true. Forsaken in freedom. That's you exactly. And that forsaken condition has no other cause than the very existence of freedom. You can tell by looking at you.

Mummy does not understand. What she does know, though, is that the world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egoistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates.

The twins explain to Mother that the non-existence of that selfsame Mother is conceivable and possible. But I gave birth to you, me personally, one after the other. So you exist. That's why. And so do I. What rubbish. It's a beautiful, infinite, bright and youthful world, especially if you're young yourself. And now they can cut out the new Elvis poster, at last she gives them permission after previously having forbidden them to do so.

Mother is shoo'd out like a fly. And once again the children have the not-quite-normal look they had before.

Mother leaves, and in the doorway she says that her children, who will always be little children for their Mummy to look after, their whole lives long, ought to take pleasure in the insignificant things in life, too. There are people who take no notice of strangely shaped trees, flowers or bushes by the wayside, or even damage them. These are the same people that are cruel to animals. They are thoughtless people, ordinary, average people. Which her children are not. Her children should heed the little things that others disregard. She brought them up to do so. And she has often had to struggle with her husband. The aforesaid husband is a soldier and thus of coarser stuff and he'd rather watch cheap B movies. If he were not of such coarse stuff he wouldn't have been able to kill. He needed that coarseness. A soft streak would have been amiss, it would have been at odds with the profession.

Mother can still see his wide-open mouth as he watched that entertaining Heinz Ruhmann flick. It was Die Feuerzangenbowle, his very favourite film. He has seen it numerous times and never tired of it. He is the only one to have perceived the subtleties of the film. Everyone else brays out loud at obvious gags. When it was made, the film was an indication of what lay in store. Father could see as much. Often, without being asked, he describes the content of Die Feuerzangenbowle. Unfortunately the children won't be getting to see it. In the film, the New Era was already showing its true face, in the shape of a young teacher with nationalist ideals. The teacher in the movie says that the Old Era must be unremittingly put behind us. Daddy thinks so too, and the twins are busy creating the New Era. Which is even newer than the New Era in the movie.

What are you all going on about, I'm against anything traditional that's out of date, you know I am. And I saw a whole lot of musicals featuring Marika Rokk, she has tremendous stamina and amazing willpower, because she still dances. And then there was that sentimental Hans Christian Andersen movie. The star killed himself and his wife and children because the wife was Jewish. Before he died he had one final opportunity to display his profoundly humane brand of humour, which was not a destructive sense of humour. That kind of humour only works if it comes from deep inside. Deep inside he was lacerated by fast-acting poison. Some people die less conspicuously and perhaps the torment they suffer is even greater. As it was, his innards were torn apart, and all that remained to posterity of the Danish teller of fairy tales was celluloid. Something survived him, at any rate.

What wonderful, wonderful times they were. Scorching hot desert sand.


IT IS ESPECIALLY mild, this spring light that enters through the glass doors designed by Lalique, doors that were at the World Fair in Paris back in the twenties and subsequently brought to Vienna. In her own imagination, Sophie is also made of glass, or sparkling china, or (best of all) high-grade steel. Sport polishes Sophie up and has already succeeded in making her agile all-round. And what sport cannot manage, her father's library accomplishes: supplying the cultural background. She is more of a sporting lass than a culture vulture, though. No intellectual supers wot, Sophie. All of her contours are rounded, firmed up and gleaming. Dirt is altogether alien to the way she is, just as years ago everything that was un-German was alien to the Germans, artfremd, though nowadays of course a mighty tourist industry is getting under way, bringing the world into the Germans' homes or else transporting the Germans far from their homes to the world.

Nor is there any point on that smooth surface where an attacker could get a purchase. True, it is a tempting challenge to a groper, but he invariably loses his grip. Sophie enters wearing a tennis dress (she almost always wears some sporting outfit or other) and asks Rainer (who has a love for her that he doesn't show, so as not to compromise his position): Can you just lend me a twenty for the taxi, I haven't got any money on me and Mama's gone out for tea. Weeping softly, Rainer rummages in his little purse, Sophie gets the money, which represents a large sum to Rainer and which he will undoubtedly never see again. Because money means nothing to Sophie. She takes its availability for granted. Whereas Rainer gazes after his delicious twenty for quite a while, even after it's long since flown the coop. Rainer's father considers that riding in taxis indicates an ambition to be a grand seigneur, an ambition that his son must quash, but it's pointless if he goes paying for other people's taxis. To Sophie, a taxi is a means of transport.

Sophie will never give the money back. She will forget about it. Because for her it has no real value.

Rainer's thoughts will dwell compulsively on that and other money. But he will never dare ask for it back.

The carpet is a great soft Persian expanse, Sophie is something you have to get inside but you don't know how because there's nothing to get a grip on. Should you fuck her in the mouth and pound her tongue to pulp so that she can't come out with any more of those thoughtless hurtful things she says, or should you do it from down below, which poses problems since she never lets you anywhere near the way in. You slip off. Though slipping off is nothing compared with the downhill social slide! It's the lesser evil. There may of course be a causal connection.

Modern paintings and objets everywhere, emanating long traditions in culture and art which you can only share in once you have taken possession of these things somehow or other. The best way of doing this is to take possession of Sophie, but (see above) there are no loops or straps to get hold of her by. Though Rainer has studied the rules of art thoroughly and has a good knowledge of them he owns no art objects whatsoever. Oh and anyway, the rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all. Rainer has reached this conclusion all on his own. People, on the other hand, are subject to laws because otherwise it would be every man for himself, anarchy. So says Rainermother to Rainerfather and so says Rainerfather to Rainermother. Rainer, however, has rather a penchant for anarchy, precisely because he knows the laws that govern the social life of man and despises them. Everything has to be destroyed. And nothing built up again afterwards.

Out shoots a Rainer mitt to apply the tried and tested lever hold to Sophie once again, but she glides straight through him and says she has to get changed now. Yet again. I'll come with you. That's what you think.

So he stays put. One of the countless errors of the middle classes is that they are soon demoralised when they venture out on their clumsy forays. When they have a real chance they relax their grip and do not even pretend to persist. The whisky's here. Help yourself while I'm gone.

Rainer tugs violently at his cheap loose-fitting pullover, Sophie gives him the slip, yet again. This is getting dreary.

His wretched brain wanders off to old and recent humiliations. Points in his deformed mind where the film is forever catching and sticking. Nothing of beauty. Only unlovely things. Sunday outings with Mother surface, trams smelling of damp socks, crammed with pathetic grey crowds of people of the kind a long war produces and cannot disperse right away. Off we go, to the Vienna Woods. Balaclavas made of unravelled respun wartime wool, baggy skiing trousers, brogues, and worst of all the dreaded packed lunch. Giving off a cheesy reek. Making you thirsty. But you can't go to a cafe or restaurant because it costs money, children can drink water, but there's no water anywhere to be found. Presently the cheese sandwich will be exuding its quintessence from beyond Mummy's cheap metal teeth and sending forth stench from her stomach, because she didn't chew properly. Chewing too much simply spreads the evil taste everywhere.

The detested shelter where they have to wait for at least twenty minutes till the next 43 comes curving round. The end of the line. Neuwaldegg. Invariably packed in the middle of a pack of impoverished humanity. Often they save the fare and walk back along the Alszeile, at the end of which (isn't Mummy super) they are allowed a ride on the merry-go-round for the cost of the tram fare, which brings home to them all the more clearly the fact that they are children, a fact they want to put behind them. Nonetheless the kiddies, Rainer and Anni, shout and cheer, the poison of passing cars already in their heads and hearts. Not because it pollutes the environment (which has already been ruined by the War in any case) but because there is no capital to buy a car. And then there's Anni, grubbing in dog-dirt and wastepaper to draw attention to her serious emotional problems. Emotional problems are a luxury and are therefore ignored. She wants to be on her own in a swish car and not stuffed into a lousy tram (let alone with the family) where everyone is equal and you can't be special. If you were in a Mercedes, no one could come up any more and ask: What's the boy's/girl's name. Stroking your head with hands that quite plainly proclaim their owner a member of the worker species. And not realising that the infant they're patting already bears the poison of individualism in its heart. And is prepared to squirt it.

Once, when she was being stroked by one of these mittened hands, Anni actually wet herself, and all the while putrid garlic breath was wafting across her and she was being talked to as though she were a normal child, which even then she wasn't. Neither normal nor a child. The hot urine trickled down between her thighs (that downward impulse), ate its acrid angry way into her hand-knitted woollen knickers, and relentlessly found its way out of the dismal Sunday scene, along the grooves on the floor of the tram. Drip drip. Down fall the maternal arms like clubs and thump and retire upwards again and then down once more, keep-fit for Mumsy who has just had a nice relaxing outing. Insane bawling from the female infant. At the first blow, Rainer has instantly taken refuge between two aged granddads, clawing hold of the Vienna Woods walking shoes one of them is wearing. Does the lad go to school yet? What's your name, sonny? Piss off, the lot of you.

And out there the Opels and Volkswagens surge out of the autumn haze like sharks, great powerful bodies, unswervingly obedient albeit untamed, and promptly shoot back into the mist, certain where they want to go. While the 43 strains and rumbles ponderously on. Anna lies in her own puddle, appallingly dirty, and Mummy asks other mothers for advice, what can you do with a girl who's so big but still wets herself. Well, you'll just have to do a wee-wee before you start, isn't that right, sugar?! Just remember next time. You wait till Papa hears about this, there's more thrashings to come. Even if Papi only has one foot left, he showed what he could do with his arms and they're as strong as ever. If you have two of them, the brats make twice as much work. Quiet now, or I'll slap you again.

The siblings link hands stealthily, unnoticed by the masses, they bare their milk-teeth like vampires, just wait, Mami, till we're bigger, we'll do the same to you, and worse.

Under the seat are an apple core, two cheese rinds and several wurst skins dropped by someone who thought himself at home and supposed he could make a pigsty of a means of transport that belongs communally to the public. Anna is not remotely consoled by the thought that a part of the tram is hers. It also belongs to others. Some people imagine they're at home wherever they may be. Doubtless he does the same at home. Yuck. Some people.

Young lad Rainer bites into the cheese rind, retching, and sucks at it hard like a leech. Damp sand grinds between his jaws, where some teeth have yet to make their appearance. Slosh, the stomach's heaving already, the bread and dripping (half rotten by now) are straining for the exit. The emergency exit. In the long run you cease to take any pleasure at all in a family outing if it always ends so embarrassingly. One of them pisses, the other throws up. And to think you could be sitting in soft leather seats the whole time, saying where you wanted to go and getting there without any problem at all.

Effortlessly, Sophie breezes in. This time, for a change, she is wearing an afternoon dress, as she has to go into town with her mother. Bright light enters from behind through the terrace door and, far from roaming aimlessly about, instantly settles on Sophie's blonde hair as its resting place. The parquet flooring glows a little too.

Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature.

The child in Rainer cries out loud, the worst thing of all is arriving at the last moment and not finding a seat left in the tram and having to stand. Whining is useless. Grown-ups won't get up, but a child has to be prepared to stand up for a grown-up at any time. So there you are, jammed into an ugly dark forest of bodies each of which is just as unattractive, with no entrance or exit in sight. You're in for good and you've got to go the distance. Packed in among the rest. Hiding amid winter coats stinking of mothballs and pre-war anoraks. And somewhere or other (you're spared nothing) there are two good-looking youngsters, no doubt students, whose fathers have their own cars but do not have the time today to drive their son and daughter here and there, but there is a car, there is one, it's theirs, these two talking about skiing and group travel as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You've got to emulate them, though maybe you'll never manage it, with a Papa and Mama like yours. You've got to emulate them, as soon as you're old enough, though that will be a while yet. How streamlined they look, like the people of tomorrow, and how stylish they are. And those fashionable tight ski pants! Those two belong to no one, you can tell right away, they can live their own lives. The way things still are now, though, the maternal hand pushes you down to the floor, crushing you, making you retrieve a banana skin with your teeth.

Sophie (whose exterior betrays no signs of any such physical functions, and certainly no low or base ones, but who nevertheless is in excellent working order, though you can't tell how or by what means she operates) leaves for the umpteenth time, off somewhere that's labelled No Entry. Almost every time we meet her she will be needing to go somewhere in an urgent hurry though she'll always arrive late. Which doesn't matter in her case. And Rainer is the one who remains behind, vexed.


THEY REMAIN AT the edge of things, not because they're afraid of the light but because the light, understandably enough, is afraid of them. In schoolyard and classroom alike. The wolf pack always cluster together in corners. They flaunt their unchallenged ubermensch status, which the rest would like to flaunt too but they only have unter-mensch status, which has to apply to some in order that the contrast with the ubermensch achievement be clear. Out from the gloomy corners they stick out their legs, suddenly, and almost invariably some Mummy's boy or a Daddy's girl in a checked, pleated skirt goes flying. Their well-behaved fellow-pupils say they never run out of subjects of conversation when they go to an ice-cream parlour with their boyfriends or girlfriends. They talk about rewarding ways of using your spare time, what's going on at school, and who's going out with which Institute of Technology or University student or who only got a neat, natty clerk to go out with. Other subjects of conversation are concerts, plays, exhibitions, parties and records. The Anna-Sophie-Rainer lobby give stuff like this the thumbs-down. They have grown out of the record phase, or at least if they do listen to records it's only cool jazz or rock. When Sophie gives things the thumbs-down she does so less vehemently because she has no need to show vehemence. Things come to Sophie, and sometimes she says: go away for now, and sometimes she accepts them. Depending on her mood and whim. Rainer says it is good if she is hard, the only place she should relax is in his arms, there she can be soft if she wants.

Sophie has to be properly motivated if she's to commit a crime, or several crimes, because she herself does not believe she needs to make the effort. Nor is it nice to stay up at night perpetrating deeds that shun the light. It takes willpower, since you could just as well be in bed reading a suspenseful thriller.

The writer Adalbert Stifter, a suicide victim, raises his voice above the noisy German lesson. The victim of his own failed life-plan and a wrecked marriage, he has nothing better to do than drivel unctuously on about Whitsun celebrations when he goes out to the hushed edge of the wood at dawn, not where there is a cocky little fawn (who gives a damn about his funny little cock, says Anna, or words to that effect) but where instead he goes walking in what he considers to be the endless countryside, as it were, though what would he know of infinity. His mind is incapable of grasping the concept. Rainer senses within himself the infinite potential of a writer who breaks loose of all the fetters. He is the one who apprehends infinity, not Stifter, as Stifter's ruined life showed, a life in which he never dared venture anything. With military precision, Adalbert Stifter continues his review of various beauties, not only living but also inanimate. Nature tends to an inanimate condition, thinks Rainer, all we do is assist the process. He promptly passes a note to this effect to Sophie, who is scribbling outlines of horses in her spiral notepad. She thinks nothing at all of inanimation. But she thinks a lot, far more, of sporty animation. You have to become aware of your own body, or of a horse's when it shifts from a trot to a gallop. Then the wind caresses horse and rider alike and the fresh air dispels bad or restless moods. You shouldn't rest in a breeze such as that or you'll rust.

But Evil prefers places that are sheltered from the wind. Pale young softies would rather seek out the seclusion of cellar bars, and out there, in the light of day, you can help blind people cross the road or stroke the doggies.

What's the racket, Witkowski one and two, would you kindly keep quiet or do you want a mark against your names in the register? No, you needn't bother with the register, just record your own blunders in your own private notebook. I bet something goes wrong every week. Your breath smells, your complexion's an ugly grey and your ankles are thick, Frau Professor (Anna.)

Stifter benevolently hammers away like a woodpecker at his theme of the sheen of radiant air and wonderful April clouds shot through with occasional rays of sun and the beautiful green strips of winter seed pricking up, he'd have been better getting his prick up somewhere else, says Rainer, casting Sophie a sidelong glance as he snarls and snorts.

Anna suggests roping in Hans Sepp, whom she only recently met at a jazz club, to commit a crime or two with them. He would make an ideal tool, and anyway, he ought to quit the working class milieu he's in. In public life, somebody is always getting a hold on some relatively helpless person, in factories, in offices, in one way or another. At the Elin Union they're urging him to mess about with heavy current. Presumably his life is constantly at risk. Current kills cleanly and unexpectedly. And likes killing. It gives no warning. It strikes out of the blue. The humiliated worker sees a great many others at work who are in the same boat, and solidarity with them is inevitable. And that solidarity gives him a strength he is not supposed to have in Rainer's gang because Rainer is and ever shall be the leader-it was his idea. Wherever Hans looks, he mustn't see any other workers like himself. Wherever it may be, he must see us alone. He is destined to become a receiver of messages, reprimands, orders, encouragement.

Anna says stealing wallets is kids' stuff, what I'd like to do is blow something up. Then people would sit up and take notice. The world out there wouldn't be gently indifferent. They'd pay attention.

Rainer brags, saying that, whenever his father flies to New York, looking down from on high practically blows up (his expression) his chest with happiness, because up above the clouds there is freedom. The only snag about this is that his father has not been beyond Zwettl, beyond the woods, since the War. A detail Rainer doesn't add. Anna thinks of how she once gave Daddy a bunch of lily of the valley for his birthday, which he flushed down the toilet. Whatever put that into her mind now?

True, it has to be visible to others, but anarchism is sufficient reward if it is practised for yourself alone. Then (and only then) it has a liberating effect. It is wrong to want it to achieve an end. And especially for a group of people, irrespective who those people might be.

De Sade says you must commit crimes. In using the word crime we're adopting the consensus term, though among ourselves we would not describe any of our actions as such (Anna). We need the universally valid norm to get a kick out of our own extremeness. We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils.

Rainer, who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplates an evening he says that evening is a melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to an end.

The German teacher tells the Witkowskis to stop disturbing the rest of the class with their constant gabbling.

Stifter says: Then there were the pale russet woods stretching along the mountains, cloaked in a frail blue haze. Stretching their legs ha ha. Off on their travels. Hope they bought a ticket. No, joking aside (Rainer), if you commit crimes you need the support of someone who loves you. In his case it is a woman. Sophie. It is not the kind of support a woman gives a bourgeois philistine, it is the support a woman gives a young artist. If a human being ventures so far into illegality there has to be a partner waiting at the threshold, all tenderness and intimacy: Sophie. In reality I am revolted by my desires. But the desires are stronger than I am. And my love of you is stronger than I am too. There is no physical desire in it, though. We're keeping that for later.

Crap, says Anni, love is nothing but one skin touching another.

One thing's for sure, I can't stick this Adalbert Staffer a single minute longer, declares Anna. If anyone will force this darning needle from my needlework kit under his fingernail during class without shouting out, and when I say full force I mean full, I'll go to the boys' toilet with him, the cubicle on the left. Rainer finds this kind of revolutionary. Anna says: No, it's not, the aim isn't equality for all, that would be contrary to Nature and genetic theory, this is the exact opposite. Total discrimination and isolation. Equality can only be of interest to those who are incapable of rising to the ranks of the strong. They compensate by downgrading the strong and then imagine the strong are weak as well. Now how about that needle? Gerhard Schwaiger, an average kid, a late birth, covered top to toe in pimples-or at least the parts of his body you can see-and with a tendency to blush, sees his big chance, here it is, zero hour, and instantly rams the needle beneath the nail of his left forefinger. Ow! Sophie gives a smile, like white wool, dabbed with talcum powder for good measure. Rainer is astounded that it's Schwaiger of all people, who's normally interested in nothing but chocolate. Schwaiger is pale as a handkerchief and says: Ow, how that hurts. Anna sizes him up joylessly. The Frau Professor says Schwaiger is like a child but if he's so desperate to go, go ahead, go, but next time remember to go during break. And off Gerhard goes, larding his way out the door, first giving Anni a conspiratorial look that is meant to be eloquent. It isn't eloquent, though, it's pathetic. Help me, Anni, please, I've been worshipping you for ages and now I need you to be a bit friendly and obliging or I'll never get a hard-on and be able to shove my prick inside you. Just a morsel of love would be the loveliest present you could give me, baby.

Him of all people, Rainer says to his sister. I hope I don't have to come along with a screwdriver and extract you from the fat, Anni. Got a rubber?

I've got one left. But if I know him he'll have had one on him for months, looking forward to a chance like this. The rubber will be thin and brittle by now and won't do its job.

Witkowski Anna, could you kindly go on reading where we just left off. Yes, Frau Professor, Stifter tells us that people are not free, that they are slaves to the Laws of Nature. So you have to commit violent deeds (if you don't have anyone to do other kinds of deeds with), actions that ordinary people would call crimes but which we define as the norm, though of course it is our norm and not that of the rest.

Whereupon Anna is sent out of the class. Which was what she intended. So while Adalbert Stifter goes on holding forth about the rosy-hued faces of young people who blush if you look at them unexpectedly (the drooling old paederast gets off on shame) Anna strolls absolutely calmly to the toilet and red-faced Gerhard lying in wait for her. Come, come, come to me, Anni, I can't stand it any more, crash, he nearly ends up in the bowl, the jerk with his blubbery white ass didn't get a proper grip, you can see right away that he's inexperienced. Anna slips her panties off and gives curt instructions as to the position he's to get into. Needless to say he doesn't have a hard-on now, might have guessed, that's the last straw. Anxiety and agitation can do for someone who's never done it. D'you expect me to do that too, huh? At last, at long last there's a sign of life, it stirs, it moves, to the accompaniment of deep crimson and pallor on the part of Gerhard. First it collapses a time or two, like a house of cards. Anna observes the manipulation of Gerhard's member with interest and plays with the rubber. Will it, won't it, yes it will. There we go. Fine. When she sees his red glans pointing her way she thinks: Hang on, perhaps not after all, how revolting, who knows if I can stand it. But presently the question is answered in the affirmative, the wretched under-achiever shakes and rubs his member desperately till it more or less stands up hard, it peeks about and all it sees is the stinking cubicle with its peeling green oil paint, Love has never chosen a setting such as this, nor has Love chosen it this time. The incompetent has been madly in love with Anna for a long time, but this fact is of little help.

A promise is a promise, so she lowers herself upon this over-eager cry-baby, he can hardly grasp that at last the great day has come, hooray hooray, he'll tell some of the other kids his age all about it afterwards, in detail. Memory will make it all more important than it is, in any case, oh that's good, that's so good, I could handle this every day, no problem, but unfortunately I don't get it every day. Unfortunately you have to wait till you're more mature, but right now I feel very mature already, Anni honey. People need this, I need it more than anyone else because my libido is so strong, I love you, I love you, oooh Anni, now, now! Please stay, don't go now. Best of all, don't ever leave me at all, I'm going to study medicine some time, soon. Shut your trap, d'you have to yap like that, they'll hear us! Can't you be quieter when you come? Oooh Anni, go on, please, don't stop now, it'll be fantastic if I come now, no one has ever felt this just the way I do, the rest don't feel it so strongly, let's face it, I'm stronger than all the rest. You're so beautiful and you have a great figure, so thin, I'm going to lose weight now too, you'll see, I'll lose weight just for you so that we go together, there's never been anything like this, Anni sugar. This happens millions of times a day, jerk. Come on, you nobody, shoot your wad, get a move on, Kraftmann'll notice if we're both out so long. I feel as if my insides were being hauled out, Anna, my beloved, that's what you are now, no doubt about it, I love you, I love you. My whole heart is yours. Look, are you going to shoot your juice or not, else I'm stopping. But Gerhard is coming, massively-he gives a loud squeal like a branded pig. If no one heard it's a miracle.

Anna's eyes peruse his distorted face and she fights back the retching once again, only succeeding at the last moment in keeping it down. That'd be great, throw up all over the greasy slob.

We'll never part again, Anna, isn't that right, from now on you're my girlfriend, the whole class'll know, just mine, all mine.

Piss off! About time too. Do you always take that long? For a whole half hour after Anna has left Gerhard goes on begging her for a little love and affection, which he doesn't get, though. At times young people suffer profoundly. Often grown-ups do not take this in at all, and if they do they take no notice.


SOPHIE'S PLACE IS furnished with genuine Biedermeier. None of her schoolmates realises this because they are youngsters of today for whom the past is dead. Quite the opposite of bieder and Meier, though, are Sophie's wishes to be an utterly hard woman for whom feelings do not count, only figures. She would like to go to Switzerland to take special courses in finance and economics, and then deal in shares and currency. Anything that is not currency or a share will simply make no impression on her. In this respect she is a stark contrast to Rainer, who needs feelings for his writing. And for her, his Sophie. Because Sophie has touched the very core of him. Sometimes something of this kind happens to a man and a woman only once in their entire lives, and at times like that it's important not to miss the right moment or things will turn out wretchedly. Rainer deliberately lets feelings right inside him, but there nausea at those very feelings eats its way out and is expressed in a poem. Rainer has quite enough ideas concerning the past, the present, the world. He has only one request: to be left in peace to complete the book he plans to write. The man in him says he has to have Sophie, the artist says: Stay the lone wolf that you are. Rainer puts up armoured defences made of ice, but you're supposed to sense that Sophie could melt the ice.

Sophie is wearing a tennis dress because she has to go out to a match soon. Rainer's lower jaw grinds against his upper jaw. From the outside these jaws look white. What they are grinding is no less than a piece of chocolate cake that the maid brought him. They not only have the occasion to grind, they also have a reason. Sophie is forever walking out of the picture just before you press the button. Sophie is a will-o'-the-wisp. Free as air. The girl has also brought a tray bearing whisky glasses. The gang have seen the drink in films, where people live on it. In the latest films you can also witness social structure disintegrating. Marriage and the family will be the next system to go if we're not careful. Given that the War left almost everything in confusion, the class system can be overcome and you can even make it up into the higher social strata (or ruling class, as it came to be called) if you've got the required gumption. New German films demonstrate the economic flexibility of private individuals. While behind the scenes Capital is at work on its own flexibility. This is something that new German films have taken from victorious America. In America, boundary violations have always been possible, in Texas for example, where grazing land has boundaries. Creaking like icebergs, companies amalgamate to create amalgamated companies. The water sprays and boils up high. Divorce is in because people finally have the time for a breach between partners, but the topic of capital accumulation is out because it's not supposed to be too visible.

Hans, who is forever having to jump to attention at work, is the first to leap hastily to clear a space on the table for the maid. Pointlessly, his mother has taught him to behave with courtesy to women, as in the old days. At the last moment, Sophie holds him back, and so the maid has to cope single-handed. She doesn't exist, Hans, you have to understand. But everyone you see exists, isn't that right? Wrong.

Along with all their many other errors, the main mistake of the Austrian anarchists (in so far as they existed) was their terrible social situation, which they wanted to put behind them as fast as they possibly could. But that's idiotic. If you want everyone to be on an equal footing, you may as well have done with it and be a Communist. How dreary. What you have to do is destroy most of what was done by the older generation.

Rainer states that in the summer he is going sailing, that his brother in America knows several film stars, and that his mother is going to the warm-water spa at Villach tomorrow. This last is a long-standing dream of hers. And he doesn't have a brother either. Rainer reports that the German surrealist tradition was unfortunately broken by the War. He is interested in aesthetic problems, and wants leader status. Maybe leader status can be achieved by dealing Sophie a short, sharp blow on the mouth, making the said mouth bleed. No, nothing doing just now, she's opening a packet of biscuits, his favourite, chocolate-covered kind. Rainer gobbles like an idiot. The most powerful urge known to Man is the urge to be free of manual labour. Any means that accomplishes that end is fine. Some people erroneously imagine that they have a birthright to non-manual work. Rainer thinks Hans thinks that way. Because at irregular intervals Hans says that the only thing Nature means to him is leisure, which is a positive value. In his leisure time he goes off into Nature. I agree (Sophie), in my free time I'm out in Nature almost all the time as well, that's where to look if you need me.

I'd like to change my job some time, it doesn't satisfy me, I want to become a gym teacher. Feel my muscles, Sophie, I'm building them up just for you, they get worked on every day. When I'm out in Nature I unfortunately still have to keep to the marked public paths, but as soon as I'm good at climbing I can venture off on unmarked paths and pick one edelweiss after another. Rainer avoids Nature whenever he stumbles across it. He gets out of gym classes whenever he can, pleading sickness and debility. Father mustn't know of this. Mummy writes a note for him. Sophie says that it's too bad, public places are increasingly being messed up with paper and worse, the more average people (who invariably dump their muck) go off into Nature. It is a new problem, one which is harming the environment. In the old days people had no time to harm the environment because they were busy doing harm to themselves, in the War, for instance.

Rainer: Hey, Sophie, I've written another poem, another new one about you.

Sophie: It's really the only way you stand out from the masses. Because you don't have the material means to stand out from the masses. Which naturally you'd infinitely prefer. Rainer: You really make me sick today. Money! Yuck. People's minds are independent of their worries about their daily bread. For instance, the upper strata of society often lack the necessary intelligence, whereas ordinary people can sometimes be very bright. The two things are totally unrelated.

In Hans's opinion, all that counts is a person's essential nature. You have to refine your character, Hans would like to go into a longer explanation of this, since it is intrinsically difficult for him. But alas, now Sophie sends him off to repair the record player, because for some unfathomable reason it is not working. Doubtless she thinks every kind of electric current is the same. And he would dearly like to join in the talk and profit by it. Who can say what he mightn't be able to put to use later, when he's a gym teacher! You have to think of the future too. The future is not heavy current. Rainer expounds the beauty of violence. Feeling bones and knuckles break, sinews and tendons rip and tear, taut skin burst. Or even making these things happen. He also declares that they are going to be redoing their home soon, with period furniture imported from France.

You and your fear of contact, you can't even offer someone your hand or look into someone's eyes without being embarrassed, says Sophie, and she dodges Rainer just as he is offering her an unembarrassed hand, to stroke her or paw her some other way. Sophie is well practised at dodging Rainer. Leave me alone, why do you always have to be groping me? People use their mouths to talk, not their hands.

But they kiss with their mouths, Sophie, dearest. The urge is overwhelming.

Hans immediately replies that he's far stronger, wanna bet? And look, the twerp really is reaching out his arm for a bout of arm-wrestling to prove it. However, the grammar school boy with his scrawny arm merely gives him a disgusted look. Pity, says Hans's expression, so much for the trial of strength we were looking forward to. Strength Hans certainly has. Enough for several men. What does he train for, for hours on end? For nothing, since no one recognises his achievement.

Sophie is silent. Anna is vexed. Lost in thought, Anna picks a hair off the sleeve of Hans's sports jacket. This is an advance, made because Anna feels attracted to Hans. Because when Hans does something he relates differently to things than Sophie or her brother. So what kind of feeling does it give you to touch Hans? Immediately she touches him, and the feeling opens out into a new dimension, the dimension of strenuous physical activity.

Rainer says he finds tennis stupid but he might like to give golf a try. His uncle in England (who does not exist) plays golf. Hans does not know what golf is. Rainer says he doesn't need to know because he has no need of golf either.

Sophie says that in her view the over-emphasis placed on free will and individuality goes back to Christianity.

Rainer, who is still far from having outgrown Christianity and likes having frequent discussions with priests, says she ought not to speak so dismissively of God, because he has not yet decided that God definitely does not exist. He used to be an altar boy and continued to be one into his teens.

Then Rainer expands on Man's free will. Sophie says intellectuals will still go on emphasising free will even when they've got nothing left to eat.

Rainer says: I am the intellectual you're talking about. Sophie says that those who go all out for the intellectual's job end up adopting the ideology of the intellectual.

Suddenly every problem resulting from freedom from material production acquires an inflated significance. A lop-sided world comes into existence, defending itself against everything else.

Rainer explains to Hans that if you are a worker you mustn't think like a writer.

Hans explains to Rainer that he wouldn't want to think like a writer anyway, he wants to think like a gym teacher.

Have you found out what's wrong with the record player yet, Hans? No, I'd rather stay talking with the rest of you. Rainer says he'll have to practise listening first.

At this moment Sophie, who is gradually becoming interested in the prospective gym teacher, asks: What's that you're wearing, the suit you were confirmed in, the trousers are far too short, ditto the sleeves, and where are the cuffs anyway? Not there, that much is certain.

And then the material, no, the way you look is absolutely impossible, it offends my eye. Hans, who specially put on his Sunday best suit on account of Sophie, a suit that has never offended either his eye or that of his mother (who has already let it out twice), shrinks till he's no bigger than a pea, as if the air had been let out of him. There he was, specially wanting to appear before Sophie in a suit so as to have the advantage over Rainer in his jeans, and now he's jeered at like this! He covers all the places where the suit is too short with his hands. He doesn't have enough hands. The suit shrank at the cleaner's, I swear it did, it used to be real long, the sods at the cleaner's let it shrink. I couldn't do anything about it. Perhaps we could sue them, because they ruined it.

Wait, I'll get you something of my brother's. It's the right size, put that on! Rainer's eyes fair pop out with envy. The clothes are a V-neck cashmere pullover and trousers made of a fine woollen cloth, pure wool, the label inside says so. The fact that Hans rather than he is being given such lovely things cuts Rainer to the quick. But it's just one of capricious Sophie's whims, she's as flighty as a will-o'-the-wisp, but doubtless that will sort itself out once she settles down. She is only playing with Hans, who does not realise this, because he is still a beginner in the art of love.

Sophie says Hans should change right here in front of them. He doesn't want to because his underpants are dirty. But he has to, otherwise the trousers and pullover won't be handed over to him. Anna's eyes burn holes into Hans. Sophie tries to clean a stain on her tennis skirt, a stain only she can see. Rainer, with only himself as audience, says you must take action, act, act, and yet again act. Later you have to bear the consequences of your actions. In general, of course, bad actions, since these moral categories do not exist for us. My father's going to buy me a sports car for my eighteenth birthday.

Funny that you want to do something all of a sudden, says Sophie. Up till now all you've done is read and write poems. She thinks it's not his style.

Rainer says Sophie has no idea what a wealth of rage and hatred there is in him. Thought has its limits, limits that I hit long ago, after all I've been thinking continuously for years, and now I've finished, frontiers are there to be torn down. My father's going to pay for me to go to America for my eighteenth birthday too. The difference between de Sade and Bataille is this. Sade, locked up with lunatics, scatters beautiful rose petals atop the cesspit. He spent twenty-seven years in prison for his ideas. Bataille, on the other hand, sits on his ass in the Bibliotheque Nationale. De Sade, whose aim of social and moral liberation is well known, was out to question a poetic idol in order to force thought to complain of its fetters. Bataille's desire for social and moral liberation, on the other hand, is very doubtful. The difference between me and de Sade, for example, is that I am not a moralist. That aside, I am everything he ever was, and more besides!

Who are these people, asks Hans, now wearing the cashmere, and he is instructed who they are.

These assaults we are planning are meant to have a framework of higher motives. Above us, so to speak. I shall explain those motives in a moment, says Rainer.

Please, I implore you, don't explain anything, any more explanations today and I'll scream, says Sophie. But I've got to explain why we're going to do it, otherwise you'll just do it without any reasons, and that doesn't count.

Hans says he wants to push ahead with getting some education.

Anna says he'll have to read a lot.

Rainer says he shouldn't read but should listen to him, Rainer. He is the intellectual, not Hans. If the intellectual cannot make his world conform to the ideology he espouses, and in reality (like Hans) has to do unclean manual work to survive, he ends up advocating a world that is not genuine, no longer his own. You'd better defend your own little world, Hans. Don't try to become more than you are because there's an other who is greater than you already: me.

Hans is disappointed that Rainer is sternly advising against working at an education. But he is right in so far as your station in life can cause you greater suffering if you're knowledgeable than if you're ignorant, which can be bliss.

Now Sophie ungraciously shoos them all away because Schwarzenfels's sports car can be heard outside, he is coming to spirit her away to a tennis match for the in-crowd. That is the kind of sports car Rainer is going to get for his birthday, the very same. Might he try it out, so that when his birthday comes he'll be able to drive it right away? No he might not. Rainer does at least attempt to catch hold of Sophie wherever some space is still free, but she slips through his fingers (which in any case are not very venturesome) like sand. Fine sand.

At the tram stop, their starting point for a return trip to poorer districts, they are still talking about an assault. Needless to say they will not commit it to get rich but in order to liberate themselves once and for all. For the entire future. Hans still isn't convinced that he needs to liberate himself. Right now he'd rather be watching a game of tennis and learning some more about sport. Regretfully he goes on looking around for a long time, but he sees nothing because a sports car is much faster than a tram, which has to labour through the interminable reel of stops.


JUST A MOMENT. Let's not leave this tram in such a hurry. Let's stay on a little while. The crowd on board are all one colour and at first glance you cannot tell what they are. Cattle or people. Nothing stands out from the crowd, except for the hat that ugly woman is wearing. It is a shocking colour that is in fashion. It stands out in a negative sense. They are cattle or donkeys, says Anna, they'd trot off patiently to the slaughterhouse, they'd hold the knife themselves and indicate the place it had to be driven in.

The men are a gloomy uniform grey, working life has out deep furrows in their sexless, barely male faces. You can imagine what they get up to with their wives at home: nothing. Nothing agreeable. But not even anything particularly disagreeable either, they don't have the style for that. The revolting work they do has stripped the hair from one man's head, robbed a second man's mouth of teeth, and put dirt under the fingernails of a third. Inwardly, Hans remains detached from them. This shows visibly in the way he squeezes up into the darkest corner so that he won't be noticed and on no account associated (erroneously) with this herd.

But if a pretty young lady shows up on her own he gives her an inviting wink. This is known as flirting. It is something carefree people do.

Rainer and Anna, who wouldn't be associated with the herd anyway because they don't look as if they do any work, stand there out in the open with the breeze from the open platform blowing in their rugged faces. Soon the tram will be far behind them and they will be driving a brand new car.

The gap between Hans and the twins widened here where other people were present and could see them. Anna and Rainer were on top and Hans was (still) down below. But it was not to be like that for much longer.

If it isn't the airstream squeezing at Anna's breasts, who is it suddenly squeezing like this? Answer: a chubby man, plainly an office worker, on his way home to his wife and child, plainly out to cop his share of something that's several sizes too big for him: Anni. A fresh young filly much to his taste.

Suddenly some soft mass is resting on Anna's ass, it is this person, seizing the opportunity (which rarely presents itself to people of his kind) to make up to this young and doubtless inexperienced creature and put her to his own uses. There is no parent or guardian to be seen, so the coast is clear, she could be taught a thing or two, you can see right away that the two young ruffians with the little slut won't put up any real resistance to a figure of authority. He is the figure of authority in question, a bank clerk with prospects of becoming branch manager. Only (of course) if he keeps a clean bill of conduct. Which he'll see that these unfledged brats don't sully.

If they kick up a fuss he'll deny everything. In tones of righteous indignation. And he'll say: what a cheek.

Is this a pointed stick being poked between Anna's thighs, or something more disagreeable? It is an unappetising something. To be exact, the bank clerk's dick. Small and pointed and erect, yet still with the vulnerability of flesh, not quite rock-hard (doubtless it never gets completely hard unless you force it by milking away for three hours). The wretch squeezes up against her, begging for a little love and understanding, which his wife is forever denying him on the stupidest of pretexts. A girl's ass like this, doubtless still an untrodden path, really is the greatest bliss. I don't believe this (Anna, tipping off her chums).

The clerk's weight becomes more of a burden. Courage mounting, it pokes a little further in, the crowd on board grows as they approach the city, the crush is conducive to communication between young and old. Between up top and down below. Usually down below. The woman's place is lying down below, but in this case she is not lying, she is standing in front.

A hand follows, cautiously groping, though no one has summoned it. The hand approaches nonetheless. As if that were where it belonged, it ventures towards the Annabreasts. At this point Anna gives a signal, this is the moment we've been waiting for. Hans is slow on the uptake, preoccupied with a petite blonde (red roses, red lips, red wine), but Rainer gets the message.

As if on command, Anna gives a full smile of well-honed predatory teeth, the lips part, a moist tongue appears, best act a bit backward, it fosters trust and a carefree attitude in strangers. The would-be libertine makes a nasty sign with his index finger, ambiguously signalling to Anna: I want to get in there, what's the best way, how ridiculous that we're stuck in public transport like sardines in a tin, it'd be better if we were in a big bed, I'd show you where to find God, not up in heaven, at any rate, no, in me, inside me, I'd ram it up you so it came out your mouth, it's big enough, that's how strong I am, a real man and always have been since my youth, which thank God I have been able to preserve, though of course I'm by no means old, call me mature, old enough to value a seventeen-year-old virgin, the wife's already filled out somewhat, see, she's broader in the beam. Naturally a man has his choice of all the age range, every colour, shape and size. That is how a man thinks. That is not how a woman thinks because her sexuality is passive. My personal character predestined me to going it alone. Not every man is predestined to do that. More women are available for sampling than I can possibly consume. Can you feel how hard it is, a real ramrod, and my balls are especially firm and full, feel, this is your big chance, cutie, the chance you've been waiting for.

One money-counter hand takes hold of the Annahand (Anna not having offered any signs of resistance so far) and slowly guides it to the clerk's holy of holies. It is a hand that does not have to get dirty at work. You can see the sophisticated manual skill of the hand. It is a hand that knows what to do. Counting other people's money as long as it's light and now, in the anonymous dark, guiding a strange lass's hand to the very centre of Life. Here we are, the very centre, correct, the penis. Hello there. Flabby and flaccid, it is upstanding like a monument to something great. Well, isn't it a particularly fine specimen?

Now! nods Anna, and she scrabbles about amid the greasy trousercloth, she can't find it, wherever's it got to, wherever's it got to, a touch on the small side, huh? Now that must be it, hang on, here we are, surely he hasn't got a pocket-knife on him, or perhaps he has, for peeling apples or slicing sausage perhaps. No, it's not the knife, this is the prick, a knife looks different. Here it is, hooray, we've found it.

Hans is still totally dopey but Rainer interpreted that Now! back there correctly. Light as a butterfly he wings into the inside breast pocket of the distracted victim from behind and removes the wallet, which is where right-handed men always have it, in the left pocket. This character wouldn't even notice if you planted a bomb on him. There doesn't seem to be much in it, but we're happy, you can buy several paperbacks with this.

Please squeeze it a bit, kid, rub it, stroke it, be nice, that's good, thank you kindly, my wife back home won't do this any more, and anyway I'm really grateful. May I see you again, fair maiden? A bit closer to the tip, that's right. You do that so well. Though I could teach you to do it even better. You wouldn't have time tomorrow after office hours, would you? Pity.

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.

And now these sharp pointed shoes, so shiny you could use them as a mirror to see yourself if you wanted, and Hans does want. With those shiny shoes, Hans is constantly kicking his mother in the belly, that belly he once came out of himself, and he does not even notice. They're fashionable, these shoes. A shade uncomfortable, mind you. You have to suffer if you want to look good, says Hans to his mother, wittily. Then the pay-off will be all the bigger, my pay right now is on the paltry side, alas.

You know, Hans, that time we had to surrender in the council block, the caretaker hung an old white pair of underpants in the window as a sign of submission. Though we couldn't just give up. It would have been a pity to waste a white linen cloth at a time when they were shooting at us. An undamaged linen cloth was valuable. Better for underpants to die than a good linen cloth. And a lot of people were shot even as they surrendered, that's been proved.

Suffering in his tight shoes in order to look good, Hans picks up a wad of addressed envelopes and stuffs them into the flames in the kitchen stove behind his mother's back. He doesn't know quite why he's doing this but there is some kind of compulsion, a voice that belongs to Rainer is ordering him to do it. Rainer's voice is in his ear and Sophie's image is in his heart. They are leading him, inciting him. And in the end he does something meaningless, something a good deal of effort has gone into teaching him to do. It is meaningless because Mother does not notice anything, she'll notice later but she will blame herself, not him. Right now, Hans leaves the house. It is a beautiful warm evening. A pleasure to be out and about.

Once Hans's father had been set free by his work, he died very quickly. There are a great many people who work their whole lives long and still aren't free. Before that, Hans's father had become Hans's father, but he did not have much time to rejoice in the fact. But basically every human being, be he rich or poor, experiences only a handful of brief moments of happiness. Brief but intense. After intense suffering, Hansfather dies beneath a block of original Austrian rock.

At least he was spared the mediocrity of everyday life, his son thinks. The son is constantly in danger of going under in that mediocrity, but he will do everything possible to avoid it. A brief intense life and then perhaps a brief intense death, I want to experience everything acutely, even if it's only briefly. You're only young once, and I'm young right now. Your father was never young because he never had the time. But there has to be that much time. That's what he failed to grasp, see? He got it wrong.

Hans is right, because this is a new era, at last, thanks be to God, a better age than the old one, this age belongs to the young, and the young are not tardy in grabbing it.


WHO'S THIS YOU'VE dragged in with you, asks Anna's mother. One of your schoolmates, I suppose. He ought to be pleased he can go to high school and will be able to study afterwards, schooldays are the happiest days of your life but you don't understand that till later, and then it's too late, alas, and the happiest days are behind you. Later on you have to do a job, in your case an academic job, and life is tough, you find out for yourself how tough it is.

To which Hans replies that unfortunately he's not a participating member of the happiest days because he does not go to the grammar school. But I'd like to, and that is sufficient because all that counts is the will. Where there's a will there's a way. That way might (for instance) take me to a position as a gym teacher, which would be demanding too but in a different way to being a heavy current electrician, which is what I've learnt to be at the Elin Union. Right now, at this very moment, my girlfriend Sophie is busy (deep within herself) teaching me other sports in addition to the ones I have already mastered (such as basketball, running and jumping, all at the sports centre), sports like tennis and riding. Which is the finest thing in the entire world.

Out of all of this, the only thing Mother has grasped is that Hans is an ordinary worker, which is the kind of company she disapproves of. So you don't attend any kind of general high school? Wanting to isn't enough. Actions speak louder than words. Not that every action is necessarily enough. It all depends. Best of all is having possessions. Go away and don't come back, you're bad company for my two children.

Hans says he proposes to continue his education on his own initiative. This takes energy. Which he has.

We don't learn for the sake of school, we learn for Life, he who learns more gets more out of Life. I want to learn for Life anyway, I don't give a damn about school. You can get left behind and come to a tragic end. People fail both in school and in Life.

Considering the way she is, Anna listens to this with astounding patience. All the while she is pondering how to impress Hans with sundry intellectual accomplishments later on in her room, the room which is hers alone. She will use her piano playing to skilful effect. The heavy artillery: Hans is beginning to value Art, though he does not know what Art can mean. That the two of them will go to bed can be taken for granted, Sophie doesn't do it but Anna does. She will translate a pornographic passage in Bataille for him and, once he starts to drool and slobber, God and the libido will see to the rest. She will get into the most inventive of positions, positions you see in the latest French films, though he won't recognise as much since he does not go to see that kind of film. Nothing but one-two banging. She'll play it cool and austere, but soft enough not to scare him. She looks at Hans's hard muscles beneath his pullover. They are rippling. There are not many muscles in Anna's natural environment. Muscles grow elsewhere. She likes the fact that once Hans is undressed he will be just a body and nothing else. This is a novel feeling, not like other times when the mind is still operating, forever flashing its messages at inappropriate moments. Even the way he picks up objects, you can see that his hands know exactly how to take hold of something. He is an expert on manual things, things you do with your hands. He would know how to use a hammer, nails and a file too; he moves in totally different circles. This attracts Anna. While you're young you have to find out what things are like elsewhere, you already know how things are on home ground.

Mummy says that the Latin for what she just said, that you don't learn for school but for Life, is on the tip of her tongue, she'll have it in a moment. She has a reservoir of proverbs and sayings. He will not understand, he will be devastated, and in future he will leave her daughter alone. Her family has a tradition of education, it is by no means a matter of your own initiative, it is too valuable a thing for that. Indeed, the abilities and knowledge you have are the most valuable thing of all. What you yourself have is always a risk factor, it's best to keep it aside. And incidentally, she'd prefer it if the two of them did not go to Anna's room unchaperoned. She fixed that room up herself. Flower-pattern curtains. Hardly Anna's style. Women have no business in a girl's room, it's a room for a girl, as the expression implies. Really Anna is still a child. Hans is about to comply, automatically, because Annamother inspires respect, but Anna says she can kiss their asses. And they go anyway, of course. To make up for Anna's uncouthness, Hans says he will even bring some flowers next time, a big bunch, Annamother promptly adds that that can be very revealing. At least the prole is polite. There is a language of flowers, a language Mother has learned. Roses stand for love, always supposing they are red, and carnations stand for the socialist party, again supposing they are red. And then there are flowers that can stand for constancy, devotion, trust and other similar nonsense, you have to be careful not to get them mixed up by mistake, it could be disastrous if it's someone you care for. In general, Nature has its own language, which you can only hear if you are perfectly silent. It is either within a person or it isn't, and he can only hear it if it is. This is every bit as important as book learning, though that is also necessary. You should take note of roots that are a strange shape, stones, and forked branches when you pass them along the wayside, perhaps collect them, and not deliberately ignore them. I'll pay more attention to the language of Nature in future, Frau Witkowski.

Anna: Are you coming, or are you planning to put down strangely-shaped roots? No? So come on. This way.

Mother wields the threat of Father. Which merely provokes a mirthless laugh from Anna. She says: Papa would love to do it to me himself but he daren't.

Mother calms down by telling herself that the two of them are only listening to records and smoking in secret and having secret discussions about art. How is anyone expected to talk to that fellow about art!

Hans has a queasy feeling because being alone with a girl for the first time is very taxing, it's harder to get by than being with his pack of mates.

Anna eyes her face in the mirror, it is on the harsh side, she reflects that now things are becoming serious she would rather be sweet and blonde like Sophie, being harsh is more of an effort, it is difficult to keep it up. Better to snuggle up, all softness, but you must never do that or else they promptly think they can get away with anything. Her line is being hard, like Jean Seberg, that's all there is to it. She has the hots for Hans and imagines what he looks like or to be exact what he will look like in a moment. She has already seen him wearing shorts at the WAT and playing football. He must be even better with nothing on at all. He is like a wild animal, you can't win him over with talk about literature, and this appeals to her. Educated as she is, at present she is nothing but a body and must descend to the level of other bodies where she is one among many and not the best, everywhere else she is better because she has a mind. But that doesn't count now. Anna senses a certain tragedy in this, you're very naked without your head, and her head is what a woman in this situation has to lose. Anna stows her head in the bookcase and inspects Hans, who looks as if he thought he was a wild, beautifully-built animal, say a wolf. He is grinding his jaws vigorously (that old trick of his), which is meant to suggest passion, arousal, and at the same time loneliness, which John Wayne and Brian Keith and Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda are forever suggesting, over and over again. Using the selfsame methods, though better, of course. The enamel on Hans's teeth squeaks in protest at this rough treatment, the demands that are made on it are always too great. The muscles are supposed to look white from the outside, it's always worked in front of the mirror and has never failed to have its effect on a girl. Girls are impressed. However, you often don't have enough confidence, and usually the girl has even less confidence. Anna knows exactly which film that's out of. She sees the prairie before her, the horses, the log cabins, the cacti, and the lonesome men with their guns. But although she knows all about it, she still wants it, wants it. Funny. You see right through something, but you still want to check if there isn't something else behind there, something you've missed. And even if it's solely sinews, muscles and skin, that'll do fine. No stupid prattle. She herself has the brain, but now she's going to let it alone and be only a body for Hans, who has never been anything but a body.

Anna has found her passage in Bataille and is translating: Simone's mother suddenly enters the sickroom. He pulls down his trousers, because his mother is bringing the soft-boiled eggs. That's what the book says. She can't manage entirely without books. When he exposes himself (in the book), he does so because he wants his mother to leave, and because he takes pleasure in going too far. Fortunately Anna's mother is not present here in her room. And that's exactly how it is with us, Anna continues. In a minute we're going to go too far, it feels good, it says so in the book. Simply for the sake of doing it. Without any purpose. It's wrong to be wanting to achieve some aim.

Hans does not want to achieve any particular aim, all he wants is to get round Anna. Anna has a sensation of unlimited possibilities that starts in her head, it is a feeling that has often been described and Anna is emulating it so as to experience it precisely the way it is described. Without her head, Anna could not now know that she is only a body and nothing but. Anna unbuttons Hans's shirt, making brief, trembling movements because you always hear that you're supposed to tremble. Hans is trembling too, but only because what he's wearing underneath is not as clean as it ought to be, but in all the excitement this goes unnoticed. But don't think this means I love you, he says hastily. I don't love you either, at all, because you don't need love for this, declares Anna. That's news to me (Hans). Love makes a slave of you because you're always wondering where your partner is now or why he's not there. It robs you of your autonomy, it's terrible. Hans considers how best to do it and then does it. Like the aforementioned wolf, the greedy predator, he leaps on Anna's mouth and kisses it. His teeth dig around inside in premeditated fashion, the tongue ditto. It is not very skilfully done, but at least it is savage and becomes a man. Anna gropes, paws and claws at him, using her teeth and fingernails. The latter are not very long because they have to be kept short for playing the piano, a minus point. But by way of compensation things go twice as fast What you leave out in the way of pain you can make up for with speed. It's supposed to hurt because what's good is perversion, not what everybody does. What she's doing does hurt Hans and he pulls a pained face, immediately recalling as he does so that Gary Cooper also often has a pained expression on his face, suggestive of inner torment, when he is playing a love scene. You have to look as if you were doing it against your will, and then you have to screw the bint anyway because the feeling is too powerful for you. It has to engulf you, and sure enough he is promptly engulfed, the red wave, the white heat, the blackness, call it what you will, of oblivion.

What do I have to do now, Hans wonders inwardly, something always has to be happening, no tick-over pauses, it always has to be continuing, otherwise it's hard to bridge the gap, you lose the rhythm. Now I have to rip her clothes off, if she says no I mustn't take any notice. Anna is far from begging: Please don't, instead she takes her clothes off herself because Hans is clumsy. As she is slipping out of her panties, the thought goes through her head: is this why I read the whole of Sartre in my spare time, all about Being and about Nothingness? What use is it to me now? I might just as well be a girl who's never read anything but Bravo. You don't need any more for this. The fact that she perceives this distinguishes her from millions of other girls, but on the outside Hans, alas, only sees a girl the same as a million others. And he treats her accordingly. As skin, flesh, sinews, muscles and bones. Which all the others possess as well. The realisation that someone totally different (a prettier girl than herself) might just as well be lying there and that it's not at all uniquely her, Anna, comes as a cruel shock to Anna. Inside her, things are like this: she unfortunately sees through what others take in like syrup, and this torments her.

Oh, Hans, Hans, she says, in spite of herself. He accepts this without a moment's hesitation. That's his name. Yes sir! Here. All present and correct. Screwing about to commence.

Then she'll shut up at last, usually she talks too much, it's almost as bad as her brother. Hans thinks that all the talk is gradually beginning to get on Sophie's nerves too. Sophie would rather have Hans's silence, Hans the lone wolf, than all the twaddle of some Rainer who's forever looking for a group where he can shine. It's a compulsion with that character.

Come to me, come, come, come, whispers Anna, as if he weren't already doing everything in his power to come. But he keeps on wilting. It's the excitement of the great occasion, it's his first time, it can remain with you for a long time. She goes on stroking him and whispering words of love, which (incidentally) are pretty banal, she's done better in the past, she's completely changed, because right now she is a woman pure and simple and thus tends to be unoriginal. She says she really wants to have him, he's so handsome, he's handsome in her eyes even if others maybe don't see him that way because she sees him with the eyes of Love, which often deceive you, but so what. She has such feelings for him, he's under her skin, she can't get him out of her system. For him it would do if he could get a poke in her cunt but it's so difficult to get it in if it isn't quite hard, what a nuisance. The sweat is already flying from him and since it isn't working out as he would like it to he turns brutal, no, not to himself, of course not, but towards Anna.

He bends her back, kneads her, forces her head right back so her neck makes a cracking sound, ouch you're hurting me, yes, right, I'm hurting you because I'm so strong and I don't realise I'm hurting you. You're so strong. Ah, at last, the magic word. As if he'd been started up by a code word, he manages it at last and up it comes. But the words Anna would say at other times in similar situations (such as: At last! You ready, huh?) stick in her throat, so momentous is this occasion they call Love, this thing that falls wherever it happens to fall, on soil or on a concrete ramp where it will shrivel up. and have to be thrown away. She doesn't know herself how it happened. Heavens. She goes babbling on and on about how beautiful it was and that they'll definitely have to do it more often because she liked it so much and no doubt he liked it too, didn't he, it'll get more and more beautiful as time goes by, that was just the start and if the start was so beautiful just think what the end will be like: even more beautiful. My darling, my darling, and she squeezes Hans so tight that he can't get his breath, but the main thing is that he got his jism out and put up a reasonable show in doing so. After some initial difficulties.

There is a warm feeling in Anna, and nothing else. In Hans there is a thought of Sophie, who is going to give him his first hour's coaching tomorrow. Now he gives Anna light pecks with his kisser, which is aiming now here, now there, absently and haphazardly. Anna confuses this with post-coital tenderness, which it is not and is not intended to be. On the contrary, it is solely a way of diverting attention from the fact that Hans has no tender feelings for her whatsoever, though he is glad to have got it done good and proper for once. No doubt Sophie does not want a man who is inexperienced, it's quite enough if one of them is inexperienced: her. This kind of thing can even harm a sportsman, it can reduce his fitness, and he needs to be fit for Sophie so he can conquer her in sporting style. Anna doubtless wants to do this frequently, he'll tell her she's got it wrong. She hasn't been counting on the needs of a competitive sportsman.

Hans, Hans, Hans, says Anna softly.

That's my name, all present and correct, answers Hans, laughing at his own joke.


SO THAT NATURE gets its turn as well (and so they can look out of place) the group venture forth into the famous Vienna Woods, where there is a great deal of the aforementioned Nature. In fact there is nothing else. Except day-trippers in quest of a natural way of life, since in the present age industrialisation is proceeding apace. Off the ramblers go, likewise proceeding apace.

The last scraps of morning mist are climbing the leafy slopes, and the youngsters likewise climb to the summit, where there is a tower with a view plus a cafe and restaurant, where Nature promptly comes to a well-earned stop because you can eat gateau and you are screened off behind glass. The sun enters at an angle, leaving hunks of light you have to weave your way through. The foliage of deciduous trees and various rotten stuff constitute a rustling carpet. What distinguishes the group from other groups who are out and about dressed for a ramble is that they are not dressed for a ramble, but instead they are carrying a basket containing a sack tied shut. There's an amount of scratching and whimpering going on inside the sack. This is because there is a cat in it. They caught the cat. In Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason is a character who wants to drown his cats, and so today they are planning to drown this cat too, though this cat also has a right to live. Rainer says that he himself has an equal right to non-existence, just as this cat does, this cat which he is going to assist on its way to non-existence before it can count to three. The cat has its suspicions. Hence the brouhaha in the sack.

Sophie is wearing a casual woollen dress made by Adlmuller. Anna's between-seasons coat was run up on her mother's sewing-machine, you can tell at a glance. Sophie wafts with springy step across roots, pine cones, twigs and beechnuts. Sophie is the one who has to do the drowning, in a stream in the Vienna Woods which they are still looking for. She is the only one who hasn't yet undergone the initiation. Without which she won't belong to the gang. Because once they tackle their assaults on a serious basis it will be no good her weeping and wailing like a little girl, she'll have to react coolly, impassively. Rainer takes an especial interest in Sophie's participation, since it will be something they have in common, something that will unite them.

As is well known (or rather, as is not well known, because who does know this) the Vienna Woods consist of countless hills; in among these hills there are small mounds which are neither one thing nor the other, and these are divided up by furrows along which rivulets trickle. The springs are clear and gush forth, ramblers quench their thirst there if they have one to quench. Unfortunately there is often very little water in them. Except in the spring. Which is now. Often you hear the rustle of a small animal. Busy looking for food.

The group looks for one of the fuller streams. Otherwise the drowning will take forever. And who can tell if the cat will cooperate. Sophie has long blonde hair which gleams whenever one of the slabs of light gets tangled in it; when it is in the shade it is a muted yellow, brass. Rainer has even accepted that he will cut a lesser figure here than in the jazz club, that indeed Hans, who never seems the superior, might appear a cut above him in this green spot. At least Sophie is prepared to go through with the drowning in the end. Anna stays apart from the others, occupied with not showing that there is now a bond between her and Hans that can never be cancelled, the indifference in her features is a product of long practice. Just now he wanted to kiss her. Nothing doing. Tenderness is for kids.

Still, when she looks at him a tremor goes through her. Prompted by the memory of desire. If mere memory can send a tremor through her, what will it be like in reality?

Was that an animal wailing? No, ramblers making jubilant noises. Hallo! Hallo! They have startled the animals, these fat men and women with jobs for life who can finally do something with neither point nor purpose, that is to say: climb mountains. The Sophienalpe, the Schopfl, the Satzberg. In sporty outfits that generally strike weird Styrian notes. But they are city-dwellers and their rural enthusiasms are a token of affluence, because they no longer have to live in the country, nor in squalor. And how good they look in their Tyrolean hats!

They scatter leftover food around and are destroying a natural, organic environment, making it artificial, though this is a problem Anna and Rainer are not used to perceiving, since they, after all, are out to spread artifice anywhere and everywhere, as far as possible. Cheap sunglasses hide their pale, bleary-eyed faces, Rainer's nicotine-yellow fingers twitch in the direction of cigarettes, to start a forest fire. Birds utter penetrating cries. Leaves flutter down. Trains whistle in the distance. Sunday.

Anna talks of Schonberg's Verklarte Nacht.

Wrong place. Wrong time.

In this wondrous daylight you go on about night, and not even a real night but one that's been worked over in musical form, says Sophie with a bemused smile. Hans is shadow-boxing the whole time and contesting imaginary wrestling matches and playing football, he thinks no further than the tip of his nose or as far ahead as his arms reach. He is totally in the now. He is a man of the present. The pussy-cat in the sack is not present to his mind either. That is the future. Just don't think about it. He demonstrates how to fool a footballer on the other team and dribble your way past him, he also acts out the other player, no doubt Sophie thinks he is terrific. Sophie is enjoying the sunshine and the fresh air, though she is able to enjoy these for several hours every day on horseback or in some similar way. If you are to enjoy something you must first be familiar with it. The twins are not altogether in their element. Their lungs are rattling. They have none of that fitness and stamina Hans has so much of. Too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, boasts Rainer, and he tries to start a debate about Camus, to show himself in a favourable light. Sophie wants to go in the real light that's favourable for getting a tan. Hans wants to show Sophie a number of judo stunts a friend taught him. Soon they are tussling and laughing. This hits Rainer's and Anna's guts like poison. Anna hastens to assert that she is now practising the Berg piano sonata, a goal she has long been aiming at, and now she's reached it. It is extremely demanding but she will meet the challenge in the end. Can you eat that, asks Hans, and he neighs like a Lipizzaner stallion. Have you heard this or that or the other record, Anna? No, because that is low-brow music, you have to learn some more, Hans, or else you'll be left standing where you are, and at your present stage you mustn't do that on any account because otherwise you'll be left where there is nothing at all. Sophie's parents have season tickets to the Philharmonic. Often Sophie goes with her mother, just the two of them. Sophie's mother is an acknowledged society beauty, everyone knows her, everyone says hello, needless to say only in those places where everyone knows everyone else. I bet she has no values, says Rainer, who has merely seen her, he is of the opinion that she has no standards at all, she doesn't need any. She goes drifting about among great sterile transparent jellies. Nothing keeps her steady and stable, but the glass-bright mass keeps her in a constant state of suspension, she doesn't touch the ground. Sophie too will be like that one day, if something isn't done to prevent it in good time, now. Love will prevent it.

The Philharmonic only play reactionary stuff like Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven, spits Anna. When they heard Webern last Sunday they applauded like idiots, but the fact is they despise music like that. The audience the Philharmonic gets is too well-bred to boo a Webern, they know how highly-rated a composer he is, replies Sophie. But of course they don't like him. Webern's work is a joke from start to finish.

Hans enthusiastically points out a squirrel, a red one. Red all over, really. What a dear creature. It races up and down the tree trunk, its eyes are bright. The sun struggles across the sky. Little midday clouds put in their appearances. Let's hope they won't gather into dark cloud-banks. Here at last is a stream of some size that may be suitable for the drowning of cats, no, definitely is suitable.

Okay then, Sophie. Get in the mud so you can get close to the water, or at any rate close enough. I think I'd rather not do it, says Sophie, I like animals. I always curry my horse myself. You've got to, or else you'll be expelled before you've even joined. I think you're absolutely childish, playing at Indians. The poor pussycat can't help it. You've got to do it anyway. Get a move on, we have to catch the bus. All right, I'll do it. Thank goodness I brought some Elastoplast with me. When I do it I'm sure to have to think of my favourite mare, Tertschi. She's an animal too. We'll have no use for weakness in future, Sophie, as you well know.

Sophie hauls out the scratching foaming bawling cat, which instantly slashes her hand and sets it bleeding. Ow, couldn't you have got a less painful creature? The only thing we could lay our hands on was a cat, get on with it.

In her good dress, Sophie kneels down in the dirt, covered in mud, and holds the loyal pet, which is used to people, down in the water. This takes considerable effort and strength. Snapping, snorting, thrashing and gurgling in the water.

She practically has to lie on the wretched creature, I'm getting drenched, I'll catch pneumonia.

Before the animal's death can occur, Hans, who was so comical with that squirrel back there, hauls Sophie off the cat, the soaked animal struggles out and races away, spitting. Doubtless a fox will get it, which will not be a very pleasant death either.

Hans gives Sophie a clout so the blood trickles down from the corner of her mouth. Ouch. The gang stands round as if they were the Holy Family and the roof of the stable had been blown off and it was raining in.

Sophie is flabbergasted. Something is stirring within her but she doesn't know what. I hope nothing is stirring within Sophie, thinks Rainer, aghast.

Hans, who has seen all the right exciting films and not the wrong ones, which are plain boring, pulls Sophie towards him and kisses her, so that the blood is smeared across his mouth. It tastes sweet. Sophie is sweet. Like something washed in a special soap powder, no, like something that doesn't need washing at all because it never gets dirty. Angora.

You just have to take a young lass's sweet mouth without asking, says the folk song. And then keep a startled silence because it has come true.

This little scene leaves two people satisfied and two unsatisfied. It is always like that in life. Fifty-fifty. Which makes things fair.


YOU HAVE TO shrink back from me as you would from a demon. Fear is seen in the eyes, hunger in the physique, ill-treatment on the skin, often it's more than skin-deep. It extends into the very soul. That is expressed in a look too. A woman recoiling from the man who's about to rape her. The man she knows is her master in this situation. There must be submission in her gaze. Static. Putting on one expression after another is pointless, this isn't a movie camera, it only takes still photographs. Concentration, Gretl, please. A tenant comes in, imagine this situation: contrary to expectation he finds his landlady, who is still young (which you of course aren't), about her toilet, all alone, he gives her a look that tells her immediately that her hour has come and that no power on earth can help her now. He won't hesitate for a moment to use force. What on earth are you doing with that duster, Gretl, now of all times, get rid of it and show your stuff. You have to ease the lingerie down slowly, try to keep your hand over it, but like everything else of this woman's her hand is in the wrong place, you can see everything.

Herr Witkowski talks like a waterfall yet again, which unfortunately is only silver, Frau Witkowski preserves her silence, which is golden. Herr Witkowski has been familiar with the saying since childhood, he is also familiar with it from the prisoners' quarters at Auschwitz, likewise the statement that honesty is the best policy. Ever since History forgave him he has been honest, it has been his policy for quite a while. After 1945 History decided to begin again from scratch and Innocence, after much hesitation, forced itself to take the same decision. Witkowski started over, at the very bottom, where normally only young people with everything still ahead of them start; the climb is a more arduous one if you have only one leg, indeed everything is tougher with only one leg; walking for starters. And even more gold is silent (for ever): the gold from teeth, spectacle frames, chains and bracelets that were saved up for, coins, rings, watches, the gold remains silent because it comes from silence and to silence it has returned. All that comes of silence is silence.

Don't leave me standing around stark naked so long, it's cold because of saving on the heating, says Margarethe Witkowski. First I've got to think about how to shoot it, there has to be some violence in it. Double up in pain, imagine you've been hit. That's fine, even you get the message, little by little. If only I knew what angle to choose so as to get everything in. The panties have to be at your feet. And now step out of them. Slowly! That's the discarded skin of an animal you're leaving behind, say a snake, and up you rise, as snakelike as possible, to your reluctant but compelling desire.

Frau Witkowski does this as she imagines a snake would do it, and up she rises, but not to her desire, a stench is filling her nostrils and she has to race to the kitchen, where the rice pudding has burnt. Thus she destroys her husband's delicate artistic mood. The genius was inspired and his prosaic spouse has destroyed it all, totally. I have to see to the cooking, it's high time, too late, in fact. Meanwhile her husband abandons himself to his own thoughts, which are somewhere far down, in the Polish lowland plains, Russian plains too, where Communism is constantly coming from these days. Back there he was still somebody. Who is he now? Nobody. A porter. Herr Witkowski is pleased that the putsch was foiled back in 1950. He too was one of the little wheels (though not a very handy one, given that he lacked one foot) in the ranks of those who did the foiling. Because he tirelessly drew attention to places infected with the bacillus of Communism. You couldn't be too careful. This is how it was: Communist raiding parties received 200 schillings per man per raid from the Russians, it said so in the paper. The Western occupying powers intervened and prevented the putsch. Restrictions had to be imposed on the circulation of newspapers (not the same newspapers that reported the 200-schilling payments) on the grounds that they had spread unfounded rumours. No one troubled to call in the public prosecutor. In this way, a socialist home secretary by the name of Helmer circumvented the freedom of the press, quite effortlessly. This was good, since no one grows heated over things they know nothing about, and staying cool was the order of the day, to avoid clashes. Once a paper starts peddling untruths it has to be disposed of. The Socialists aren't exactly number one party in the Witkowski book, after all, he's not a worker, but this time they kept in line, there's no denying that. Perhaps they will learn something from history at last. Perhaps they will lend their support to the right powers from the word go, that is to say: the powers of high finance, they are the only powers that count anyway because money rules the world (thinks the invalid, who has none himself and so, consistently enough, rules nothing), money can rule all by itself, everyone knows that. In consequence, those who have nothing are left with their nothing, more is given to them that have, and a modern monopoly system is set to begin. Capital reaches out its helping hands from foreign countries in the West, swamping our Heimat with foreign money and influences and linking hands with our people to form a chain as strong as the caterpillar track on a tank. Herr Witkowski espouses the cause of Capital, which he does not possess, and this enables him to gaze with confidence from the Past into the Future. With confidence, because in days gone by he gave Capital his personal protection, and now it is again in full control, personally showing its gratitude to him. By allowing him not only his full invalidity pension but also a job as a night porter in a hotel, where he gets to see important representatives of the middle class, travelling in the course of their work as industrial sales representatives. So it goes, with the one representing the other, even if he doesn't know who exactly it is he's representing. It goes without saying that Herr Witkowski still represents the National Socialist Party, as he always did, he knows exactly who's in it and what the people in question stand for. After all, it was that very party that made him so big that he surpassed himself. No one else would have enlarged him in that way. Nowadays he enlarges his nice photos. He looks not only to the well-being of the individual but also of the group he oversees. Since he always bears in mind that he represents a whole group and not merely himself in his spare time, he always behaves accordingly. He sets an example. To teach the youngsters. Just as others also represent their companies with dignity in their spare time.

When he considers his children, he has his doubts about the fruits of his upbringing. Strangers are well brought up but his children are not. At the time of their conception he was still an officer. But what was the result? Two children who give him the shivers. In the old days you never used to see children like that, but nowadays there are a lot like them. The wife makes a pig's ear of everything, including the milk pudding, which she stirs; this doesn't make it any better.

He goes to get his pistol, to clean and grease it, you have to do this even if it happens not to be needed just now. Be prepared. The steel is a cold weight in his hand. In the case are his favourite photos of Gretl, the gynaecology photo (which will soon have to be taken anew, the photographer is more experienced now), the brothel photo, the schoolgirl photo with the apron and cane. The pistol case is kept in a secret drawer no one knows about in the kitchen cupboard. It wouldn't interest anybody anyway, his son is unfortunately only interested in literature.

Taking an abrupt decision, the ex-officer (the things an officer has to be capable of, such as decisiveness!) goes into the kitchen to rape his wife, since he suddenly feels like it, but the cow makes an awkward movement, as usual, and he slips on the tiles and falls to the floor with a crash. Where he flounders to and fro, his remaining leg twitching. However badly he wants to, he can't get up. Getting it up is usually a problem of another kind, in fact, but this time he'd have been sure of a hard-on because he was so full of desire. So much for that. It's his belief that the cause of the trouble is that the powerful stimuli he was flooded with as a young man in the occupied eastern territories have been far weaker in recent years. Once you have seen mountains of naked corpses, women among them, the charms of your housewife back home offer no more than a paltry temptation. Once your finger's squeezed the trigger of power, you slacken off rapidly if squeezing strangers' hands at the hotel is all the force you can exert. Regulars greet him with a shake of hands and a slap on the shoulder. Along with popular salesman jokes and anecdotes. He tells them at home to turn Margarethe on if his prick isn't enough, which is often the case. Damn the thing, there are times when it simply won't get up.

Times are growing weaker and softer and so are the youngsters of today. He does not know where it all will end. In half-hearted mediocrity, plainly, if not in something worse. His son is afraid of that mediocrity too.

Papa is still floundering, revolving helplessly, because he keeps paddling on one side only and not on the other one as well, which is a mistake. Recently, to crown it all, he's been tormented to extremes by sciatica and rheumatism too, as if having a leg missing weren't enough of a problem. He revolves on his axis and tries to get up on his foot. Which he can only manage with the assistance of Margarethe's patented lifting-up grip, heave-ho, that it? Now he's standing again, crutches jammed under his armpits, there we are, he'd imagined that he'd be able to do without crutches when ravishing Gretl, at one time he didn't need propping up like that.

Poor little mouse, why don't we go to bed, it's more comfortable. But the bed gives and I'd really like to drill you into the hard unyielding ground. Well, but still, it'll be snug and warm and cosy there, dear, and I've got a drop of rum left, come on, duckie.

Various parts of Otto's body hurt badly when he props himself up on his crutches and swings his remaining leg, to and fro, to and fro, but he doesn't betray the fact. The charismatic authority he once had drags his wife along behind him yet again. I'm always so tired nowadays, I'll have to get a check-up. Poor dear, yes, why don't you do that. And instead of giving it to Gretl good and proper, seeing that she's right next to him, he buries his greyed head at her breast and can't help crying. She is very moved by this. Because she does not know the reason and mistakenly supposes it's because of her. Poor little fellow, it'll be all right, she says softly, comforting him. It does not comfort him. The lumbering man sobs, he's coped with so much, he's killed so many, and now there's so much he can't handle himself. What bad luck.

I can't help crying just now, I hope the children don't see me in this state. They won't be home so early, they've been out the whole time recently, I don't know where. What they need is a firm hand, which I have, I even have two, though only one leg.

My poor poor Otti. Stroke stroke pat smack.

It's all right, there there.

We'll have a drop to drink, then we'll have a nice cup of coffee, and this evening we'll listen to the Maxi Bohm quiz show. There are valuable prizes to be won by listeners at home, sometime or other we're sure to win. If I don't know the answer we'll just ask Rainer or Anni, children learn so much these days. But we're sure to know the answer, because we're the parents. There we are, now my Otti's laughing again, there's a good boy.

He tells her to pour it out, but not to be so stingy as the last time, after all, he gets quite decent tips. Even if it's fundamentally humiliating. But things have changed, and incompetence is making the running. Drinking brings the gift of forgetting and is good for the gastric juices. Seeing how rarely there's meat on the table. Herr Witkowski gives a comforted snuffle, looking forward to his good coffee, which he will take with a massive amount of sugar. There are good things in life, there really are, as long as your expectations aren't too high. Of course he could demand a good deal if he cared to. Since he's entitled to it all.

Today he even gets more than usual. Because he cried so much.


CAFESPORT IS another scene. A scene, because that is where the artists and intellectuals go to be seen. Taking part is what matters, not winning. It is like sport, which is where the cafe got its name. Many have already lost their faith in Art, in spite of the fact that it was they alone and no one else who were predestined for it. They practise Art because it earns them nothing and they are therefore unsullied by filthy lucre. If they did earn anything from Art they'd gladly be sullied. But they would never have recourse to an ordinary middle-class profession, not because they can't master one but because the ordinary would master them and there would be no time left over for Art. You can't express yourself aesthetically, man, if some boss is expressing himself by means of sports cars and villas at the expense of the afore-mentioned artist. Anyone whose cigarette is only a single notch above the cheapest is immediately a target for cadgers.

At the table where the Holy Foursome are passing their time today, two other people are busy trying to prove Pythagoras's theorem by purely graphic means and failing in the attempt. As far as Rainer is concerned, mathematics belongs in the realism sector and is therefore uninteresting to him. If they were discussing literature he would long since have butted in and annihilated somebody, which he has a right to do.

Elsewhere some Greeks are sitting round, practically pushing their dark heads into each other as they joke about women and occasionally chat one up. All this happens close by the Ladies, just where the women have to pass by.

Whenever something is said that isn't to Rainer's taste, and at other times too, irrespective, he will stand up abruptly and stride thoughtfully off into a corner, where he stares about blackly till Sophie or Anna solemnly fetches him back. What's up? Tell me, please, please. You get on my nerves, stupid cows. I have other concerns, at a different level, the level I live at. You bore me rigid. Please, please come and sit down again, Rainer. You lot don't understand anything at all, how can anyone take action together with people like that, they'll run away from everything because they're cowardly mediocrities. Rainer wants the others to get their hands dirty on his behalf so that his can stay clean. Let the others take action for him. He'll keep clear. But he'll egg the others on. And he'll take his share of the money, he needs it to buy books. He sees himself as a spider in the background of their net. But he's going to go about things without the safety net of petty middle-class security. He will pull that net away from under the others' backsides so that they have to rely completely on each other and on him.

Rainer gapes at the cigarette butts, scraps of paper, red wine stains and crumpled paper handkerchiefs (and other, worse things) on the floor and waits for the inevitable nausea. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't. Right now, this very moment, nausea has seized hold of him at last, so that he drops the pen with which he was about to jot a line of a poem in his notebook, the ink squirts out, wasted. Now, was that nausea or wasn't it? No, on the whole it probably wasn't. The place looks as philistine as it always has done. You could hardly say that space looked even slightly heavier, thicker or more compact. But (like Sartre) he has realised that the past does not exist. And the bones of those who have died or been killed, even those who passed away in their beds, have an altogether independent existence of their own and are nothing but a little phosphate, calcium, salts, and water. Their faces are merely images in Rainer himself, fiction. At this moment he has a very strong sense of this. It is a loss. But he doesn't tell anyone that Jean-Paul Sartre had already sensed that loss in exactly the same way before him, he pretends the loss is his own.

Hans, who lost his father, is not thinking of phosphate, calcium, salts and suchlike, which is what his father is now, instead he is humming an Elvis hit, without the lyrics because they are in English, which Hans never got to grips with. Generally speaking, there are few things he has got to grips with. Though he'd be happy enough getting to grips with Sophie.

Another scene is the jazz club. Rainer wants the others to commit crimes. When the musicians take a break he strolls over to the saxophone and tries out a few fingerings he thinks are right, though maybe he wouldn't produce a single note if he were to blow in it. All that counts is that the people who see him imagine he can play the saxophone. When the musicians return he hastily lays it down so no one will smash his gob in for damaging a musical instrument. Then he orders a raspberry soda, the cheapest drink there is (they haven't bagged a wallet yet!), and starts a poem (he'll write the beginning today and the end tomorrow). Nothing out there can distract him from it. It doesn't matter what she looks like. Even Sophie has to accept this. Though one isn't as severe in respect of her, because she is the woman one loves. Love is only a small component in Rainer's life, because he knows that Love can only ever be a small part, Art makes up the rest. In the poem, Rainer expresses contempt for all fat people, with their poncy flash rings, nothing but money-making in their heads. True, he's never seen people like that close up. Sophie's father is on the slim, wiry side, really. He is a sporty type too. Rainer would not care to despise the father of the woman he loves, so it's fine that he does not need to. He has the image of fat rings on white fingers from Expressionism, which has been forgiven and forgotten. He despises them all, day-tripper obesity, caryatids in tails, it wasn't for that that his mother pushed him out of her (so he writes and so he feels, intensely). But his mother would also protest at the thought of having pushed him out for these good-for-nothings in Cafe Sport and Cafe Hawelka. She did it so that he could have a decent education. Which he at present doesn't care a shit about.

Even in here, in the unvarying gloom, Rainer is wearing his fashionable diamond-shaped perspex sunglasses. His hair is combed right into his face. This is supposed to be a Caesar haircut, but he does not look as if he were from ancient Rome, he looks as if he's from modern Vienna, which is incessantly whispering that he should go on helping to rebuild his home town and make it more and more beautiful. This, however, he has no intention of doing. Vienna, the City of Flowers: a perennial favourite for school essay-writing competitions, Rainer has already won a prize twice, once he won a rubber plant, the second time a handsome fern which has already died because loving Mummy watered it to death, ferns tend to prefer it dry, as the nursery gardener confided to the young essay-writing competition winner. (He came third, but so did nine other high school pupils.) The advice was ignored. His school always participates in things of this kind and then shows off about it afterwards. All those flowers, springtime blossoms and others, burgeoning in every corner, on every square, are now decidedly improving the city's appearance, fresh greenery, replacing the foreign uniforms that vanished when the Treaty was signed. At last. Even the Russians, the worst of all, vanished too, though as a rule they do nothing of their own free will, they prefer forcing others, particularly women, to do inexpressibly awful things. They enjoy that. Now they're gone, and the Nazis, both the neos and the old guard, can come out of their grey nesting boxes into the daylight again, like flowers. Hail fellow, well met.

Oh and, while we're on the subject of blossoms and leaves, Rainer has only ever seen grammar school pupils among the other competition winners at the awards ceremonies in the Vienna schools board offices, which is because grammar school pupils can express themselves, they can write down what they feel when they see a tulip or a lilac bush. What they feel is Joy. And Hope for the Future. Even if someone else is capable of feeling Joy, it doesn't mean he can write it down, without making any mistakes, not by a long chalk. The language they speak isn't the language of high culture, it is the language of their own, which is not recognised. In Austrian usage there is a vast and gaping rift between these two linguistic levels, which comes from the inequality of Man. And will continue in perpetuity. Not Man, the inequality. All it takes is for one speaker to use the imperfect, and lo, the other no longer understands him. That is what happens to Hans with Rainer. Hans is awkward, Rainer is articulate.

Rainer's talent for writing was already recognised back then, now he is out to make it his definitive profession. In his case, his profession will also be his hobby, which is ideal. Many people claim that this is how things are with them. Usually that is untrue. If a plumber or a butcher claims his profession is also his hobby, it is undoubtedly untrue. Nor do you believe it if a tram driver or bricklayer claims as much. If a doctor says his hobby is healing and helping people, you're more inclined to give credence to the statement. Healing and helping can be both leisuretime pursuits and jobs at one and the same time. Hobby is a word that is rapidly gaining currency. The Yanks have gone, their language remains, hooray.

Reluctantly Rainer now notes that Hans, the jerk, is not his own tool at present but the jazz musicians'. Hans is zooming hither and thither, zealously folding up music stands, cramming double basses in canvas wraps, alternately closing and opening the piano depending on what he's told, wiping out trumpets, stacking the scores in piles and distributing them once again when he's given the order, picking up chairs and putting them down and scraping them along, undoing everything he's so carefully accomplished simply because one of them snaps that he's done something wrong, asking how long it takes to learn to play the flute, sax, trombone, bass, etc. Piano takes longest, no doubt, learning to play the piano is the best policy, like honesty, which this Rainer is about to make an end of. I'd like to do something like that some day too! Being able to play an instrument must be nice. Perhaps even nicer than being a gym teacher or an academic. In a minute, after the last number, 'Chattanooga Choo Choo,' he'll lug a whole lot of heavy things outside along with a crowd of other idiot volunteers, where another good-natured fool will let his car be misused for the transport of instruments, just to be part of it all for once, which is all that counts (see above) because winning isn't everything. A number of questions remain unanswered: Is it difficult? How long does learning to read music take? What is the correct way to tune a violin? Who do you approach if you seriously want to learn to play an instrument? I'll volunteer first thing in the morning. The things you like doing, you do voluntarily. Working on heavy current is something you have to do, though. That will have to be given up.

I can't stand it any more! explodes Rainer, breaking out of his thoughts and into Hans's. What he was just thinking was: I spit on you all! With your packed lunches and fat bellies. I am gigantic, I walk on the ceiling, you can all see me, clear as day, right, that's me! He snatches the clarinet case which eager Hans is about to help carry outside out of the lackey's paws and smashes it down on his head, it makes a roaring sound and the wind instrument inside it howls. Hey you, yells the musician in question, have you gone crazy?

The amateur clarinettist, a law student, does not understand the expression this prompts on Rainer's face (impenetrable, expressionless) and so ignores it. If he only knew what Rainer is thinking about him right now! Rainer is thinking: I'd like to rip your throat open with a meathook. The chemist's son has no idea that this is what he's thinking and thus has no occasion to be afraid, but Rainer is proud of having thought something so brutal. Soon it will be done, for real. At Rainer's table the plotting and planning is begun in earnest. I can't be saying everything four times, that goes for you too, Anna, though you know about it in rough outline. Being my sister. Sophie must know, since she is the woman I love, and Hans, seeing that he's the one who'll be doing the dirty work, will be put in the know as well, always assuming he can grasp what it's all about. Which is by no means certain. Are you coming, Anni, or aren't you? She is not coming yet because, perceiving a unique opportunity, she is casually trickling off Chopin's etude for the black keys at the piano, casually but a great deal of practice has to be put in at home if something like this is to result, and she's about to start on something from The Well-Tempered Clavier when the jazz pianist (a medical student) comes up: Kid, you're in the wrong groove, why not forget it and go on home to Mummy and keep up the practising, but not here, not in a cool joint like this. This isn't a music school, you come here when you've finished music school or you've taught yourself to play. But if there's anything else I can teach you, honey, I'll be glad to, stop by again when you've got some tits. With Annamother around, teaching yourself anything is quite out of the question, you have to have expert tutors, nothing else will do.

A cold shiver goes through Anna because she has discovered that possibly she is not quite perfect and has to go on developing further, a notion she rejects. She has already reached the finish and has nothing more to lose. The fact that there might be something else ahead of her drives her crazy, because as far as she's concerned she's done it all, and murderous feelings surge within her.

There must be nothing more to come, only absolute nothingness, where there are no moral standards, such as this student no doubt still has, even if he talks to a woman in a way that seems coarse. As she goes by she knocks a half-empty glass of beer and splosh, there go the contents all over the know-it-all young academic's brand new blue jeans, they'll have to be washed, which will mean a little more wear and tear, which will hurt the student's finances. Fine.

Rainer is going on at Sophie, who is sipping lemonade, she shouldn't gabble, she should listen, though she isn't saying anything anyway. What Hans thinks is that if she doesn't want to listen to him (to obey him), she ought to feel (him). But Sophie does not want to listen (or obey), she wants to see. She wants to see Hans lift the heaviest of heavy objects, and even heavier ones, with the greatest of ease. There isn't a single soft spot on his torso, though hopefully there are soft spots inside him. Rainer's torso, by contrast, has something of a chicken about it. A chicken that has been totally starved of sun and almost totally of feed for a long time. Still, he doesn't just cluck, that's true.

Hans flings himself into an armchair and describes in broad outline (the details are yet to come) his future music studies, which will enable him to give pleasure to people and help them relax and will make him successful. Down, boy, says Rainer. But he goes on to say how the old woman gets up his nose with her stupid envelopes and the work she did for the Party when she was young, that is why I want to get my distance from all that, maybe musically. Rainer says he'll hit him in the gob in a moment. In a low trawl, Sophie says: Leave him alone.

Anna: You could bore the pants off the Goethe memorial on the Ring, Hans.

Sophie: Don't be so arrogant.

Hans: See that, Anna? When a woman loves a man and she can't show it and doesn't want to show it either, she'll stand up for him in front of other people. In doing so, she realises what her own feelings are, in spite of herself. I've seen it in films, time and again. Anna zaps her hand between his legs, not a bad spot. Are you two at it again, breezes Sophie. Hans shoves away the unloved hand, which he nonetheless still needs from time to time, and is ashamed. Sophie is not supposed to know. Though she is supposed to suspect. And to want it herself. On the one hand, Anna now wants to punish him, and on the other she is afraid that he doesn't want to do it with her any more. Although she was good, no doubt about it.

Hans is my concern, defending him is no business of yours, he can defend himself and I'll tell him now. And anyway I don't give a toss (which is of course not true). Hans knows that a woman who stands up for a man in front of other people may often look as if she's doing it against her own will, but it is stronger than her will. Gentleness conquers toughness. The last impression in the world that Sophie gives is the impression of inner turmoil. She orders a rum and Coke. This is too expensive for the twins and they look away when the waiter comes, but the waiter is used to that kind of thing. Hans orders something even more expensive, his mother back home in her old kitchen chair would take leave of her senses if she had any notion of it. His secret overtime.

Anna says that the weak are defeated by the strong in the world of Nature. A reed by the north wind, for instance. And silence by the forest. Rainer: So this is going to be robbery and assault.

Hans: I'm not crazy. You don't know what you're all talking about. It's madness.

Rainer: Madness? Categories such as that do not exist- as far as I'm concerned, everything is healthy, except for fruit and vegetables. In art, too, madness comes in handy, in the art of the insane, and soon there will no doubt be artists who inflict wounds upon themselves, they will be the most modern of all modern artists. For example, you're injured and you go for a walk along the street and display your injury to a police inspector, calling it a work of art, he does not understand this, and the gulf between him and the artist (who is at one and the same time his own work of art) becomes immeasurable, never to be crossed. Submission to something you didn't preach yourself is no good, I quote. Because Man must burst his ridiculous bonds, which consist of what is supposedly current reality with a prospect of a future reality of scarcely any greater value. Quote: Each and every full minute bears within it the negation of centuries of lame, broken history. End of quote.

Bah, goes Hans, gurgling down a drink. That's one of the few jobs I wouldn't care for. Policeman or artist. Though maybe an instrumentalist. He will also see that the woman he loves (Sophie) is not exposed to disagreeable things, Beethoven and Mozart may be allowed once he's subjected them to close scrutiny.

Anna turns her listening apparatus windward because there was a heart-felt inflexion in the name Sophie that she did not care for. It is shitty that, in obedience to a natural law, you no longer like what you already have quite so much and instead strive after the unattainable, she herself would like to be the unattainable but Sophie has already picked that role for herself. Shit. For all she cares, Sophie can die. Sophie promptly notices, she raises her eyebrows.

Rainer says to Sophie, doesn't she think that of all of them Hans is the one who ought to want to be extraordinary most of all, because in the way he thinks he is the most ordinary. Don't you agree? Anna says that every sentence Hans utters comes out exactly how it's been uttered at least a thousand times by other people before. Is Anna at the helm or at the rudder in this love affair? We shall see. Perhaps we shall see in the next few fractions of a second because she is out to grope Hans's thighs again, where there is certain property she is interested in acquiring. But the thigh in question is removed, you don't do things like that in public, least of all with Sophie present, and so the hesitant loving female hand reaches smack into some old chewing gum that's been stuck there. It's sticky, and where Love has found its place, there Love sticks.

Hans is against violence on principle. You only believe this if the one who says it is physically very powerful and thus does not need to use force. He bought a book by Stefan Zweig, an important writer, and liked it a lot, but he'd still like to ask a thing or two about it, since it is literature of a more complex kind. Sophie, do you think you could give me some information about this book? Rainer says that Sophie might be able to answer his questions but he will do so himself because literature is his field, not Sophie's. Sophie's exclusive field is his own literature, she has to concentrate on that twenty-four hours a day. If Hans tries his hand at simpler stuff first, that's fine. Hans says that Stefan Zweig is one of the most difficult writers there are, though. Rainer says that the mental bonds linking him and Sophie are far stronger and more enduring than any physical bonds could ever be. Intellectual ties last your whole life long, physical ties last a week or so at most. At present I'm reading Camus's Outsider together with Sophie. The hero doesn't care about anything, just like me. He knows that nothing is of any importance and that all he can be sure of is the death that awaits him. You have to get to that stage, Hans, where you don't care about anything and nothing is important. At the moment everything still has to be important to you, so that you have a position to build on.

The assaults will be a powerful experience. Which one can subsequently discuss.

Hans wants to save Sophie from herself and be there for her. Sophie says she doesn't need him to be there for her. Rainer says he quite deliberately does without support of any kind, that's why he is so strong, because nothing bothers him. Hans says that getting ahead in his career does matter to him.

Anna: The best thing you can do is to imagine there's nobody else but you. Then you won't be judged by anyone's else's standards, only your own. That's how I do it, for instance.

And now the Annahand, sticky with chewing gum, wanders over for a third time, and Hans, flattered, lets it stay. The bird in the Annahand is worth two Sophies in the bush.

Rainer is pondering how to incite the others without getting his own fingers too dirty. First he'll need an elevated position to command an allround view, the view from the Hohe Warte is better than that from the Elisabeth Memorial in the Volksgarten. There are born leaders and there are the rest. He'd rather be the bellwether than the sacrificial lamb, that's for sure.


HANS POKES HIS head (born in the Burgenland) first to one side and then to the other, to see if there aren't any more beautiful women around whom he doesn't know. There aren't any, or if there are they don't want to get acquainted with him. You wait till I have my new pullover on, you'll all be doing an about-turn and chasing me. Hans knows. He winks at a black woman with a little brown guy so you'd think there was something wrong with his eye. But he sees perfectly well whenever some female beauty goes by. When one does, he thinks she is his. Every man would like to possess all the women in the world, but a woman only wants the man she loves and to whom she is faithful. Anna will presently be transporting Hans off, to be alone with him. She realises that this boy means something to her. Hans realises that with his fresh and carefree ways he means something to this girl, probably because he's been reading a lot of good books recently and she can accept him on that account. Anna represents practice for Sophie. Anna is fond of Hans because he has not read as many books as the others, he is more physical, she is all sensation, she doesn't know whether she's coming or going. The feelings of both are in turmoil, which is the hallmark of youngsters who have not yet discovered who they are and found their place in the modern economy. But Hans has had one of these places for a while now. The place in question is by a heavy current cable and he means to change it.

Out in the cool bright sunshine, which they will soon quit for the darkness of an unhealthy room, Hans wilfully kicks paper and other litter, tricking and dribbling past one or several players on the opposite team. Anna tries to waft along in a lively, supple way but the effect is tired, stiff and clumsy. Light is not Anna's domain, nor is Nature. Anna's domain is artificiality. Where she blossoms. But here there is only the light of Spring, dust, exhaust fumes and the Viennese air.

Hans discourses on Sophie's complexion, which is always healthily tanned, you can see she gets a lot of exercise in the fresh air. The wind and the sun have created that complexion. It is pure, and so is her blonde hair, which is silky, yours is often so greasy and straggly and drags on that thin bony trestle which you can hardly tell is meant to be shoulders. A clothed coat-hanger. But nevertheless kind of attractive. The very thing for a man with sporting talents who is about to discover his mental abilities. Don't you want to learn to play tennis too? You're sensuous enough to acquire a special feel for the ball. No, I'd rather practise the Berg sonata, which is a challenge for a young pianist. You'd be better off bergclimbing than bergsonating, ha ha. So you don't become too much of a smart-alick berk.

Thank God, the old folk are not at home. You have to be grateful for small mercies. Anna unbuttons Hans's shirt to see what is under it. Nothing new. The usual: a muscular, unhairy chest with beautiful, smooth skin, which you can get stuck into nicely. You can't wait today, baby, fine by me. Anna sinks her sharp vampire teeth into various parts of Hans. Ouch, says the latter, my lunchbreak's only short so let's forget the foreplay, you told me that's what it's called, let's shove it in straight away. It'll all be over soon. If he were with Sophie, he'd be in a flowery hay-scented meadow or on a warm beach beside a warm sea or in a ski hut covered with fleeces and fells, but as it is he's only beside Anna in a flat in an old building. Sophie is blonde, Anna is dark brunette, one-nil to Sophie. And that will be the final score too, one-nil to Sophie.

I want you so much, I want you so much, I like what you're doing, whispers Anna. You like that, don't you, Anni, hisses Hans between clenched teeth, oh and by the way, I'm about to come, you know, the readiness is all, I'm coming right now. Here I am!

Anna howls and coughs because she is having trouble getting her breath, Love has grabbed hold of her with terrible violence, Love always does that, it's a bad habit but Love can't kick it, it comes whether you want to or not. Anna doesn't want to but unfortunately she has to.

Anna points out to Hans that he won't find another woman with as broad a theoretical knowledge as her own in a hurry, there aren't so many like her anywhere and in Hans's circumscribed circle of acquaintances they must be even fewer and further between. No other woman would understand what she felt with you, but I understand it, that is my advantage, and that's is why I require gentle treatment, my sensibility suffers worse because of the world's wickedness than other women's. Love me, Hans, you will, won't you, please. A woman like me doesn't often ask for things but when she does you have to give her what she wants because it means she has swallowed her pride.

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