Wonderful Wonderful Times

I'm not tensed with anticipation any more and I have to get back to my place of work before they notice my absence.

Anna kisses Hans heartily. This makes a pretty loud smacking sound, which embarrasses Hans. He moves away from Anna and pulls on his work trousers and checked shirt. On the table are the second cheese sandwich and the bottle of beer you need to restore your energy. On the bed, the woman who will build you up even more. You have to love a man a lot if you'll let him eat a cheese sandwich beforehand. Anna loves Hans so much that she did not even notice the first cheese sandwich, just as a mother no longer notices her infant's shit.

Hans says he does not believe that that was Love, because Love is still ahead of him and looks more like Sophie and is Sophie. Long after his echoes have died away in the stairwell, Anna is still looking after him like a cow looking after an express train. She knows that Love looks like Hans, which is by no means an unattractive proposition but is still decidedly disagreeable. Because he has not realised what a gem she is and that she is the best woman he'll find, really she's too good for him in fact. Alas, he is in pursuit of faraway happiness, yet in reality happiness is so close. As close as the Good Things in Life are. But he must needs go a-roaming far away. Which is disagreeable for her. Though not for him.

SHAKEN BY THE wind, various trees tremble against the night sky. It looks as if they were being shaken by invisible iron clamps, but this scene of seeming disorder, which is in reality orderly, was created by a gardener, who put the trees together that way on purpose. They are creaking and squealing as if they were really for it now, but no one is doing anything to them, except the wind. After all, Sophie's garden affords them total protection from wanton damage by strangers. The impression they make is one of unconstraint and artistry, and that is precisely the impression Rainer wants to make too, crouched at the foot of a tree selected at random, maltreating the German language (as the German teacher puts it), though really his essays are of an unconventional type, slapping the rules in the face. Apart from his sister, the only person who understands this is Sophie, and no one else. He beats savagely at a blue spruce, repeatedly, because he cannot think of a certain word, it's on the tip of his tongue but it just won't come to him, but then, just as he's hitting the innocent spruce for the fifth time, suddenly there it is, the word is Death, of course, and it enfolds him in its gloom. He is forever having to think about death. He makes the appropriate face. In French, Death is a woman and appears in Cocteau; in German, Death is a man and appears in his own work. A poem is in the course of composition. Composition is a tormenting business and frequently goes unfinished because the poet gives up, discouraged. He has precious little patience for the business, because the making of a poem involves torment and unfortunately takes time, which the artist generally does not have because after all he has more to create than simply the one poem and has to be constantly roaring on ahead. Sophie does not roar like the wind, she glides like the blade of an ice-skate across a mirror of ice. This ground is her own ground, her own territory, and she needs no particular grounds to walk there, the ground is covered with an English-style lawn and sprinkled with pedigree flowers and water from a sprinkler. A white mirage materialises out of nothing and turns out to be she herself and (Rainer hopes) will not return to that nothing in too much of a hurry because he needs her for inspiration. He is stuck at the part where Death places the sailor's cap on the face of the dead child in the pond. This is reminiscent of Trakl, though only slightly. He tries being brutal, to conceal the tenderness he feels towards her, and orders her to sit down on her own lawn. This is something that she would normally say to him, usually the person who extends the invitation is the owner. But she sits down nonetheless.

A party is going on in the house, guests in gossamer dresses and brocade dresses and dinner suits making conversation. They are managerial people and they manage a great deal, as the word implies. Occasionally they can take a joke. What they manage is golf, or riding in the Krieau. The feeble sounds of a foxtrot can just about be made out, the women's pastel patches of colour glide to and fro to the music. Sometimes they flit, sometimes they shove and scoop like excavators and thrust everything aside, servants with trays flee for safety; if the servants are honest and hardworking their positions in this household will be permanent and secure. The dresses are wonderful and looking on is a treat, even if only from a distance, which is where Rainer is at present, he says he wouldn't go inside if you paid him, because if you're outside you have a better grasp of social structures, since you can see more of the overall picture. Structures of this kind have no place in literature, however, because they already exist and do not need to be invented, which is the exclusive task of poetry. The patches of colour lapped by the heads of their wearers surface like vast patches of colour (that is all they can be perceived as) from some crystal depth, jewellery glittering like the foam on waves. Rainer looks on, gaping, from his position, not of course in the street but in the grounds. Even that position is relatively unnatural, because this person is mostly to be found in interiors, carefully screened from the street and what goes on there. What Rainer's interested in is the raffish style of that girl's room of Sophie's, not the riff-raff in the streets. When I say girl I mean girl, because you are not a woman yet, Sophie, but it will be unbelievably more marvellous once you finally are one, once I've made you one. It will be an explosion, but without any of the fouling that usually goes on among human beings, alas, if the man is a jerk and the woman none too beautiful.

It has never occurred to Sophie that you can do anything else with bodies but sport, the thought has never entered her head, never struck her. There may be something apart from what I'm familiar with, something different, but what could it be? I can't for the life of me find out what it is, but it can't be necessary since I don't miss it, don't feel I'm going without something, so it won't be done, either. Although she often does do what is unnecessary. She has framed photos hung on the walls of her room: Sophie aged three, aged four, wearing beautiful tasteful dresses, on a private estate or outside one of those giant showcase hotels in St Moritz. The effect is terrifically aesthetic and she likes looking at those pictures since they emanate a certain harmony she has somehow lost, she doesn't know where, but she isn't looking for it because recently she has felt a slight need for dirt, which is the very opposite. Dirt in a grand style. Because everything Sophie does is stylish. Nothing by halves. Little piggy Rainer, by contrast, merely turns out paltry rubbish, which he then even proceeds to destroy by talking about it incessantly till every last scrap of muck has been transformed into gold, whereupon it can be slung out, garbage. Once it's gold it's no use to anyone. Why not wallow up to the hilt and deliberately forgo the transformation into literature? It is enough if you yourself know it's shit, does everyone else have to know too? Perhaps the act of describing muck means more to Rainer than the muck itself? How squalid.

Sophie's mother materialises, from out of a huge inherited fortune, in front of the huge iron gateway. Sophie's mother arises from out of the ground like a candle flame suddenly lighted, a crowd of people immediately fall upon her, scratching with their feeble claws at the portals of her capital, but they are given no reply, this crowd, and have to slink off with nothing accomplished. But she doesn't simply do nothing whatsoever, this mother, as you might expect, she is also a first-rate scientist and extremely beautiful, she gets her fulfilment out of the things she does, some people do more and others do less, she emphatically does more. Merely being at home isn't enough, you have to be a scientist too. It is like a picture by Klimt being pulled along by an express train, out of the darkness into the light. Her pale blue silhouette is by no means conceived as a memorial to all those who kicked the bucket in her very own steelworks in the Nazi period, it is intended as a beautiful sight for unprejudiced eyes; even if you have reservations, you still have to recognise beauty as such when you come across it, irrespective of the person. She tells Sophie to go indoors so that she does not catch cold, in any case some guests want to see her. Your friend can help himself to some of the homemade raspberry ice cream in the kitchen, it doesn't matter if he stuffs himself, there's plenty. You can't buy my love, Mama. Promptly Mummy goes indoors, hissing, flings herself on the bed and succumbs to a fit of hysterics, screaming like an animal in its death throes, sundry people are unable to calm her down and a professor of medicine who is present accordingly gives her a sedative. She couldn't care less about her guests, she'll kill herself here and now if her one and only daughter doesn't love her. Her husband is spat at and thrown out when he asks how she is, he comes from a relatively poor family and took a course in mechanical engineering, which involved his parents making considerable sacrifices. But those sacrifices have been forgotten, so have the parents, only the sobbing wife is still there.

Sophie drops a curtsy and swirls her white tulle frock like a peacock's tail. The tulle crackles softly, like burning wood shavings. In the slightest of breezes it lifts a little, because it offers the breeze quite a purchase, which is something Sophie never does at other times. When the material rises, Sophie's slender legs are revealed in wispy stockings, which appear all the more expensive once you pause to reflect how easily they ladder. To be thinking of how long things last when confronted with this pearly sheen is pure perversion, and Rainer makes a great effort not to think the thought, he's quite sufficiently occupied in thinking how short-lived his poetry is. This occasions him little pleasure, since many generations to come are supposed to read these poems attentively. But perhaps they never will. Because they will be unacquainted with the poems. Thoughtfully (let's hope that at least Sophie is thinking of those poems, but no, plainly she isn't) Sophie picks a tiny pointed twig up from the floor and rips a hole in the nylon with it, she widens the hole and zap, away the ladders run, these stockings are so fine that you very nearly can't see it but you know that where there was nylon previously there is now nothing, it's been ruined. It's disintegrating. Her hair has that gloss because of the one hundred brush-strokes. These are as important in caring for it as butter is on bread, always supposing you don't have to use margarine in private. Sophie has totally wrecked her right stocking, can I get in first and beg a pair for Anna, thinks Rainer, if she's doing wanton and irreparable damage, better not, whatever you do don't ask for things. I'm going in again now; after all, Mama's out of action for the rest of the evening yet again. If they want to hear one of my poems (Sophie writes them too, though without much enthusiasm) I shall read them some dirty passage of de Sade or Bataille in French, it won't shock them but it will amuse them. Not like Schwarzenfels recently, who blasted off at the people he was playing with at the Club, in a really common way, and broke a lot of glasses. He leapt onto the table in full uniform so everything clattered and crashed. People put up with it, though it was poor style, Schwarzenfels is an enfant terrible and there's nothing to be done about it. He gets drunk and becomes abusive. Simple-minded. He's a pig. He drives a Porsche, which Rainer would dearly like, though he wouldn't want the owner's intelligence, which is low.

But then, Rainer does not manifest much more brain now, either, in trying to shove his unwashed head between Sophie's legs. The attempt fails. A hasty sidestep on the part of the girl, who has already been standing again for some time, means that he smashes his head against the trunk of the unsuspecting spruce; this was partly intentional and as a result the bang is louder than necessary. I love you, Sophie, by which I mean that everything but you is of no interest to me, once and for all. It is for you alone that my facial muscles now twitch in such pain. But the pain was only foreplay, now I'm going to kiss you violently, which will be the climax. Since you happen to be soft, Sophie, it is good if I'm hard, because opposites are attracted. Our mutual attraction is powerful and we cannot do anything about it. A renewed gust of wind sets the clump of birches complaining bitterly and the two willows groan as well, at a nicely-judged interval. A bird, disturbed in its nighttime repose, flaps up, squawking. You don't get any peace in a public park as it is, and now there's no peace here either. The moon, low down, races like a lunatic across the sky, but in reality it's only the clouds that are racing. Rainer sizes the moon up critically and says something about it, it has to be an image that has never occurred to anyone else before, otherwise you might as well just say that the moon is like a silver disc in the sky or something of the kind. Sophie says that love's ecstasy is no more than ambition satisfied (Musil). Rainer says that the only ambition he has is in Art, but there he is very ambitious, in Life he is through with everything, his life is ruined because he is outside society and social norms. His love is wholly free of anything but love. He parts the cleavage of Sophie's dress and contemplates a breast, then realises that he is standing in the wet grass, alas, and tomorrow he'll doubtless have caught a cold. The soles of his American slip-on shoes have been padded with cardboard lids rather too often, and the cardboard has a short life, it becomes sodden; the lid on Rainer's desires has just as short a life, he's greedy and the lid is constantly lifting to let off steam.

Sophie tugs her cleavage back into place, to cover what it's supposed to cover, and shoves away the weirdo's hand. Because it was greedy, he won't be getting what he's after. She repeats that if Rainer's material circumstances were different he would not have to be an artist, Art is the only thing which still has a certain value for people in spite of being immaterial. This definition is rejected by Rainer, because he doesn't give a shit about people, he produces his art for himself only, if anyone else cares to take an interest, fine! Maybe one day he'll even be in print, he'll have a publisher! He buries his head in Sophie's stomach, which is flat and very warm, without pebbles inside; if one of her arrogant friends is watching, he'll envy him, because that lot can't do things like this. For one moment, Time stands still for man and woman alike, it is a good moment, because usually Time makes everything worse, poor people grow old, rich people can buy a little time but they can't hold it up for good, it always catches up with them. In the last analysis, Time is democratic, which Rainer is not. Because Rainer despises the masses. That is why he clearly towers above them. In Sophie's hollow he feels like a young animal failing to find any more to eat at the mother's belly and unfortunately having to go out into hostile Nature to look for grub. Later on it will perhaps have to provide milk itself, unless some miracle spares it the business of reproduction. Rainer is afraid of the future and afraid of growing older. Sophie really has to go now, which is something she frequently says, as we know. He gives her the appropriate reply, so that you can see her struggling with her feelings for him, and failing. She really ought to use her energies to smash in the faces of the good citizens within. He runs his hands up her legs until the aforesaid legs come to an end and his hands come to an end too because unfortunately they are shoved away. Some anarchist, only out for revenge (Sophie). No, I don't want revenge at all, why should I, I'm after whatever is meaningless as a matter of principle. De Sade said that wherever human rights are evenly distributed and any man can avenge the injustices he has suffered, there will be no great despots. They would be silenced instantly. It is only the vast quantity of laws that prompts crime (Rainer). The laws we have, and all laws like them, do not apply to me, they only apply to those who need to be led. I tend to the leadership side of things and in future, for instance, I plan to lead you as well, my dear. I have enough hatred in me for two. Who is the second person your hatred will do for? But I don't need hatred, see, I can create it without any purpose at all. I can't think what I'm supposed to hate.

Up top, Rainer has pushed the dress aside yet again and bites Sophie's right tit, which is tiny and pale pink like a child's, there is a little yell like one of the countless birdcalls you hear around here. But the yell promptly lapses into silence again. Ouch, it went.

You're nuts. I think I'd best cool you off a bit. I'll go fetch your ice cream in a moment, I'll fetch it right away.

The lawn rises to meet Rainer, this comes of his nausea, the nausea comes of his aggression, the aggression comes of his desire for Sophie, the desire for Sophie is caused by the fact that she is such a pretty girl. Reality slops across Rainer as if the swimming pool were being emptied on him. Underneath, he is in absolutely black wetness, which can penetrate at every opening, even though you desperately try to plug them. When he finds himself being licked he looks up but licking him is only Sophie's pointer Selma, named after the writer Selma Lagerlof, one of Sophie's early literary experiences, but one who has no merit since at that time she didn't yet know Rainer. Rainer hugs the unfeeling animal, which snuggles up to him. At times animals are better than human beings and you can learn from them. You can learn tenderness and how to show affection, for example. Sophie lacks both qualities. Rainer takes his ice cream from the servant's hand and trots off, long since deserted by Sophie and more recently by Selma too, who races wildly off across the lawns, taking high-spirited leaps with her well-groomed legs (she is not on duty at present), chasing an imaginary quarry. And Rainer plunges into the darkness in pursuit of an opponent that is very real, probably it is Rainer himself because after puberty the young male is his own worst enemy, or so he is informed. This comes from his seething hormones. He opens the gate of the grounds and enters a part that becomes poorer the further he goes. His figure becomes smaller, not because it is growing more distant but because it can't help being scaled down by its surroundings. Just now in the grounds he was still somebody, now he is a nobody on a tram. To experience this is dreadful because it implies the danger of vanishing altogether. The darkness swallows up the railings of the estate as if they had never existed. The estate is gone, Rainer is still there, but elsewhere.

Behind him, all the light disappears, it is called Sophie and never stays for long. Rainer, however, always has to stay where he happens to be, because he cannot change the way he is. In this respect, for once, he resembles other people, who cannot change the way they are either.

NOW THAT I have seen larger rooms, small rooms likethis one seem even smaller to me. And they really are small, says a petulant Hans, and angrily he kicks at the council flat which can't help its size and is humane nonetheless since it has everything that is essential in life. Which isn't much. Because mankind can get by with very little if need be. And so the flat does not have much to offer.

There is a wind blowing here as well, but it is a city wind laden with dirt and dust from building sites where the last of the ruins are being cleared in order to make Vienna even more beautiful. Gentle light passes through, from which you can tell that the gentleness of springtime has arrived early. The light is typical of this old quarter of Vienna, it leaves nothing unregarded, though neither does it reveal anything especially worthy of regard. The air is dry, splinters of glass, insects and 'flu bugs are to be found in it for brief spells. Girls with bobbing stiffened skirts and pony-tails sail by, their basic characteristic is youth, which they will shortly lose. They enjoy dancing and music, one floor higher dwells the pleasure they take in their future job prospects. They will be able to choose a profession because the economic boom is on, though it needn't necessarily shift you a floor higher. It might just as well fall on top of you.

Hans has a memory of the years of his youth. It goes like this. For five schillings you can sit in the first or second row of the stalls at the Albert cinema and see for yourself what the economic boom looks like, the boom you're on the brink of joining, though for the time being it's just for other people and you only look at it from the outside. It wears fetching tailored suits over corsets, or dirndl dresses with plunging necklines, and kisses Rudolf Prack or Adrian Hoven or Karlheinz Bohm. Everything is better now, or if it isn't better yet it soon will be. 1937: Managers 100, Workers 100. 1949: Managers 115, Workers 85. If it's a man, he kisses Marianne Hold or dear jolly Conny, who is to a younger person's taste. Sometimes he sings while he's about it. He often does so, in fact! What he sings is a little hit tune and his name is Peter Kraus. Often there are comical mix ups and you roar with laughter and it turns out that Christian Wolff is in fact the son of a company chairman, though he doesn't look it, his audience look like nothing at all and that's exactly what they are. Conny is saucy and promptly falls in love with him, when he still looks like nothing. This says something for her heart and character. Which are what counts. The slicked curls of the viewers bob in time like cocks' tails and are already looking forward to the moment when they will prove, under the caresses of girls' hands (those of trainee hairdressers or secretaries of the future), to be precisely what they in fact are: the slicked curls of apprentices and young employees. You shouldn't wish to appear to be more than you are, that is the message. At times the movie heroes even try to seem less than they are, on purpose. It is totally incomprehensible. Sometimes the girls' hands reach one storey lower to the pale tool that never gets to see the light of day, bathing trunks at most, but often it's tired from sitting around and simply won't be persuaded to stir. Sometimes it stands to attention instantly, but it pays no attention to the feelings of the person handling the tool. All it wants is to squirt off, then it's happy, and not into your hand, right.

And sometimes bumper-bosomed Edith Elmay turns out to be what she is: a factory owner's daughter, which you couldn't have told by looking at her. But the cinemagoer knows all along and enjoys the delicious mix-up situations where someone pulls someone else's leg, in the grip of a great love which is misunderstood at first but which will conquer all. We would never jeopardise a burgeoning love with misunderstandings, who knows when the next will come along, you're lucky if you find someone.

Many of the young cinemagoers (who see themselves as the hub of the action because the girl next door is the movie's heroine) are already dreaming of their own car or Vespa, their parents have barely had their war-damaged lives restored to them in good order, have barely had time to get somewhere in their dull, confined, timorous ways. Do those lives still work or have they gone rusty? They can't have gone rusty because the parents keep on working and working, they have to rebuild the Fatherland. Egoistic wishes have to be stifled, the only wishes that can venture out into the open are those for new vacuum cleaners, fridges or radiograms, thus keeping trade and exchange going. Trade certainly keeps going, but nothing changes. Not so very long ago, a Socialist Party paper in Graz called for the liquidation of strike leaders, and thus choked off one particular change, soon the only sign of life there'll be will be advertising, at least it changes the street scene into one of brightness and colour.

Ruth Leuwerik kisses O. W. Fischer, weeping. Maria Schell kisses O. W. Fischer, weeping. Weeping, a mother's heart considers the Sunday pot-roast which its negligence has let burn. Meat is dear and something of a luxury. The Alps jostle into the picture with ever greater frequency, and folk music makes itself heard. Twins populate the Wachau or the Dachstein, singing incessantly, till every one of them gets the husband that suits her and retires into private life with him. Their viewers are disturbed at the thought that these glossy people have any private life at all, just like themselves, if they lose it they won't get another. The main thing in that private life of yours is your health. You have to do as much as you can to provide content in that private life, which some seek in a villa at the Wolfgangsee and others in a council flat or a caravan, what counts is having the will. But not even the blonde long-legged Kessler twins have two lives at their disposal, that is to say, of course they do have two but each of them only has one. Peter Weck drives up in a new sports convertible and presently drives away again, but before he was on his own and now the enchanting Corny Collins with the dimples in her cheeks is sitting beside him, snuggling up and bubbling over with charm. For the next few hours she will not leave him, probably she never will. Nor would any other woman in her position do so, because it takes so long to find True Love and once you've found it you mustn't let it get away again. The girls in the cinema wouldn't let it either. They always stay as long as possible, and if they are uncouthly sent packing they shed lovesick tears, as Maria Schell has often done. Now and then some adolescent creates an unpleasant disturbance, puking beer and hitting people, then he goes home and is thrashed, to balance things up and restore the immutable order. Along the way, a lot of people hurl abuse at him, especially on account of his unclean leather clothing, which he likes so much precisely because it is dirty and which he saved up a long time to buy. He knows he won't get a Corny Collins anyway because the latter already belongs to Peter Weck, but he tries hard. Heinz Conrads, the local star, now somewhat advanced in years, also kisses a lass at last, he is more of an elderly person's star because he has human qualities, the unimportant elderly people who no longer play any part in the production process can make do with a native star, no special guest star need be imported from abroad. He provides the proof that the older generation have values whereas the young generation go by appearances. Youngsters spit on the elderly and their ideas, but a year or so later they haul out the same ideas themselves because they themselves are older now and have settled down. Hans is also a little older now, but he simply won't settle down. Then they even buy a flat of their own, if they can afford it.

The sun sets, as it so often has done before, and Maria Andergast sings a duet with somebody I've forgotten, it couldn't have been Attila (Paul) Horbiger, could it? Peter Alexander sings a duet with Caterina Valente. Caterina sings a grotesque duet with Silvio Francesco, who is her own brother in real life, and pulls a face so that you can tell what high spirits she's in again today, such high spirits she can scarcely believe it herself. Lolita sings about a sailor and then does a duet with Vico, who likewise pulls faces so you think any moment the rest of his face is going to fall off, leaving only his teeth. The sailor abandons his dreams and the travel agencies boost their turnover in dreams. Vico rolls his eyes so you can see the whites, he's so happy, it's as if he were having an epileptic fit. If he goes on like that, they'll have to wedge a piece of wood between his lips and secure his tongue so that the talented Swiss singer doesn't choke. Otherwise his great future will be prematurely ended. Young bambis pole timidly across the screen, their long baby legs are so sweet, and presently they're scooped up from the ground and squeezed to a corseted bust so that their tongues pop out and their eyes roll. There isn't a starlet alive who can leave a bambi, which is a creature of the forest, on the ground where it is. Because they love it very very much indeed, this little fawn standing merrily by the fringe of the forest. The person picking it up is Waltraud Haas, Haasi, playing a blonde orphan who finds a good master in the priest of Kirchfeld. She is on the brink of being led astray but she runs away. The young salesgirls in the cinema squeeze their thighs together, weeping, so that the groping lathe operator or welder hands are jammed in tight with no room to manoeuvre. The hands want to get in, but all they get into is the bag of popcorn, a recent American invention which is overflowing with sheer abundance because there's a lot in the bag. The oft-practised boob-grope is nipped in the bud this time round because Conny, that cute little Marianne, has an exam to take at the conservatoire. Watching her, they sweat the sweat of leisure, which is pleasanter than the sweat of labour because it is sweated on a voluntary basis. She (Conny) has been trained to play serious classical music, true, but she prefers singing lively hit songs in a night club, where the director of the conservatoire tracks her down, but he has to laugh (heartily) at his very best pupil's transgression, she will soon be marrying a rich young man, even though at present she's still putting up resistance. At times, Conny groans out loud in this film, which isn't normally in character since she is of a carefree, cheerful nature, as Youth should be (the serious side of life makes its appearance quite soon enough), but lovesickness even gives her a hard time, it's hard to believe. But you know her worries will soon be over. Bibi Johns and Peter Alexander sing a duet of love, jazz and fantasy, they want a house by the sea so blue with a garden I'll be true to you. Ernsti, alas, comes home later and later, he wants a VH, he'd be better off getting married. In the end the four lasses from the Wachau are married off too. Not to Wachau lads, though, they'll be marrying city boys, let's hope the latter don't think in too materialistic terms (as people in the city often do), they ought to have picked a country boy who knows what values are and where you get them: Nature.

The envelope-addressing Hansmother butts in on the pot-pourri of her son's thoughts because she would like to improve his mental ability. She fails in the attempt, because all he listens to is rock'n'roll, which his friend Rainer frequently explains to him. Rainer will have a Campari and soda before him at such times and he will explain how modern music achieves its effects, Hans would rather let it go ahead and achieve its effects but Rainer's blather prevents this. Rainer has already lied, too, claiming to know a musician personally, which wasn't true. He doesn't know any musicians at all and is only bragging. This Rainer often supplies interminable overall views of subjects that are of no interest to anyone. And now Mother also supplies an overall view so that her son will be far-sighted, all in vain. Today as always it is a history lesson, Hans has had as much as he can take of that. Mother opens a book and reads in a dispassionate tone: On Friday 6. 10. 1950 the schilling was devalued, from 14 to 21.60 to the dollar. Allegedly this showed that the wage and price agreement of that year, which supposedly compensated fully for the increase in prices, was a con intended to deceive the people. (So what. All that matters is having the schillings in your pocket at Cafe Hawelka or the Picasso Bar.) Mummy reports that many social democratic union officials left the old party they loved so dearly because they couldn't stand the united front that had been formed with the reactionary volkspartei against the struggling workers. The emotional burden was too great. If you're a socialist and a socialist union secretary calls you a bastard, you have to leave the party. Mother goes on and on like this in her boring way, working as if she were being paid for it, which she is. She needs the money. She would rather do something more interesting but she is too old. Because the future belongs to the young workers and so does the present. And in the past, too, young people were permitted to bite the dust first. Youth is never passed over. It is always up front. When the old has become unbearable you have to start something new. Hans finds his old life unbearable and wants to start a new one. If your marriage has become unbearable and you can't take it any more, you have to get out, thinks Hans, who saw this in an American film where there were problems. Mostly he prefers German films, though, not because he wants to support the homegrown product but because they are not so full of problems. With James Dean everything goes so fast and often you don't get what's going on, you've hardly understood one problem but the next has reared its head. It's better to break things off, a short sharp cut that may well be very painful, than to endure everlasting torment. Hans thinks of Anna and her cunt and that the old must give way to the new, usually something better is already waiting, otherwise you could just as well stick with the old, which in fact you chuck for the sake of what's new and better. What counts is choosing the right moment and the right place to make the break. You have to follow your heart, which in any case always tells you what you already want. Hans's heart says Sophie out loud and jumps, and four-metres-plus further on it lands in the sand, well done! Hans has private problems, his mother has public problems which are uninteresting because they produce no apparent profit and only waste time. Work wastes time too, to be exact: the time it takes to do it, but then you have money to take home, and with that money you get on the trail of quality, if you have a nose for it. Hans is beginning to understand his feelings for Sophie. In films this often takes a long time but then it can suddenly go very quickly and acquire powerful momentum.

Sophie alias Vera Tschechowa alias Karin Baal are so cool and classy, they commit trivial and serious crimes, walking the wet streets, for the sake of a man, which is the wrong way. When Hans says: Stop, choose another way, not the path of dishonesty, they consent and on the next day they are already off with him to do something better with their lives than committing crimes. Hans has made them do this because he loves them. A valiant social worker lends his assistance, which in this case Hans will not even need because he has enough willpower for several people. From time to time someone will be shot and will lie dead on the cobbles. You have to avoid things reaching the point where a gun is drawn, you have to see about changing course before it's reached. Crime is not essential to happiness and a career. In fact it rules them out, totally. To forge a career, you have to inspire trust. Hans has taken this first step, because Sophie trusts him. He will take the second shortly. At times Rainer boasts about a pistol that supposedly belongs to his father but which he can borrow whenever he wants, which is bragging too, they all know Rainer's talk. But then, his father does occasionally let him drive the car though he doesn't have a licence, that much is true, Hans has seen it for himself. This may come to a bad end, to be exact: the death or injury or imprisonment of Rainer.

Karin Baal dashes out into the headlights of a car. Hans dashes after Sophie, catches up with her, flings her to the ground, and makes it clear that honesty is the best policy. She believes this right away. Vera Tschechowa's raincoat is snazzy, the material is shiny, a man could wear that too.

Mother asks Hans to fetch her the soup she's been warming up on the stove. She has put one foot up because it is hurting. She is scattering paper all around her: On Tuesday 26. 9. 1950 strikes began at almost 200 firms in Vienna. 8,000 demonstrators advance as far as the Ballhausplatz, which has been sealed off by the police, and hold a rally outside the federal chancellery.

Wednesday 27. 9: In Vienna, Linz, Steyr and other industrial towns, but particularly in Wiener Neustadt and St Polten, there are vast rallies and protest marches. It is the climax of the strike.

Hans fetches the soup and, unnoticed, spits a thick gobbet of phlegm into it, stirs it in, and hands the soup to his mother as if he hadn't spat in it at all.

On Saturday 30. 9. 50 the all-Austria congress of factory committees convenes in the assembly shop of the Floridsdorf locomotive works. 2,417 delegates take part, at least 90% of them members of factory committees. The congress makes the following demands: 1. The price increases to be cancelled. 2. No devaluation of the schilling. In response, the government calls for the defence of Liberty, which is being endangered by the worker's rash and ill-considered actions, they mustn't be intimidated by violent criminals, in other words: Communists. They also call upon the workers to dismantle the street barricades and expel any high-handed outsiders who may have infiltrated their factories, because this strike is allegedly out to destroy the basis of the workers' Future: all-round prosperity, which (as is well known) the workers get the lion's share of, though all in all they haven't deserved it. Mother goes on reciting yet more of this text.

But Hans gets up and goes out. As he goes, pretending to do it accidentally, he sweeps a high stack of newspapers and books off this educated working class household's kitchen table onto the floor. Without picking up the mess he has made, he goes out in a hurry.

THOUGH RAINER DOESN'T have a driving licence yet, his father occasionally lets him use his car, which they have trouble paying for. Father only has capital principles, no principal capital, and he has already been convicted once of faking bankruptcy. He has difficulty accepting his unstoppable decline. The tiniest speck of flyshit will give him new hope. But everything will be fine if his son, a minor without a licence, drives. The car's the main thing. Which is Rainer's view of the matter too. But mostly he is only allowed to drive when he's taking his father somewhere, very seldom on his own. The cripple squeezes in and out of the car as if he were doing bar exercises, a complex and wearing process that gets a man quite out of breath. Today is one of those days when he suddenly decides to drive out to Zwettl in the woods. It's nice out there. Hardly has he taken the decision but he's whipping his wife Gretl in the bedroom, where man and wife can be intimate. The whip is one of his numerous souvenirs of the old days. One of the others is a bayonet. All the son and daughter hear of Mother is a low moan, but that is enough to tell them that she is being beaten again for her marital sins, particularly infidelity. You whore, you whore, the moment my back's turned you're in bed with another man. And this other man is the businessman downstairs that I've been keeping an eye on. I won't put up with these goings-on for long, though. But Otti, you're wrong, I don't go to bed with any man but you, that's enough for me. You only live for those moments you can be with that impotent good-for-nothing! No, I don't live for those moments, I live for my children and their education, that's all. See, you admit it. What did I admit, Otti? At any rate, I'm going to give you a thrashing to remember now, so you never do it again, and if you didn't do it I'm going to thrash you so that you don't think of doing it. But I didn't do it, not at all, please don't hit me, Otti, ow! That was the ow the siblings overheard.

Rainer says: Anni, we've got to do something about that old bastard. But Anna says no what can we do anyway, let the old folk alone, let's worry about ourselves. But he's going to kill her. Let him, it'll be one less, and the other will be gone too, in gaol, where he'll die like a dog, all alone. We'd be free at last. But he's got the pistol. So what. He's far too much of a coward.

So Mother, having enjoyed no protection from her children, hurries bruised and worm-ridden into the kitchen to prepare the lavish Sunday breakfast. Anni wants to put in a lot of piano practice today and then go for a walk with Hans, Rainer on the other hand is to drive Father to Zwettl because Father wants to go there and work things out of his system physically. He'll try to be unfaithful to his wife but won't succeed, still, no harm in investing a clean shirt in the enterprise, just in case. He's always dressed up to the nines, is Papa. He will try to pick up women who are even younger than Mama, who is much younger than he is. He's adopted an elegant German accent for the purpose, to arouse interest. Come on, come on, let's be off, if we don't get started now we'll never get anywhere and I want to be off into the woods. You can be the chauffeur, son, because you're my boy, all I have apart from you is a daughter. Also you can play chess with Papa in the evenings, which Anna can't because she doesn't think logically. Unfortunately philosophic books by Kant, Hegel and Sartre have to be left behind when Papa wants to go out to the woods, no power on earth can do anything about this. If I come back and find you in bed with that businessman again, I'll murder you. I'm not yelling the way I usually do when I make the threat, Gretl, you've disregarded me often enough already, no, today I'm telling you coolly but incisively that I shall kill you with my Steyr-Kipplauf pistol, I am one hundred percent in the right. But Otti, no, for Christ's sake no, the businessman's happily married and the only contact I've had with him has been out shopping, but I always hurry and don't pause for any private talk. But you do pause to change your panties first, I've caught you there, haven't I? Only to be clean, and smell clean, when I go out, Otti. I don't have anyone but you and the children, I'm seeing to it that they get a good education at school because I come from a well-thought-of teacher's family.

Revolted, Anna goes to the piano, in quest of oblivion through sound, and she finds it too because music requires concentration. Father says it sounds horrible. But she is her mother's darling. Mother has a woman's feelings, as she does too… Mother pats Anna in passing, which makes her livid.

Thus Father and Son, one on this side and the other on that, one bored and the other labouring and heavy laden, clamber into the automobile, which can seat four (though today there are only two), and drive off on a north-bound freeway, into Nature, where there is a popular cafe for outings where you can make the acquaintance of ladies who are on their own at first but often leave accompanied. And already they are amidst gentle wooded slopes and meadows, and reservoirs burrow into the ground, a typical feature of this landscape, which borders closely on Czechoslovakia and where you can already sniff the harsh air of neighbouring Communism. The air is harsher because you're further north. Spring hasn't progressed as far here either. There is a smell of pine needles, like the spray you can buy, the houses are fewer and further between, the economy is depressed, as is proper in an economically depressed area. The voices of birds are uplifted in warning, watch out, don't have an accident, and deer appear on the horizon, only to disappear again promptly in their beloved natural heritage, revolted by the car exhaust fumes, which promise to become a problem if the cars increase in numbers. Nowadays, not everybody has one yet. It's a pity you have to put up with cars, seeing that Nature itself is so pure and uncontaminated, says Father. Cheerfully. As if he hadn't been threatening murder (just now).

Right now he is a poor thing and in the hands of his chauffeur son. You're my very own boy, she couldn't manage a second, couldn't Gretl. These men are always taking pornographic pictures of your mother, I'll show them to you some time, they're the filthiest things you've ever seen. If it weren't for the fact that strange men took the dirty stuff, I'd say the photos weren't altogether without artistic merit, but these other men are simply lecherous and that renders the effect null and void. Ugh.

The son grinds his jaws and says nothing, defending Mummy is pointless because Pop will only attack her all the more violently. He'll calm down. Rainer's knuckles stand out white on the wheel as if they were going to split through the skin. The only thing that helps is thinking of Sophie, whom he can't see today because of Papa and his wanderlust. One hopes she won't be giving any other young man the eye. They wanted to have a long talk about Camus, about his book on absurdity and obsession, but now they can't talk at all because the woods are beckoning seductively and asking: Where are you from? The city? Then this is the place you want, this is the place for country matters.

His son's silence turns Father nasty and he accuses him of incest, have you screwed your Mama too, when I was out slogging my guts out for all of you?

Stray villages make their appearance by the road and then fall behind again, with regrets because they haven't been chosen for lunch, because a different village has been chosen. In terms of quality, Zwettl is not much better, though it is bigger and situated by a reservoir. At last it appears and makes a good impression, one it frequently practises. It even has a monastery to offer, called Stift Zwettl, which they don't take a look round because you can't expect it of a war invalid. On Sundays the town is resting and jolliness is rampant. Father and son eat a good schnitzel with a cucumber side-salad and a beer each. They are shrouded in the rural earthiness of a real ethnic pub. Father is already flirting with a strapping dark-haired can't-be-more-than-mid-twenties at the next table, all on her own, he buys her a wedge of Sachercake with a particularly large dollop of cream and a glass of wine to go with it. A coffee to follow. The girl gives a high-pitched giggle. Eh, schones Fraulein, how about it, you and me (better than all alone!), even if I'm disabled, I can still stand on my own two feet, or one as the case may be, I'm still a man. Giggle giggle cackle. She comes over to Papa's table, Papa pays for a couple of liqueurs, a kiss with love, advocaat with raspberries and cream. They are expensive and taste terrible. Papa has already bought her that much. The son will be throwing up any moment. Father ruins the fat woman's bee-hive hair-do, grabbing the bird's nest, may I, hoho. You may, sir, heeheehee. The girl scrutinises the son, who looks the student type. The son fixedly scrutinises the synthetic curtains at the window with their enormous pattern. The invalid scrutinises what has been waiting for him and him alone beneath the dirndl skirt all these years. His hand shoves up to dark heights. Meanwhile his son is in those loftier altitudes where he composes poetry: Here you pitch and toss, pale scraps in the depths. I am the great relief, crying out for itself. My dwelling place is all the images of the day after tomorrow.

Father anchors his other hand in her cleavage, where things are full to turning, they'll be thrown out any second now, every one of them. But the landlord, who like Father fought in the War and was an illegal party member in the old days too, stops by in jovial mood with drinks on the house. Whenever Father is offered something free he doesn't say no. He is already a little merry and cracks a pretty naughty joke: is the lass old enough to go on the game yet, she's too stupid for it, that's for sure. Screech cackle cackle. Perhaps you could teach me a thing or two, sir. There's nothing you don't know, but if anyone can still teach you anything, it's me. Hawhawhawhaw. Heeheehee.

The jolly party breaks up, though not before the question whether the boy has done it yet has been asked, or hasn't he ever, is he allowed? Father proudly says yes and declares that he coached him himself. But Rainer never has done it, which only his sister is permitted to know, because his talk says the exact opposite. To hear him talk you'd think he'd already slept with any number of girls goodness knows how many times, only for Rainer to have to abandon them all too soon. These things are indicative of Rainer's minimal social adjustment. He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.

Books are where people get their lies. Better to have a son serving an apprenticeship than a lying son at grammar school.

Bye-bye waves the girlie's little mitt. Her name is Frieda and she works in a sugar refinery. All's foul that ends foully. I'd have laid her easy as pie, wouldn't have needed more than a finger and something else, drools Papa, and he shoves his hand down the top of his Sunday trousers, which are freshly pressed though they won't be for much longer. Inside the trousers he moves his busy fingers, which haven't done any real handiwork for a long while, the last time was during the War with intent to kill. Now they're doing the very opposite. Father strikes his member in order to cause an ejaculation. This will bring him relief after his good lunch and no doubt he will then fall silent and asleep. But right now he still feels the need to report on the quality of women's pussies, which are sometimes moist and wide-open and at other times dry and tight so that you have to expand them first. Listen carefully, my boy. Whatever else, he has to stand up straight, otherwise none of it's any use, like this fellow here, isn't he a splendid specimen? A red mushroom cap spies inquisitively out, perhaps it'll all hit the windscreen with a splash and have to be wiped off.

Rainer keeps his own puke down, it doesn't taste as good as before when the schnitzel was still intact and undigested. This wretch does all of this with my mother, he thinks. And she has to put up with it as a marital obligation. And I still want to do it with Sophie, though with her it'll all be completely different.

Father picks up speed and breathes deeply. At fairly regular intervals a beery belch or even one of those farts Rainer particularly dreads fills the old banger. Rainer steers the vehicle down minor roads towards the reservoir, Nature is coming menacingly close, opening wide a yawning chasm to drag him down. The green's growing dazzling and dangerous. So much green. Like a vast hollow made of spinach. Father's wrist is working away ambitiously, he undid the top button back at the pub and now undoes others. You have to have room to manoeuvre. Father is approaching his climax at top speed and his son the reservoir likewise. The reservoir lies deserted in the feeble afternoon warmth, it is still far too cold to go swimming, you can't do that till summer. Father gives his son a man-to-man look. The son does not return his gaze but stares straight ahead. Light is mirrored on a ruffled surface. The water murmurs in amazement: What, it's this cold and you want to come in? A pair of wild ducks lift off, flapping and spraying. Sauve qui peut, it's familiar enough and no one wants to die too if some jerk takes his own life. The trees rustle as one man.

Now we're both going to die together, horrible, thinks Rainer, putting his foot down, and instantly the engine, which is relatively feeble but still powerful enough, starts to roar. Have you gone crazy, boy? The water's surface beckons, keen to embrace them. At last something's happening for a change at this dreary time of year. It's very deep here because the water has been dammed up artificially. Nature cannot always come up with dangers of this kind on its own. The gravel on the shore squeals in agony. With a scream the springtime landscape swings round and waves a stop sign. Stop! No going past this point. Danger. Millions of tiny creatures are run over, their faint warnings fall silent. Somewhere or other a watchdog barks, it has no freedom and has never known what freedom is because it has always been on a chain. It doesn't pine for the unknown. A peasant with chickenfeed in her apron gawps at them. The juices are beginning to rise in the grass because it senses the approach of summer. The water's edge surges towards them to welcome them, well well, today of all days, and we were thinking nothing was going to happen. Air-borne creatures drone on, flying low, but cannot be heard above the noise of the car engine.

At the very last moment the patricide plus suicide is aborted. One is too much of a coward to put a premature end to one's own life, there is too much still ahead of one. Which is invariably a mistake, but you believe it anyway and that is what counts. Rainer sits on the shoreline, white as a ghost and trembling. He gets a clip round the ear and says: I only wanted to give you a fright, I knew exactly when to brake, I'm a good driver, Papa. Did I alarm you? And what if the brakes had failed, huh? Another blow, one to the right and one to the left. Dad practically wet himself, luckily he managed to hold back. But he's got to relieve himself, urgently, thanks to the beer. Rainer, still weak from his intent to kill, has to drag his beer-bloated Papa to the edge of the forest, where the latter wants to have a piss. By way of punishment and revenge he insists that the lad support him the whole time while he's about it and admire his prick. How big it is. And back there Rainer saw how big it was then. There, that's that.

They turn slowly and carefully (the cri-sis having been overcome for today) and drive back to the city. The woods protest, they'd have liked to see more of these two, they very nearly got to keep them altogether. But as it is Papa keeps Rainer and Rainer keeps Papa.

THE JORGER BATHS provide a strong contrast. In the first place a contrast to the woods, where Rainer was recently and where Man has not yet won the struggle against Nature- 'the dark green, mighty forest and tough grey granite have shaped the destiny of these parts, and the deep gorges and vast plateaux have a sparse, stern beauty all their own. The impressions of these dark, silent forests have borne fruit in many who have succeeded in penetrating the defences of that formidable beauty.' The parental flat, which the Jorger Baths also provide a contrast with, is totally different. There is no liberty there, no clear open spaces like in the woods. Instead, the walls are gradually becoming smothered in complete gloom. There is no blue sky to be seen, nor any mysterious dark lakes embedded anywhere. The gloom is located in countless washpowder packs, old suit-cases, crates and boxes, stacked up to the ceiling, which have absorbed the horror of an unimportant bourgeois household (far too small for four people) over the years and are now generously pouring the aforesaid horror back out over the adolescents. All you have to do is lift any lid, at random, and out wells the fug and does its fuggy job. Nothing is thrown away, everything has to be kept to mark its own filth and that of the owners. Yellowed articles of clothing, broken crockery, children's toys, sporting equipment, souvenirs of the remoter parts of the country, papers, heirlooms, sundry apparatus for various activities, and in among the lot the yellowed, broken lives of four people, two adults and two adolescents. Rainer wants to raise himself up to the light, no matter where, in a wide-open landscape or a brighter flat with no clutter, if possible, except for tubular steel and glass; but to reach the light he has to leave the house, because inside there isn't any. You can't even breathe in and out freely because even the air is in short supply. And young people need air especially in order to grow to their intended physical proportions. But you can create your own light if none is available. To this end, Rainer often tells the others at school that his father drives an E-type Jaguar and has often taken planes abroad, which is all lies. His father, for his part, claimed in front of witnesses that the well-known pop singer Freddy Quinn was his illegitimate son and that he had had to pay maintenance on his account for a long time. This is also untrue. No matter how often Rainer parrots the story, it still isn't the truth.

What is down at the bottom on those endless white tiles across which the light glides in shimmering streaks? Not the ultimate and universal Truth which the adolescent seeks in his spare time when he has nothing better to do. What is down there at the cool bottom is water. As is water's way, it makes a blue and transparent overall impression, which is only occasionally blurred when there are too many waves, which is sometimes the case with Truth, too. Everything conduces to smoothness. No trace of roughness can be felt. Sophie too conduces to smoothness, among people. The smoothness is deep at one end and far shallower at the other, which is intended for non-swimmers. The pool attendant's whistle is shrill. The springboard springs with a creak. Muted cries call out, you can't tell where they come from or where they're directed, in this vast, echoing hollow vessel you cannot pinpoint sound. High above is the glass cupola. Up there, that is where Rainer wants to be, looking down on the youngsters splashing each other, but where is he in fact? Down below. And alas, he is a poor swimmer.

But you have to conceal the fact that you're a poor swimmer, are afraid of water that's too deep, and therefore tend to stay in the shallow end. This doesn't suit the image of someone such as himself who is always going deep down into things. Here, he can't get deep down. He is out of his element, though most elements are his. Anna and Rainer go through a lot of motions intended to show that they are good swimmers. But they're not. Splashing and spraying a good deal, they fling themselves into the one metre-deep water where you can stand, and try to make it look dangerous. The green over there, the sheer mystery of four vertical metres of water, fills them with a horror that could not be any greater if they were able to look right inside themselves. The cleanliness is enjoyable, heightened by the intense stench of chlorine, which declares: I kill off every single one of the bacilli and germs in here. Unfortunately I have to leave stray sperm and urine to the filter. Nor can I penetrate under the skin to kill off the hatred and nausea felt by these young people. The water slops about within the ceramic bounds intended for it and cannot quit its confines. Just as you cannot quit your own skin. Lots of people are giggling, laughing, shouting, squealing and doing sporty things. Some of them take weirdly contorted dives onto innocent swimmers, others dolphin about elegantly and skilfully. Anna and Rainer are not of the latter party. For them, being expected to perform something they can't do better than everyone else is awful. So they pretend. But all too frequently they have to make way, either down below when someone slips through, eel-like, or up above when someone threatens to leap onto their heads. Make way for the ones that can do it properly, is the plucky swimmers' motto, and they swim pluckily, so that the twins necessarily get left behind, because their territory is the world of the book, which is not in demand here and has neither a seat nor a vote, only trained athletes are wanted: to be precise-expert swimmers. Which is unfair, because these values are in fact worth least of all. Physique also has a value here. Above and below. More up above in the case of women and down below in the case of men. Both are developed as you might expect, given the ages of these youngsters, that is to say: the twins are on the under-developed side. We are referring, of course, to Rainer's and Anna's primary and secondary sexual features, which are more in evidence here than beneath their everyday clothing. In both his case and hers they are on the stunted side.

As if in a hurricane they cling to each other, brother and sister, and spit venom at a muscular show-off who has no idea who Sartre and Camus are or where they live (France).

At the opposite end, the deep end, Sophie, much to Rainer's displeasure, does the crawl in an immaculate white bikini which conceals a good deal but, alas, still displays a fair amount which belongs to Rainer alone. Sophie swims with style, her hair is concealed by a bathing cap, and she practises without over-zealousness because if you're that good you don't need to be over-zealous. She is here on a purely private basis. Clearly she has completely forgotten Rainer's presence, in spite of the fact that that presence ought to be both a constant threat and a challenge, not to give of her sporting best but to work on their private relationship and improve it. Taut as a bow, her body slides out of and back into the cold green water, which is known as the watery element. If something tenses, people say it tenses like a bow, but Sophie tenses her body as only Sophie can and not any two-bit bow and arrow. A gleaming opened safety pin sticking into a plastic skin. Without leaving the slightest trace of a prick. Sophie merely pricks Rainer's heart and Anna's mind, because she is weightless, only her horse knows her true weight because it often has to bear it. But no one has ever heard Tertschi, the horse, groan beneath it either.

The cupola reverberates with the bellowing of a school class turning up for a swimming lesson. Rainer and Anna observe them secretly in order to learn something and then try it out when Sophie happens to be looking. But they are too cowardly and don't like getting their heads underwater because you are helpless there, it's difficult to breathe, and you may easily lose out to a better swimmer. They'd rather look on from above. A youth, a fitter or lathe operator to judge by his build, dives between Anna's legs, and she squawks loudly and vanishes altogether with a splash. Cautiously her brother reaches down into the water to rescue her. Sophie trouts up with a hiss to help, but Anna has already recovered. Rainer trembles lest Sophie now notice that he is not a good swimmer, but Sophie doesn't need to notice anything of the kind, she is simply enjoying the feeling a body affords you when it is getting on with the private business of being a body and nothing else. Then she bounces under the shower because she is in a hurry. Rainer and Anna follow, cheesy white. Sophie is svelte and lithe beneath the jet of water. Rainer deposits himself at her side in order to expound his love. He says among other things that the abstract notion of happiness should be equated with the abstract notion of love, and he emphasises it once again, particularly strongly, because he has already asserted it repeatedly. Love is happiness, happiness without love is just inconceivable. The tremor of real happiness will (supposedly) only pass through your agitated heart if you become aware of it, if you realise that somebody belongs entirely to you, that he loves you with every fibre of his heart, that he'll be true to you, come what may, and then, that's right, then you can say: I'm happy. To claim as much if you get a good grade for a piece of school work would be decidedly ridiculous. I don't understand a word you're saying, replies Sophie to these words from the heart, letting the water patter down everywhere to wash off the smell of chlorine. She twists like a serpent, twirling into the jet like a drill in a bikini. Only he who loves and is loved for his own sake can be happy, and what produces that happiness is not so much the sense of sexual communion as of two people being together, right, as he (Rainer) once had the honour of explaining to you (Sophie), the sexual act viewed as a whole probably affords less happiness than a totally ordinary kiss or often indeed one simple word from the one you love. Witkowski Jr. keeps the thought of the sexual act at a considerable distance but he would quite like an ordinary kiss, only he doesn't dare ask for one. The thought of the sexual act has never occurred to Sophie. Beneath the jet of water, her face is as remote as if there were a motorway between them. With heavy weekend traffic on it. All one wants is one tiny kiss and one doesn't even get that. Not long ago, Rainer cut some pin-up photos of girls out of magazines, but he removed the breasts and bodies with scissors and only accorded what was left, the faces, a place of honour on the door of his wardrobe.

A huge patch of light slops across the tiled wall, some stupid cretin is playing with a pocket mirror. The narrow footbridges, stairways and galleries shake and sway under the wet feet of swimmers. The brightness is unmerciful. Anna sits on the floor, holding both hands to her because she doesn't have a bosom. She is speechless, which she has occasionally been at irregular intervals. Once at school, when she was fourteen, she suddenly stopped talking. Because she was a good pupil she was granted special permission back then to give examination answers in writing. Nowadays she is better again, but today's is a particularly bad bout and she can't say a single thing. So Rainer does enough talking for two, and says how much he wants to have Sophie, later, much later when both of them are at last mature enough. Not yet, because you have to have patience. Later, though. The moment you set yourself up beyond human nature and perhaps even try to force happiness and love, in what they call an open marriage, it's guaranteed not to come, Sophie. The latter steps out from under the shower, spraying water as if she had been born in that element and grown up in it (a feeling you have with her in every environment, regardless of where it is, on the earth or in the air). She does not confront the problem but gives Rainer a brief slap on the shoulder and goes off to get dressed. Rainer follows her everywhere, hither and thither, thither and hither, which gets on her nerves, as if he couldn't simply go wherever he wanted of his own accord. She pats him once again, like an article of furniture or a puppy, get out of my way, it's my very own personal way which I've leased, go find your own way!

Rainer says that (as in Faust) work cannot make you happy, at best it will satisfy you. Work is a means a lover avails himself of, to take his mind off things and partially work off pent-up tensions. By way of explanation: I don't think I'm mistaken in saying that you have loved, or you do love now, or at least you will be capable of entering into the emotional life of a lover. Once you have done so, you will know, perceive, feel, sense that, for the moment of concentration, work can free you of the burden that oppresses and constricts your young heart. Whenever you are near to the loved one, you are overcome by a feeling of profound tranquillity, which then makes way for powerful agitation, so powerful that your hands turn white and begin to tremble slightly. That's exactly how things are with me. Rainer clings to the railing, which is there to prevent him from falling in, because he isn't a proficient swimmer. His knuckles are white yet again, as he quite rightly said just now. And thus you live in two states, two conditions, which are in constant alternation, and both of which are happiness. Water's state is fluid, Rainer's is semi-solid.

His sister crouches at his feet in a bad mood, saying nothing, asking no questions, but merely deciding in that deathly silence within her that she won't go swimming again in a hurry because water is not her element. Her element is musical sound, the waves of which pound and foam and ebb away, they may shower down but they never shower. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out, not a word, not a musical note. Silence.

The water does not welcome her, it repels her. The attendant blows his whistle shrilly because one lad has been too beastly, leaping right into a group of people and knocking them over, but the people simply laugh. An inconceivably smooth smoothness creeps out from under the twins' wet soles and slithers away like a snake. There is nothing those soles can get a grip on. And somebody must have sneakily taken away Art, which normally provides them with a support to grip hold of, and transported it to some unknown location.

Anna opens her mouth again. Nothing. Again. If the whole writing business starts again, she'll kill herself.

Rainer states that happiness and love, which are identical, are feelings (or rather, one single feeling) of the kind you cannot describe. Any account of the phenomenon is bound to be inadequate and can never do service for true feeling, dear Sophie. Anna wants to reply to this stuff about love but cannot manage to, though she could think of the answer.

Together with her brother she shuffles towards the lockers. Sophie is already slipping wirily out of one of the cabins, completely dressed, her hair done, how sweet is the way her damp curls cling to her temples, Rainer would like to stroke them tenderly but she would probably ruin the little gesture. How sweet Sophie looks! But she goes off right away, saying: See you tomorrow, I'm in a hurry today. We've got a lot to talk about tomorrow, I've been thinking over the attacks. These words darken the clear overall impression made by the Jorger Baths today; where there was glistening brightness there is now dull gloom because Sophie has gone, perhaps for ever, but probably just till tomorrow morning at school.

RAINER'S AND ANNA'S rooms are separated by a thin DIY partition wall which lets everything from one side through to the other and back, teenagers simply don't have any privacy. You can't develop without the other one noticing and developing too. Today, for instance, Anna develops a physical appetite for Hans, and lo, in two shakes Rainer has his ear to the wall that keeps them apart, to pick up tips he can put to use with Sophie. Though no one's meant to realise that he still has anything to learn. Because, you see, in their teens youngsters invariably believe that no one can teach them anything. Naturally Sophie is somewhat different from his sister, Sophie is destined to become his loved one, who at a certain age takes the place of a brother's sister. It is to be hoped that the changeover will take place on time and the young man will cut his ties with the parental home without any harm being done.

Get undressed, I want to have you right now (Anna). Then I'll listen to the new record afterwards, okay (Hans). By now the act has been practised a number of times and goes more smoothly than it did at the outset. First some foreplay is performed and then you force an entry into Anna and rummage about inside as in a drawer of old socks when you're looking for the second of a pair. Don't pound away like a moron. Sensitive, sophisticated friction's what's called for. What I often can't say with my mouth because I'm totally speechless with rage, I express with my heart and my whole body (Anna, neurotically). Lips are silent, violins whisper: love me tender. And Hans whispers, hey, this is great, Al, and it'll be even better, just think how long we've been waiting for it, any moment you'll scream with desire and honk like a ship's siren.

Lying on his side, Rainer absent-mindedly studies himself in the blotchy mirror on the wall; today as so often he is practising having no expression and showing none. He practises keeping his face frozen and impassive so that people cannot detect any changes of mood outside, on the facade, and adapt their responses to those changes. His aunt often says that nothing satisfies him, not even his parents, who make such sacrifices, in fact he is satisfied with them least of all, although they are extremely pernickety with the kids, in front of strangers too. He only wants to listen to the very latest jazz records and is neither undemanding nor modest. Don't imagine he wears just any ordinary shoes! Not him! All he wears are winklepickers, which ruin your feet. And he won't wear the trousers from his old confirmation suit either, oh no, it has to be jeans. Since pocket money has to be saved (his parents might as well keep it themselves and have done with it), one has to go begging to Grandma or the aforementioned aunt for money to buy jeans, which means running errands, which robs one of one's personal dignity and practically forces one to assault and robbery, what alternative is there? Right now Rainer has no alternative either, he simply has to listen to Anna shouting more more more and yesyesyesthat'ssogood and to Hans burbling Jesus, Anni, you've got a great cunt and fanny. Which rhymes. Hans says you ought to be able to do this all the time and it's a pity that it's only possible at rare intervals. He'd be up to it any time, it's her parents that are the problem. Is that my sister, who I know like the back of my hand, uttering those noises? wonders her brother, and stares expressionlessly into his mirror, mirror on the wall.

Promptly he sits down at his desk and in spite of himself writes down a boast on a scrap of paper, a boast he is going to spread about the class tomorrow. To the effect that his parents flew to the Caribbean only recently, where they got a terrific tan and met some interesting fellow-travellers. They went swimming the whole time and walking along a white beach beside a blue sea, they went surfing a lot too. On the outward and return journeys they travelled by aeroplane. I am telling you this in writing because it is a means of communication that is very much my own, I feel an urge to tell you things this way, even if they're meant to be secrets. Rainer has no friends, alas, only mates. Still, even mates can be told this story about the Caribbean.

Next door Anna gives a great howl, it sounds revolting, one's mind may be on the same wavelength as hers but one's body isn't, her inarticulate scream of desire sticks to one like pine resin, it goes: Ahhhhhh, now! Presumably he's squirting his juice into her at this very moment, that strapping Goliath. And she even accepts that crap he's dumping inside her, she will put to organic use what others waste and wash their hands of, secretly washing out the sullied sheet with cold water. One can never bring a schoolmate home because home both looks and is disgusting. One is ashamed of one's ancestral home. Now Rainer is writing yet another lie, a love poem to Sophie, which is a subtle process. The title is Love, and it continues in the same clueless way because one is confined within one's limits. Love, then. I see your face before me night and day. Carissima… that was how the letter began in which I confessed my love for you… Blushing, you heard me swear my love. Kisses… I kissed your red lips, candles were burning beside us, we gazed into the bright flames and the crystal glasses. Where are you supposed to get crystal here, the only glass in this place is in spectacles, there's nothing but battered old cups. As for Rainer, the facial expression is still under control.

In the adjoining room, which is no more than a closet, Hans is grunting gibberish, Hans who is no more than a jerk, a jerk of the first order. The stupidity of it must really be getting too much for his sister, that is presumably why she is making no reply. His sister, who reads Bataille in the French original. Though at present the latter seems to have slipped her memory altogether. The wall of Rainer's den (a 'young person's room'), like most of the walls in this poor persons' flat, consists of unwieldy objects stacked high, because nothing is ever thrown away, all manner of junk which may be of some value after all or may become valuable some day in goodnessknowshowmany years. In his direct line of vision there is an old refrigerator, the door of which was removed by some heartless person years ago. Inside it are apples, a piggy bank, an old clock with only one hand, several pairs of glasses (no longer used), a flower pot, sundry cleansing agents, cutlery in a plastic tray, a razor, various toiletry articles in a brightly-coloured plastic bag, an ashtray, a purse with nothing in it, several tattered books, one or two maps for long walks, and a china bowl with a sewing kit. Inside Rainer's head the sea is roaring, and tanned feet, attached to slender legs, race into aforesaid sea, the feet belong to Sophie, and the second pair of feet, also tanned, which now enter the field of vision are Rainer's and likewise enter the salt water. All are equal before the Sea, rich and poor alike. The business of swimming can be taken for granted because in this daydream the watery element is as acceptable to Rainer as the dry element he normally inhabits.

Oooooh, cry Hans and Anna in unison, which is not a particularly intelligent comment on the situation, in Rainer's opinion. Doubtless Hans is now looking her in the face and noting that said face looks really wowed. In an old cardboard suitcase there is a bayonet, which is also old, dating from the First World War. It is a precious souvenir and the blade is 25 cm long. Which is plenty. It needn't be any longer. Rainer would like to be photographed by Anna holding this bayonet, for a lark. He would hold it the way you hold a rapier in fencing, but it would look awkward, that's for sure, because he always looks a little silly if he doesn't happen to be talking about philosophical problems. At present the bayonet is peacefully resting in the container intended for it, the suitcase. Along with it are broken toys, a slide projector for showing holiday slides which were never taken because there were never any holidays either, and a pile of pieces of felt. In his interior world, Rainer has already detached himself completely from this family; in the outside world he will detach himself by assaulting and robbing innocent people.

Aaaaah, comes a noise from next door, for a change, a variation on the same theme, though it introduces nothing new. Rainer goes on practising keeping his face impassive despite his hatred and his hand relaxed despite extreme aggression and his mouth unstrained despite his greed and anger.

Eeeeeh, rollicks Anna, yet another orgasm, who knows however many that is now, amazing. Tonight will doubtless be another occasion for Rainer onanism, to ease the tension, but in spite of himself and in total darkness, which is where he normally leads his life anyway.

Rainer, like countless other teenagers of his generation, is an adolescent who never gets what he wants and always wants more than he can get, though perhaps he'll make it once he's a full-grown adult. His position is hopeless. That is how he himself sees it. Once, last year, he expressed the trust he placed in his gym teacher and showed him one or two of his own poems, by way of a shy approach to the confidential closeness that can prevail at times between two human beings. But plainly the gym teacher entertained the whole staffroom with these paltry and (granted) as yet none too skilful works, guffawing the while, because other teachers often teased the young creator by quoting single lines of poetry at random, out of context.

Next door Anna is screeching as if something were hurting her. But no doubt this is indicative of unendurable desire, which is why it sounds like pain in many ways. Hans promptly starts bawling too, to keep her company. Like two wolves howling. Bestial stuff. Not really what makes Man noble at all. I think they've finished now, there's nothing left in Hans so they'll stop now and at last turn the record over.

Impassively, Rainer gawps into the mirror, and Rainer gawps back out of the mirror equally impassively, only the other way round. Rainer is on the right side, that is to say, the side where he himself is. He is not there in anybody's place, nor does anyone want to be represented by him, not even his class, which elected someone else as class spokesman, though Witkowski campaigned furiously for the job. The reason they give is that he boasts and wants to appear better than he is and is forever saying things that are untrue. This isn't a very matey way to behave to the others, because you have to be truthful, even if it hurts, even if you might be beaten as a result. You could bear the blows with pride because you hadn't lied to escape them.

I wouldn't play with fire myself, I'd have far too many reservations, says Rainer. A lot happens in the mind, enriching a person, but nevertheless some things still have to be put into action.

In Father's pistol case, an iron case 7- 8 cm deep, 30 cm long and 15 cm wide, lies the pistol. Underneath it are nude photos of Rainer's mother, including one or two close-ups of her genitals. Father always has the key with him, on his person. In a school essay on Paul Claudel's play Le Soulier de Satin Rainer puts forward the fundamental view that remorse affords no protection from punishment, and freedom can only be achieved through punishment.

Anna and Hans are just emerging, rather dishevelled, from Anna's room, pretending it was great. You could hear it, loud, replies Rainer. His sister snuggles up to her brother with her whole body, as if she had an incestuous act in mind. But no, she hasn't, because she has just been satisfied. Hans talks about some kind of sport. Compared with this, his carry-on back then was pleasant.

The dirty dishes are stacked high in the kitchen sink, the bottom of the sink is caked in a furry, mouldy, greenish felt that was once bacon and eggs. The young adolescent often gets in his own way and unfortunately there is no way of avoiding himself. There is a lot of dust on the furniture, dust which Mother ought to have removed. But she is out. Really, one can't invite anyone here. Often the adolescent obstructs himself more than his parents do, and is in his turn considerably impeded by the conditions of his life. For instance, the two of them could fetch a duster now and clear things up.

We have to go over the plans for our crimes in detail, Rainer reminds them. Come off it, not now, not after that intense experience, breathes Hans, heavily, like an athlete, and he makes an eloquent face. You ought to screw too, you wouldn't have those thoughts any more. Though Anna may possibly be pregnant, it is Rainer who throws up, a biological curiosity of the first order. Dad and Mum will be home any moment and will find an unwanted friend in the house.

Sure enough, here comes Mum and here lollops Dad. Won't you give me a kiss, eh, a kiss for your Dad, he demands of his own darling son. The latter flushes and says no, you know why not. Well, why not? Because Auntie said not long ago that only homosexuals kiss people of the same sex. Where does the boy get things like that, when we were young we had no idea about things like that! He gets if from your sister, you heard what he said.

And the ceiling complete with the light attachment – two of its little glass cups (where the candle-shaped electric bulbs are mounted) are already broken – folds down upon Rainer and his needs. But it's not as if this put an end to the needs. They are merely locked up in a prison with no means of escape.

KOCHGASSE HAS BEEN taking Hans in for several years now, to make him forget his childhood in the country altogether. All that's left are long lines of men in working overalls, washed-out trousers or smocks, and nothing about them reminds you of green meadows and a little stream. The city has no mercy, it takes a great effort to stand out so that others notice and acknowledge you, sport helps you achieve this, you fight for your team and you may even win! The muddy paths rutted with tractor tracks, the rural animals and people, have retired to the places they belong. Kochgasse conveys an urban atmosphere, today it takes him in once again and sucks him into the correct hallway, which is functionally furnished so that workers will feel at home there and not come across anything unnecessary which might be a pleasure to behold and would perhaps encourage them to want inessentials in their own lives.

No adornment, no gables or oriels, no turrets, no stucco reliefs, those are all for the irremediably dead bourgeois. Who doesn't really exist. A down-to-earth j image to match the down-to-earth strength of Recon- j struction. Which the workers who live here have been busy at for a long time. The Poetry of Life can be supplied by doilies, family photographs, pictures of deer, and the new furniture, from which may sometimes come the unwonted sounds of a new era, always supposing the furniture in question is one of the popular new radiograms. Bought on credit. Every inmate is allowed to create his own Poetry, the architect left space clear on the walls and ceilings for this purpose, for pictures and statues. Whether aforesaid Poetry is up top, round the sides or down below is just a question of the degree of maturity of the people in question.

Hans enters and instantly hits on naked simplicity.

It has no character whatsoever. Only Mother's work impresses a stamp on it, heaps of envelopes are lying around ruining the impression. Hans is now familiar with rooms unblemished by use, where islands of furniture drift by from the depths like floating pack-ice. Sophie has a room of that kind and he has often spent time in it, always keeping Sophie from something urgent that she was just intending to do. But she is glad to have him there and give him pleasure because there is something between them and that something is maturing by the hour. It is not only her environment that makes Sophie different from the other girls he knows, however. She is so special. He'd know her among thousands. Even in working overalls it would have been love at first sight, as they say in hit songs.

What Hans means by this is: if she had been wearing overalls too and not just him. In the flat, Hans finds two mates from the Workers Youth Group, which he is also a member of (whether he wants to be or not), waiting for him. They have posters with them and a bucket of paste which they are stirring. This leaves Hans essentially unstirred. Recently he has taken to changing at work before heading for home. He won't wear anything in the street but trousers and a pullover. At one time he would cycle home wearing his work clothes, but nowadays his muscles are clad in the clothing Sophie has given him. The things have stretched somewhat and are visibly creased in the critical areas, although Hans looks after them very well and is forever shooing his mother off to the ironing board. They lose a little more of their shape every time and adapt to Hans's. Their original owner is now studying in Oxford and will no doubt have bought himself some new things. Where muscles come from and where they go are two quite different things.

Hans's muscles go into electrical current and are absorbed by it wholly, they are transformed into pure energy. Hans often chews a square, snow-white lozenge of dextrose to replace the energy he has used up.

Recently he has practically been living on these lozenges, they are so pure and so regular in shape, like Sophie, and sportsmen advertise them. They are called Dextro Energen. Skiers and tennis-players alike know the uses of Dextro Energen and avail themselves of it.

Hans goes instantly to his closet to take off his good clothes and put them away tidily. Wearing his everyday clothes, even though he will very probably be going out again (wearing his cashmere) in just half an hour, he enters the living room, where his fellow-workers are skulking. These last few weeks, the new company he's been keeping has given him greater assurance in his dealings with people of every race, class and nationality than back when all he knew was his own race and class. These young fellow-workers represent a step back to his former life because they are of his own class and in that class they will remain, you can tell right away, they are incapable of getting anywhere. Mother has made them coffee to warm them up and every one of them has a thickly-spread slice of bread too. Her son gets a slice as well. The youngsters with the bucket have their enthusiasm and their socialism, and Hans has his ambition, which is so strong that you can even swim against the current, you can even fight against heavy electrical current, which is an invisible enemy, Hans will take on anyone who represents an obstacle to his future. Hans puts on a new record so he doesn't have to listen to the old tune about the Communist Party, which is scratched and sounds awful, and furthermore the two of them always say the same thing although they are different people, they have no lives of their own, no individuality. They do not realise that Hans has already quit the long chain of hands passing the bucket of water forwards in the direction of the house that's on fire (which you cannot see, but it must be there because otherwise there wouldn't be a bucket). He has got out and has simply gone away, and the last in line needs a little more energy to bridge the vacant space, but that's all. They declare that the time to join forces with the right people has already been upon them for some time.

One day, once he is mature enough, Hans proposes to join forces with Sophie, in matrimony.

Hans's hands are worn with labour. He has been working since he was fourteen. There is a paste of grime and sweat under his fingernails. The grime and sweat unite to form one substance and so do the body and the mind, a two-in-one unison Hans has been wanting to get to know ever since he got to know Sophie. On Sophie's nails there is not even varnish, they have no need of it, they have nothing to hide nor do they hide it.

Mother knows the parents of these two from a bus trip they took together and wants Hans to get to know them too because they have the kind of sense her son lacks. You have to join a group, one individual cannot achieve anything on his own, only when you're united do you become stronger. Hans says he has already found a group of that kind and is respected there on account of his special abilities, which nobody else respects him for. No one can take his place in the group, he's unique.

I'm irreplaceable at basketball, both as a thrower and as a catcher, but anyone can do my work exactly as I do it, and it's the same in Life. That is just one example of how things are in every branch of Life. Work is an evil and people keep telling me that it is a necessary evil but I could manage without work and Life would be better. All I need is Sophie. If she loves me, I can even do without work.

Having said this, he is all contempt for the wretched extra-thickly-spread margarine slice, margarine again, no wurst, yuck and he hurls at his fellow-workers the proposition that it is the individualist who must achieve his liberation and not the group because a group is unfeeling and anonymous and you disappear in it, never to emerge, unless you are its leader or the group is made to measure, like his own group, which he helped sew together.

All this time, his slice of bread goes uneaten. I give you enough of my money to buy decent butter or wurst. It's high time to become an individual. That is the new-style worker, the modern worker. Though I won't be a worker for much longer. The old-style worker remains a worker for ever. The individual worker requires a lot of space, light, air and sun, where flowers, grasses and trees flourish. Which the aforesaid worker comes to appreciate again, at long last. He neglected all those things during the political struggle. Sport is also writ large by Modern Man.

Mother now makes the cardinal error (one she makes whenever she flies into a rage and can no longer control herself in her behaviour towards her son) of talking about the concentration camp. About the child who was eating an apple and was smashed against the wall till it was dead, whereupon the mother went on eating the apple. About children whose torture consisted in being thrown from the second floor. About the mother who was sent to the gas chamber along with her two-day-old child because she had begged the doctor to be allowed to give birth to the child. The doctor gave his permission. A great many friends of your father's and mine, of both sexes, were beheaded at the district court, too. I think of them constantly.

Hans exaggerates a yawn. He's heard it all, frequently, and his opinion is that times have changed and people too. People have other things to worry about now. Particularly young people, to whom the future belongs, which after all they are helping to fashion.

His two mates with slush in their heads are stirring the contents of the bucket, ill at ease, so that the paste will stay gummy and not go hard. For which the paste has to have warmth, which is not available outside but in the cosiness of a kitchen range, which is where it is right now. They do not know which side to approach this Hans from, he makes such a self-confident impression, plainly the others have already appropriated him and harnessed him to their own purposes. Outside a cold wind is lashing cold rain along the streets, the trees are bending over into wet loops. This is the violence of Nature. Countless invisible hands, from the workers' movement, are reaching out to the two young lads with the bucket of paste, pushing them forward to put their arguments to Hans. And some of them are in fact issuing from their mouths now. But he does not pay any attention to them. He only listens to the voice within himself that says you have to go to the roots of existence in order to understand yourself, and only then can you understand others. If you imagine you can do anything for others without first having grasped your own natures, you're deluding yourself. That's absolutely essential. Sometimes you may do things that even appear nonsensical at first glance, but they're not, because they're terrifically important for you. My new friend's name is Rainer and he's in better shape than this dump. Which isn't true, objectively speaking. The Witkowski's flat is in an extremely shabby state. But this bedazzled young man does not see that. Who is this Rainer, asks Mother. Which she has already asked once before. But she's forgotten. His father was in the SS, replies Hans, now he's a pensioner and a porter. His kids go to grammar school with Sophie and I'm going to go to technical college some day. You wanted to be a gym teacher the other day. Not any more, I definitely want to make a bigger success of things.

The paste-bucket bearers are silent. They have to be going now anyway. Outside the downpour is easing off but it is still shaking the panes to the foundations. No doubt a similar downpour is lashing Sophie's window and making the birch trees in the garden tremble, it may as well bear a message of love to her while it's about it. Without a shadow of a doubt, Sophie will be sitting in the lamplight doing her homework, how Hans would like to be doing that too, but he doesn't have a school to go to, nor any work worthy of the name.

So aren't you coming then, say the two poster-pasters, and they get up. Why not go along too, suggests Mother. In that pissy weather, no thank you, but even if the weather was fine I wouldn't go because that would be just right for tennis.

You always enjoyed your work. Your work is what's really made you a member of the working class, one of the unbroken line of human beings stretching out before and behind you, the people who will forge the new era (Mother).

You must be joking. Enjoyed it? Manual labour is a primitive stage of employment which will come to an end altogether one day, says Rainer. He, Anna and Sophie say that human culture did not even start to develop till people learnt to distinguish between manual work and methods of doing the same work with tools and other aids. Without the work the mind does, there would never have been any culture. Which is the most important thing of all.

Mother says she must be going crazy, and the two pasters say that they must too. We don't think we'll get through to him just now, Frau Sepp. Goodbye, then. We're going to leave this mate of ours, they've got to him, maybe he'll see the light but on the whole we rather doubt it. We're seeing more and more cases like his these days.

Mother says: Please stop by again when you can stay longer. We'll convince him, you'll see. But you have to be going now.

The gusts of wind outside take their cue, open their arms wide, and swallow up the two youths plus their bucket. Let's hope they don't swallow the posters too. The posters are paper and that means they are defenceless against the wet. They are protected by makeshift plastic sheeting. Anyway, the storm has abated, the walls of houses stand out wetly, the asphalt is gleaming again the way that wet asphalt gleamed in the film. After all, it was this asphalt's fellow-asphalt that played the part in the film.

Mother says: If your dead father knew, your father who sacrificed himself for the cause.

He didn't sacrifice himself, they killed him. If they hadn't he'd be alive today. Where did it get him. I'm sure I won't be sacrificing myself. If I read Rainer's books about pain it's more real than if I think about my father's pain in the deathcamp at Mauthausen.

Are you going out later, Hans?

In this lousy weather? Right now it's impossible to see fifteen feet ahead on horseback, which is where all earthly happiness is, and out in the country the evening mists are drawing in, reducing visibility further. On horseback the open country is different from when I visit Auntie Mali on the farm. Later on I may go to a jazz club.

When I look at you I feel as if I may have lived my life in vain and your father may have died in vain. But when I look at the two comrades who were here just now I know there was a meaning in it after all, a meaning my own son can't afford me.

Death's good for nothing anyway, it costs nothing, nothing but your life, giggles Hans wittily.

He is uninterested in strangers on principle, because he is only interested in himself and Sophie.

Go on, eat me, there may be worse times ahead, admonishes the spurned slice of bread and margarine. But Hans believes in a better future and does not eat it.

IT WAS NOT so very long ago that Rainer strayed and quit his predestined path as one of God's children. In the past the Catholic faith served him for many things which he now hopes to recover by violent means. Recently his sister Anna has been tending with ever greater frequency to be a mute in the midst of this jettisoned detritus. Still, at times it all bursts forth out of her and washes away almost everything that gets in her way. Today they are both lying on Anna's bed, holding each other tightly in their arms; they have diverted the wind of Reality to the dining-kitchen (done up in a farmhouse style) and in here they let the wind of the Past blow. Rainer is possibly going to break a taboo in here, the taboo on incest, to see if anything comes of it. But in the event he doesn't break it after all. So other dams have to break. The adolescent knocks them down himself because this degenerate home's door will stay shut if ever freer morals come knocking. Say the worthy progenitors.

Along with other misdeeds, Rainer used to be an altar boy at church. Nowadays this is a source of abhorrence that memory cannot cope with. Papa used to say: Off you go to mass. And off he went. Father's blows hurt worse than the cold tiles under his raw knees. That icy winter cold at 6 a.m. and the priest's slaps, though at least he didn't use aids such as coat-hangers or crutches, whack, yet another clip round the ear because Rainer got his Latin muddled and answered back cheekily a time or two, though no one had asked him anything, he'd been given an order. And then wearing these white lace-trimmed vestments with black collars that drag and make you look like a girl. And then the pictures, mostly of God and the Virgin Mary, in sundry styles and materials. The majority are rounded in shape because they were made in the Baroque era. And the giggling groups of youngsters, the Flock of Catholic Youth, bleating, shoving into the Catholic Youth hostel to play table tennis, serious songs issuing from the student throats of the older ones, and that pride when a child becomes a member of the Flock of Catholic Youth. Of late they have been able to watch TV, and do so, all the time. The Church always has the latest gadgets, and uses them against its members, too. Golden banners and flags with portraits of the Blessed Virgin, girls in navy blue pleated skirts: it all happens in the unloved Piarist Church. At choir they often say that God summons young folk, and lo, there they are, the moment they're summoned. Because young folk are proud of their Christianity. Which takes courage in a world grown thoughtless and heathen. Rainer is also a constituent part of Youth. Unfortunately he is the poorest component, and shows his wear and tear particularly clearly. He goes forth unto God, but he does so reluctantly, albeit he of all people has been summoned the most, because God knows his weakness and his reluctance, that is why he summons him especially loudly: Rainer! Rainer! He'll be throwing up on the tiles any moment. If he went to the high-class Piarist Grammar School, God would doubtless be well pleased with him, but his parents can't afford the fees. His rich fellow altar boys are never clipped round the ear. Naturally this fact struck the enlightened Rainer immediately. He always notices things like that rather than immersing himself all the more profoundly in prayer and ignoring the outside world. The Church takes whatever it can get and keeps hold of it. The Church never passes it on to where it's needed. Rainer needs love, not blows. God supposedly loves him, but the fact has never struck him, he's only been struck by the priest.

Nonetheless, Father kicks him into the sacristy every Sunday, with his one remaining foot, to get dressed up and show off his talents to his auntie and grandma in the choir of bright and cheery youngsters. God especially loves the choir because it sounds so hale and fresh. Rainer's auntie and grandma are diligent churchgoers, and in May and in Lent they do extra shifts and now and then fork out funds in recognition of his pious duties at the altar, so that he can buy himself a pair of those fashionable shoes with the sharp points or a pullover some time. These funds, alas, are the whole point of the exercise as far as this superficial lad is concerned, but he will learn to search within himself. Right inside. And then the scratching and scraping of feet in outsize interiors that are just about suitable to the greatness of the Lord God, you can't see Him, true, but then He needs an awful lot of room. Boys on the left, the young servants of the Lord. On the right the girls, the young handmaids of the Lord. The dean's words go smack down the middle, to the effect that Our Lord has suffered the little children to come unto Him, even though they probably had something better planned at the time. The altar boys sit resting during the sermon, most of them thinking of some kind of mischief, filth, or school affairs of no consequence, which does not bother God since He is even acquainted with the concerns of infants and His ear is ever open to hear them. But Rainer thinks of God, in person, in order to confide his worries to Him. For a short while, God is even his last hope because nothing whatsoever is working out any more and Jesus (of course) will fix it, but before that can happen you not only have to pray, you also have to make sacrifices, and Rainer prefers not to invest. It's too uncertain. Anyway, why does the fellow have to be up there and not down here, down where your prick is, which, if Jesus is to be believed, you mustn't rub or squeeze, not your own and (of course) not anybody else's either.

Only one image involving a certain harmony has remained in Rainer's memory, where it has stuck for a long time. One big Catholic Youth girl had looked out a certain passage in the prayer book for a smaller girl, and, having done so, stroked the little girl's head, over and over, which made Rainer quite calm inside. For years and years he would think of the scene in the bathtub (an improvised tub in the kitchen) while Mummy, even when he was a big boy, soaped his body to make him clean all over, one of God's Children within and plainly identifiable without, too, as a Child of God. Nonetheless he was always embarrassed, although a Child of God is pure in every respect. I'm your mother, I brought you into this world, and you don't need to hide from your Papa, he's got the same as you, in the same place too. Which prompts a muffled howl deep in Rainer's throat, the way a wolf howls.

Mistakenly he longs for harmony and peaceableness, indeed for beauty, which he often unlawfully tells his schoolmates about. So that they will understand him, he describes that harmony in terms of expensive cars, air travel, parents who kiss and crystal that glitters, all of which can be viewed in his home. Though things like that cannot be purchased. They are either within a human being or they aren't. But his schoolmates don't believe what he says.

Come on, love, you have to be quite clean, Anni doesn't kick up a fuss if her own mother does it, it's just as if you did it yourself. But go right ahead and be embarrassed if you insist. Being embarrassed is healthy enough, at any rate.

We are all the same, that is to say: human beings made of flesh and blood. But not you, Mama, you're incorporeal like the Lord God and only Papa degrades you physically, and that's why I say that that body does not exist, that's why I cut away everything below the chin before I pin up photos of pretty girls on my wardrobe. Because flesh rapidly starts to stink once the meat's been killed and left in the fresh air. This boy! Now dry yourself off properly, you can do that yourself, can't you.

The organ thunders, and Rainer dries himself off, you're not supposed to look down at yourself while you do so, your gaze should be straight ahead, everything you do is done in honour of a Higher Being. When you're bigger a lot of things will be different, some things will finally take it easy and lie down.

Anna tries to express most things by way of music. Today she has already gone through Schumann and Brahms on the keyboard, tomorrow it may be Chopin and Beethoven. What her mouth cannot say, music says, including things that come from the Lord God, as many composers (Bruckner) have claimed. Rainer reads some old diary entries out to her, to the effect that great things can only be accomplished as a result of long-term, precise planning and preparation. Back then the statement struck him as being universally valid. That's what it says here. It goes on: 1. What am I planning, what is my great aim? and 2. What might be conducive to the realisation of that aim?

At that time, Rainer still wanted to study some science subject (chemistry) at the Institute of Technology, now all he wants is to get hold of other people's wallets and then some day hold a position as a teacher of German literature, writing poems on the side. The paramount principle (it says here) should be that natural science will never be an end in itself, will not remain the sole concern of his thought and actions, but will have its place in a larger, more comprehensive structure. He wants (as the diary says) to have higher standards, above and beyond human thought, but at all events they have to be standards. May the Christian faith be the foundation of my life to the very end. I see my task as a scientist as follows: to introduce Christian thought into the area chemistry gives me access to and achieve a synthesis of the two fields (at least in part, as he has added in all honesty) – to the greater glory of God. Listen to this, Anna! It's incredible, incredible. One result of this endeavour would necessarily be to use chemistry for the good of mankind, to make existence fit for human beings. In this I see a way of practising Christian love of my neighbour, in my whole life, by employing all my talents, powers and abilities. May God in His Grace allow me to realise this ambition.

Whaddyathinkofthatanni? The basic essentials are: 1. Thorough knowledge of chemistry, maths, physics and Christian thought, and 2. Thorough knowledge of German, English, Russian, French. In this, may I at all times succeed (guffawhawhawhaw!) in remaining modest and humble-though not in such a way (oh no, not on your life!) that I go crawling to the kind of people who might cause me problems at some point or from whom I can profit although their actions ultimately run counter to my ideals. Furthermore, I must have 1. Self-discipline hahahahahascreechhahaha! The siblings rollick in a heap, drooling with laughter. This last needs to be a process that emerges from constant engagement with the world about me canyoubelieveIwrotethis? No, says Anna. Well, not bad, a whole word, to be exact: no, a new record! A minute later she is able to talk away again like a parrot. But no one knows of the traces left within Anna.

From countless portraits and ceiling frescoes, the Lord God looks down on His children, who have turned out so wretchedly, and is astonished that He could have created something like that and then taught them this fact in religious instruction classes. Belief still causes Rainer problems in his honest moments, he cannot yet rule out the possibility that such a God does exist, even if he and Camus have substituted Nothingness. He hasn't disappeared yet, and numerous priests are even personally acquainted with His family.

Come and get it, children. And in a moment they are sitting down to their ever-popular dinner. As always, Rainer addresses Mother when he wants to tell Father something. Tell him I'll knock his crutches away and send him sprawling on the cold stone floor. I want to write a poem but there's no foundation here for it to stand on. Yes there is, you have the choice of a cosy farmhouse floor or a stone floor, says Anna, which is quite a speech for her. Father promptly yells like a raging bull and says he'll break his back for him if he talks so disrespectfully. Then his son will have a fractured spine and will be creeping about the floor like a worm whereas he will at least still be able to hop or hobble. Father also says he can take him away from that grammar school any time because he is the breadwinner in the family. Mother offers round mash and stewed apple and says that in that case Dad would have to admit to people that he'd sent his son to be an ordinary apprentice instead of to grammar school, wouldn't you, Otti, eh?! I'll beat you black and blue as well, Gretl, see if I don't, because at that age I was one of the illegals, doing my duty. And nowadays I still do my duty, at a desk where there are a lot of keys to rooms that I have access to at all times.

Rainer bares his teeth like a rabid dog. The Saviour up on His machine-made parlour crucifix looks worried. The pressure of His crowns of thorns is considerable, because the barometer says a storm is on the way, and in the parlour the black stormclouds are gathering too. Our crimes will be crimes of violence, Anni, don't you agree? Not committed when we're worked-up, though, to get rid of aggression. No, you have to avoid getting worked up: you have to do it in cold blood. You're quite right (Anna), because otherwise the crime itself would be of secondary significance, whereas in fact it must be the main thing.

In the big farmhouse chest, which you could fit an entire butchered pig carcass into, there are a lot of broken toys left over from childhood days. Like everything in the flat, these toys have survived into the desolate era of leaden adolescence, to no one's particular delight. Rainer's old diary also says that the task (whatever it might be) is a big one, but oughtn't that very fact be the incentive to tackle the problem and thus ultimately gain in strength? This calls for self-discipline, respect, tolerance, and the ability to do without things. Nowadays Rainer tells anyone who will listen, and everyone else too, that at home he never had to do without anything because his family has everything there is to possess. Which is a lie. But here it says that doing without will make him richer (it's unbelievable!), he will scale the mental heights, where (as it quite clearly says in here) a bracing wind, fresh and cleansing, blows. Yuck. Everything that's been cleansed is, in his opinion, nothing more than a fine ice-cold stream of air. The image on the picture postcard of Ourladyoflourdes is curled up at the feet of the Redeemer, which is where it belongs and not, say, at the head, the draught is to blame. There are waves in the holy water in the heart-shaped container too, it's slopping about. The rosary, also from Lourdes, the gift of a neighbour, sways gently to and fro in the fresh breeze of Youth. This fresh breeze is coming off a life that has just got off to a fine start and will hopefully not be cut short prematurely.

Mother finds consolation and help in religion, in her difficult situation as breeder and household manager. Papa tolerates this without comment, even though the Lord is a man too, as the word implies. He'd better not get too close to Mother, hadn't the Lord. She's the one who is forever chasing after Him.

Rainer never thinks of those filthy photos which apparently exist, though according to his sources they are photos strange men took of his mother. The fact vanished from Rainer's head as fast as it had entered it. Supposedly there are close-up shots of genitals too. What you don't see doesn't exist.

The stewed apple is eaten up by Papa almost single-handed, though it's the children who are still growing and Papa has finished growing, indeed he has already been maimed. Mummy doesn't get any at all. After all, she was the one who made it.

Outside, some stupid clouds or other are massing and will spill all any minute. Right into an everyday evening.

The twins leave the farmhouse parlour with their arms tightly round each other and enter the world of the music that sounds forth from the record player, the artist is the very opposite of the farmer who has a parlour like that at home. Anna enters the realm of silence and Rainer that of manic talkativeness, which is his way of trying to get hold of the world. The Poet is a King in his realm. His is the Empire of the Imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions.

THE CAFE IS a typical grammar school kids' cafe. So a large number of grammar school kids are there. They are discussing religious or philosophical topics. Schoolgirls go to mass with jazz music, throw their first parties, and after a lovely concert of church music bestow their first kiss. A grammar school boy seated at a marble-topped table tells the person sitting opposite him that the time may be right for their friendship, their first fleeting acquaintance, to become something else – the grammar school girl still describes the two of them as chums, which strikes the grammar school boy as reticence of an incomprehensible order. Somehow he senses that that is exactly what might endow their relationship with a quality of permanence, though, and he says it out loud. At that party last Thursday he was aware of it, too, the schoolboy says in low, soft tones. And so the pleasure he takes in symbols that can express with such marvellous directness what words can never say is all the greater.

Hans listens to this foreign-language dialogue and scans the pastel-coloured ice creams, squeezed-out tea-bags and pots of hot chocolate. But he promptly withdraws his gaze in alarm on realising that no one wants it.

Presently the schoolboy says to the schoolgirl: Not even the canniest of historians will ever find out who it was that kissed whom on that 27.3.

Hans wonders: What does 'canniest' mean, and what's this 'whom' anyway, and what is a historian?

The schoolgirl says that she is looking forward to the holidays and that the great day of her first ball must have been under a lucky star because it was such an exciting evening, I have good memories of it from the start to the very last moment. We were dancing and everything seemed so sparkling and beautiful. The two young pupils confuse the various past tenses; and though they constantly have to make use of them, they still remain as new in their mouths.

Hans also hears that the fellow at the next table, who doubtless has no idea what a real man has to be capable of, went skiing in the Otztal Alps. His thoughts were with the schoolgirl beside him a great deal, as they always are when he is in the mountains. The connection may not be apparent at first glance: the thing is that whenever I see lofty mountains I have profound thoughts, and aren't friendship and love -and fidelity – profound human experiences? demands the schoolboy, and the schoolgirl answers that she too went skiing, but somewhere else. And once again all that passed between them was written words. And a telegram that never reached you: Happy Easter and baci mille. Brigitte.

Hans wants to order a beer and another one later and yet another, but Sophie has already ordered a coffee and a cognac for him. Sophie's soft silence nestless into her dark pleated skirt and dark pullover. Hans is silent too, in her brother's expensive gear. All around him Innocence is talking, sons and daughters are talking away as if they were being paid to do so, about things and doings and goings-on that are as innocent as they themselves. Hans is neither a son nor a daughter because he is the son of a nobody.

Prater Park dappled with sunshine in the first light of day, the wet grass, the wet leaves, the thrill of getting up really early for once, the horse's neck nodding, a fine spray of powder snow, the swish of steel runners in glacial snow, shrieks of merriment when someone takes a tumble, and then a jolly evening in the log cabin, with punch or gluhwein, ditties to guitar and accordion accompaniments, and then that notorious step outside the door of the cabin, gazing into the starry winter heavens, the first kiss, and someone to catch a star.

Hans wants to try a huge gateau with buttercream like that some time, but Sophie imposes her veto. He is not allowed to booze and then sing hollodero or spit at people either.

Thrilling car trips with elder siblings acting as chauffeur, Father gave them a little car as a present when they passed their school-leaving exams and later he'll give you one too. Evenings of music played en famille in a wood-panelled room, Father playing cello, Mother (who is a doctor) playing piano, the siblings playing flute or violin, loved silly by their parents. New Year's Eve at the Semmering house, the youngsters laughing and giggling and kissing as the provisions the merry party need are lugged up to the house, which has about as much in common with work as a carwash has with a blast furnace, how dearly, how very dearly Hans would like to carry loads far heavier still, so heavy that everyone would marvel at him. The itch to travel. To head off to the romantic old monastery and take part in spiritual exercises at Whitsuntide, to find what you have lost, and subsequently say it is impossible to describe that Whitsun atmosphere. They often say it is impossible to convey an atmosphere in words but they use an incredible lot of words to say so, words you wouldn't think anybody had ever heard of, but they are familiar with every one of them. Whitsuntide, says the youth, who is already a student, Pentecost, it suggests strength, the Holy Spirit – or is there perhaps something else to it?

Hans pricks up his ears and lays them back because there is undoubtedly something else to it.

Love of a young girl, for instance? Judging by the sheer radiant power of the experience, it cannot be anything else! After breakfast there are discussions of fidelity and such matters, and then they join forces to cook up something for lunch, followed by another discussion, of duty and affection. Some masses are beautiful and profound yet low-key too, which really gets to you.

Now Hans is permitted an ice cream after all, and he splats about excitedly with his spoon in the unfamiliar pinkgreenandbrown slush, piggy that he is. Aren't I a mucky pup, demands Hans, and Sophie smiles. And now I'd really like a piece of chocolate cake. You'll be sick (Sophie). Nobody has ever seen Sophie eat, but she must do so because she still carries herself upright and walks about and uses up calories.

Birthday parties where everyone loves everyone else and minor quarrels only serve to make that love even deeper, rather than eating it away like nitric acid. A cool church, words spoken freely but not too freely, the sounds of guitars playing, the togetherness of a group of people that are as one, afterwards we have to take our leave of Father Clemens. Alas! Slide shows that are both interesting and fun. Walks on clear starry evenings, on your own land or on land adjoining your own. Something that represents a new beginning, a new bud set to blossom. Eternity is silence and sounds are transience, gets written into the appropriate diary. Sunshine and parents who get on well, visits to castles, farewells, sadness (though with a twinkle of merriment in one eye because it is perfectly likely that we'll meet again), siblings who help you cope by playing amusing parlour games, siblings who squabble and laugh as they do so, the piano, Debussy, Impressionist paintings, a lake, sheep, the miller in the forest, golden clouds, rambles with a rucksack on your back. Minor rendezvous and major plans, the chapel of the Hofburg, jazz clubs, lemonade, swimming baths, leaving the slopes, not enough snow, alas, skiing injuries that heal, jokes that make you forget you're confined to a sickbed. The feelings you have, birthday surprises, evenings spent listening to Fischer-Dieskau singing lieder. Being confined to your bed, a passing fever, visiting art galleries, 'satisfactory' for your Latin homework (a grade that calls for a celebration). Visiting Grandma. Rain, a dark sky, street lamps, the back seat of the car, wurst rolls, skin creased by laughter, photos, a silk headscarf, integral calculus, translating Cicero, debating whether it is right to cause other people unhappiness for the sake of truth. What is truth, what is dishonesty, and what is hypocrisy? Listening to records, discussions by candlelight. Beautiful dresses, your first evening gown, which you promptly wear to the Burgtheater, which you enjoy immensely. Don Giovanni at the opera house, which you enjoy immensely. The boy you only knew as a tennis partner with a powerful service suddenly slips off your coat at the cloakroom, it is as if he had been transformed, and later he kisses you in the park. In doing so he has crossed the borderline dividing childhood from adulthood. A serious matter, which the family celebrates. A point when everything seems empty, faces are revealed as masks with nothing behind them, you are on the brink of a deep abyss, you cannot see any way out (etc.) and you are suffering. There are a lot of expressions that describe this state precisely. As you find out when the problem is discussed among a small circle of friends. The problem ends in mutual understanding and thus automatically ceases to exist. Love. Only ignorant people grow angry, the Wise Man understands, or some other maxim to the effect that Man is the dearest object of God's love. Something or other is sealed with a long kiss and ends in peace. Holding conversations in French and English.

Hans gnaws at his lower lip with his upper teeth. There will be a hole there shortly, though that is still better than having an Abyss of Principle yawning before you. He and Sophie understand each other on principle, though. Sophie is sucking lemonade through a straw. This morning her mother threw another screaming fit before driving off to her bank to do something or other. As always, Hans is flexing his muscles, quite openly, he slides to and fro on his chair as if he'd shat himself, he gives Sophie a confiding wink and in his turn describes a terrific booze-up where one or two friends of his were hilariously abusive and went on a rampage, a few things were smashed up in the process. He is talking too loud and everyone can hear him, nobody understands him, but they tolerate what they do not understand, and if the tolerance is lacking it is through discussion.

Even if occasionally one has to part from the other here, there is still a sparkle in his eye on account of the reunion that is doubtless soon to follow, adieu, a grey VW beetle crawls round the bend and is gone, but a great deal remains behind: friendship, and a human quality. To the accompaniment of good-humoured jokes cracked by her family, who are just eating lunch, a girl suddenly leaps to her feet as if a tarantula had bitten her and welcomes her boyfriend, whom she has been awaiting for so long and who is now returning from a climbing trip. Afterwards the whole family does something together. This sense of sharing, which pervades the place like a thick fog, leaves Hans enraged. He pulps the last fragments of ice cream in the metal dish with his spoon, taking out his anger on innocent foodstuffs.

Accounts of hikes across glaciers, farewell to the family. Dearest sister Christine, who is in on the joke. Off to the post office, a one-and-a-half-hour walk, peaceful hours in Uncle Sepp's Olde Bar. A young lad climbing down the mountain to her after first climbing up it. An altogether unique feeling flowing from me to you and from you to me. Grannie, giving her friendly nod. Walking, talking, eating lunch. Taking strolls to the clearing amid the larches. Someone who loves nothing quite so much as the sight of grass and sky.

Hans tests the currents that are flowing here, all about him, from one to the other and from the other to one. What is it that's flowing? The people in question have no name for it, or at least not as such, though their language offers them ways of addressing each other that creates an instant unity. Heading off towards the Semmering hospital, viaducts, tunnels. Going up to the Jockelhof, fixing the rooms, eating and taking siestas and being too lazy to write during the holidays, a band of mist and a blue sky, beaming, the sky's a fine one to go beaming. Plenty of things to talk about. Mutual understanding.

Hans cannot suppress a cough and splutters half of the coffee Sophie ordered for him too into the saucer, mixed with saliva it comes spraying out of him. In his brain there is a huge hole, which might also be labelled Nothingness in general. When grammar school kids talk, they are simply together, with each other, and the very simplicity of that apparent fact is what expresses the 'immeasurable profundity of what is said', they say in two-part harmony. It is often interesting to watch other people, you sit on a tree-trunk for the purpose. The goal is on the tips of our tongues and its name is Love.

The inexhaustible reserve the youngsters around Hans are drawing upon now affords a brief meeting of glances and a brief attainment of peace in each other. If you are sitting on a felled tree in a pine forest enjoying the sunshine you can easily forget what time it is. Not that you could forget your gold watch, just the time of day.

In spite of himself, Hans glances at his old wristwatch to see if he hasn't left it somewhere. It is still there.

Sophie is silent, and so is everything inside her. Her silence does not imply that she lacks anything here any more than elsewhere. From time to time she says hello to an acquaintance. If she exchanges a few words with one of them, a curious common ground is established. Hans believes that what is between her and him is Love. It leaves him shaken because it generally does leave lovers shaken, but it leaves Hans all the more shaken because he knows nothing he can compare it with. He is at the mercy of Love, helpless.

Another schoolkid is now comparing two people who get on well with two hemispheres that fit exactly, making a perfect sphere. They talk in a relaxed way, with mutual confidence, about that perfect geometrical solid.

Saying farewell, and wondering if you shouldn't feel just as you did saying hello, but all the richer for having received a gift.

No one has ever given Hans a present except for Sophie (trousers and a pullover), Mother has occasionally bought him something useful. Sophie asks Hans what he thinks of crime. Rainer wants to commit crimes, and she thinks that at last she wants to too. These kids here really get up my nose, don't they yours? You're used to things quite other than schoolkid small-talk.

Hans, who has no greater wish than to be a schoolkid, says he has broken open vending machines in the past, but now he means to lead a decent life in order to win the woman he loves. He doesn't say who that is, oh no. No, he daren't say that.

Is it Anna, asks Sophie. No, says Hans, no, it's not Anna, but I'm not letting on who it really is, and he gives Sophie a calfish look so that she will suspect it's she herself. Sophie can't make any sense of this stupid facial expression and asks if he thinks doing something illegal can break down your inhibitions. Hans is unfamiliar with the word. The word illegal, that is.

If I drank another cognac now I'd start yodelling, I'd give one or two of these schoolkids a thrashing, I wouldn't care who I hit.

No but seriously, I really wouldn't mind getting my fingers into something alive. Hans has only ever jabbed his fingers into wet plaster or Anna. Hans says this alcohol is making him warm, though he's used to drink, once he drank three litres of beer in one go, man, I was really pissed that time, know what I mean.

Sophie sizes up Hans as if she were seeing him for the first time. With a man and a woman this always happens at some point before the sequel can ensue. Her gaze deliberately includes his face and his body, in order to arrive at an overall impression. The season is over, the balls are no longer about to start, as is often the case. She opened the opera ball wearing a paste coronet on her head, which was ridiculous but Mama insisted. Now she has time off and can assess Hans's face. So this is a human face as well. Isn't Nature wonderful, so varied, thinks Sophie. There is an extreme Left and an extreme Right, which come very close to meeting, and there is even this kind of Hans. Apparently the fact doesn't disturb or inconvenience anyone. In Nature the species and forms are many and various, and there are two completely different sexes. Sophie's is an ancient aristocratic family.

Some months ago, in her dancing partner's arms, Sophie forgot everything, in particular the world about her, and now she wants to forget everything once again, in a transaction of a wholly different sort. She actually has what others merely wish they had, and she is forever wanting to forget it. You can't do it, in your family people don't do that kind of thing, Hans tells her. What counts is that I do it, says Sophie, who would like to knock a lot of things down. Which Anna and Rainer would like to do too. What they all want to knock down, however, are quite different things, because they possess quite different things.

Rainer, who wasn't invited along but figured it out by means of skilful questioning, enters the cafe, gives a casual wave to all four points of the compass (but receives no response), and promptly starts talking about crime too. This may be contagious. He doesn't want to talk about his love for Sophie as long as this Hans is present. The experience of crime makes you mature, he declares. In Camus's The Outsider, which he is currently reading together with Sophie and with her alone, the hero ends up in prison too. Under sentence of death, he hears soft sounds outside, sounds originating in Nature, and becomes sensitive to nuances. That is important. Because everyday life more often tends to destroy sensitivities than create them. Vienna Actionist artists (you can see it coming) will shortly be destroying their own bodies, we intend to destroy other people's bodies, which affords the greater satisfaction. Whoever would destroy his own body of his own accord, you only get one, demands Hans. An artist. An artist may mutilate himself. Which is fine. I too often feel like tearing myself limb from limb and throwing away the pieces.

I want to lay my whole body down on Sophie and get inside her, thinks Hans. He will do it just the way he does it with Anna, only much better because love will be involved as well.

Sophie scrutinises Hans closely. Rainer wants Sophie to scrutinise him rather than Hans and knocks an ice cream sundae that he is just being served onto the floor. Before he can trample on the colourful scoops of ice cream (because he doesn't like the flavour, and money is unimportant when you're beside yourself), Sophie says: Have you gone crazy.'' If you want, Sophie, I'll tell Hans to spoon it up again. You're behaving absolutely childishly again today (Sophie). I'll show you who's going to spoon what up (Hans).

The waitress in black and white scuttles about amid the tables and is addressed as an equal by the adolescent higher classes, black and white fade to grey in the process, which is subtler, you need an eye for the differences. Some address her as an equal though they live in twenty-room villas in Hietzing. They come to her with their unimportant problems, school worries in the main, which she then tries to solve or dispel. Every job has its satisfactions if you do it with care, and this one is particularly satisfying because you have contact with people. And you get a good class of people here.

Just bear in mind, Hans, that what matters is the how and not the what.

Rainer says: Murder and assault are not lunacy, they are the logical conclusion if you live a life without an assured financial foundation.

Hans says it's insane, you can't hurt your fellow human beings on purpose.

Sophie answers that if she has understood correctly you should only do it for the sake of violence itself.

Well, the money is of secondary importance, of course. Murder is merely matter that's got in a bit of a mess (Rainer).

Sophie makes some response, and Hans seconds it. He shares her opinion. He says: I agree with Sophie.

Rainer says he should shut his trap because he is unfamiliar with the polarities of Thought involved, neither its perfect autonomy nor its strict dependence. To provoke Rainer, Sophie tells him he should go and do his homework, and then he can think about the lovely things he'll buy with the money they grab. Rainer yells that he doesn't give a damn about the money any more than Sophie gives a damn about money, he is just like Sophie and feels just the same. Sophie goes on: Perhaps a bicycle, some educational books, a building kit… and now it's high time he vanished, she's seeing Hans today, not him, he shouldn't go snooping after her.

Hans says he agrees with Sophie.

Rainer establishes a definition: The person who is in charge is never snooping, after all, he is the one who holds the reins. Also, he has written a new poem, specially for Sophie, in which he disposes of Christian thought, which no longer counts any more, once and for all.

Sophie says that Rainer will still be writing poems when he's a respectable civil servant. Hans says that's what he thinks too, Sophie! Sophie can sense Rainer coming very clearly, it is like masturbating before the orgasm. Hans says he shares her opinion. He subscribes to that absolutely.

You illiterate ignoramus, roars Rainer, seeing red. What he also sees (alas) is Hans and Sophie still wrapped in a species of mutual understanding that operates at a deep level that is not his own.

It is shallow. He and Sophie, on the other hand, have depth. Depth does not go down below, it goes within. He says he doesn't give a toss about either God or his parents, whom he hates, right, he hates God too, and because of that I'm freer than you two! He has decided that nothing is of any importance. But they have yet to find out what that Nothingness is that is nothing.

I really do agree entirely with Sophie, says Hans, and now at last I'm going to smash your gob in, Rainer. But Sophie restrains him. Rainer notes that Hans is a strange, disruptive factor in Sophie's life. Not to be confused with a stranger who acquires subjective significance. Because in point of fact Hans is no more than an object as far as Sophie is concerned.

Shit, now I've forgotten my purse, observes Sophie. Hey, will you lend me the money till tomorrow, I offered to pay for Hans. Rainer knows he must not be petty if he is not to appear petty, so he pays up on the spot, not without plainly letting Hans know that he is the one who is paying for him.

Sophie gazes out of the window and down a peaceful avenue of villas.

I agree with Sophie, entirely, says Hans.

NOWADAYS THE NIGHT-TIME cries of ow can be heardmore frequently than ever by the sensitive distinctly pricked-up ears of the adolescent son and adolescent daughter. And in addition they often hear of Papa's intention to shoot Mother because she has transgressed her marriage vows. But Rainer can see that the only transgression involved is that of a meaningless life. Hers. She has never transgressed. Who would she have transgressed with anyway, the shape she's in these days? Mother's life is one long chain of meaningless years, just as the lower classes are chains of people, none of whom ever stands out as an individual. Generally they remain stuck where they are and never reach the next level. Rarely, but only rarely, one of them makes it up to where there is more room to manoeuvre and develop his abilities. But in the jazz clubs these second class citizens with poor prospects are always the only ones who listen when Rainer delivers a lengthy lecture, on God, say, or on contemporary jazz of the cool school and its structure. Schoolmates invariably skedaddle when they clock Rainer because they know: Here comes another boring speech and I won't get a word in edgeways. The guy's deadly. Beat it. True, you yourself know more than he does, but he never lets you show your knowledge off.

Whenever Mummy utters her low cries of ow into the night, Rainer next morning gives his father the kind of look that prompts the latter to say to witnesses: Just see the way he looks at me! What he wouldn't do to his own father!

At breakfast Anna accuses her mother of having ruined her life, and Rainer prophesies to his father that he (Rainer) will personally ruin his (his father's) life yet.

Rainer has natural leadership qualities, he is a fuhrer by nature as anyone can tell right away, but no one takes the trouble to look at him that closely. So the fact that he will be the leader if an assault is made is not questioned. Everyone looks to him, waiting for his suggestions about how to do it, Sophie looks to him the most and burgeoning affection becomes Love. The next step is for Love no longer to be doubted: it is simply there.

Rainer's personal familiarity with horror is one of his strengths. Horror often visits him in a dream, in which he is walking the streets at night, the leaves are falling from the trees, smothering him entirely. Whenever he writes poems he is prompted either by books or by the weather.

Today is what's known as Headmaster's Day, a day without school. On this unaccustomed day off, different people do frantically different things. Rainer leaves the house early and goes to a locksmith's, vaguely wanting to have a second key to Father's pistol case cut from an amateurish wax impression he's taken of it. He does not yet know why he is doing this, but probably it is in order to hide the pistol so that Mummy will not be shot by Daddy, which she has often been told will happen, though the consequences to date have not been worth mentioning. But you never know, you never know… One thing's certain: No pistol, no pistol shot. Later on, Rainer will find that the key does not fit and does not lock, because nothing Rainer does ever works, except for mental activity. Because Rainer is Brain become Man just as God is God become Man (Jesus) and Hans is Action become Man, a man who needs a leader though. He only ever thinks when it's too late. Mostly what he does is nonsense. But Rainer shoves his oar in and issues contradictory orders that no one understands and which everyone therefore carries out in a different way from what was intended.

Anna the half-mute goes off to play chamber music, to create a bright cathedral of notes beneath her fingers, sounds that so rarely issue from her mouth in such quantity. In her head, the darkness of absolutely evil deeds. These days, though, her tongue isn't exactly obeying instructions. Anni goes on getting thinner and thinner. Her eyes smoulder darkly in her bewitched face (Hans once read this in a most instructive novel), but sometimes you're terribly afraid when you glimpse the hopelessness of her generation in those Annaeyes, there is no wall behind them so the hideousness outside has free access to the brain and can cause pitiless devastation. Anna plays a Haydn trio with friends of similar inclinations. She is playing the piano part, the clarity of Haydn (in contrast to the unclarity of Brahms or Mahler) soars to the ceiling. Anna's confused state remains down below and makes itself at home in the girl. After her confusion come (in order of appearance) the wish to cause injury, to kill, to take everything away. And an unpleasant pull in the lower abdomen that says Hans and means Hans too. But he's out more and more often, hopefully not with Sophie, but perhaps that's where he is. Sophie never screws, and brother Rainer also views the sexual act as a degradation of the woman and the man. If Sophie did do it, contrary to expectation, he would suddenly no longer view it as degradation but as exaltation to sublime heights. At any rate he still has prospects of promotion, and things still ahead of him which in a different set of circumstances he would unfortunately already have behind him. It's always better to have good things ahead of you than behind you.

Anna trickles off the pearls of the fast movement as though they were Japanese cultured pearls. The violin is playing lousily, Anna's musical ear is whimpering in distress and calling for the violin to practise more. Today they are playing for fun. It is not work. Mother Witkowski is very much with Anna, at a distance.

Anna is finally making the dreams of art and culture she had in her youth come true. She didn't manage it herself because she married this lout of an officer whose handiwork was killing and whose brainwork was the pleasure he took in killing. She had piano lessons for only four years, which is nothing for so large an instrument, practically the Queen of Instruments if it weren't for the organ, which is even bigger. Four years are nothing at all if it's something enjoyable. Otherwise they can be an eternity.

Rainer is at the locksmith's. Then he swots for his exams at a schoolfriend's. Anna busy with her chamber music. Rainer only has mates, no friends. Rainer is at one of his mates'.

As always, their parents hurriedly get on with taking photographs in order to make proper use of the children's absence, carpe diem, it may be your last! Herr W.: Today you're the bad maid who gets a thrashing for the errors of her ways at work and in private. Frau W.: Ow. (She is bruised.) That's what I am anyway as far as you're all concerned, a maid, that's all. I think the suspender belt doesn't fit any more, I've put on weight. The last few times we always played at the girl gymnast taking a shower.

Herr W.: Don't call a serious activity playing. In my case the field of operations is limited on account of oneleggedness but if a person does what he does well you always have to take it seriously.

Frau W.: Do you want me to use any kind of prop, Otti?

Herr W.: Now you've put me off my stride, I have an identity, I'm an amateur photographer. And the embarrassment is all wrong too the way you do it, though you of all people ought to be able to do it. And I can't decide about a prop so quickly because an artist has to wait for inspiration. Which has evaporated now. You hurt my pride as a photographer with your talk about playing just then.

Frau W.: I didn't mean to hurt your pride, Otti.

Herr W.: But you did hurt it, here, I'm going to give you my crutch special.

Which promptly follows. But it only hits the wall, making one of many dents, the spouse having leapt aside in time, in obedience to reflexes which have been sharpened by many similar situations and for once are correct. The dent finds itself in the company of many more of its kind dating from similar attacks at earlier dates, dents which even further disfigure a wall that already has deep rifts.

Strange to say, the day has a second instalment, since the first was so good, and this is known as the afternoon. It takes place after lunch, during the course of which Rainer wordily prophesies to his father that he will yet destroy his (Daddy's) life.

Now the parents, clad in festive garb – Father dressed to the nines as always (he buys a new tie every week and his shirts are murder weapons ironed sharp as knifeblades, after all he's a ladies' man with a reputation to keep) and Mum looking as if she'd been fished out of the garbage, her assorted articles of clothing don't go together at all and didn't even match up in their early days – the parents go to call on a distant aunt, who has always felt Rainer's gaze to be sinister, it is both penetrating and sly, the aunt in question considers him capable of anything. Which would delight Rainer if he knew.

The parents are safely out of the house at last and the children are in it. Today Anna's taking a turn at photography for a change. Last week, in Sophie's room, Rainer saw a photo of her brother at Oxford, dressed in a fencing outfit and with an epee. Today, Rainer draws a boy scout's knife (which was originally a Hitler Youth dagger and is now in retirement) and poses like the photo of Sophie's brother as well as he's able. Ready to thrust, or whatever they call it, this stance, the dagger in one hand, the other cocked at an elegant, graceful angle aloft in the air. The result is pathetic. Hang on, Anni, I know how we can make it look less pathetic, Father's souvenir bayonet, which he in turn had from his Dad, you wouldn't believe this monster had parents who begat it and gave birth to it once upon a time, but he did, the bayonet is the proof, it dates back to the First World War. Do you know which of our five hundred detergent packs that alarming bayonet is in, asks Anna sceptically (today her glottis is in working order). She looks around and winds on the film. I know, the cardboard suitcase in the third row from the top, the fourth object from the left, we'll be totally overgrown with stuff if this goes on. The rescue parties will dig us out completely smothered. There's enough junk here for five lifetimes.

The case is opened up amid tottering stacks of cartons and the bayonet is extracted from its bed of rubbish. Now the entire performance over again. With a killing edge this long (the blade measures 25 cm) things go twice as smoothly. And so they did. Anna has her pictures home and dry. Rainer's murderous expression fits nicely, because he's thinking of violence. The expression on his face is not meant to be merely brutal. It is meant to suggest the expression of someone who has read Camus and has to kill because of the sheer agony the world causes him. Camus is an existential nihilist but he believes in God, which Rainer also did at one time, erroneously. It still causes him problems, but as it also caused a Camus such problems one is in good company. Camus is a supernihilist, nothing is nothing and thus meaningless. To cling on to Nothingness is just as cowardly as clinging on to God. In my opinion, absurdity in Camus's sense could be equated with Nothingness. Camus views pain as the fundamental principle of worldly existence. Pain and boredom. One is familiar with both from one's own experience. Cf. The Possessed. Best of all, read it together with Sophie. Read it with the woman one loves, who differs from other women in that she has become unphysical once and for all. Anna and Mum are forbidden on pain of death to leave bloodied wads of cotton wool or sanitary towels lying around where the general public might see them. Materials of this kind have to be destroyed or removed, leaving no trace behind. Anna would do this anyway of her own accord. She has to eliminate all traces of her physical presence as it is. Though to herself she doesn't deny that she likes having Hans in her. At times she stops speaking, at times she stops eating again, not even soup crosses her lips, and if she does eat she sticks her finger down her throat afterwards and throws up the soup, which after all has done her no harm, in a high arc. The wretched remains in the toilet bowl are immediately removed, like the bloodied cotton wool. Which befits a process that is on the unpleasant side. Away with it. And then it might just as well never have existed, and it's forgiven.

Rainer practises a curious straddle position, which no one could possibly begin to understand, a few more times and brandishes the bayonet wildly. Anna says: Hey, keep still, I'll blur the picture, it's dark in here as it is. Rainer presents a pathetic picture, and the picture that results looks even more pathetic than the original. The eye of the camera has no mercy on dilettantes, and neither does Rainer.

Presently Rainer and Anna will be going to Sophie's, Anna in order to happen upon Hans, perhaps, and Rainer in order to explain to Sophie why one has to be merciless, to oneself and to others. But especially to others.

Under his leadership and direction a crime is due to take place and hopefully another, and that is only the beginning of his career in crime.

The costly camera is placed just as it was in its box before, so that Papa will not notice that they have been working on the side in their spare time. The twins go out into the public light side by side, where a maple tree (one of many of its kind) is maliciously fluttering its leaves and where there are other trees, and flowers will soon be out, making the city more beautiful.

Anna spurns ways of making her person more beautiful. She shoots off towards Hans, who is doubtless expecting her already. With him she doesn't need any improvements to her exterior because what lies beneath the outer layer is of greater importance to Hans. Wearing a freshly washed pullover, Rainer is planning similar things with Sophie. They add savour to the distance by conducting a conversation on cultural topics. This makes the distance shorter and shorter.

THEY DAREN'T GO into the bar because they are covered by the Youth Protection Act, which divides humanity into two classes, those who may and those who may not. You can tell what kind of bar it is from the cars outside. They freely give enquirers information concerning the financial status of their owners. You have to be careful, whatever you're up to, or else some professional will come along and chase you off. Anna has a go at the part of the Eternal Temptress because Sophie looks too innocent for it. This isn't a place for kiddies but nonetheless kiddies occasionally walk the beat if they are in need of pocket money for new records. A suit steps up to the seductive promise of Anna's get-up. The suit is not particularly well cut but it's interested in the action in the Big City, which is neither big nor much of a city. He reveals the portal by raising a velvet curtain and sets off for his hotel room, which is supposed to be in the upper middle range and which he pretends is the lower end of the top class. From the cut of the suit you can tell that he is an oaf from the provinces, he thinks you can tell something quite different from it, viz that he is a man of the world with experience in luxurious living.

But he isn't. Because now he falls for Anna's trick.

Anna staggers out of the next gateway, oh God, I daren't go home, my Mum or else my Dad are sure to give me a thrashing because I was supposed to be home long ago. Please help me, I'm a helpless girl, I can't handle my problems on my own.

The avuncular provincial eyes and assesses and examines and tells himself, in novel terms, that he's in luck, in a position to take possession of something young and as yet relatively unused, which he will tell stories about later. Perhaps I've landed myself a completely innocent girl in this dismal Vienna side street, a girl who even has parents and has no notion what's what, so that I shall be able to give her personal instruction, hooray. Schones Fraulein, all alone, we'll have to do something about that. I have a nice hotel room, very expensive, it even has its own bathroom. Oh, it's really terribly good of you, I've no idea where else I could go, or why, but now I know, if I look at you. Won't you give me a little kiss, my little mouse, by way of a down payment (which is total nonsense since he's the one who'd be paying anyway)? I'll be nice to you, I know exactly how to do it, I'm not just some banging ramrod, you've got yourself a connoisseur of women, sugar, I can prevent conception too if desired. I'll give you your kiss in a moment, though you're not supposed to do that with a perfect stranger.

This disappoints the provincial and dampens his ardour, because it suggests a certain familiarity with physical processes that this inexperienced little slip of a girl didn't initially seem to have, it'll end up with him having to cough up, which he doesn't usually have to do with women since he's been giving quality service for years in market towns and provincial centres. But you wouldn't be here, you'd be in Gansendorf or Ottenschlag, if you weren't specifically after the amusements of the City. Come here, darling, I can hardly wait for what we're going to do in a minute or so, I hope I can smuggle you past Herr Fischer the night porter, I only took a single room. Which is doubtless a flea-pit, comments. Anna venomously, under her breath. She has her doubts. I could stay at the Bristol any time if I wanted but I don't want to. I'm a machine salesman. The machines bit isn't true, it's ladies' wear. In town you say machines so you don't make an effeminate impression, in the country you often say ladies' wear because the female in question is an easier lay if she gets to choose a stylish dress afterwards.

So you have the total receipts on you, that must be dangerous in this part of the city, with crooks about.

My, but you're brave.

I never have money on me, on principle, says the subhuman, and in spite of himself he reaches into his jacket where the heart is and then across to where other women have a bosom, which Anna, however, does not yet possess. You'll be amazed at the things I can do, drools the clothes salesman, and he turns his attention to Anna's ass, the rudiments of which are there. A woman's beautiful curves and contours are my greatest pleasure, splutters the travelling rep, and he enumerates various details, as if he were trying to sell the lot to Peitel amp; Maissen. He knows it all from firsthand experience and now he checks up on it because Anni has to fasten her shoelace. Which is a pre-arranged signal. Sure enough, on cue a number of shapes slip out of an entry and slink up silently on gym shoes, making for the next turning, which is unevenly cobbled, with grass and weeds growing untidily amongst the cobblestones, evidence of the neglect of this city. A crime is creeping up quietly. As all crimes do. So that they cannot be identified as crimes too soon.

I can't wait any longer, I've got to step inside that entry with you and feel your rock-hard lips on mine, says Anna, salivating greedily. You've got it, baby, squelches the traveller, his thought mechanism befogged, I won't be tight-fisted, I may be from Linz but I can be generous when it's called for. Lasses like this are still classed as children in Linz on the Danube and the police are careful to protect them, but here in the capital that smells of corruption you can use them and afterwards send them away when you're through.

Here we are, the entry. In we go. And in goes the hand, shoved under the dress. But here comes the Crime of Robbery personified, too. And just as the fellow from Linz is rummaging about under the Annaskirt, his Linz-head is dealt a hard blow by an unknown fist, one that belongs to a worker at that: Hans. True, the fist does not transport him to Dreamland, but it does interfere notably with the rhythm of Love and knocks him to the ground, which is dirty, sorrows come not single spies and a battalion of them is no better. Hans promptly bounces onto him and leaps up and down on sundry parts of the body, which you can't tell apart in the dark, let's hope some of them are the kind that particularly hurt. Anna bites, scratches and slaps away in true woman's style, all of it aimed at that unfortunate salesman head, women always aim at the head in this kind of situation, any expert will confirm as much. They lack practice at this kind of physical exercise, otherwise they'd know that the skull is especially tough and resistant, because after all it acts as a protective case for Man's brain. The traveller groans out loud with disappointment on finding that instead of loving and banging all he's getting is shoving and bashing. It was a set-up, he realises correctly, but the realisation gets him nowhere. It is no longer possible to yell because Sophie, with great presence of mind and astonishing instinct, has instantly covered his mouth, the bastard had better not bite me shutyertrap, we're prepared for every eventuality and have a knife. Right here. The trader, whose sole familiarity with knives comes from his wife and the kitchen, falls anxiously silent. Where's his wallet. Take it, it's in my inside pocket, my life matters more to me, I prefer it to money. It's the most valuable thing there is. Four to one is cowardly, I'll tell my wife and my boss back home, when I tell them I'll say it was six to one. Ouch. The plump wallet is expropriated and the traveller, who is well and amply fed, is hit, kicked, threatened, abused, spat at and humiliated in every conceivable way, and by girls who could be his own daughters, too, judging by their age, but they are the children of people who have brought them up badly, alas, so that they have become young criminals. Ugh, how nasty, it's enough to make you spit. You don't get this happening in Linz. Shall I pull his prick out and hurt him, asks Anna, in quite a state. No, don't, replies her brother, the leader (who else), keeping a genteel distance and directing the action sensitively. Do you think there's nothing that horrifies me? But in Bataille I read about what you can do with this kind of guy's prick, his sister stubbornly insists, starting to fumble about. We can at least do enough damage to make it useless for a while. And we'll be hurting his wife too, long-distance.

Look, we've got the money so let's get out of here, we don't want to get into danger by taking some ill-considered risk.

But the money was supposed to be the least important thing.

Money is unimportant, but it's reassuring to have it.

But I don't want to be reassured, I'm all worked up, it'll only take me a minute to take it out and spit on it. Keep a hold on him. No sooner said than done. Even Rainer helps with the holding, so Sophie won't think he's only doing it for the dough. You little fucker, you wouldn't have thought this would happen to you, would you, you thought something nice was going to happen to you, you swine. It is yanked out and spat on. That's what this guy was going to foist on me. Me. The fellow won't be foisting his wretched little tool on any women in a hurry. I'll bet he's lost interest today. Hey, come on now!

Hans kicks the salesman from Linz and his pecker, which won't be stirring for at least six months, that's for sure, and to think that at first it looked as if he was going to reap more than he'd sowed. He kicks at his neck and at scraps of underpants that glow white in the dark, making the fellow from Linz tip over sideways, shed a little Linz blood, and fall suddenly silent. He won't have sustained any permanent injuries. Still, he won't forget it.

They shoot back into the dark, out into the street which originally spewed them forth, not even the dark city by night can stand ill-bred adolescents such as these.

Shouldn't we piss on him too, asks Hans, turned on by what Anna did, no, we're not going to do anything else now, we're off, puffs Anna, clawing at him. Suddenly she's in a hurry.

Sophie is wearing a simple dark dress and blends in with the courtyard wall. Shudders keep on passing through her, again and again. These shudders are linked to a strange sensation of urgency in her lower abdomen and they recur with increasing frequency. She is unable to interpret the feeling. But it isn't puppy love or loyal friendship. No doubt it is something on the negative side, as the feeling that she shouldn't obey the sensation indicates, you can never rely on sensations. Come on, Sophie, breathes Rainer, and he takes her in his arms. She shakes him off and darts back into the street like a black thread being pulled very rapidly over a smooth tabletop.

TO INTRODUCE SOME clarity into their fogged lives, Rainer, Anna and Hans dash off to where clarity is present full-time: at Sophie's villa in Hietzing. It is always a radiantly sunny day there, and there are always young folk radiant with youth. The day is radiant to keep them company, as it were. This spring it is already quite warm, giving promise of a hot summer that will scatter the youngsters in many and various directions once they've passed their exams. Some of them are hoping it'll be the same direction as Sophie takes. Presently Sophie's naked feet will be tripping across the promenade, the asphalt is already warm, indeed hot, and the tennis racket is enjoying the view from its Vuitton bag. Mama will be hysterically wrapped up in silken scarves and kerchiefs to guard against the sun, as usual, because the sun is always bad for her, Mama being blonde and her skin extremely white. Mama will direct the entire operation from the cafe, constantly hurtling to the telephone with a display of professional nerves. She will say she is meeting Sophie for tea. Obedience is lodged within Sophie like a coil spring, tensing and relaxing painlessly. Like some beautiful, graceful animal: you squeeze its flanks with your commanding thighs but do it no harm or permanent damage. Hans will stay behind in Vienna, clowning around with frisky hairdressers every so often, now that he knows what you can get up to with tarts like that. He is not yet one of those who pine for Sophie and the Riviera because he has never heard of the Riviera. Alas, Rainer and Anna have heard of it. What threatens them is the woods. Which have so often intruded their unpleasant attentions on the siblings. Out where the woods are darkest and most solitary, of all places, Auntie Pussy waits, tempting people with healthy country air, the very people who'd rather be unhealthy than healthy. To think there are so many others who consider health the most important thing in Life. And they can't go. First the body must be revitalised, before university studies replace the revitalisation process and start on their destruction.

But before that there are still the school-leaving examinations. Which you don't talk about, because that's bad form.

And before that there's Sophie, what a coincidence, you think of Sophie with a tennis racket and there it promptly is, the tennis racket, plus Sophie. Both are sitting in a cream-coloured Porsche being driven by a young aristocrat. Instantly Rainer drowns him in hatred, that hatred of his that was waiting, dammed-up, impatient, to be poured upon something or other. It doesn't matter who's sitting beside Sophie. He must be hated. This is unfair, seeing that the fellow (leaving his background aside) may have honourable intentions. Every one is different from his predecessor. This makes for variety. Sophie flits out of the beautiful car, she too is very beautiful in her tennis dress, she is not sweating (which often happens when you indulge in sundry sports). Sweat cannot get a purchase on Sophie. She is an angel. A bodiless being. Rainer digs his upper teeth into his lower lip. Sophie's white figure leans against the Porsche window and whispers dainty words to the driver, which you cannot hear, even Rainer cannot hear them, though he is the language expert around here. What were you saying to that guy? he promptly asks. Hey, are you crazy, I suppose you think I owe you explanations about everything I do, you must be nuts (Sophie). Whereupon Rainer nervously slaps his thigh muscles several times. This doesn't make them any tougher and he hurts himself the most in the process. Anna makes a half-hearted attempt to grab at Hans's thigh muscles, which afford a firmer purchase than Rainer's, but Hans evades the groping hand and tries to convey to Sophie's eyes, with his own eyes, the news that Love has taken secret root. Also, his eyes devour Sophie's figure, which is highly visible today. Rainer and Hans are out to scale the heights where Sophie is on offer, they are jostling each other to the abyss, each of them wanting to reach the top first. Speechless, Anna grabs at Hans, to whom, after all, she represents a genuine little peak compared with him, so why does he want to be off climbing the highest mountains right away before he's properly acclimatised?

Flowers that are starting to blossom early are glowing in the garden. The gardener is snipping away at something nascent to perfect its shape. The gravel crunches under the departing Porschewheels. The gravel is sent flying when the machine gets up speed. The rival is rapidly distancing himself, as is right and fitting. Sophie has loaded all her weight onto her standing leg. This is in fact better than standing on both legs at the same time. In this position she is the Eternal Seductress to Rainer and Hans. Rainer prefers Sophie to the Eternal Melody of the Forests, perhaps she will invite him to the Riviera for the summer, because if you're in love you cannot bear to be without the loved one for a single minute, that is exactly how Sophie feels about it too. Hans makes some superficial comment about Sophie's legs, because there is no depth to him and so he cannot make any comment on her thoughts. She looks down at herself and says she never really noticed. Come on in, all of you. The whisky's over there, help yourselves, I'm just going to get changed, won't be a moment. Rainer and Hans, each after his own fashion, one with a great many words and the other in the few he knows, both say she should stay as she is. Anna maintains an embittered silence and keeps a watch on Hans, her property. But the unfeeling property in question is hankering after a new owner who will be in a better position to look after it. Hans sizes up a desk lamp made of chrome steel, doubtless because electric current is his special field, maybe there is some electrical job to attend to here, which will secure him a better footing.

Tentatively he moves a biceps into the picture, so that the raw strength that resides in the muscle will be seen and acknowledged by Sophie. Hans is an animal and he wants to waken the animal that no doubt dwells in Sophie.

They are hardly in the room but Rainer's inner tape-deck is humming, spewing out the feelings he experienced during yesterday's assault, doubtless he will conclude with his feelings for Sophie and between now and then there will be at least two hours of deadly boredom. I am your leader and I hope you enjoyed yesterday's operation, still, there's a thing or two we have to improve, and that's what we're going to talk about now. Above all, the timing. I'll tell you why, in detail. Sophie yawns, and Hans says he agrees with Sophie.

…(Anna).

And just think how much money we bagged, what are we going to do with all that money now, what lovely things you can buy with it, and possess, hisses Rainer incautiously and overhastily.

Sophie responds to Rainer's pesky drivel with her patented ear-closing technique. Today she is seeing Hans with newly awakened eyes. Because he has a hard, strong grip Sophie's eyes look for the muscles under his wretched cheap sports shirt, it is cut in an emphatically sporty style with a lot of pockets everywhere and that is why it is forever crying out in torment, it is so impossible, her eyes seek and sure enough they find. What tensed up within Sophie yesterday tenses again today, it is different from the way a muscle tenses because it is more of an idea, in the head. This time the intellectual was fighting a losing battle, even though it was his idea. But he doesn't have a hard, strong grip. Rainer says that an intellectual wearing a black roll-neck jumper doesn't have to deal out such heavy blows because he has other things to offer, things of higher quality.

Anna says nothing, and considers Sophie with the eyes of a rival.

A long procession of tiny beetles is wandering up Sophie's legs and crawling under her tennis skirt, where they go to work in a way of their own, rooting around. The beetles say the others should go and just Hans should stay, and Sophie promptly says it too. She's the master in her own house and she can decide who goes and who stays. She says this right out in the open.

A mixed response, though not a good one, except from Hans. Anna feels it hurting her but at present she cannot express it, she can only write it down, is there a piece of paper handy, grammar school kids always have paper within reach. She is going through a bad patch and is in urgent need of protection and support. The staff have already petitioned the schools inspector for special permission for her to give written replies in her oral exams too, because she is so intelligent and nobody wants to stand in the way of her academic future on account of dry rules and regulations. Inside Anna, something of crucial importance is knotted up, something it may never again be possible to loosen, yet kids in puberty and late puberty ought to be open, not closed off. Honesty plus soap and water suit Youth better than dishonesty and dirt.

But then, Rainer is all the better at it, compulsively opening the sluices of his mouth. What pours out upon his fellows essentially amounts to saying that Sophie can only truly love him, Rainer. Even if he goes now, her thoughts will nevertheless remain with him and go with him, and, that being so, he might just as well stay anyway. Hans had better not start imagining things that aren't the case.

Right, fine, but now beat it (Sophie). I totally agree with Sophie there (Hans).

Help! (Anna.) (What they hear is: croak, croak.)

Take some chocolate with you, chimes Sophie, with certain undertones and overtones. No, we won't take any chocolate, Sophie, because that's sadism, says Rainer, on the safe ground of his own field. Passion, dryness and grim determination. Dryness because you get sadism when desire has become free and unclouded, as Jean-Paul Sartre says.

Hans, on the other hand, explains that he is really an animal, not a human being, and that is why his manner is distinctly animal. He once read this in a thriller. Hans has read things, but they were the wrong things, simply the kind of stuff you find lying around in a workers' home that has had the pleasure of a workerseducationmovement. But he has read enough to know where the way to the top and the way to the bottom are. The world of books was the only way out. And in a workerseducationhome there are always books. But there is no other world. Only your own. His parents were workers with awareness. Which got them nowhere, seeing that one is dead and the other practically dead.

Rainer bickers. He is more unscrupulous than Hans because he has more to lose than Hans (who does not play the game), that is to say: a future career in the academic and literary world. Hans only stands to gain, and Sophie is even giving him her support! Hans is an unconscious ball tossed about by the elements and by Sophie. Rainer is not a ball in anybody's game. He acts of his own accord.

But still he is obliged to leave and take Anna with him. Please go, both of you. The siblings, pickled in hatred, shuffle out onto the English-style lawn, where they deliberately trample several costly blossoms and grasses and leaves underfoot, beneath soles paper-thin, because the shape of fashionable winklepickers would be spoilt by re-soling. Then they walk to the bus stop, with Rainer holding forth on why he left of his own free will and is therefore stronger than Hans, who stayed behind against his will. Thank heaven that at least his sister doesn't make any stupid objections or interjections.

Anna is silent, appalled at having to leave her Hans behind in an enemy house. Rainer's and Anna's love has been meanly spurned today, which has torn a rift in them both, which will be difficult to patch up or glue together again.

The pain does its job and swells to full proportions as the tram, reeking of unloved average people, takes the two of them back into its body again, it is a womb that the infant always wants to quit as fast as possible. One really ought to have a Porsche. But one hasn't got one, even if one says at school that some non-existent relative or other owns a luxury automobile of that kind.

In Sophie's room a record has been put on, and Sophie demands that Hans sit in that armchair over there and get undressed, yes, completely, and masturbate in front of her eyes, she wants to watch, just the way he always does it at home on his bed-sofa. Hans says he can't do it with her watching. Sophie says she wants him to do it with her watching. Hans flushes red as a tomato, he becomes agitated and stresses the reasons why he can't. He'd better, says Sophie, or else he can go right away and never come back.

Clumsily, Hans undresses. More clumsily than at the WAT when he goes to play basketball. But in the end he does manage to unbutton his shirt. He swears he almost certainly won't manage it, it's too embarrassing, he simply can't do it. It's supposed to be, says Sophie. As embarrassing as possible. That's why I want you to do it.

Hans says he'll do anything she wants and she knows it, but she shouldn't abuse that, it's unfair.

But I like abusing it. You have to take your socks off too, of course, what does it look like if you're naked but still have your socks on, it ruins the overall impression. Hans takes off his socks, revealing his dirty feet.

Sophie perches in a corner, scrutinises the rims of muck between the toes, and says she wants his freedom to submit qua freedom. She knows she is causing him pain, but she is coercing that freedom by torturing him, as it were, into identifying of his own free will with the flesh that suffers the pain, that is freedom, d'you understand? She rolls up into a sort of ball and chews off one fingernail after another.

Sophie says he can always beg her to let him off. If I put pressure on you, your fear and pleas are free, they're there of your own accord. It's your decision and yours alone, got it?

Hans says he'll do it because he secretly loves her. Which is no secret any more now. He eyes his cock with little favour. He'll never get a hard-on. That's for sure.

Now you have to stroke yourself, go on, says Sophie. For the first time she looks neither pale nor tanned but has red blotches on her cheekbones and almost looks alive. She says she wants to see everything, she wants a good view of all of him, she wants him to sit so that she can see and if necessary switch on the electric light, which he knows all about.

I'm doing it just for love, says Hans, and begins an unskilled tugging and pulling, rubbing and squeezing at his prick, which his anxiety has shrivelled with anxiety to the size of a twopenny banger.

It is a conflict of diverse forces, with Hans in the middle, making a rather powerless, indeed impotent impression just now.

Is that it, asks Sophie. No, that's not it, I can do a lot more, grinds Hans, who is working himself to a slow rage. He looks at Sophie, and instantly the fresh vitality of Youth and Fitness triumph and his member rises as it's supposed to. Youth and Health have won out over Age and Infirmity.

Sophie practically chews a knuckle off.

When he announces for the fifth time that he's doing it for love, Sophie says she doesn't give a toss why he's doing it just as long as he does do it, and she lays the palms of her hands on her throat to cool it off.

Hans works away at himself as if he were trying to jerk a wire through a wall, though all he's jerking off is himself. Sophie wants him to squirt and tells him so.

Hans doesn't want to mess the brocade of the armchair with his seed. Sophie says he can go right ahead because after all it's her armchair. Well all right then, I'll soil the armchair, puffs Hans in a regretful tone, and he goes ahead and soils it. Pretty soon there'll be sperm stinking of fish all over the room, thinks Sophie, and she gets rid of Hans in a hurry.

FOR ONCE HANS is wearing work overalls when the wages he has earned are paid out to him. He has a book tucked under his arm, a book that never used to be tucked there. For all to see. It is not a worker's book; but then, this worker has already ceased to be one. In his case things do not go as far as in Rainer's. Rainer wants to establish a whole new culture himself. Hans plans to work his way up economically rather than culturally. The economy is more to his taste. Right now he is already a tiny wheel in the machinery. Trotsky addresses him from the pages of this book, which Anna has lent him. Trotsky confides that in a society where worries about one's daily bread have become a thing of the past, where the children (all of them well-nourished) are cheerfully receptive to Science and to Art too, and where even the immense power of the ego will be trying to make the world a better place, Culture will have a far more forceful effect than it ever used to. This doesn't exactly knock Hans's socks off. What knocks Hans's socks off is Sophie's leather armchair. He plans to buy himself one just like it.

Today as always the Kochgasse knocks his optimism for six the moment he sets eyes on it. Any moment, enthusiasm for sport will replace this inappropriate optimism, and set Hans soaring high at basketball. Not long ago Sophie came and watched him play. Not a single loud or nasty word was spoken, the prevailing tone was one of relaxed politeness. Sophie seems a will-o'-the-wisp to him because one moment she's here and the next she's somewhere entirely different, cheering on the team she supports. Should he take her flowers or would an expensive perfume be better or maybe an extra-large bonbonniere? The best thing to do is to ask a woman, since she'll understand another woman's heart's desire better. Anna, in other words. He has to study later too, so that Sophie can be married and the armchair bought. Sophie is very complicated. The cause of this is her idiosyncratic nature. If you want to be complicated you have to be familiar with all the possible ways.

Rainer, the braggart weakling, has to get lost, hissing and frothing like Coca Cola, whenever Sophie says: Hans, you stay! It is a fresh pleasure for Hans every time the self-appointed leader has to beat a retreat. Rainer (the liar, the bigmouth) said he always goes on purpose so that he can test the tool of his imagination (the bonehead) on him and Sophie, patiently and calmly, as a locksmith tries a key. Rainer said he wants to make a tool of his flesh and Sophie's.

Hans muscles his way through Schonborn Park, behind the Ethnological Museum, swinging the briefcase containing his thermos flask and lunchbox to and fro, high spirits personified. He is not under any pressure right now because Sophie never strays into this area. It would be terrific if the girl stroked him just once or touched him in some other intimate way. But she doesn't. Because her pride is highly developed. Hans for his part no longer kisses women who are not that proud. His interest in Anna is dwindling in proportion to his love of Sophie. Already it has almost disappeared. Nowadays he only gives her hurried kisses by way of a thankyou for sex, which Sophie doesn't yet want to perform. The mental world Hans inhabits is inexact, as are the ideas of Life and values of the fellow-workers surging homeward in front of him, beside him and behind him. Three plane trees are swaying rhythmically in the wind and creaking because they are old and legally protected. Hans wants to protect Sophie for the rest of her life and be out in the open, in the fresh air a good deal. Soon the ice cream parlour will be opening its doors and admitting the surrounding Youth. Hans is already looking forward to licking away at a raspberry cornet and buying Sophie one. Soon summer will have arrived and it'll perhaps, correction: definitely be possible to get an eyeful of Sophie in a tiny bikini, the steamy mists of the water in the foreground, the steamy vapours of dewy forests in the background, and between them the steamy embrace of two bodies. Hans breaks into a bit of a run. He is running on ahead of himself, filled with a prospect of perhaps getting properly to grips with Sophie next time. If he imagines the place between Sophie's thighs he gets an instant hard-on and can't run or jump so well. No doubt her body is whiter and softer than Anna's, which is darker and harder. But he will never despise Anna in times to come. No, he will be understanding. Once he is studying he will give serious attention to her problems, and will be able to advise and help her, too. From time to time, he and Sophie will take Anna along on an outing in the car and try hard to teach her some sport so that she gets more out of life and develops a more positive attitude. Soon the chestnut blossom will be out, old people take greater delight in that than young people do because young people will see chestnut trees in blossom many more times whereas for old people the time is running out. A young man takes greater delight in it than a girl because he'll be kissing the girl's mouth beneath the chestnut tree and the girl will have to defend herself.

The city has a city smell. It is better than the countryside, which we have fled from. The city smells of adventure, jazz, cafes and exhaust fumes. Hans swings the briefcase round in a circle and this evening he'll swing Sophie round on the dancefloor the same way. The thermos flask is in danger of being broken, Life is good but in a moment his mother will be souring it for him once more with her talk of politics, cramming the embitterment into her rustling stacks of envelopes. Next month she may be getting a better-paid office job, as a full-time assistant in the accounts department.

There she is. Mother. Dealing the typewriter hammer-blows. Badmouthing the petite bourgeoisie, who cheered Hitler the loudest. Her son ought to stay away from them. Politically unaware, they enriched their petty profit-mongering egoism at the expense of minorities.

Hans tosses everything onto the kitchen bench in an untidy heap and flings off his shoes. The picture of his dead father goggles at the history-making power of the workers, with misplaced optimism and misplaced trust, from out of the frame where he will remain (as long as there is anyone at all to spare a thought for him), unable to go class-struggling. And serve him right. Morbid altruist. So he crumbled unto dust, with the flames helping along a little, and not even the whereabouts of the grave is known. And if report can be believed, millions of others crumbled along with him and vanished from the face of the earth, without trace, and still their places are being taken by new generations who will disappear in turn because their very existence is of no consequence. No one notes them down or counts them. Hans won't disappear. Hans will achieve his full status and potential at night school. Often Hans will pick up a tennis racket in his leisure time. Sport gives you a particularly strong sense of being alive, which his unknown Papa can no longer experience because he no longer is. Perhaps his Papa would have sent him to grammar school straight off, without approaching it in a roundabout way, if he'd been in a position to do so. Later on, Hans will be a big boss in the financial empire of Sophie's father. Because he'll be marrying the daughter. And he'll earn his advance laurels to the full, so that the father doesn't regret having taken him as a son-in-law. He will have to work hard, but then he will be accepted. Their initial sceptical attitude will have been forgiven once the first child is born, at the very latest.

Not to freeze underground with the millions who were exterminated. But to warm yourself at the fire of eager sportsmanship and bebop.

At irregular intervals, Hans tosses off articles of clothing, and tells his mother, who is holding forth about the War and the fact that a Wall Street company in America financed the SS, that jeans and every kind of hot music come from America, and that he is going to make a career for himself on the lines of an American-style manager. Still he won't deny his feelings and become an ice-cool careerist.

On the stove, something cheap and evil-smelling is cooking loudly away. The typewriter pauses in horror. Then comes to a full stop.

Hans tells Mother that Man has to achieve his liberation and rebel, and afterwards a life free of obligations can begin, as Rainer is forever saying. Some things he says are spot on, you've got to hand it to him. Then later, when you're older, business life starts exacting its obligations. In business you can discreetly lead the masses. All men are not equal, people differ in colour, shape and size.

Mother says that that concept of freedom is wishy-washy, nobody lives in a vacuum, we are determined by society. She ladles some indefinable slop that looks suspiciously like semolina into a bowl and accuses sundry Socialist Party men of treachery. Principally she accuses the notorious Socialist Home Secretary Helmer, who had shop-stewards arrested in the fifties and was responsible for other dirty deeds as well. The past of this shady character is obscured by a thick haze that not even the police could dispel. But Socialist functionaries Waldbrunner (Minister of Energy and informer), Tschadek (Minister of Justice and enemy of the workers) and many other leading trade unionists who dumped shit on their party and its tradition come in for Mother's violent abuse too, without any regard for their status, rank or personal qualities. Not to mention Olah, the secret agent.

Hans says that he is above the vacuum of the petite bourgeoisie, where you can suffocate if you don't watch out.

Mother saws off bread, wedges thick as doorstops, needless to say, nothing dainty about them, and tells her son, who has somehow or other not turned out quite right, to consider that that very attitude declares him one of the bourgeoisie. Even as you appear to adopt a position above their system of values, you recognise that system. It renders you blind to poverty. The mere fact that you speak of 'Man' is a crime. There is no such thing as the universal 'Man', never has been and never will be, there is the worker and there's the one who exploits the worker and those who abet him.

Hans says that Rainer says that it's appalling to imagine yourself a part of a whole. Because you must always remain an individual, completely on your own, and quite unmistakably distinctive. Which is a fortifying thought.

Mummy howls out loud. Not because she has cut herself but because her son is taking the wrong path. Turn back! You are trampling on the wishes and needs of your class, Hans. Nothing is universal. Instead of the unity and strength of your class, you want it split into individual molecules, every one of them isolated from the rest. Mother is like a hornet. Any moment she'll be sploshing semolina around the place and pointing for the fifty-thousandth time to murdered Papa, who did it better. You can see for yourself where it got him. And first he had to undergo inconceivable suffering, which is not to Hans's taste. After all, he wants to be inconceivably happy with Sophie.

Mother says it wasn't her that taught her son this egoism. Nor would his father have taught it him either. And out comes the motherfinger as usual, pointing to the well-loved but now almost forgotten features of that face. Hans says (it's all right if Papa hears this) that Love, to be exact: his love of Sophie, is a better way of tearing down barriers, whatever kind of barriers they may be, than fighting, no matter who the enemy may be, because his love knows no barriers or bounds.

Mother says she'd like to know why Love always crosses these famous barriers to go up and never to go down. Would he like a fruit yoghurt for afters? There's one left, standing all alone on the window sill, keeping its cool. No, Hans doesn't want a fruit yoghurt such as he ate in his early years, Hans wants a whisky or a cognac. Already he can hear the clink of ice, already he can see a white female hand, which is not a ghost's but quite specifically his Sophie's. It is specific yet unreal, like the concept of the working class. Unreal, like exploitation, which you can free yourself of at any time, after all, if you have the will to do so. It's all up to the individual.

Mother longs for the words, deeds and works of her dead husband, whom she'd still like to have with her in bed at times and whom she'd always like to have around, to help her get her bearings in bringing up her only son. Things aren't easy nowadays, Hansi (that was his name). Your poor maltreated bones have no idea that there are other crosses to bear besides the physical one. No doubt it hurt to die. You poor thing. I think such a lot about our cycling tours and all the things we shared. It was the last time you laughed. Those nights spent in barns, in the biting cold, squeezing up close together. Country milk and country butter from a farmer. Washing in the trough at the well. Discussions in backrooms of pubs with a tobacco haze in the air. And the ones who were going to continue the tradition but our son is not continuing anything, and what has become of the others? They are not in our old party any more. And then the shock, which must have been terrible. Having the life crushed out of your body, which wasn't ready for it. Though perhaps it had been prepared by the frightful pain beforehand, which one would rather endure dead than alive.

Sleep well, Hansi.

And Hansi, who is already a Hans, though he doesn't yet know what wee Hans ought to have learnt, removes a wad of addressed envelopes from their bed and stuffs them into the little kitchen stove behind his mother's back. Where the wad immediately goes up in flames. It's the second time he has done this.

Later, Mother will go on looking for the missing envelopes for a long time, once again unable to imagine where on earth they've got to.

THE HIGH ROAD twists through leafy, hilly landscape towards the Danube, but shortly before it, even before Klosterneuburg has been reached, it narrows, and the old Witkowski car has to twist as well, like the road, and inside it Rainer twists about, talking strained stuff about the inner tensions of artists, using the example of Camus to illustrate his point. Rainer doesn't have a licence but he is out driving with the permission of his invalid father, who is staying at home today, relying exclusively on his one leg if he wants to get about. Sophie is sitting in the front, next to Rainer, taking an outing to get some fresh air, which she gets all the time in any case, and Anna is in the back, exuding a pungent smell of sweat without any embarrassment, a smell like that of a frightened animal. But she still occupies a higher cultural position 'cause of playing the piano. It seems that whatever cannot escape via her mouth is making its way out through the pores. Her hopes are pinned on America, that vast land of infinite opportunity. She is applying for a scholarship, for next year. Her English grades are very good, and she is also a rebellious though basically quiet model pupil. In spite of the fact that she never so much as glances at a schoolbook at home. Now, as if on cue, a second frightened animal shows up, which in turn resembles Anna. This animal is on the back of a horse-drawn cart which evidently has wine-growers aboard. It is a dog. The dog is high up on a stack of winegrowers' tools and equipment, with a rope round its neck, and as it lurches about in despair the dog is digging in its toes as hard as it can, as if it were a cat and not a dog which can't extend its claws. The dog intuits that if it loses its balance and falls off the cart it'll be strangled. In its eyes there is naked horror at the brutality of its owners and of the world in general, which can really be a distinctly entertaining place if you're chasing some little animal, a springy feel in your paws, powerfully aware of the relish of Life. It is still spring. Spring is manifested in the new life all around, no doubt there are eggs all over the place, the deer are pregnant. But you cannot see them because things in a nascent state stay hidden to avoid premature extermination. Already the dog is gone, the brutal country labourers with their lack of affection for animals are gone, and the car with the three of them inside is gone too. It is a morning for playing truant from school, a morning when Hans is busy at work, which can be seen in the fact that he is boring away at the day, uninterested, waiting for evening to come. The schoolkids, by contrast, are interested as they bore away at things, since high school instils the researcher's curiosity in them.

They have already passed the Schot-tenhof. The road is a silvery-grey ribbon, just as roads are often described in books. Turn-offs would take you to the Salmannsdorf vineyards or to Neustift am Walde, but they are not taken because the party is heading for the Grinzing vineyards. The ribbon of road spirals gently upwards so that you have a view. The view from the Cobenzl, from the house on the Roan or from the Kahlenberg has even become famous. The car is parked and the walk is walked. On the left vineyards ascend the slope, on the right they drop down towards the Danube, which is likewise a silver ribbon, only further off. The air is clear and still so cold that they have to wrap up in their fashionable extra-long scarves. Above them are mathematically precise clouds. A breeze raises dust. The vines are not yet flowering, which (according to a Viennese song) will happen later, and elsewhere, to be exact: right beside the Danube when the vines are in flower. Then a thousand violins will play, the song continues and falls silent before its own idiocy. The three of them take the final plunge into the vineyards, beneath their feet the famed loess where vines flourish particularly well. The church belfries in the wine-growing villages are not yet in action because today is only Friday. You can hear dogs barking, hens cackling and their cocks crowing. The area is almost without people. After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it. Today's youngsters often bear solitude within, and without they are forever heading straight into it. The path they are on today is the upper Reisenberg path, which approaches the Grinzing inns with absolute fearlessness. Down below, they will go for a coffee. Old villas in the valleys, hiding behind trees although they are perfectly presentable. Glassed-in verandas with Virginia creeper growing on them, with its cousin the vine working for the villa owner and producing a harvest at a discreet distance. The incredible and utterly crazy beauty of the town elbows its way into the scene so forcefully that even Rainer tries to keep his trap shut, but he fails and promptly praises their surroundings. The air is completely transparent. Like aspic. The aspic would claim in turn that it was as clear as the air above vineyards.