Why still the dull duskiness around the floor-length drapes behind which two guards whose balls no one beats to death are playing ping-pong, no, not with skulls, not with brains, but with little celluloid balls. This paper bears the words much better than you, take a lesson from it. Why on earth those long curtains? So that the guards’ balls won’t always slip away, gentlemen ladies! And they don’t have to constantly look for them between the preserving jar of the Floating Woman and the bones, skeletons and skulls of the Dark Men and Women who placidly keep still, because all their doors, windows, balconies have been boarded up. A kind of at-restness, it seems to me, surrounds their silenced silhouettes. As I said, there is a place in Vienna where they finally found their way back home, this is how long it took since they were sent packing. Tired shapes now, they stand around here, putting stones on their own graves (some are missing ping-pong balls that they picked up secretly at night), and their flesh became a cloud and wept there in its grave, but just before, as a warm-up, it merrily jumped around in the fire, whoa!, dancing down their grand entrance stairs are our two beloved stars, Marika Röck and Paula Wessely, hey, hey, hey!, the way they throw their bones around themselves, they’d want to get the attention even of animals. Especially that Marika from Hungaria, now, that’s a woman!, yummyyummyyummy! But only the scaffolding held up, a scaffold whose house was taken away: These bones here are no longer taking a walk. In questions of the so-called pure race, it’s not enough to say that every tall blond person can be defined as Nordic, for folks are intermixing everywhere, and at some point, they simply can’t be distinguished anymore (that’s why we Austrians were so good at disappearing inside ourselves). Yes, the more foreign they seem to each other, the more enthusiastically they intermix! Why do people go on vacation? I think it’s to get away from home so that, when they get there, they can do exactly what they do at home. Don’t you make any stupid jokes about Ernst and Juppi now, who made a special trip here right into the TV! They sing so beautifully, and our images even come live, only smaller, of course. No, just a moment, they are also homages to themselves as role models! At any rate, that soap opera of a woman roaming around here, rocking softly without a bathing suit in her container, unfortunately was not built on the model of auntie Countess Maritza, whose operetta voice in the high alpine altitude can coleraturate everything anew, an incredibly talented woman, our Dagmar (Dagi) Koller. Sorry, but this dead woman is just a broken form for nothing, put together, show-cased, no, she doesn’t suit us, she is no longer a good fit for our yodeling Nordicks unless we were to take her out and pack her, together with our lily-whitewashed vests in our overloaded suitcase. So, as we say here, let’s keep this church in the village, meaning let’s not go too far from our village, which we wanted to sell to the whole world as the only way to be and seem to be, that is to say, the whole world has been taken to our village and has also become a village: Ours! Take your place on the square; in your new role as a roll of dough that adapts to any form, there is a place left at the center for the foam! Here, your bowl with the Schlag, our locally whipped cream! Though in case you are a car I am talking to now, I enjoy doing it because you have a strong heart under the hood, I am telling you: You can pick up your registration documents immediately, which document only you! Should you no longer want to be reminded of the dead, become a remembrance yourself! Folklore as part of those nice musicians, when the spit splashes out of the brain of Hias, the singer. He sings horribly out of tune, but one can cozily tune in to even such horror, the poet got it quite right, memory granteth the sea and an LP full of wonderful German country songs. I am going shopping right away, what did I forget this time? Then again, maybe I’ll spare myself the whole shopping. I am worried about myself: I enter the supermarket, I scream, I beat my chest, roll my eyes, blood comes out of me everywhere. I tried to purchase this preseasoned caraway roast here, my stomach lining screams, billions of campylo- and citrobacter bacteria or whatever they are called invade me everywhere, and on the way to the hospital I don’t have to think long and hard, because I always had a good meal before, pure pleasure! If only my homeland would not be so wrapped up in itself! The hometown keeps even this museum, where this woman is floating about, constantly locked up from the inside. This is a collection of forebears, it means, our forebodings get collected here, namely that once again we are somebody who keeps dreaming in the golden sunlight until we can finally get out again. When it comes to that, nothing can hold us back. Even if someone tried to make our bed all over again and channel the flood a little. Then we’ll come right away and elegantly disguised as fires this time.

  Sunken humans, however, leave their peculiar containers as quite normal figures. The guards fall asleep over their instructive super-glossies in which kings and princesses are constantly woken up by jumping peas. This group of humans slipping through the door one after the other, fearfully huddled together at times and setting off in the direction of Südbahnhof Station, is getting bigger by the minute. A man who passes us very closely doesn’t even say “Grüß Gott.” Could it be that he was stark naked and stank of shit quite pungently? No. And there, the young man in a suit, in pursuit of what?, better send him quickly off into the world than look any longer at how old-fashioned his attire and worn the fabric is. Over there two horrified figures in skiing outfits, somewhat unfit for the season, and farther left, at the gate, like fog, a group of young people staring into a boundless void, and for that they had put on alpine climbing gear (Thermo underwear? No, I think this heat comes from something else!), those things, clinking softly, strapped to their backpacks, are climbing irons and ice picks, which stick out of the tops of those backpacks like a bizarre old-German crest. Slow and chatting, very close to the entrance, a group of three older men in baggy knickers and anoraks, those men must also want to get out to the country, but they’ll have to hurry to catch the last express train, it’s very late already and the local takes hours. The group, now dispersing a little in the haze of the city, seems to share a certain clue- if not helplessness, they stray here and there, separate, come together again, their searching eyes looking in all directions. There, a young woman moving very swiftly and wearing a sort of dirndl dress, races in big leaps, as if she had a goal, light-footedly, elegantly, down the flight of outdoor stairs, but then she suddenly hesitates, looks around undecidedly, she even turns back to the building, for a moment the light of the lantern in front of the Empress Maria Theresia monument is reflected in her totally lusterless eyes, I measure that gaze, it is suddenly filled with unspeakable horror, and terrified, I quickly shake it off. Filled with inconceivable bewilderment, all those people gathering, separating, and coming together again, hurry away. Even a child is among them, its arms paddling as if it were drowning. Still, as much as they might be turning and spinning about, they are all heading in the same direction and continue their dull activity: just walking away.

  30

  The forester takes care of quiet and order in the woods. But the growing disorder all around here doesn’t bother him either. The land does not want to recover from the thunderstorms of the previous weeks; just like a stubborn patient, it throws the saving thickener, the mud, now dissolved in water, against the walls and rolls around restlessly in its bed. A fever-hot hand rises up from the valley and wipes several tons of earth and stone off to somewhere, the land did not check before whom or what it would hit with it. A group of grazing cattle gets carelessly swept off the edge, the animals tumble through the refreshing autumn wind, spinning in the air, still howling, legs down, legs up, bowels outside. Crusty earth as soon as it is sown back together cracks open again. The meadows turn brown underneath the tracks of soil transformed cockily into hardened coxcombs by the heavy clearing equipment; the topsoil, the “maternal” soil we call it here, is about to drown under tractor treads. Brooks peek curiously over their banks’ crust, they already got out once, licking the mustard-yellow loam, they surely can do that a second time! They only need a trigger, a shove. Brown, muddy, the dishwater—in which the three logoi, those three humans that meant something to us (the Un-Made, the Self-Made, and He who finally made something of himself), washed their hands in all their innocence—rolls ahead between the slopes, the water sweeps away chunks, shreds, this enormous water supply must be diverted, but: where to? During the past few weeks this area alone had about a quarter of the median annual precipitation—well, there were quite beautiful days in between—but now, almost imperceptibly, it got overcast again, so for heaven’s sake, where to with it all? The land is at the limit of its receptivity, of people and in general; it has enough of it all, it tells us in a sad, pleading tone of voice during the evening TV and radio programs. Everything is soaked so thoroughly, and the great weather of the past few days does not seem to have passed on much of this sogginess, this moisture, to the air: The earth has apparently lost or gambled away its evaporation bonus. Entire villages have been ravaged by floodwaters and have not fully recovered to this day. Gentle valleys filled up with floods and gravel after the water receded. Where to put all that, while the evening air is almost summerly, and walkers sit down like fieldstones under the trees to rest. People come up curiously to the cliffs and escarpments; just for the visiting strangers, the side valleys expose their flanks and present their crisp brown calves and cuts, partly sliced loaves with white skeleton bones of rocks protruding from them, all the earth having been ripped from those rocks and thrown into the valley. As if giant animals were sandwiched between those loaves for us to eat. There is too much of everything. The narrow valleys are log-jammed and up to thirty meters at that! The forester puffs his pipe and lets his dog off the leash for a bit, but the dog, who usually enjoys this rare opportunity, stays close to him, sits down on his hind legs next to his master, and looks cautiously beyond the street’s break-off, beyond this ski jump: So then, a selection among people does take place indeed! But it is mean somehow that the forester was robbed of both his sons at the same time. One could have been quietly left to him by the Nothing to replicate its infinity in one person at least.

  The Nothing, which the forester’s two sons are playing cards with, just shrugs its shoulders indifferently. The wind at first makes itself only heard, then it shows itself. Humbly, the last foliage trees farther up the slope lower their heads, they’ve already been through a lot this year but don’t want to be spoilsports today either, when the wave drives them on to celebrate our team. The hunting dog, that dutiful fellow, sniffs the air and lets out a loud howl that transitions into a high-pitched yelp that can ride along atop the wind down into the town of Neuberg!, let’s get it out into the world, it is such an earthly sound. For a moment the forester turns away from the white undersides of the leaves, those throats of trees humbly offered to the wind, toward the animal, but the dog avoids the master’s glance and looks down to the ground, almost embarrassedly, without pity for his master. Down below, driving along on a side street that turns off from the valley—across the gigantic and, since primeval times, washed-out clay cave, where thousands of bats are dwelling—and that soon merges in a big loop with the highway, is the minibus of the local trucking company, which takes tourists on various round trips, most probably they are on their way over the Wild Alps to Mariazell. The hunter asks himself if they will take the route via the village of Frein past the “Dead Woman,” that icy veil of water poured down the rocks by a dead woman in endless bridal repetition; an iron cross planted in the middle of the waterfall steps forward threateningly whenever a group of people wishes to cross this water on a small bridge of rocks across which the spume sputters its rage at the young birches and maples, a water creature lives there that struggles desperately to spit out something sharp, unwielding (a fishbone?), which it swallowed. Wouldn’t it be safer for the tourists to drive over the high mountain pass of the Niederalpl, no, better via the Frein, the street over the Niederalpl is especially dangerous and tricky in bad weather, the traffic alerts have been warning repeatedly since the storms. But the driver knows what he is doing, he is from here after all. Just now the last simple folks got on the bus. The forester is a man who continues on his way. And already the minibus turns noiselessly into a curve, crosses the mountain torrent, that angry child who threw out almost all its toys, so it got new ones of course, just many more that now clog its whole bed. The municipality is dawdling as usual, well, how can you recruit folks for this work when all the young men are up with the owner of the hunt, where they can get three times as much per hour, most of them take their long-announced yearly vacation at this time. While so much would have to get done here! Right now the woodsman should also check the creek, which has its source here and is the forester’s biggest worry, because it’s supposed to flow into the Tyrol creek but doesn’t seem to feel like it: since the storms, it brazenly moved its bed. And took all the bedding with it. The new bed badly needs a cleanup. Where it is now, in the raging stillness, this both unspeakable silence and pain-filled screaming of the night of death, while the forester’s sons and other sons are sleeping near and far, waiting for a noise to cut through this eternal silence, there is a new, an unfamiliar noise, was this a shriek of horror? Whose? The sons put out each other’s screaming like a cigarette so that the father won’t hear them. At any rate, the debris can’t stay there, neither can the bed, or at least it would have to finally be put in order, new sheets and covers would have to be bought if needed. The creek with stuff foaming in it, but what is it?, can’t lie down there every evening, in its stinking, grayed linens. Well then, the forester will now take a look at this, and worse, he will then call the municipality from home and raise hell, the high water’s already there for the taking. Of course, he will keep silent. Below, the holiday guests who stayed home are resting in their deck chairs, soaking up the sun, those worshippers, a motley selection of humans who take God’s scourge, the sun, as a stimulant, while they are trying to get away from their lives in beds not their own; yes, there they lie next to each other, while, above, the creek climbs into its new bed, getting all the soil cleared away for it.

  Couldn’t that wind bring snow? No, not yet. The forester presses his hat with the world champion’s tuft of chamois tighter on his head and turns, face first, into the mountain wind, the dog stays at his left foot, although it got the Go! Down from the pasture slope the jungle of firs presses against the man and his animal, and suddenly this master of the hunt becomes physically conscious of this forest’s gigantic primordial weight, he can feel every single tree as if it had grown out of his skin, for where once the forester’s offspring kept growing, there is nothing but emptiness now after this Bethlehemitic Infanticide as only Herr H. had ordered it before. Here before him, behind him: this state-owned stately logging road the hunter is walking along with hunched shoulders, the animal panting behind him, and there the slope’s gravelly spine cuts through it spikily, its entire vertebral column exposed, heavy trucks dragging along on it with creaking transmissions until the mountain side’s abutments break off, well, yeah, they really won’t last much longer. In the darkness someone inside the forester leafs through him as in an open ledger, there, a hand reaches inside him and turns blank pages that the forester forgot to write on, and now it is too late to leave something of himself behind, a trace. After the forester it stays blank. The hills are breaking, making waves, and the trees on the slope are doing what they usually don’t do. To wit: I hear a voice, it is the voice of night’s awakening, wherein his, the forester’s children, are living now, which is their first vacation ever. The voice speaks to the forester in two parts, thus exposing all the forces coming out of chaos, which wanted only to be thrown into the pond as a few small stones. Thus, the mountainside darkened, a shadow fell on it, clouds piled up, and rising already is the full force of the chasm’s darkness that carries the loam of the everlasting, all-consuming dampness, this now ever more active force of the water-colored roar that carries the lasting, upholds the trembling, unleashes the coming, and also makes it easier for the vacationers to stay, because it never lets them go again. The waters reign, no one else does. The airs are managed by the weather, but the water reigns all by itself.

  The trees don’t just rustle, they don’t just stand there, they work! The forester feels as if all of a sudden something pushed this jungle, one of Europe’s last and the only one in this country, no, rather lifted it out of the ground as a whole. Some might think that all those loggings were bad for us and the Brothers Tree, and this is why we should kindly leave them in the forest or wherever they live; let’s instead use our forklifts to lift a multicolored vegetable gondola (all food is chemistry, the chemistry of grosseries, that is!). No, what really harries That Which Came From Above is water, which can grab our crowns that capped us, corked and screwed us up for so long, and then the entire forest to finally fell us all, yes, this hand also falls. And they’ll get us by the scruff of the neck, after we had slipped so many years through the fingers of the Living One Himself, who manages the stars and arranged everything here so lovingly for a foldout. Not everything comes down to an eternal cycle of becoming and forgetting, it comes down to something coming to be but not wanting to be forgotten like this jungle here, this only one unreasonable amid nothing but reason. This forest is an infinite relationship between water and earth, and this relationship must be worked out anew.