Silence sweeps the streets, and God transfigures the inmates of the region – indeed, several of them are still at work, some carving and snippeting at their furniture and homes, the rest looking after their current partners who are in non-permanent residence. New ones are forever having to be hauled home (and promptly their usefulness is at an end) to make Nature's standing promise of work and shelter come true. At long last they settle down! And so they keep the promises Nature mistakenly gave them: the gentle blunders that became human beings; and human errors have destroyed the forests that give them life, too. One further thing that Nature promised: the right to work, according to which every occupier who has sealed a pact with his employer can be delivered by death from God too (God's stinking delivery). Now I've made a slip as well. Nor do the lords of the land know of any deliverance from the dilemma. There is less and less work, there are more and more people doing everything they can to see it stays that way and to see that they themselves stay. Like now, wearily but proudly hanging their signs of life on the wall and handing in their cards. All around, bodies are beginning to develop, and the most oddly constructed of figures are coming into existence. If the architect who made these motorway-users could see the freaks arising flushed with hope from their crumpled marital beds (to think of all the other things they've crumpled!), he would promptly redesign them, given that he himself rose again in a far more thrilling way from his cramped sepulchre to set us all an example, which can be studied in museums and churches. The bad witness we all bear the creator simply by being there and not being able to help it: now they are all stirring and humming, and as their bodies work they move in the rhythm of pop music on the 03 station or a simple record. How calmly Marx responded to us! All the spendthrift debts which they are now collecting, hugging each other tight: who would give them anything at this hour! Not even the innkeeper by the bridge, obeying his dark instinct to earn more than he has spent in the way of drinks, trying the food he himself has prepared, where 86-year-old kitchen maid Josefa licks the plates clean and gobbles up the leftovers.
Something is always left over of the work, to which they are more devoted than to their dearest beloved. The women have been freshly prepared, or preserved. Yes, they too desire something, but not for much longer, the way they're roaring under the lash of the weather, which even dictates their attire. Thus their round fat bodies hum away, life goes on, man vanishes continually in death, the hours sink to the ground, but women flit nimbly about the house, never safe from all the blows that fate deals. How alike their habits are! Every day it's the same. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Procrastination, procrastination! But the next day has not yet come, the woman of the house cannot yet enter it, to be finished off by yet more work. Now they repose unfeelingly in each other, the pistons thrust down, a course is set for the pathless shores of bodies but the goal is missed, yes, we may fall but we do not fall a long way down, we are as shallow as the shallowness about us. If our deserts went by what we earn, we would just be able to buy ourselves some shoes for our weary wanderers' feet, but no more, and already our partners are lapping about our ankles, they want to play themselves and think they are trumps, oh horror, they really are winning the trick! And the distance to the heavens remains ever the same. Quick, let's place a foot on the runner-board of the car, which we have wrested from our bodies in the form of work, many many hours put in at the factory. We have entered as children of God, and after many a year nothing remains but to board the cheapest of mid-market cars, and we whose gears have meanwhile changed slightly are refused access to the works by a master of shifts who newly holds the stick. Right, they have eliminated our place of work entirely, and now the factory operates almost on its own, it learnt it all from us! But before poverty moves in and the car is sold, let us ourselves come back a time or two from foreign parts. Let us squander ourselves in someone else's parts a time or two more. We will not be driven away from this table by any thought that has eluded our possessor, nor by any suit advertising in the newspaper, any nonsense to put a prompt stop to our lives because we poor work-horses absolutely had to have a few more horsepower in our meadow. And then there's the Direktor: he is not the sole ruler by any means! Not even the firm, that captive buzzard, can soar as it would. Who knows what other beast it might encounter!
Thus we all have our worries: whom we could love and what we could eat.
One would not imagine for a moment that there was anything fake about their feelings. Rather, one would think they were genuine jewels that others bedeck themselves with: the throngs of thonged bodies, tricked out in their best (new shoes!) and wandering the paths of their little love affairs, turning to a restless trick or two in their rooms. A human choir sending their many-voiced echo up unto the father in the air on the chair-lift. It was he who created the erogenous zones with which Woman pretties herself up of an evening, rapidly shoving her work out of sight lest anyone pay her properly. Flabbergasted, the men gape into their women's holes, torn by life, and yes, they shudder, as if they knew that the box has long been empty from which the seeds have been shaken out for years. But the dear women are so attached to them. And tomorrow morning the first bus has to be caught, no matter how helplessly they have to thrash their wives, who are attached to them and their short barrels: shoot! Jobs don't grow on trees.
The others, too, take this road to death. They accompany each other for a while, and breathe loudly at the gate, for it to be opened to them. And there come yet more people who have fallen into each other's weakly branches, to tangle their limbs. So that they are a twosome when they have to face their foreman. One has to be able to do something or other! To be bigger and more numerous would be a good start, if one is sinking beneath the stroke of the factory's daily scythe. And from the spoils the owners pick out the very best that you experienced this year on the beaches of Rimini and Carola, where, blooming luxuriantly, you sank beneath the rubble of your short-lived pleasures.