The woman suggests that the child has to eat too. Her husband does not hear. He is leafing abstractedly through his pocket dictionary. The house belongs to him. Already his Word has arrived there and will be taken to heart. He opens wide his wife's genitals to see if his signature there is legible. Angrily he drives his tongue in. It is a knack he acquired out of nowhere one day when he returned from the office. Joyous, the Direktor is a god. And soon he will be in the office joking with his secretary. He has to make a good showing! He tries out ever new positions from which to kick his cart down into his wife's quiet waters and start paddling like a maniac. He doesn't need water wings, he'll never pull one of those plastic things over his red head simply to stay in good health. His wife has been healthy for the longest of times anyway. She writhes beneath him and cries out as a whole herd of seeds plunge stampeding from his well-appointed glans. What's the matter. Only someone who need have no worry about a position or income can clink the ice cubes as loud as this.
This Man, who is now holding his pet tight in the clamp of his thighs, to bite the cheeks and pinch the tits, did after all devise a strategy of his own to cut the firm down to the essential core. Yes, you saw right! And you'll see more still when the gates are thrown open in the morning and the bowed backs of the gleaming herd (having drunk enough) – when they've barely had time to register the sun – disappear again into the darkness and hang up their fate to dry. Right. And every so often one of them is still in his dripping wraps. Who will have mercy on us? Rather let an excessive surplus be earned for the company, than that the superfluous ones, true at least to their wretched names, should earn something for their own homes and gardens. Profit for the foreign multi-national that owns the paper mill. So that he can start up from his sleep bawling, wrap all of us in paper, and gobble us up. The child has his workshop where he is housed and shaped up. At Christmas he performed a solo, standing in front of the manger where there was a dear little child such as himself. This year the snow fell early and it's going to be there a long time too. Sorry about that.
Later one of the woman's neighbours comes to visit, unbidden, uncalled for. The complaints simply pour from her. The abiding weakness of the female sex etc. Which has now awoken and, climbing the stairs, can only break loose out of itself as a complaint. This neighbour is as bothersome as an insect. She shines her light upon the people in the meadows. She confides expressly in the Frau Direktor, and expresses her confidence in the Son of God, who created the people hereabouts out of the earth and transformed their trees into paper, and she hopes He will show favour to her daughter who will soon be finishing her business studies course. Her husband no longer meets her, he meets a twenty-year-old waitress in a station restaurant. The Direktor's wife can think of no more words to say to her visitor. She has no refreshments left to offer her. How lightly she wears her wealth. There she sits, surrounded by furniture and pictures that hadn't a moment's peace till they belonged to her.
Essentially the Man is a big creature of pleasure, a bankable piggy, a citizen singing and gaming. So that his wife's body will be in a state to report for its daily duty, he chooses lingerie for her from a mail order catalogue. And lo, his choice has fallen upon naughty items, so that she can try to be like the models in the photos. But the undies are wasted on her. She leaves them in the drawer, forgotten, and says nothing. No red lace to disturb her peace. But, come to think of it, that's just how he likes it: when his people altogether forget themselves when he uses their love against them. Peacefully they pass like Time in their homes, waiting for him. The child, hungrily stalked by sport. The woman, thirstily compared with photos and films. Families with no dependants and no dependencies simply drive up in their large family car, equipment in the boot: the whips, the birch rods, the fetters, the rubber accessories, all for the big babies whose members are always weeping and wailing and whining for someone bigger than them to come and tame them. Some day their wives will be quiet too and the milk will come. The men even give each other* injections, in goes the needle, so they can stay the course longer when they go dropping their coins in the slots of the collecting boxes their wives beseechingly hold out. So that they themselves will be collected again. Calm. Pull themselves together fast. Pull a fast one on their business partners. Women are standing bowed over bowls of salted snacks, laughing, and presently the gentlemen dive onto the sofas, collapse, wag their tails, and then, as fast as they can, flee the ones they have charmed. How deeply the men desire that their shots should go far, far overshoot the mark, the game (what a game)! The women, stretchmarked by their children's sojourn inside them, have to serve themselve up, naked as the day their bundles of joy were born. The weighty wine glasses totter on the trays: their Lords and Masters embrace them from behind, from in front, from anywhere and everywhere, fingers are inserted and withdrawn, mouths suck between thighs. They break their favourite toys. Aha. Now they're resting after their labours of love, the loved ones and the thunderous horsepower that lay with them. The labours of sundry hairdressers have been ruined. There is garbage for charwomen to clear away once again. And then they all go on, and off, in their cars, in the loving arms of their wives. And who, in truth, will be embarrassed before his own car seats? They don't eat chocolate, mind you. The stains, which are all that remains of what we thought the highest of pleasures, tend not to wash out.
The Man can never simply disappear, all of a sudden. He is so settled in his beautiful house. In the evenings, the house is cloaked in the darkness of the forests and mantled in the gloom of the local people: handsomely turned out! Sympathy would be wasted on the woman. The pores of her child are still so small. The woman reels beneath the heavy burden of her happiness. She is under house arrest, but her sentence may be commuted for good behaviour. Round and round she goes in the same old rut; she mustn't deny her circuit judge his rest and recreation, though. His same old rutting. Barely home and his whistle's wet again. Company outings generally end in wetting the whistle, then out it comes, wanting to be blown, wanting to sound off in the open. Life mostly consists of things not wanting to stay where they are. So be it! All change! It all makes for restlessness, unceasing social intercourse, people go calling on each other but have to carry themselves with them wherever they go. Well-ordered servants, there they stand with the sausages of their sex, banging their cutlery on the table, wanting a hole to be served up fast, a hole to hide away in, only to re-emerge greedier than ever, to offer their hospitable services once again to those who have no need of them. Not even secretaries care to admit that the groping that goes on in their blouses is like a denunciation. They laugh. There are so many of them around here, too many for them all to get enough of their improper nourishment.
The Man appears at daybreak. And stands revealed. The naked truth. He knocks the woman over, slaps her on the backside, he who has travelled from afar. The tubes are already rattling on the bathroom shelf, the slip-on cover is trembling on the toilet, the porcelain is gleaming. You can hear the silence that has prevailed in the Man's rod all night. Then he speaks. Nothing can turn him away. On the level floor stands the woman, weary from her long and toilsome journey through the night, and now her socket's due to receive his plug. She has long since seemed as intimate as a rolling milclass="underline" even to his business associates he brags of her, and in short and powerful bursts the Direktor's dirty sallies talk their way to the top. And his subordinates maintain an embarrassed silence. The Man forces himself, well be hearing from each other. The Direktor reaches into the pocket of this body, which belongs to him. The loved objects are all there. Nothing missing. The Man is fond of easy talk and the woman is always easy. How could he possibly be expected to contain himself any longer, this silent can opener? Like a plant helplessly seeking the light the moment it's switched off. The child plays very nicely to order. How much better will he perform on his fiddle when one day, like his daddy, he's learnt to work the fiddles of manhood and fatherhood and perform the parts! The long and tedious breast-feeding lies in the child's forgotten past, but he still expects his every wish to be as automatically satisfied. For so long the woman gave of herself to the boy – and what has the trying creature learnt? That you have to try try try again, because heaven is a hill you have to climb, and the climbing has its price.