Lust by Elfriede Jelinek Page A

briskly, leaving you, and starts his car, where the dew lies fresh and glinting in the first bright highlights of sunshine. Quite unlike your matt and dull hair from which the glinting highlights have gone forever.
    The factory. My, how it deals with the unskilled folk who are pumped into it from inexhaustible sources. And how
    loud it is, inexhaustibly drowning the din of the stereos! A whole houseful of humanity. A factory built on the Direktor's lot. His plot. Who did it? they wonder, fetching a refreshing Coke from the dispenser. A tent of light and living creatures, where paper is manufactured. Rival firms are putting the competitive screws on, and if anyone ends up getting screwed it'll be the employees at the mill. The company that owns the factory in the adjoining federal province has far more clout and is right on a major traffic artery, the bleeders. Wood is pulped and the pulp is processed at the mill by people who've been pulped, at least that's what I've been told, and I'm glad that I, being free, can go into the silent woods in the heat of the day and spew my echo out. The armies of the irresponsible, people like me, who read their papers on the toilet, see to it that the trees disappear from the woods so that they can take the trees' places and unwrap their food from paper wrappings. Then at night people drink and worry. And when there's a dispute, the bloated and blinded multitude plunges into the depths of night.
    The factory has gone to the wood. But it has long since been pining for somewhere else, somewhere that production costs are lower. The divine hoardings that line the arterial roads set the hordes dreaming and steaming off on their toy train sets. But the points all point to nowhere. And even the Herr Direktor is in the hands of the powers that be. Gobbling public money. Opaque are the policies of the owners, whom no one knows. At five in the morning people fall asleep at traffic lights on their hundred-kilometre drive to the factory At the very last crossroads, at the very last holy red light that toys with them, they fail and are killed, failing to slam on the brakes, failing to break off their dreams of the last grand slam Saturday night. Those TV caresses, which for years have nourished their pawing and panting, they'll never see again.
    And so they all cause their women to sound forth once more, that they might not hear the last trumpet at least till next pay day. The trumpet call of rumour never falls silent in this place. Those who have been dropped by the banks sit chirruping in the furrows, eating their last crumbs of bread. Behind them a wife wanting her housekeeping money and new books and exercise books for the children. All of them are dependent on the Direktor. That big kid with the mildest of tempers. Though his temper can snap round with a crash, like a sail, and then we're all in the same boat. And promptly fall out on the vast, wild side. The side we flung ourselves across to at the very last moment. Because we don't know how to strike up our thousand-voiced siren song to better effect. Even in our anger we are forgotten. But our running sore is hurting. And we run wild.
    6
    THE WOMAN GROPES HER way along a fence by an old volunteer fire brigade station, failing in her confused state to find the emergency exit from her memories. There she goes, not even on a lead. The dirty washing-up waiting to be done is clean gone from her mind. Already she has ceased to hear the familiar jingling of the bells on her bridle. Speechless, she licks up like a flame, like sparks. She's left them both behind, her practical-minded husband who is a great sport and is still growing, regardless of the flames shooting from his genitals, and her child, all gut and screech like his violin playing. Let them drone and howl together. Ahead of her is only the cold tempestuous wind off the mountain. The terrain is threaded by a few paths leading into the woods. Dusk. In their cells, the housewives bleed from the