Lust by Elfriede Jelinek Page B

brain, from the sex they all belong to. What they have bred they must now tend and rear and keep alive and cradle, in arms already laden down with hopes.
    The woman moves towards the icy channel in the cleft of the valley. Awkwardly she wanders across the frozen clods. Now and then animals are revealed through an open stable door, then there is nothing. The rear quarters of the animals, pulsing craters of mud, are turned to face her. The farmer isn't exactly in a hurry to clean the shit off their hind parts. In the large livestock sheds in wealthy regions, the animals are given an electric shock through the yoke about the head if they crap at the wrong time: cattle training. Beside the cottages, wood is stacked, wretchedly snuggling up to the wall. The least you might say of Man and Beast, their common denominator as it were, is that both are tucked fast in their beggarly beds by the snow. Sparse plant life, tough leafage, is still straining for the light. Iced-over twigs play with the water. To be stranded here of all
    places, on this ice-tight bank where even echoes founder! Nature presupposes sheer scale: anything of a smaller size could never excite us or entice us, tempt us to buy a dirndl dress or a hunting outfit. Just like cars approaching a distant country, so we too, like stars, are nearing this unceasing landscape. We simply can't stay at home. Someone's put a country inn there, just for us, to put an end to our rambling. And Nature is put where it belongs, with a preserve for domesticated deer or a path through the woods with every tree labelled for our instruction. In no time, we know all there is to know about it. There are no mountainsides to cast us wrathfully down; quite the contrary, we gaze at the bank strewn with empty milk cartons and tin cans and we recognize the limits Nature has placed upon our consumption. In springtime all will be revealed. The sun, a pale patch in the sky, and only a handful of species remaining on earth. The air is very dry. The woman's breath freezes as it leaves her lips, and she holds a corner of her pink nylon dressing-gown to her mouth. In principle, life has ample opportunities for everyone.
    The wind forces a frozen cry from her lips. An involuntary and none too savage cry, a mute sound squeezed out of her lungs. Helpless as the child, a field tilled and ploughed and beaten till it's used to the treatment. She cannot take her beloved child's side against his father, because after all it was Father who filled in the order form for extras such as music or holidays. It's all behind her now. Her boisterous son is probably tearing downhill into the dusky valley at this very moment, like an upturned plastic ladybird in his plastic moulded sledge. Soon everyone will be at home. Fating. The terror of the day still pounding in their hearts. If the child doesn't have pieces of shell stuck wet behind his ears! Such filth. That children are here today and gone tomorrow, like time, is the responsibility of women, who stuff food into their own or Father's images
    and show where things come out again. And, wielding his sting. Father drives his sons out onto the piste, where he can be lordandmaster of the leaderless mob.
    The fist knocks the woman senseless against the railing. She has left the last of the cottages far behind now. The children's babble told clearly of how wonderful life is if you let circumstances pull the wool over your eyes. With eyes wide open, the woman always has to go walking on other paths, she's always been squeezed from the tube of her house into the open. Quite often she's gone astray. She's lost her way a time or two and ended up at the police station. Where the officers opened their arms wide and welcomed her in, offering a place to rest. The poor folk who spend too long at the pub get a different welcome. Now Gerti is silent. Amid the elements. Which soon will lie wide open beneath the stars. The child who has been singled by Fate as her surviving next of kin is