The Children of the Dead by Elfriede Jelinek

Author:Elfriede Jelinek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

18

At night they sleep restlessly amid the whisper of leaves and needles. With needles they fought against the truthfulness of nature: The area was inoculated with a monoculture, and now the fir repels any other tree that wants to join as a newcomer. Karin F. is finished for now with bloody or otherwise somehow wet appearances. For many reasons dear to them, quiet is important to the guests. Karin, too, is to lie, leaden as the area, in the dust of her clothing. The activities of insects has intensified, it is an invasion. One steps on earwigs, ants, variations of beetles on lettuce leaves, wasps, flies. Something’s crackling, fluttering all the time, and once again some room must be combed for animals at the guests’ request. Someone’s got to be able to find that wasp’s nest, yes, there it is, in the corner of the curtain rod, this address is located on our approach slope. All that mumbo jumbo about countries where hetacombs of dead are buried, what’s that all about? Can you please tell me where those countries are, you betcha, I won’t find them! Karin wears her jogging suit again and shyly enters the kitchen to get a bottle of mineral water, with the help of such ordinariness, she tries to make herself unhappened. The water’s murky flood falls immediately from above through the wasteland of her body, foamy bubbles are floating around inside the woman who sloughed and spilled herself today in view of everyone. But her desiccated body does not absorb anything, and the flood gets passed on in the hollow Bakelite capsules of the kidneys that float in her renal pelvis, to be removed sometime. The nicely wood-paneled corridor opens up darkly, it crackles under the step of our fellow sister K., who lets herself enter into an entirely novel appearance. Being all there has never been her way, anyway. She presses herself, flat as a photo, against the wall, as footsteps come up the stairs, hesitate, turn back again, and rattle down, the maid probably forgot something. Karin bends out the window, the landscape lies motionless before her, the woman scans every centimeter for life. It seems to her that lately she can see better in the dark than in the light. She startles as she sees, motionless, quiet like herself, that young student standing at the wall across, so close that Karin would only have to reach out her hand to touch her, like a bouquet of flowers you put on your own grave. The two women lend each other, casually as if lending each other a handkerchief, a long look, their pupils glue themselves to each other, transfer pictures that had the paper layer of reality pulled off their skin. The lovely, gentle road of a video device is unrolled, they have it good! Every motorist stuck in traffic dreams of having his own rolled-up road with him that he could race along all by himself. Karin sees, yes, she actually sees herself on the wall remaining at the scene of an accident she can’t remember.

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