Father, going blind, but safely guided, goes toward his future home after leaving his hereditary home. He has been assigned a nice room, it is waiting for him. Someone else had to die a lingering death before a new patient could be accepted. And this new patient will someday have to make room for someone else. Mentally damaged people need more room than the normal sort, they can’t be put off with excuses, and they need at least as much space to run around in as a medium-sized sheep dog. The house declares: We are always fully occupied and we could even increase the number of beds! However, the individual inmate, who usually has to remain lying down, because he makes less dirt that way and is thereby stored in a space-efficient manner, is exchangeable. Unfortunately, the house cannot suddenly double its price; otherwise it would do so. Anyone who lies here is stuck here—and he pays through the nose, so the administrators can profit. And anyone who lies here remains here, because that’s what his family wants. If worst comes to worst, he can only get worse, and wind up in a Bedlam!
The room is neatly subdivided into single beds, each inmate has his own little bed, and these little beds are small, so that more beds can be squeezed in. Between the beds, a foot of space is left free, so the inmate can, if necessary, get up and relieve himself, something he cannot do in his bed, otherwise he would require intensive care. He would cost more than his presence is worth and he would be transferred to a more terrible place. Often, someone has good reason to ask who has lain in his bed, eaten from his plate, or rummaged in his chest. These dwarfs! When the lunch gong rings (they’ve been hungering and hankering for it), the dwarfs form disorderly packs, trudging and jostling toward the refectory, where their Snow White tenderly waits for each of them. She loves every last one and hugs every last one—this long-forgotten femininity with skin as white as snow and hair as black as ebony. But here there’s only a gigantic canteen table coated with acid-proof, scratch-resistant, washable plastic, for these pigs don’t know how to behave at a meal. And the dishes are made of plastic so that no idiot will beat himself or anyone else, and there are no knives or forks, only spoons, don’t you know. If meat were served, which it’s not, it would be cut up in advance. They shove their own flesh against one another, pressing, pushing, pinching, in order to defend their tiny dwarf places.
Father doesn’t understand why he’s here, for he has never been at home here. Many things are forbidden, and the rest are not appreciated. Anything he does is wrong, but he’s used to that with his wife. He’s not supposed to hold anything or even budge; he’s supposed to fight his restlessness and lie still—that stalwart stroller. He’s not supposed to bring in any dirt or carry off any sanitarium property. The outside and the inside should not be confused, each belongs in its place; clothes must be changed or added to for the outside, even though the man in the next bed has stolen them in order to nip Father’s plan in the bud. Nevertheless, Father instantly tries to get away when they put him to bed, but he is promptly apprehended and forced to remain. How else would the family get rid of their troublemaker, who disrupts their comfort; and how else would the administrators get hold of his money? One family requires his absence, the other his presence. One lives from his coming, the other from his going and never coming again. So long, it’s been good to know you. But all good things come to an end. When the two ladies drive off, Father, supported by an involuntary helper in a white smock, is supposed to wave at them. But instead of waving his hand, he holds it unreasonably in front of his eyes and begs the man not to beat him. This casts a harsh light on the departing vestige of the family, for Papa was never beaten, absolutely never. How could he say such a thing? This question is directed at the good, still air. The air doesn’t answer. The sausage-maker drives faster than before; he has been relieved of a dangerous person. Today is Sunday, and he wants to get his children to the soccer field. It’s his day of rest. Carefully picking his words, he tries to console the ladies. He condoles with them, pickily choosing his words. Businessmen are well versed in the language of picking and choosing. The butcher speaks as if discussing a choice between filet mignon and rump steak. He uses his normal professional lingo, even though today is Sunday, the day for the language of leisure. The store is closed. But a good butcher never stops working. The K. ladies spew out a torrent of innards. The expert finds that these innards are suitable, at best, for cat food. The ladies babble: This action was regrettable, but necessary—indeed quite overdue! And it was so difficult for them to finally make up their minds! They overdo it. The butcher’s suppliers usually underbid one another. But this butcher has fixed prices and he knows what he’s asking for what. An oxtail costs this, a ham that, a steak even more. The ladies can save their torrent of breath. They should be more generous when purchasing sausages and smoked meats; now they owe the butcher, who doesn’t take a Sunday drive for nothing. Only death is free, and even death costs you your life. And everything has an end, only a sausage has two ends, as the helpful businessman points out, bursting into loud laughter. The K. ladies agree somewhat mournfully because they are losing a member of their family; but they know what is proper for customers of many years’ standing. The butcher, who considers them part of the solid core of his clientele, is encouraged: “You can’t give birth to an animal, but you can give it a quick death.” He has become quite earnest, this man with the bloody occupation. The K. ladies agree with his last statement, too. But he should keep his eyes on the road. Otherwise his statement will come horribly true before they even realize what’s happening. The streets are filled with inexperienced weekend drivers. The butcher replies that driving is second nature to him, it’s in his blood. The K. ladies have nothing to respond with except their own flesh and blood, and they have no intention of losing either. After all, they have just lodged some very precious flesh and blood in an overcrowded dormitory, for which they spent precious money. The butcher shouldn’t believe that it was easy for them. A piece of them went along and remained in the home. Which piece, the butcher asks.
Soon the ladies enter their slightly emptier apartment. In this cavern, which closes protectively, they now have more room for their hobbies. The apartment doesn’t welcome just anyone, only people who belong here!
A new squall—the supernaturally huge, soft hand of a giant—arose and pressed Fräulein Kohut against an optician’s display window, which was chock full of glittering glasses. Mammoth eyeglasses containing violet lenses hung broadly over the store, trembling under the lashes of the gusts, a danger to passersby. Then all at once, the air grew very still, as if catching its breath and being frightened in the process. At this very moment, Mother must be cozily burrowing into their kitchen, frying something in fat for the evening, when it will be served cold. Afterward, some needlework will be waiting for her, a white lace doily.
In the sky, there are clouds with hard, rosy outlines. They don’t seem to know where they’re heading, so they race headlong, now here, now there. Erika always knows several days in advance what will be awaiting her several days hence; she’ll be serving art at the conservatory. If not, then she’ll be doing something else with music, that bloodsucker, which Erika serves to herself in various states and conditions: canned or freshly roasted, as gruel or as a gourmet delight, on her own or in charge of other people.
Several blocks away from the conservatory, Erika begins searching and sniffing around, as is her wont. An experienced hound, she picks up the scent. Will she catch a student without an assignment, with too much time on his hands, leading his own private life? Erika wants to enter, she wants to squeeze her way into these vast domains, which, although beyond her supervision, nevertheless stretch out far and wide, divided into farms. Bloody mountains, meadows of life, into which she has to clamp her teeth. The teacher has every right to do so because a teacher acts in loco parentis. She absolutely has to know what is going on in other lives. No sooner has a student retreated from her, no sooner has he poured himself into his portable leisure container, where he believes he is not observed, than K. is there, tre
mbling, ready to join him secretly, without being asked. She leaps around corners, she pops up unexpectedly from corridors, she materializes in elevators—an energy-charged genie swirling up from a bottle. In order to expand her taste in music and force it on her students, she occasionally attends concerts. She weighs one interpreter against the other, annihilating the students with her yardstick, to which only the greatest musicians can measure up. She pursues, always out of the eyeshot of students, but always within her own eyeshot; she observes herself in the display windows, watches herself hot on the trail. Most people would call her a good observer. But Erika herself is not most people. She is one of those people who lead and guide most people. Sucked into the vacuum of the absolute inertia of her body, she shoots out of the bottle when it opens, and she is then flung into a previously selected or unexpected alien existence. No one can prove that her spying is deliberate. And yet suspicions seem to develop against her in various places. She pops up at a time when one doesn’t care to have witnesses. Every new hairdo sported by a female student triggers thirty minutes of violent discussion at home. Erika then accuses her mother of always spitefully keeping her in the house, so she won’t go somewhere and experience something. After all, she, the daughter, is long overdue for a new hairdo. But Mother, who doesn’t dare do what she’d like to do, sticks to Erika infectiously, like a burr or a leech. Mother is sucking the marrow from Erika’s bones. What Erika knows from her secret observations, Mama knows; and what Erika is in reality, a genius—why, no one knows that better than her mama, who knows the child inside and out. Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.
Outside the Metro Film Theater, Erika has been finding hidden treasures for three merry spring days, ever since they changed the program; for the student, obsessed with himself and his mental obscenities, buried his distrust long ago. His senses are concentrated on new focal points: film stills. The movie house is featuring a soft-core porno flick, even though children pass by closely on the way to their music. One of the students standing outside the theater judges every photograph by the acts it depicts. Another is more interested in the beauty of the women. A third student stubbornly yearns for what is not visible: the insides of female bodies. Two future young men are engaged in a fruitful argument about the size of the female breasts. Then all at once, hurled by the squall, the piano teacher explodes in their midst—like a hand grenade. Her face has assumed a quietly punitive, slightly pitying look. One would never believe that she and the women in the photos belong to one and the same sex, namely the beautiful sex. Indeed, a less sophisticated person might even conclude, just from her outer appearance, that the piano teacher belongs to an entirely different subcategory of the human species. However, a photo does not show the inner life; so any comparisons would be unfair to Fräulein Kohut, whose inner life is actually in blossom and in sap. Without saying a word, she walks on. No ideas are exchanged, but the student knows that he has once again not practiced enough because his mind was on something other than the piano.
In glass showcases, men and women keep their noses to one another’s grindstones; they are hooked into everlasting lust—an arduous ballet. Their work makes them sweat. The man is working on various parts of the woman’s flesh, and he can publicly display the fruit of his labor: when the juice shoots out and drops on her body. In real life, a man must usually support and feed a woman; he is judged by his ability to do so. And here too, he offers the woman warm food, which his innards have cooked on his front burner. The woman moans—figuratively. But one can almost see the shriek. She is delighted with the gift, she is delighted with the giver, and her screams continue. The photos are silent, of course, but a sound track is waiting inside the theater, where the woman will shriek out her gratitude for the man’s effort once the spectator has bought his ticket.
The student, who has been caught unawares, strides behind Professor Kohut, maintaining a respectful distance. He rebukes himself for injuring her female pride by gawking at naked women. Maybe she considers herself a woman and feels lethally wounded. Next time, his inner clock should tick loudly when the teacher comes stalking up. Later, in piano class, the teacher will deliberately avoid looking at the student, that leper of lust. By the time they get to Bach, right after the scales and finger exercises, the student’s insecurity spreads out and takes the upper hand. This intricate musical texture can endure only the secure hand of the master pianist, who draws the reins gently. The main theme was messed up, the other voices were too importunate, and the whole piece was anything but transparent. An oil-smeared car window. Erika jeers at the student’s Bach. It is a muddy creek, faltering over obstacles like small rocks and mounds, stumbling along in its dirty bed. Erika now explains Bach’s work in greater detail. Its passion is a cyclopean structure. It is also a well-tempered foxhole with regard to the other contrapuntal business for keyboard instruments. Deliberately trying to humiliate the student, Erika praises Bach’s work to the skies. She claims that Bach rebuilds gothic cathedrals whenever his music is played. Erika feels the tingling between her legs, something felt only by those chosen by and for art when they talk about art. And she lies, saying that the Faustian yearning for God produced both the Cathedral of Strasbourg and the introductory chorus of the St. Matthew Passion. Then she tells her student: That was not exactly a cathedral he was playing. Erika can’t help pointing out that God also created woman. She adds the stale male joke that he did it because he had nothing better to do. But then she negates her little joke by asking the student in all seriousness whether he knows how one should look at the photo of a woman. Respectfully, for his mom, who carried him and gave birth to him, was a woman, too; no less and no more. The student makes several promises that his professor demands. Erika returns the favor by explaining that Bach’s mastery is the triumph of craft in his extremely diverse contrapuntal forms and techniques. Erika knows all about craft: If practice alone counted, she would have won by points or even by a knockout! But, she triumphs, Bach is more, he is a commitment to God; and the latest edition of the Encyclopedia of Music, Vol. I, even trumps Erika by crowing that Bach’s works are a commitment to the special Nordic man struggling for God’s grace.
The student resolves never again to be caught in front of the photograph of a naked woman. Erika’s fingers twitch like the claws of a well-trained falcon. When she teaches, she breaks one will after another. Yet deep inside, she feels an intense desire to obey. That’s why she’s got her mother at home. But the old woman keeps getting older and older. What will happen when she falls apart and becomes a dismal creature in need of care herself, when she has to obey Erika? Erika pines for difficult tasks, which she then carries out badly. She has to be punished for that. This young man, who is covered with his own blood, is not a worthy opponent; why, he was already defeated by Bach’s miraculous music. Imagine his defeat when he has to play the role of a living human being! He won’t even have the courage to pound away; he’s much too embarrassed by all the notes he’s fluffed. A single phrase from her, a casual glance—and he falls to his knees, ashamed, making all kinds of resolutions, which he will never be able to carry out. Anyone who could get her to obey a command (there must be a commander aside from her mother, who cuts glowing furrows into Erika’s will) could get anything and everything from Erika. Erika needs to lean against a hard wall that won’t give. Something pulls at her, tugs at her elbow, weighs down the hem of her skirt: a small lead ball, a tiny concentrated weight. She has no idea what damage it could do, once released from its chain. This fierce dog, baring its teeth as it strides up and down the bars, the fur bristling on the back of its neck, is always exactly one centimeter away from its victim, with a dark growling in its throat, a red light in its pupils.
She is waiting for that one command! For that steaming yellow hole in the wide mass of snow, a tiny cup of piss. The urine is still warm; and soon the hole will freeze into a thin yellow pipe in the mountain, a signal for the skier, the coaster, the hiker, revealing that hu
man presence became a brief threat here and then moved on.