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
Laurice Elehwany Molinari