This unbelievably stupid saying hung in the damp kitchens of the slum residents, embroidered on pink wall hangings. What happened if you rejected it? What if you just weren’t interested in this gift in the form in which it was intended for you? Nobody escaped their surroundings through work. There was no work anymore anyway.

It was impossible to attain better living conditions, there was simply no space available in a world where the few were intent on keeping the many at bay.

“Why did you do that?” You want to ask the old people. “Why give birth to children you hate because they’re loud, because they’re losers—from the word go, because you can see yourselves and your miserable childhoods in them, because you know you’re going to screw it up, just like your parents did and your parents’ parents did, by passing on this hopeless existence?

“What’s the point? Leaving the children in their own urine at the foot of the bed where you’re passed out drunk or fucking somebody? You get off on their tiny bones that are so easily broken, on the feeling of finally having power over somebody who’s scared of you, and then you look at the children, hazily, and hate them for their neediness, that’s so much like your own. You were never helped either, not by anyone.

“Your dull brains get some sort of satisfaction from tormenting your children, do they? You’ll show them, eh? The people lording over you. The ones who turned you away, pushed you from the city centers where they drive around in elegant electric cars and speak of an ever more prosperous future.

“You could go on strike. But from what, since you don’t do anything? Nobody would care. You could start an armed resistance, but—you don’t have the energy. Or the weapons. And no idea whom to aim them at. So you just lie there. With your face in your vomit.

“Why are there still men wandering around freely out there who don’t want to be fathers, they just want to turn up to fuck or to beat women, beat them to death, before they slump into the corner and say: This isn’t what I wanted. You didn’t want any of this? It just so happens that it stinks outside and it rains nonstop. And that from the very first moment everyone has to be afraid of everyone else, because they have this so-called survival instinct. Nobody can bear it.”

Don couldn’t bear it.

And

Refused to accept her preordained role as scum.

And

Wasn’t going to wait for love anymore.