Sports Play (10 page)

I don't know how it all started. Just now I was swimming amongst the crowd, which I parted with my elbows and hips, as Jesus did the water, caught right in the middle of a half-speed breaststroke, as if I'd been nailed to the Cross with my arms extended. But what held me back, not this Cross, became palpably weaker with every second.

Countless lower leg bones are thrown down, on the skeleton feet there are sneakers of all sizes and makes. The feet fall down and are then used as footballs
.

ANOTHER PERPETRATOR:

I'm trying to present several examples of how to annihilate human beings, in order to do that it's important that, how should I put it, it's important that I take place somewhere else, essentially. Let me briefly describe my almost uncanny series of victories: it's as if I'm sitting in the control centre of a substation. One handle, one kick, and I can take entire parts of the city out. Suddenly they've no juice! Just because I wanted to take advantage of an opportunity for social acceptance by finally suspending the values of
society that really are of no value to anyone at all. What are you doing gesticulating like that, you, woman, you're out of your invalid authorial constitution, where on earth did they let you out? Where were your valuable values produced? Let's take a look and see if it's worth opening your door. No, let's leave it closed. What you bring to me is anyhow just what the newspapers have been bringing me for years, without really allowing me access. These values don't belong to me. Nor do I want them. Keep them for yourself! I've ordered quite different ones. They don't have to be durable. You're not durable either, poetess, wife, you're almost dead and gone, but not as far as the drag lift. Squeeze your fat arse into it, you'll soon see what happens. You are a cast-off being on a hanger. Why don't you phone the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and get the lowdown on competition. And then choose a competition where you at least have some chance, or else you'll be in the downhill race before you've even reached the summit.

Even today, years after my first grievous bodily harm, at the time without lethal consequence, this activity holds a particular allure for me. I'll never tire of it and would accept punishment and other disadvantages for it. At this point, are you hearing the usual engaged artists whining? Well, I didn't engage them. I engaged a completely different group. Where does this female fighter's bawling come from? Did you engage them? If I didn't know where it was coming from, this bawling could force me to flee. It's coming from one person alone, namely from you, my lady. You consider yourself a siren, but no one's listening. To a person like you! Are you expecting perhaps that someone'll be finally tied to a mast because of you? You also want to be part of the hang-gliding and the music-making afterwards. Does anyone have noises for that?

You signed yourself up. Good, so I'll take you around, see, the noises are coming from here. From your own dismal dreaming mouth. What do you look like? Please, just take a look at my girlfriend, she looks significantly better. Yes, being thirty years younger does make a difference. I call
upon the art of narrative not to leave this poetess, she's got to be left with something, this public prosecutor who every year is re-elected by at least one person.

Take note, there's more to come, look at me, and write me onto this executioner's pad that you're holding on your knees in the hope that someone will finally put their head on it: I am the letter for this slot into which I slide. I'm the nappy for the weight-lifter, needed in case during his activity something comes loose from his marbled façade. Perhaps the pressure exerted on me is making me somewhat sentimental, it almost seems like it. My war will go in my favour; should war be favourable at all, then it is in favour of my comrades who'll be eaten up by wheels like unredeemed kilometres, like dispossessed benches with a plaque that certain people are not allowed to sit on. It was only then by chance that no one actually sat on it.

Crime is also work, most people apart from the dedicated forget that. That's why we acquired them, to appreciate our work and sing our praises. They turn us into something. We'd not have half our value without them. They've founded a new international organisation of the delicate. Once again they prove to be excellent at complaining, and have done several interviews today. The crime takes place, everyone is filled with war-like sentiments that are expressed sometimes this way, and sometimes that, and this time I will most certainly be there at the forefront. It just won't work that there'll be others I'll have to get upset about. Finally I'm taking part so that I can advance. I'm not leaving. One just falls in love with a sportsman when he's winning. And what arse has taken away our will again? That was the will to power, it's what we could have done with. Instead what he's left us here is the will to confess and regret, and to be looked at askance. It was all only left unsupervised for one moment, but you should have seen how our madam author pounced on it. The only thing missing was a diving platform so she could've fallen flat on her face. She'd like to open up all the car cemeteries just to see if she could find a couple of wrecks, hair pieces,
dirty cushions with burn marks on, all just lying around so she could complain about them. The will for victory was free for the taking. If you'd seen it, well, you'd have snapped it up like some mustard-gas viper. This woman with her noisy goitre. She's forgetting one thing though, it's our energy that disappears as fast as time does. Equally we have little power to persuade our idols to answer our prayers. Even if we stick a knife into a tennis player, it is not us who'll bleed.

I mean, we all read about this woman who slipped out of the yarn that the newspapers spun about her in order to offer her up as a victim. What? You were the victim of rape, and your daughter is the victim of child abuse?

Right, women such as her would be vacuous if we couldn't read about them – that someone has drilled a hole in her in order to hang up his own picture or any other one. We condemn that. We condemn it heatedly, as we like looking at hot pictures. We also condemn ourselves and are laughed at for it. And in turn we can use that to turn down the judgement that went against us, and in any case we will pre-empt madam author. The opponent is our enemy-deflector. What was that? The enemy is the death-deflector? Not bad either. It's not important to have been there – apart from at one's own death – but to win.

VICTIM:
(Whilst being hurled around and kicked, is still doing banal everyday tasks, like dusting and putting away, tidying up etc.)

Is it not the case, my Lord, through whose handiwork I'm dying here, that the comradeship within your team exerts the strongest attraction? Although you might have become a policeman on your own, your pregnant wife would never have come up with the idea of watching how my face was cut up, how I was stamped on, and ripped to shreds. Your pregnant wife would never accompany you in normal clothes and with a riding crop. Your wife would never offend common decency. But stop, she's doing precisely that, I see. But surely that's purely a man's competition, is it not? And yet she dares to compete, even though she should
be going over to the women's competition, one battlefield over. Perhaps it was just too far for her. The result is actually not too bad for such a little battle, ten percent of our population eradicated. Madam Everything's-Fine would be better off using her fiery breath for lighting the gas for us, although one can also, without lighting it, breathe it in directly down a tube. In this fire, fuel becomes heated against me. Us victims are not spared and soon we have to strew ourselves across the earth. Still we're overlooked because we're happy to be victims, but soon we won't be able to be overlooked because this woman will write about us, without ever having known our poor throng. Yes, you're much better off being perpetrators. Perpetrators don't have to speak, they don't need to. I never had the opportunity to be a perpetrator, but there's no doubt you feel like a million dollars!

Concerted effort, above all in dangerous situations? Blind mutual trust? A strongly pronounced idealism, perhaps? Before you kill me off for good, may I offer you the maxim that you can only exist and act as a team? Just like the entire police force, who in roughly sixty or seventy years, in women's clothes, with community service weapons, and with three black plain clothes stripes on their shoes, will come after you. Or those firemen, who still believe in what they're doing even when they only have to tame some fleeting hardening of their hosepipe. The hosepipe: something that becomes hard purely because of water. It doesn't function quite properly with my blood, that makes the arteries impenetrable. The knife would not saw beforehand but immediately enter. Did you fulfil a childhood dream by entering this group, a dream that even today has not lost its fascination? Ach, if only I could also belong to someone who'd reach into me like a trained engineer and unscrew death, and if possible, completely remove it. Put it down far away! But in a way that you still find it when you need it. I would love to be in your place now, believe me!

The scales are very elegantly inclining in your direction, not in mine. There's nothing to be done. History will judge with abusive words spoken in a dream, carefully-aimed, like the lashes of a whip, shivering before your coldness that will still prevail. Just like today. It will assume the right of naming what you're doing to me, your kicks and blows, as ‘domination': a lovely grand word, why are you holding onto it so tightly, give it back to me! The word is like a far-away sea stroking my ear, but then rushing over and past me. This word was never meant for me, as I've not been back home since then. I can say the following about you: you are manifestly unable to instrumentalise your body for sporting purposes, so you go for the second best option that occurs to you, namely to cut through the original locally fate-woven threads of hope of my body, which is already half-squashed by your kicks. Yet the latest goods were already awaiting me impatiently in the national costume shop. Of course you took no notice of my brand name, sewn into a hidden place, when you sent me off to no-man's land. It doesn't matter. No one is going to expel you for it. But you did forget to make a note of the sender. Well, maybe a couple of artists rushing past specifically did not want to be in your midst. You, dear murderers, represent the breach through which nothing should flood in, and now this singing group is coming along, whilst you are still swimming with your drowned eyes through the newspapers, the group with their thought-out moves and bell pulls comes along and tames your appetite. Now it's striking thirteen! Don't think anything of it, there's nothing to stop you joining any other team.

And I don't believe that you'll have anything to regret. The day before yesterday someone had a fatal accident whilst skiing, and by the afternoon his companions were back up on the lift. They wanted to take full advantage of their holiday, the way they'd practised on other people. For them no one was missing. Of course these people are as interested as you are whether the pair, what shall we call them, hillocks, helmets, little tarts in skin-tight T-shirts or
the cola bottle in his jeans were real or real synthetics. And in order to find that out, we can use a standard question that to date has been extraordinarily maintained. Because afterwards everything becomes clear. And this is how it usually starts. When it comes to sport we are dealing with a mass phenomenon. Under its influence people behave differently to normal. Under the influence of sport people suddenly feel significant, that's their delusion, is it mitigating or aggravating? What's your opinion? Call us or write to us now. Although we'd prefer it if you didn't. Basically we're not interested in your opinion. And what's more: I will personally no longer take your pathetic calls, ladies and gentlemen. However the editor-in-charge will for at least two hours after the programme has finished. The receiver'll slide down her arm like silk and fall out of her hand. My body experiences the efforts of your sport to kill me as oppression and annihilation. Whereas the other way round, if it worked and you yourself were allowed to be an athlete, your body could feel this oppression firsthand and finally consider itself content.

To me you're a bit of a historical milestone, sadly I noticed you too late and was going too fast. Please tell us about your experiences and then read about mine! Sadly I noticed too late that you're emotionally deficient and feel insufficient, which, instead of making you weak, seems to spur you on in a place where you're not supposed to be, namely under my skull and in my kidneys, in my abdomen and behind my ribcage, so that I'd buckled up over the meal. If only you were honest enough to concede that rising to the top of your group was your true motivational basis. But in this way, oh dear! You pull yourself across me like a burning carpet, lethargically, darkness over darkness, dragging behind you the umbilical cord that binds us. It billows out so elegantly, my nightdress in which my blood freezes. Sadly, you only know your pleasure and your work. And in reference to myself, your victim, that means the work of killing. I am confirmation that you've done your work well. You appear to find comfort and support only in
the depths of my body, you burrow into me rather than withdrawing into yourself. Oh, I see, clearly you're losing the contact between yourself and other members of your group. Perhaps your colleagues are distancing themselves because they see that the exclusivity of your contact with my body will be positively identified criminologically later on.

Your pregnant wife, your girlfriend in the dirndl, whatever, skips around here and bedecks her stone-age cave with Chinese lanterns and press clippings, so that you're inspired to oppress me all the more. It's all very pretty, really! Do you have any other ideas? I'm still pondering why I didn't get it beforehand, when you were looking at me with an expression on your face that still reflected a reciprocal relationship between distance and sympathy. I simply reacted too late and too slowly. Could not conceive what might be possible. That you're concentrating into a proper mass, into a woman who kills her husband, a man who shoots his wife, a woman who locks her child in a box and throws the holes in the lid away, until the child slowly suffocates on its own shit. Yet only God is entitled to slowness and peace and quiet.