Sports Play (14 page)

By the way, you're looking in the wrong direction and of course the only thing you see there are my breasts, which are no longer the youngest. Earlier on you looked at my
sheaf of papers from the front, this year boldly-patterned for a change, but actually it was a sheath belonging to my sword, something I noticed only when I tried to pull it out of me, panting with exertion. Excalibur, in particular the model with the practical handle that fits many other household products, for example this practical floor mop. But you didn't notice that of course, did you? I get it. This glossy magazine – just look at that beautiful dress, for me it replaces a happy relationship with everyday life, just look over here! You're looking straight into my heart, into which my fuming hands gouge, a bloody tear, yes, just look at it, I told you how deep that tear goes. I'd like to buy this dress. What I have now is this heart, and that dress would look so good over it. My heart is still young and steamy, even though I myself am now older and running out of steam. I hope the dress will make me younger.

Don't worry, I might constantly be opening up my breasts, but only to myself, not to you. Why are you flinching? You don't need to be afraid of me.

SPORTSMAN:

Your image is as firmly engraved on me as cuts in a diamond. Here you go, I'll just open this notebook because you really want me to, yet I always see someone other than you, someone who you don't even vaguely resemble, and who also dresses completely differently. Really I should be seeing you in every picture! Well, I prefer to wait until you show me your breast disrobed in murder, otherwise I wouldn't be able to recognise it at all, and woe, woe betide me, if you throw down your womb. Where does this all take place? I'm just asking. Because I can't quite see it yet. I wait for you to carry by your hair, no, let's forget the hair, you're not courageous enough to carry your hair on a pike across the street... I myself am open to anything that comes along, but I don't see you coming, very sorry about that! And why are you coming from behind, sneaking up. Doesn't matter. Your image is already blurring because you don't resemble any of those who leap by, rave up, high-five or stuff their evenings inside television screens. And when
they pull them out again, they look as if they themselves had come from there. As stars, however, not as consumer goods.

You've no alternative but to bow to yourself again and again hungrily. I on the other hand will not be watching, and I'll never love you either, even though you appear to consider this a possibility. You'll never get it together to place your hand on my chin, as my dear mama used to, and wail: my child, mercy, have mercy on me! You're far too arrogant to ask me for anything.

WOMAN:

Please don't keep looking elsewhere. This is where the party is. You are here. So am I. I still compete with the daughters of the nation in joyful exercise. They pass us by in their youthful finery, in tops and leggings, in string tangas and extra-wide pullovers with nothing on underneath. I look coy, I don't have anything else to entice you with, whilst you're the only one I'm not looking right now. You don't notice that I've just not looked at you, as you're looking at the box in front of which you alone can stand. And if I twinkle once from the sidelines, stumbling towards you through the mascaraed eyelash forest, you're long gone, over to another broadcast of another game. You yank open the window to the world, even though it's only the next screen that's not reflecting your face now, but always someone else's. Balls smash through the meadows when morning glimmers, I sink onto your chest, just as I'd imagined, and fall into nothingness, because in my tenderness I leant too far out of the window. Please could you tell me where the bus stop is, where is the remote control? The stop is right in the middle of the slaughter, no, the middle of the shaft I've dug into my breast so I can fall into it at the end. And I find you there! So you're the young man that I selected, even though you never even saw me in this picture, which is hard as steel and saturated to satiation with a couple of kilos of youth all wrapped – without ever breathing – in five grams of stretch jersey.

Listen: I too recently fell prey to the illness named viscose, although you can't see it in this picture, or can you? I will rid myself of this illness by means of premium offerings of cotton or virgin wool vitamins. But the means is nothing, the purpose is all. Here my pure silken, caressing needs collapse in a crackling heap to the floor. Because you don't notice straightaway, I grab your arm with my icy claws that were once hands. When I was still a woman. My soft bosom has slipped to the back, they're laughing at me, laughing at me. Even you laugh now in spite of yourself, and then again out of spite. Who am I. Here is a machine, a dagger I think, I hand over my breast that is no longer constricted by artificial fibres, why doesn't he just take me captive himself? But I don't get there because my breasts have wandered round to the back. There are no bars and it doesn't say exit on the sign. So they have to stay a while with me, my hot breasts, in which I could warm myself for some time to come, and you too, if you'd let me. Could you please help me? So! So! So! And again! Now everything is okay.

SPORTSMAN:

Can't you just be quiet for once? Out of you gushes repetitively a law, like some sort of endless puke-sausage, without interruption, it's tedious, no wonder I went away without even noticing you! Unfeminine! So unnatural, you stupid old cow! Alien to the rest of the human race! Not unambiguous like a film, but ambiguous. Info without receiver. News, served up without being arranged for the picture beforehand. Different different different!

WOMAN:

Well I do think my dying is somehow real. I fall down, excellent exercise, in order to stand up again... After all, my summits have remained untrodden all this time because you've not trained enough with me, a real extant female machine. Of course you chose another trainer. I'd secretly veiled myself with a cloudy scent, yet even if your face had banged into me like into a ladder that had not been put away, you'd still not have noticed me. Now I
remain proudly silent. There is a kind of educated person who is totally contemptuous of their surroundings because others are contemptuous of them. And they say that to your face with an ease that amazes me, even though I, too, am one of the well-read rather than the well-viewed. No, it's not worth looking at me. Instead I'm the one who, over these fifty years following the war, has felt obliged to great conscientiousness in speaking and questioning and looking. And as thanks I rule the world from my TV chair. And straightaway I'm sorry for what I've arranged, because no one's listening to me but everyone is watching the broadcast of some stupid game.

How is it that I become even prouder of myself whilst at the same time diving into my daily goggle-food, TV announcers, experts, commentators. I don't make an appearance. I don't have anything to contribute, but I am caught up in a secret war against everything that's alive and can thus be watched on screen. Precisely because I don't appear, at the very best I come and go, sit down quietly, stand up again, without anyone noticing.

I embody the contempt that confronts me. Contempt can be read even from my beautiful yet repellent apartment in the green belt. I don't need people there because millions come and visit me every evening, fortunately in a small and manageable size. You don't care. I'm my mother's first word and you are your father's last. I'm a happily-complaining messer-up of stuff.

SPORTSMAN:

Why, then be clearer!

WOMAN:
(Avidly.)

Well then, I wish to complain about what your fathers did as follows: wherever they trod they shot, slaughtered, burnt everything. If I was to try that the best that would happen would be a badly-managed suicide as, of course, I'd use my feelings as a razor blade. I don't usually have anything else at hand. Oh dear! That feeling is too soft! Take another one, add glue, skin and hair to it, it doesn't resemble a
person. Me! How pretty rage is! I feed it regularly every day with dry food that has to be dissolved in the water of my tears and then it's ready for consumption. But not even the dog gobbles it up. I stare into the far distance until I've focussed the image: the whole magnificent species went in and out through your fathers. The victors then took the apartments off the others and ate the food that grew in our fields, the fruits, right, they stuffed them into their mouths. Then...how can I put it...they went over to the war graves where the women were wailing like there's no tomorrow and manhandled the women under their, the victors', soothing trauma blankets. And then they slept well. I tell you, and I don't like telling you here, but we live in graphic times and I'm playing my own part. Nevertheless it's true what I'm saying.

Television, which first told me, as it always comes to me first, cannot perform miracles! It's up to me to yank open the windows onto the world, and for the world to appear in this set in which incidentally, my heart is stored too. Television is my heart's crypt. In this sacred ark I can set the sail so that distance can finally approach, as I'd never travel there anyway. No one listens to me. Everyone believes me. No one believes me. Gradually being nasty is getting too much for me even though I see so much nastiness every day. It'll never be too much to moan about my environment though, to complain, well, at least my breasts, which have always burdened me so, have been relocated to the back because at the front there was simply no room for them anymore, amongst all the sighs. You can see for yourself. I'd really like it if I could snuggle into the everyday, but I prefer to enter into a never-ending and in no way secret war against everything that lives. My sole reason: because so much, including myself, is no longer alive.

You see: it only evokes the appearance of being alive, unless you press the pause button. And then suddenly nothing is evoked. Nature can only appear as it's been envisaged, how natural history filmmakers viewed it, as a universe. But Nature is not everything, not by a long shot.

It's terrible, I can't stand it, I'm cut in half, ripped apart, cut to shreds, I suffer. In these few words I've given a description of the better kind of people to whom I belong. And I played a possessed woman and yelled loudly at people who didn't react because they too were sitting in front of the box but watching something completely different. I'll have a series out of me. Terrible what happened in Yugoslavia, but it's all over now. People walk on the streets. Now a man kills his wife because she fell asleep in front of the television.

SPORTSMAN:

I agree, because I'm so healthy and strong I've nothing to fear from simple pictures. I don't need to dread the competition. I appear more frequently, I can afford to. I feel myself in you and then out again in one hot spurt, relieved. I know a woman, for example, who always says: fabulous, delightful, wonderful, cosy. She's the most hideous of them all. At some point women didn't want to give birth to men anymore, so then they wouldn't have any incorruptible witnesses for all that which they didn't do. Instead of your breasts, you'd much prefer to drag your guilt around, the way we do. You'll never manage. It doesn't count if you buckle them onto your back so that the weight is better distributed, and you can let your head hang more easily. Supposedly because of the old guilt about our war that expired so long ago. Although you probably have quite different reasons, unfortunately you've stuck them into the housekeeping. What? You're still holding your head down and pretend to be all knowing, all Cassandra. Sharpen that tongue and act as if you're keen?

Without this guilt you saddled us with, you women would have to muck out your own stables, stand ankle-deep in your own dung, groping around for the animal in yourselves in order to slaughter it, so there's something especially good for your families to eat. It's not enough for you to cook unless you can cook someone's goose. This excitement of yours is terrible and it doesn't exactly make
you attractive. Why don't you let friendliness and liveliness grow on you instead. Now, you finally have enough room in front to study your feelings precisely. And if they should slip from your perception, then you can pull on the lead, which has a sort of retracting mechanism, you know what I mean, the dog does too, and with it feelings can be re-spooled or re-tangled, as the case may be.

WOMAN:

Humans cannot stand the pressure of even mild suffering. No wonder you're disgusted by me. You don't want me to be a peacemaker in public. You want opponents, they're the only ones you can have fun with. Every night I lie in front of my television and hollow out the picture with my tears. So – now you're in the picture! My bed is filled with ground-down daggers that penetrate me, now why did I say that so floridly? It really wasn't necessary. Just now you were able to take that in at great length from the screen filled with crying women laden with dishes, corresponding members of this terrible time, who are not able to write so well themselves. With me as commentator, whilst there are already others bemoaning the loss of their erstwhile lands, Croatian women I think, a kind of elite, because they deserve our full sympathy. I am the expert in this area and also in that area over there. You can see domestic workers who want to buy a new cooker but can't find one. I'm not allowed to lament that apparently. Why ever not? My home affairs will last just as long as yours and theirs. After all, I'm a woman! Tomorrow morning and then every Wednesday at 6pm is the repeat of my broadcasting mission. As a woman, I am someone who deserves to be repeated more often than up 'til now.

We are in play about a play within a play here. What would you prefer to hear? Would you prefer to hear another play? To divert yourself? A wedding, that women so long for? Taste, that women already have? Conquerors, who also want to possess women? In short, one of those women dares to stick a knife in her husband's heart, a place for which it was never intended. And then the god of war himself
comes and rapes the woman again because her husband is dead and can no longer do it himself. Afterwards, as an aftermath, the poet assembles a whole murderous dynasty to the sound of his Odyssey, he tickles us to death by laughter with his dagger. Talking talking talking talking, not one night can the woman separate herself from talking.