Sports Play (15 page)

SPORTSMAN:

Please, I can imagine that one day they will revenge themselves on us, women. Even shy people find inventive new ways of whipping their opponents mercilessly. But why this terrible excitement, you stupid bitch? My powers of comprehension do not comprehend why you have to bloat yourself up from this height looking down like a sail on water, only to drop down into a curtsey in front of every weeping whistle buoy, even in front of a mass murderer of women. If he's the real thing and wails good and proper. Well, even for you the most important thing is to be recognised from afar, you'd even let yourself be murdered to get that. Good, we've got the murderer, now please can you minister to this domestic worker, otherwise he'll kill someone else! Why do you talk so much? What are you so afraid of, even if the reason for your fear has been in front of your eyes for ages, grinning at you boldly. Have you lost your blindness specs? Don't you know what you're afraid of? You scream? As if the carpet in your sitting room had sat up, gone away and taken all the furnishings with it? Amazing what people think of taking upon themselves to become more interesting to their contemporaries.

WOMAN:

They're free for the taking, so just take one! Whichever one you want! Yes the one that in the best-case scenario will attend upon you with a saying! I talk in a more meaningful way. Now she's rinsing her make-up brushes, of which she expects great precision. It's already late but I, too, want to look cheeky and youthful today, and use clothes to be nice to my body. Nobody looks this way when I enter. Why am I always wandering off and glancing backwards in order to play back this blame demo tape. I walk over everything in
a far too superficial way, clamber over rocks as if they were cotton wool. They can't harm me. I have to come to terms with this situation, but it won't hurt me, because history steps nimbly over all of us. That might sound pretentious, but it happens to be true. Whether protagonists or victims.

I was the sole inventor of victim welfare so that history would take note of me at last and do what I told her. I'm so fascinated by my own invention that I can't talk about anything else. Now I've invented this victim bomb – the only weapon, by the way, ever to have been invented by a woman – and it has caused much derision because I just can't get this bomb lined up with a decent target. And now I've gone and invented the victim bonus that the guard in front of the museum showing the Wehrmacht exhibition has only to tear off, so that I can be the very first to go in and present my pathetic impressions to a camera. And yet I myself am sharply focussed. You're quite right. Mistakes, misjudgements, cemented images of the enemy, distortions of reality are gaining importance as a condition of my military decision to only let the victims speak from now on. So I'm not saying anything else. Thank you for applauding me for it. If you want to applaud some more, then I can ensure that someone similar to myself is bitten to death by thirty dogs on stage. What, that's not your thing? You wouldn't like that?

SPORTSMAN:

Now then, I don't need breasts, I need bottoms. I like those much more. My manly soul bows to you, I dodge back, deterrence is absolutely a major element in politics, and then I leave. I don't have to make many words. For words I have you and the patented distorted reality you need to raise the curtain, no, to raise the fallen. You women make big things small and the small big, that's just like you.

WOMAN:

A female state in which no man's voice would be heard. This female state consists of women and I can name a few
now: Claudia, Naomi, Helena, Christy, Amber, Brigitte and Susi.

SPORTSMAN:

And tell me please where is this state so that I can go there immediately and enrol in the factory where they make people. I'd make much better ones. I would cover myself with eternal midnight. I, the eternal boy, would make myself available to these women. I want one like this, and that one over there. What a woman. I could never hate her. What they'd do to me.

WOMAN:

Let me tell you that you'd stand no chance with supermodels. But you can have me any time, I'm as free as a bird. What, you don't want me? You're liberating yourself from me like a swarm of bees? Are you swarming over someone else? Who was it who killed the dead, I ask you enraged and aggrieved. It wasn't me. But the fact that I ask does make me attractive in some way, doesn't it? How is a woman who's handicapped by her breasts meant to draw a bow? Can you tell me that? What do you think I did? I first ripped off my right breast, and then the second along the dotted line, I ripped out the pattern sheet, now that was clever. And now I'm putting my handiwork to one side so that I can take a break. I open the fridge. I feel sick again when I try licking an icicle, but we still have strawberry and vanilla left. I've ruined it with myself. And before I finish off my needlework I have to sleep a whole night with myself. Yawn.

SPORTSMAN:

Thanks for that. I'd rather have all these women, Claudia, Cindy, Amber without a bosom than have you with both breasts. God prevent goddesses appearing to me to drive me crazy with their doe-eyed looks. That's all I need. But being followed by a photo is actually not that unpleasant. On a photo it's quite normal that only appearances count.

WOMAN:

Dead silence greeted what she'd done. Broken only by the bowstring's twanging as the corpse-white stiffened hand of the High Priestess let the weapon fall. I'd never manage that! Down it went, the great gold bow of our people, clanging three times like a bell on the marble steps, and to rest, as still as death, before her feet.
¹
If I was to try that then people would just give me their smooth cold shoulders.

SPORTSMAN:

What? The women who surround you have been despoiled like temples? They have no more windows for people to see what's inside? Breasts would have suited them much more than you! Pity that they lost them just because you wanted it so. Do I care if you've not got yours any more or that they're small and dark, like the women I don't like. As long as Claudia looks the way she looks. She never needs anything filling with putty or repairing, not even her teeth, which are well-shaped and don't dribble. A bunny from another star.

WOMAN:

What would you say if those who presently call me bitch threw me down, tied me up like a sheaf of wheat and took me to a homeland that I was the first to show them?

SPORTSMAN:

Have you completely lost it? Angrily climb over them? Order a breastplate to fight off grievances so that it clatters whilst you eat? Like food in a prison that you can't just send back if you don't like it? No, you really have lost it. You're divested of sense, you're so monotone, you've been saying the same thing for thirty years. You're divested of sensuality. There I am showing you my cauldron of coloureds, but boy can you rile other women with your accusations!

WOMAN:

But I'd like to boil in this cauldron of yours.

SPORTSMAN:

I'll hold my top lip tight so that it can't help me to eat or bite. My fists jerk down but then I talk about something and forget it instantly. But one thing I know for sure: you can forget about me ever taking any notice of you.

WOMAN:

If what I've made can be broken so easily, then perhaps I should stop production altogether. And see, I've already stopped it and taken early retirement. My efforts to improve the contours can also be seen around my mouth. The lipstick goes astray easily and then can't find its way home again. Things can't continue like this, one trains for nothing and for nothing again, and then one isn't even selected. One just has to select oneself and warn, a Cassandra, who's long been an object, picture, that runs away. Product, that won't sell. That old dream of men, to be immortal, to be eternal. As a picture, it can be achieved without effort. Well, I'd like to have that dream too, because it's not exactly pleasant to watch what can be done to a child as soon as it's ready. I've just been reading something again and I'm completely done in. Insecurity and fear have also long been considered commodities. Super! I secured the monopoly on those in time and manufacture the proven anew and afresh; I can make myself important with it, because in terms of form, size and liability – I won't be responsible for the latter! Stick it to the car window yourself! – standardised, purchased and eaten.

(Kicks the VICTIM gently.)
Typical. My colleagues have apparently used recycled materials for building their porch and don't quite have control over this technology. Not like me. But should they succeed in replacing badly-functioning parts, then technically there'd be no reason for death. And what will I do then? What will I be able to talk about solo, without my proven team? Then we women
have to make efforts to keep pace with nature. Now we prefer to improve our nature by means of surgery.

Well, because you asked me previously, I'll reply: death is not an authentic sign of existence, it is an obsolete evolutionary strategy. But it is still used with pleasure. I get that, because I create and create, albeit not jobs. History is a battlefield and not a maternity hospital, if possible, one for gentle birth. The graves are there, it'd be better if you could visit them tomorrow, because by then there'll be a couple extra! First of all they have to muster, then I'll sing about them. I'll always be there before you. Omnipresence instead of omni-potence. Our sons will be dead bodies, our daughters will meet us suddenly coming out of doorways, pale as paper serviettes, because they weren't considered for the modelling contest. Perhaps that's a good thing. Once you've been present on the screen as a nude, or in the case of a man, as a corpse, then you don't have to be present anywhere else. One doesn't miss the dead, one does miss certain dead stars because they weren't received just once, but millions of times. Pure self-conception.

Because who doesn't have their own receiver at home? I am from now on no longer at home at all. In this way I can no longer be overpowered by an emotion when it kicks in my door.

She looks at ANDI in his body-building poses and doing the ‘walk' on the television screen, then distractedly take her breasts off her back, holds them in front of her like a blouse and goes at them with a dagger
.

VICTIM:
(To the PERPETRATOR, whilst removing the trainers from the lower leg bones and trying them on, of course all the while being disturbed in this activity by the PERPETRATOR.)

Once you arrive back home, unshorn and unshaven, I fear that within you a sensitivity for barbarity can quickly change into endearing gaiety. You cannot reconcile self-interest with this deed, but you can carry out what you're doing to me in a climate of normality. Is it not the case, that you have clearly sensitive reactions of conscience when you think, for example, about the destruction of the planet the
moment that you, with a guilty conscience, betook your family into nature in the car? Something occurred to you, no? But when you look at me, nothing occurs to you, does it? Perhaps you believe that my wealth of experience had become so large that you had to carry some of it away in order to re-motivate me to further action, my basic mood appearing to be laziness? Just because I reacted to you too late, in fact, not at all? You were right to stay with your group. Now, as I'm dying, it is clear as glass that another group could never have offered you this same temptation. Let's all party!

HITTER:

But do you, to cap it all, also love a kinsman of your own sex?

VICTIM:

No, I don't love my kinsmen.

Two somewhat older and corpulent tennis players, ACHILLES and HECTOR, dressed in club gear, are playing tennis. They are playing, as it were, a sort of interlude
.

ACHILLES:

I'm satisfied that I've once again survived the management crisis. Even countries can be founded anew. I, however, will always exist. Sorry, I'm bleeding all over your carpet. And it hurts like hell. I'm injured, but can see no mistake in my negotiating tactics. I negotiated as if I could simply pocket these new countries in my trousers.

HECTOR:

I do so understand. Survival can become a real passion. You just keep on having a go. A plumber who's climbed up on a roof can confirm that, without even a warning from death, the most ordinary things would occur to you, such as washing the car or doing the weekend shopping.

ACHILLES:

Yes, only when death is close can I find any satisfaction with my life. I've always deliberately ignored traffic lights. What needed constant renewal, like some parking permit,
was not the desire to die at any moment, but rather the desire to survive. One whips out some piece of paper and arranges things with one's new proprietors and then again with the next ones. Quasi with the Stasi. And then with a company that arranges rafting trips and perhaps offers a cut-price group tariff. Anything's better than ecclesiastical girls' competitions under the supervision of married women, sweet Jesus I'm obstreperous as you can perhaps guess, but you have to keep your eye on the ball.

HECTOR:

Aha. Do you feel that in particular during sporting activities, that one has to come to terms with others? Did you become an official in order not to have to hunt yourself? Why be unpopular out of ambition? Why be mean out of love? To have escaped an alien hand, even if it belongs to the tax man, is a lovely feeling, too. Strong as a squall, it comes under an arm prepared to strike as if it was a branch of a tree. For instance, last Christmas I ran around the block for hours just so I didn't have to place my head on one. At the last minute I decided I'd better not kill my wife and children. Yeah, yeah, women. It's easier for us normal people than it is for them as they never have to make human efforts beyond the call of the everyday and the expedient. Now they're standing around silently and always stay on the oriental carpet, the gruesome. And they look blankly, as if we were like our offices, empty unwritten pieces of paper wherever one looked. Over there, the railway gate, it's coming down. Careful, steer your car speedily across so that you don't get caught on the lines when the train comes. Such events, should they take place, show us clearly that the soul is bound to the body like a leaf to the tree. One just can't get rid of this body. One can get rid of this body all too easily. Then at some stage a female model becomes our world view. We officials also shape ourselves by doing nothing yet bloom and thrive anyway. We don't even have to be vulnerable.