Sports Play (6 page)

WOMAN:
(While kicking the bundle.)

Son, please, son, just this once don't go to the sports field! I get all worried inside that I won't see you again. Early this morning – reluctantly as usual – you kissed me, but you felt superior to me while doing so. No matter how sweet you were being I feel you're eluding me, you're being snatched away. Yet for ages now I have found ways and means to imprint myself on you, like a piece of paper full of triumphant youth protection measures, even though you grew up a long time ago and tower above me like a wall with signs stuck on it. I squat in front of it now in the hope of being let in, and your skis threaten to fall on top of me from the cupboard. When did we last go skiing together and you injured me with your point of view! You still undertake exciting activities, yet they never refer to me. Your T-shirts portray you as a day-walker, guarded every second by a watch that's been calibrated to do just that. Soon a handshake will suffice when we meet. One day I won't hear from you any more because you'll have had a terrible accident. Dynamic young people are just not the slowest! After your accident I'll be under the impression of a tragedy. A couple of days previously you'll have said to your companions, before going up in the ski lift, that you've got everything you need for the season, skis, shoes, bindings. Everything will happen so quickly that it'll be difficult to grasp. On the fast lane to death. You'll have raced to death on the way home from go-karting. An overtaking manoeuvre will be your doom. Your car will smash against an oncoming bus. Ten bus passengers will be injured, but what's that in comparison to your death! This victory over your body will not be a one-day wonder, but a comeback on a detour via death. You can finally establish yourself at the top and stay there. You lie there whilst the country flies by. Yes. You and your friends. One day you'll have run round the world and then where do
you go? That's why you work in your ski teams, so that you don't remain undiscovered.

Your friends, they're playing fast and loose with themselves, without the necessary forethought. Now you're silent, repay maturity with immaturity, as nations were wont to do before they united, just so they could go for each other with greater zest. All of that merges seamlessly with my gentle suffering. Fortunately I'm not aggressive, nor are my girlfriends. We talk about themes and ask for respect, the name of the discount that we apply to the themes after we've chosen them. Supra-successful female poets give us lectures. They splash around in themselves because it seems so warm there, and a little lightly-scented foam sprays from around the mouth. They wipe it away. Then they say what they have to say: courage, sorrow, dismay, multiculturalism. Always the same thing. This woman runs her wet index finger along her reading circle and believes that is sufficient sport. Boredom already begins to pull at your cradle, son, and you're certainly no slacker. You want to get out, if necessary with the dog. Look at this other dedicated woman! She is touching the edges of the mixing bowl that surrounds her. Moreover she's surrounded by friends, which improves the feedback. A chirpy hearth and housewifely sounds. We women are mainly amateurs, yet we diligently help all to pass on what one of us is saying, we just don't know who.

Yes, even amateurs can feel satisfaction if they're right. Your friends mock my fear of losing you. And you mock with them. At first a reasonable debate amongst yourselves, it often leads to bloody confrontation. I know that. Yet still I drill holes in your defences. As a result I don't sleep for nights at a time. Although I'm an expert in arguments, I write them up in my notebook and then wipe them away, first with wet tears, then with dry. Why have I suddenly become the enemy in your eyes, how did this come about?

Where does it come from, your permanent citrus freshness that you use to take my breath away? What, from me, from
my own cupboard? I just want to know where you are at this moment. Your sports friends find this ridiculous. You harvest applause from your friends when you mock me. Soon I won't be allowed to look at you in public. No one looks at where the mother is standing anyway. A mother determines the appropriateness of her children, only then to be disappropriated herself. Sport is at its most effective when it takes place in public – when photos of the stars are emblazoned on the front pages and peep out of the back pages that hide them, only to reveal them all the better. Soon I'll just catch sight of your heels from behind when you turn up to kick a poor maltreated ball. And the ball came round specifically to visit you. But it wants to head off straightaway, to the midfielder, who is free, unlike you – unlucky. Where you are not, that is where your happiness is. So you think!

Your early years were better for me. I so want to get to know your friends, but you don't let me. In my own way I'm also a heroine, you just don't see it, although I take great care with my clothes, as always. We mothers are either silent heroines or louder heroines. You have blocked the understanding between us like the plughole in a basin, all from a sense of injured love for yourself. You want to keep them to yourself, your companions. It's as if you're going to war. I call out frantically – don't torment me! I don't doubt your talent to move quickly or to stand still or to equip equipment with yourself, whatever you fancy. Nevertheless you jump around in front of my eyes, a courier with a courier's bag around his neck.

And yet we could walk along this lovely stretch easily. You still boss me around at home if you want something. And even that is happening less and less. I feel as if something has been snatched away and yet I would do anything to make you happy. Please carry on living with me and eating my food. Go to bed in your childhood room and sleep close to the wall, so that I can count your breaths and use them to keep time, measuring warring conflicts elsewhere in the world, or rejecting them without knowing
their measure beforehand. Why all this trouble with a tape measure if I'm against them anyway? Just because they seem to be too numerous? No thank you, they've been rejected lock stock and barrel as they come along, the wars. I wrote you alone as a reckoning into my book, my child, before another could count on you. And I want it to pay off. It can't possibly be such an effort to be good to me, you're already good to your sports chums. I pretend to be indulgent, it fills me up from the inside. As long as you, my son, are still there, I feel exalted, shining, worthy of love, but as soon as you slam the door behind you, a feeling of disappropriation comes over me, I have been bereft of you. A carpet, which someone has trampled on and that now lies empty like a calm but permanently resentful sea. Before this stretch, which can cause us harm at any time, not through fire but through water, you stand, saluting and announcing: courier present and correct! The sun comes out, it only shines because of you. You are not at home, so it can go away again.

THE CHORUS:

Why did you send your son away to the sports war if you wanted him straight back again? Because of the damage to his posture? Don't deceive yourself, just look at the posture he gained through his sport! Is it any better? No doubt you thought that this way he'd stay your son much longer, if he had an aim that wasn't aimed at a person. What? The mother should be exempt from all this? That he trains his strange urges into a void? You were the one who first urged him on, woman! You must have noticed that one, once they've entrusted themselves to sports shoes – always one size up from one's own – for example the American basketball player on the photo there, is that your son? No? There you go. Or that one there with a pole on his shoulder, he's not your son either, is he? There you go. You can't just get out of a contract signed in blood and sweat and pain. The one lot cash in on the contract, and sooner or later the other lot hand out their cash to doctors, so that those left standing who stagger into goal, are punished by
having a little bit of cartilage cut out of their knees after the timekeepers have packed away their stopwatches. Then they feel much better.

Here you can see two completely altruistic teams who are serving a higher purpose: television team ORF is playing magazine team Falter. Falter wins hands down. The average age is much younger and the team takes pleasure in a youthfulness it wants to see immortalised. You, woman, you will always be a mother, no matter what. Why don't you let the young people have their fun? If you'd wanted to create a happy smiling couple with your son, then you should have bought him as a cuddly toy. You've no idea what it means when awkwardness suddenly becomes a love affair with oneself, one that excludes everyone else, I mean a physical affair, which always leads straight to the state and its glory. Unless you take the shortcut to war, and by the end you're in a completely different state to the one that you and your field pack upped and left. Well done for fighting against all this! It must hurt you if it's to do any good! Why not just let go of the placenta, so that we can cut the cord! Let's see if he's any good. Throw the velvet train over your shoulder, your new outfit from Rue Morgue. Changing to this label has not paid off. And it has not paid off for your son to be born. So there!

He needn't have bothered coming at all for such a short period, this skipjack from Ginzling, wherever that might be – although you probably know, mama. Always accompanied by a vociferous group of fans, the boy swore: I'll be back. Up 'til now he's not kept his word there, in his grave. All the best things take time. We're still waiting. The mother, I tell you, did not create what was procreated. Within her body the mother provides accommodation for the father's guest, and in this way protects the entrusted deposit. She can profit from this deposit: the father's child for God, who will look after it? What, you think that no one can be a father without a mother, better still – be a mother alone? Get rid of papa? Just look here, I can show you someone who wasn't nourished by a dark womb or
motherly night: magnificent, a bright blonde child, a goddess could not have given birth to better: Franz Linser, the counterpoint to the EU-Commissar Franz Fischler. What do people say about him? He is slim and well-toned and what's more, an idealist, whereas Fischler could be thought of as a bureaucratic prototype. Or here, further on: Gail Pallas Athena Devers. If you calmly counted her hormones, she might not even count as a woman. Every city she has lived in can consider itself lucky to have been able to host virtually the first modern Olympic Games, so that Gail Devers can host us through it all. So, this body has been formed, now it only has to submit to the sauna and be skinned. How do you make it clear to a young man that he has to go to war if he's not done any sport before? Your son is vital! We need people who are concerned about their bodies and yet unconcernedly throw away their souls, as Plato said that one single time he worked up a sweat. He couldn't compose himself for years afterwards.

Thinkers are so stupid, so one-sided, so feeble! They are so intensely preoccupied with politics or crime. Although the integrated time-keeper has taken crime time away from us once and for all. No, I get it, they're not fighting just now! They're waging war against their liberation, which in turn only brings about momentum. They'll soon see!

Here, for example, you see right away the gentleman of this political movement, the one who's really moving us at the moment. He stands there on the street with his sweaty marathon headband, gasping like Christ on the Cross after he'd begged, the hairdryer's gust still caught in his hair stiffened by a perm, nevertheless, the crowd oohs and aahs, it's shorter than his normal flames of hair, what, he has a new hairstyle? Probably because of the sport, yup, that's what he's telling us! That's how he gives it to us! Sometimes his bitterest opponents have become his best friends, that's what you call fair play. That new haircut makes him look so much younger. A good thing he's had it done, now we believe everything he says, because there's no longer room in his hair for a wave and a backflip. What
does he want to say to us? He says: the point of sport is that it makes people not care about dying, because they've been created for quick consumption as it is. He himself is our example. He sacrifices himself. With his shoes, with his whole body, he wants to brush against us so that we can't miss him. People nowadays want to be modern and he takes advantages of this. You put their packaging in the waste disposal, so that people no longer have any worries, just in case they wanted to buy new ones and don't have enough room. One always needs more room. After all, when people allowed themselves to be bought, the packaging was the most important thing at the time.

He tastes even better if you put him in the fridge beforehand, this muesli bar of a leader you see in front of you, this ballast, so that we can really go under. A spy who loved himself. Yes, peoples and their descendents, all dejected and motherless. That's why they sounded out their best friends. So that they could belong to them, their dearest human comrades, even more than before.

Bones crack, tendons rip, veins burst, ligaments stretch, but somehow someway survive. In sport the human bodies are like pizza boxes or disposable cups: at first they're beautiful, and then they're used, even abused. Nevertheless they're washable and easy to clean, all down to modern fibres, which the creator used on them, particularly on this one person, who in his sweet damnable way strokes our television screens from inside with his muscle fibres, so that we can see right to the bottom of our screens. You have to leave him to stew in his own juices for hours so that he can be softer to us, or no, here it says something quite different: fibres softer than his have not been invented yet! But tomorrow could be the day, and then they'll be everywhere.

They'll be even more breathable than us, who also like to breathe but are perhaps still too few to pull even a hair from the head of a stranger. Of course it's good that this man wants to make us harder again, only we're not meant
to be hard on him. One mustn't stop the sort of person who just sails on through. We got our new fibres back in today so that we can hang onto our sporty fuehrer with them. Even as a child he was climbing up everywhere, and also practised the art of acting. He acquired his considerable agility himself by warming himself up every day. Yes, warming up, a chapter to itself. The follow-up preparations after his contest even more so. Internally going over the whole course, the positive or negative performance. From now on, when this man walks past, we no longer have to fear his kisses. In accordance with the howling masses, we can even allow ourselves to yearn for them. Before he comes to us, he goes through his contest thoroughly in order to avoid any unpleasant surprises. No one knows the piste better than him. We fall over, he stands up. We are still shovelling the snow out of our ears and he's already run away from us again mentally. That is, if he can find his mind amongst all the blissful spirits in the foaming waters of his brainwash machine. He thought he wouldn't need it again so quickly. Perhaps he's stuffed it into his tennis socks. Heel to butt, step position, change step, jumping jack, knee-lift, shake out.