Sports Play (7 page)

This world-cup fuehrer has no need of poetic thoughts about war, although there are some left in stock: Goethe, and the inimitable way he speaks about Nature – this ongoing war – for it all started with stone-throwing. So let's not throw the first stone at this man who only wants to enjoy himself. He is so beautiful he has to settle down on a chair, as the earth couldn't bear him if he didn't distribute his weight more evenly. He runs within a hair-breadth of the speed indicated by his stopwatch to indicate that only he is honest. The path is the destination. He's someone not handicapped by his body, but keeps it company in case he needs it urgently. We need nothing more than the body! We've become so frugal after experiencing the ruin of the masses following a strict diet. Everything was at stake, about a hundred thousand – maybe even more – who kicked the bucket only so that we could start the
game all over on another, happily refurbished, field. Do you see the chalk markers, the sand, the net? Over there they're showing us what a rake is, so that the field can be calculated anew. Here are the red and over there the yellow chalk stars that separate the teams, scribbled in a rush and yet still hard to wipe away. What's in it for us? Each can choose for himself. We demand everything from the body, the last drop. By and large the body doesn't care as long as you think with it, but a convertible is better at providing shelter. It might have no roof but the body does. This body's uniform is the Golf GTI. Duty apparel and working apparel mixed together are officially considered a uniform, as proved by every constabulary or fire brigade sports day.

Yes, mummy, as of today's date your son has used up the freshly-laundered body and soul he received from you. He's finally allowed to wear something smarter the day before the competition, something more everlasting than the still ongoing life he received from you. Stand still! Take two steps back! Forward! Ahoy friends! If that's too strong, then you're too weak. Because your boy has started to be hot for sport, he needs extra artificial organs en masse that his trainer is unable to supply; he can't take care of everything. And so mama has to pitch in – protect her boy, bear witness, sign contracts, donate a kidney, so he can become a consort and man of the world, her son. Hey, look out! Your demolition is impending! Your elevation is needed! Doubtless love holds some attraction. But whoever has access to admirable airbags with a bare undercarriage or a freshly-trained Cornetto, including a kiss-proof Magnum, should not only share their virtues with themselves but also with Vienna's pleasure palaces. Are you surprised that your son flew straight as an arrow from you into the pub for a drink when he heard the order: hosepipe – water on – go! Today he sits in a back room where he's allowed to listen to a modern, but in no way moderate, sermon from the party. The Church does that sort of thing with a jazz mass. The fuehrer does that sort of thing with time measurement. It won't take much longer.
Mama, your son would've run away from you in response to any order. He only needed to have heard the order once.

The medicine machinists, who can be considered for the lottery draw, have to have successfully passed their machinist apprenticeships. The trainers too. You, the mother, are still allowed to wash your son's new soul at 30 degrees, it won't bobble, and even after thirty washes its colours will look like new. Is that new? No, washed like fresh wool. Is he new? No, hardened off under grenade fire. Your son will only be a harmoniously-assembled man once the starter has given the command: ready, steady, go! And you think he still ought to fit in with you? The stone that has just been thrown will fit much better into the wall that covers its genitals whenever a free kick is given. As the last neutral word “Go” is uttered, the starter quickly lowers the flag, whereupon the relay race and the timekeeping begins. When your son crosses the finishing line with his stone, his time will be kept by two stopwatches. If he quickly smashes a stone onto someone's skull, the timekeeping is interrupted, courtesy of the organisers. Simultaneously, the boy has to give a verbal report that is checked against the written one at the finishing line. It should contain no more than three, at most five words, saying roughly: here I am.

So now it's just lying around, the time that the loser lost, what do we do with it? Mother! It surely won't be the time that another lost because of your son, when this one kicked the other one in the head? No, the son and the recipient of the charge, who was actually expecting a throw-in, has no idea where the other's seconds got to. He doesn't know where the opponent's decisive seconds went missing. And we've not got them either. We just think: the more you stuff into time, the more it expands. This time will bring everybody something, it's still brand new.

WOMAN:

All's well and good, I'll stop despising the body and weeping over dead bodies, since continuing to despise
is simultaneously a betrayal of my son's body, through which the soul I breathed into him wanders around, but can never sit down with me, never needs to catch its breath. I try to put myself in my son's position. He rips the protective seal of his soul from his body and sprays it all over the field, like water from a bottle that a runner snatches up from the refreshment table without stopping for a moment. He sprays it away, unused and unprotected. His body only unnerves him when he has to immobilise it for a moment, to take in nutrition. Soon he'll be a young dead man, or at least in hospital, if he carries on like this. I'm used to lamenting. He doesn't take any breaks, the son, he makes a noise. He'll have to suffer beforehand, I can't spare him that. Please, as for me, I've always worked at having as little contact with the body as possible. Once was really enough! I was told I was a prude old nanny goat because I'd signed up for a social dance class, actually as a passionate lover. Why on earth? Please, I take my clothes off straightaway after only two days, my skin doesn't like it. I even want to spare my clothes close contact with myself. Giving birth to this child was really the most strenuous contact with a stranger. Is that why I hang onto him so much now? He remained my only son. An Apollo! Exactly! And now? He wants to be famous and express himself, not only in splendid speeches but also through his body, this malady, that just seems to be essential to him. So I went and made him one. Because other children had one too. If I hadn't given him a body though, he wouldn't constantly be complaining, how he's getting on with it too slowly, why didn't I give him a better one. How bulky it is when he wants to vanquish it.

It gets in his way, this body. He just doesn't appreciate what he got from me. Is that why he bought himself a new Volkswagen? He probably wants to get rid of his mother too, along with the sluggishness of his body. His mother who thinks of him constantly, like an unchanging Olympic flame that can't find the Olympic spirit, because it's still
too dark and the television floodlights have not been built yet. One moment, the television's coming now!

Yes, if it weren't for mama. And here, her sun god, who only swaps the track, the golden one, with his hot wheels when he has to. Or for example this kind of sport: you have to stand on your toes and cut through the neck spinal bones, then the victim gasps and rattles, and then maybe a couple of thousand come to help out, blood for blood. Later on they drop their motorbikes on the sun-sodden river bank, stretch out, turn their faces to the sun, get a tan, continue on their travels to check out new places, then they lie down again after their sightseeing, of course right in the middle of my dear sun. They think about travelling to the Dominican Republic, then they forget about it. They think about travelling to the Seychelles, then they forget about it. In addition to summer, my son loves winter, spring and autumn. Then he returns home, my prince, the war having turned out favourably. I was against a war having taken place at all and sit whole murderous hours in front of the television, weeping and wailing. They just won't let me bury the dead! They only let me look on. How common. We women. We community nurses. All crushed by the mountain of tragedy.

VICTIM:

I've often wondered why sportsmen – my great role models – although famous, are not actually really anybody. In fact they're nobodies. And that's because they can't each be our own son. But some sons, and yes, I include yours, dear madam, want to be one. Long after the broadcast we talk about them, our heroes, and they for their part are happy to be seen by us, want to give to us. However: whatever identity we might bestow upon him, it is not through his deeds that we recognise our favourite sportsman. We have to take his face into account and read his character, which at least can be read very quickly. The newspapers, let's tentatively call them our gods, at least until they've proved themselves and represented our opinion, have tailor-made a character for him – something a father did in the old
days. Whereas a mother, the guard dog, went shopping and barked at the fence to stop an intruder coming into the house, before her son had tidied away his character, his slalom poles and his ancient dumb-bells. But when mother came back from shopping, that was when her son first flushed. Immediately the mother thinks: that horsewoman, the plague! But it was just junk mail with too broad a portfolio in the post. I mean absolutely anyone could catch it, and be caught standing shyly in front of detailed reports about something that one has not won, again.

The son is mortified. So. What are the papers writing, the ones that love clear lettering and strong colours on the jerseys? They want to tell anyone hanging around on the battlefield of life, like some sort of skittle knocked down by a mean bowl, exactly what he wants to hear. Everyone always knows better. Then they realise that it just won't work, because the papers would be a metre thick and destroy every letterbox they were pushed through. You see, here it says what the one has done and how the other has misbehaved. And we're still sitting here undone. Why can't we all become famous? It's not possible, because humans are too different but there's not enough differentiation available. Who will sing about us? No one, unless we do it ourselves. Should war break out again, here are two qualities to choose from: fidelity and the ability to forget. I can hear a song coming on in a two-stream wind tunnel. What's howling so? Bingo! Whoever has these two qualities can place his cross where someone once stood. That makes everything clearer, should we ever lose again. And the crosses are already there. And so the fuehrer knows exactly where he is, when he flits past us in his sports car, at least until the point where one country stops and the next one starts. And he stares at this point night and day. As we don't let anyone over our borders any more, we're already here and can quietly reach the boundaries of our performance. We can even cast a glance over there and yet still come back. It is simply more beautiful inside ourselves.

THE WOMAN:

My son in one of his final dialogues, just listen to him. He wants to come over the ball like a violent storm and then in three seconds he's already lost to his opponent. I can put myself in his shoes, how disappointed he is inside. My son wants to pre-empt death by joining a team. And then he really is quite alone, because the ball, of its own accord, has run off somewhere different to the place shown to it by a kick. It could happen that the match is over before he can make good his mistake. And that is because one is needed elsewhere, on another field. That's approximately what happened to me that time, just after my son was born. Suddenly he was gone. And I could only finish him off much later. The son has role models. But I throw a sheet over him the size of a huge tent, so that he can't look at them. He should only look at me. And now he lays a blanket over the dead that he made so that I don't see them, when I come back from doing the shopping. What happened in the interim? Provocation, exchange of fire, expulsion. Resettlement by new national costume troops and a beating for each of the old ones, that's a fixed feature of our current particularly cheap return sale. I am absolutely in favour of peaceful dialogue, particularly in war zones. I don't wish to conceal the extent of the depravity. I relish it. Now my son kicks against my dead body, which I cannot endorse. He has put on his new, freshly-imitated and still warm from the oven Ray Bans specially for the occasion, and has been given the latest haircut, which of course he's not allowed to miss. And then soon enough the next war arrives with a brand-new fashion, pity that I'll no longer be able to see him then, the son. A newspaper had shown him this haircut until he knew it off by heart. Look into today's newspaper so that you'll be able to recognise your son when he stands, completely transformed, in front of you. You won't be able to recognise him by his jeans, since he got those from millions of other sons.

This man here, for example, is certainly not a quiet one, it says here. And over there you can see his entire wealth,
which, furthermore, speaks for him and unfortunately didn't fit completely on the page. May he be granted his wealth, because he could snuff it at any time and what's he going to do with it then? Become a daredevil? Nevertheless here's his girlfriend, pretty as a picture, yes, right next to him, super figure, figure B, yes, that one next to the Ferrari that's letting out a bellowing sound in the chest voice of conviction. In my opinion, this woman looks like a living Victoria sponge, with hair growing on it. I don't have to be right though. Taste and a slap on the face can vary. Look, at least he's admitting that he really did need a second person standing next to him, he's too fast for one person alone. On most of the blurred photos I have of my son he's wrinkling his brow so peculiarly. He's acting as if a hero could spring right out of him at some stage. Taking, like giving, does however require some practise. My son preferred to take. So stupid to be practising what one can already do. I was an accomplice to it. Now a fighter wants to quickly take his qualities out on my son, qualities that several sports journalists have been trying to wean him off for years. For years my son has wanted to be like him, but then he'll have to live with it all by himself as I'll no longer be around.