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 wome
n 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.
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 wo
n’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.