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.
ACHILLES:
Yesterday the head of the local Chamber of Commerce called me for no good reason at all. I stared into his eyes, my bat at the ready in my bag. I was fully aware of the danger; that I would have to pull it out at any moment, bloody as it was.
HECTOR:
I just looked out of the window as this sheister tried to turn me into someone who’s afraid. I’ve never dodged a ball. I always understood that waltz time was a challenge that I had to take on board. Officially. At the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Ball. No, thinking is not a means of understanding. Rather it is sport that lifts us inside and...and...er, hurls us back into the furrow of our being, into the car park of the nameless, where we can be buried, at a small surcharge of course. Nothing grows out of us, although disorder is created in paperwork. A beginning of all life. Out of us grows law and order. Indigenous peoples remain disorderly, they don’t have the choice to become civilized. They wander around their savannahs but don’t call their movements sport even if they are mass movements. Bones lie around the edges. We on the other hand create order from the sweaty, the dissolved, the spent. When they release us, we immediately go to the fitness club where they torture us again. Our bodies are and remain tanks that besiege women after we’ve showered. We drive around their narrow alleys even though there are no cycle paths there. Well, sport’s certainly not orderly. It didn’t haul us out of our being but out of our offices. Why? Because we just happened to be there. Or wasn’t it sport that hauled us out? Was it thought? But thinking doesn’t actually do anything. It’s more essential to move about.
ACHILLES:
Don’t over-exert yourself. Forced membership of a chamber, from which there is no escape anyway, basically slumbers in the darkest depths of each person. We wouldn’t want it any other way. We were commissioned by circumstance.
HECTOR:
None of us ventures outdoors voluntarily unless he wants to swim a few lengths, play in a golf war, go for a jog or harness himself to a Trojan vaulting horse. We dignitaries, we stay. Us, not the poets, us us us, because everything we do looks similar to an accomplishment, but isn’t one. As far as I’m concerned, tennis, beer, cross-country running.
ACHILLES:
Attention. Important, important, important. Yes. We stand above other people, all in white, with a coat of arms sewn onto the breast of our training jacket. As soon as we show other people our rank, our power and our weight, they rush to suggest a diet. Yet we forego nothing. We are and we remain in the game.
HECTOR:
We survive from victory to victory, attuned to each other. Attention – an important message! Tonight is club night, closed membership, on the side lots of people who for their part still have room for something, a fleeting schnitzel, an abandoned grilled liver, an orphaned potato salad. Countless glasses of wine. The people who present themselves have already been uncorked. They believe they can take away from us all the good air that we’d reserved for ourselves. We should’ve let these people in before they’d planned a revolt against us. Then they might’ve stopped breathing voluntarily and there would have been more for us. A whole field of people belongs to anyone who’s victorious; these people who are trading while throwing their seed at us. That’s why we need this members’ club that we debated for some time. It’s a way to prevent people from outside having any influence. This is how I see it: compulsory membership means that some are permitted to go bankrupt for us, other against us. What century are we in again?
ACHILLES:
Yes, what individuals achieved in earlier times can nowadays be ascribed solely to our organisation that represents each individual. We have as many members as there are people. Extra extra: a very important piece of news is on its way – today the meeting will go off without bloodshed. So leave your phrases at home – they can play quite happily with the children so that they too will learn to speak like masters. No heads will roll. And should heads roll, then our children are sure to want to be there. We’ll be very gentle, like newborns, and that is also how we’ll feel. Where there once was passion, hearts will now bloom like flowers, even before it’s the proper season for it. And you, madam author, why are you so aggressive? We haven’t done anything to you. Why are you getting so worked up? We adore going to the theatre, we’re just not interested in what you have to say. Us. The only thing we did, was an innocent kiss. Harmless. We even let the beetles, the happy ones, play under the soles of your feet. We could’ve made out an order to you to squash them and then we’d have given you funding. But when you come to think of it, we’re not actually generals. For each individual it is unbearable to stand alone. We know all that. So why do you keep on saying it? We built a strict sauna specifically for ourselves and in there we practise price restraint each day for hours at a time. For all I care even with the weights that you, madam author, constantly want to place on us. It’s perfect for us, the room, it doesn’t have to be any bigger. We wouldn’t know what to do with additional dead space. If we want to run, we go outside, if we want our clothes to do the running, then we use a washing machine. In this way you can survive your enemies, regardless from whence they come.
HECTOR:
The essence of the mighty is the right to decide over life and death. We don’t even have the right to decide on membership, now all have to become members. Doesn’t matter where, even in your own life. That’s long since superseded those terribly bloody battles of history. What a good job that was, wasn’t it? My body was even dragged three times round the outer castle gates! The others stand down straightaway, in order to freshen themselves up a bit for the resurrection of the flesh. They don’t have much time. It’s such a great invention now that people don’t have to strew their lives across the fields of history but can instead entrust their lives to us, without any residual risk. We wouldn’t dream of dying for them. Excuse me, nothing happened to me sadly, but that was a mistake in my terrible war against our dear president. Never again. There are countless people who live without blood immediately dripping over their mouth and hands. You mendaciously maintain the opposite, you, woman, with the painted face! At some point you women gave us this sign of life, but you didn’t attach the instructions. Once again, that’s so typical of you. We overcome death much better than you. As long as there are discussions about shop closing times, then none of our businesses will die. Quite the opposite, more people will come and join us. The shop girls wither in their shoes. Sometimes more courage is required for their straightforward work than for more exceptional work. That is their life, fresh, red, it bubbles cheerfully in the department store snack bar. Forget about it, unless you’re thirsty! Then, stop by. We keep our dogs on the lead and let them defecate in the gutter. They’re not going to maul anyone. Don’t shriek so! If you have to cower in the dark branches of a spruce that’s hanging heavily over you, then please, not to avoid our dogs. If you constantly and publicly maintain that we are the owners of the Alsatian that mauled you, then please take responsibility and do so at your own risk. Oh yes, we can see: your antlers give you away as a Jelinek, no wonder you’re afraid of dogs. And there’s not even one bow, or several, drawn at you.
ACHILLES:
You built an entire wood so that no one can see us rangers, but that only you can be seen, authoress! You timid animal. You were quite right to demand an entrance fee to your game park. People are still paying to be able to see your sophisticated coldness, your sophisticated protests and like small hooves, to scribble over their traces. Well, if people want to pay for that, fine by me.... However it’s not sport that you want to light up a torch for us and in doing so, set the whole country on fire. In the best-case scenario, you could call it sport if there was a spotlight permanently directed towards you and your own light was no longer necessary. That’s what you’d really like, isn’t it? The first lot start fleeing as soon as they hear your voice, which I won’t comment on further here. I’m not waiting for you to warn me, I’d rather wait for people to perish by themselves, whilst I and my comrades carry out our dark deeds under the very same branches to which you fled. We noticed too late that you were there and writing everything down on your shopping list. It makes no difference that a god has imposed the death sentence on all people in existence. With a little more dedication than you’ve shown – sadly in the wrong direction – you’re in! First you’re a child, go to school and are knocked down on a zebra crossing. Later on you got older and never wanted to be overlooked again.
HECTOR:
This walking ghoul should kindly walk away now. The stakes are one’s own company, here we can squander ourselves and others. We don’t do it for anything less. Millions slain, killed by heart attack, cancer or stroke! My God life is dangerous, even without someone talking about it. It’s fanned to a folly because all the time ever more people are being produced. Look, I’ve been mowed down but there are new guys waiting, they were ordered to leave this hostelry immediately, but they never went.
ACHILLES:
We look every new guy in the eye in order to retrieve the real man from under the stamp of greed, concern, lament over a bad economic year – a juicy figure, not some lost one who never sought anything. The universal process: poor, deceived creatures go bankrupt and we just let them fall from our hands, our takers-hands in the shape of bags. We don’t return them because they’re already beat enough. The space allocated to them on the supermarket shelves will soon remain empty. Immediately someone else fills them up, competitors from the EU that supply cheaper products. No further sign of the old masters of the shelves, that meant the world to them. Bankruptcy! A terrible slaughter has broken out in the food industry, above all in the poultry branch. Bows are once again being so overstretched that the ends are kissing.
HECTOR:
Is it perhaps superfluous to run to the net? The victims have all fallen and bounced back on their feet. This time, however, on the field of marriage. They only feel comfortable in this uniquely-patented moral institution. A two-hander where they always draw the short straw. Because the small figures of their wives have kept open the gates to their hearts today, as they do every day now, until 10 p.m. We’re branding them with a new perfume brand, we can’t afford something cheaper. So that the owners can find their dogs again, at the very latest when they start sniffing around the corpses.
ACHILLES:
It never occurs to anyone to revolt against it – a futile start. Usually we say something very simple. However from a great height it sounds quite different. Like a yodeller folded along the hands who’s been thrown into the cesspit of folk music shows.
HECTOR:
Our victims are piled up in our immediate surroundings, we step over them and go to the changing room. Then afterwards, as I said before, sauna, shower, change.
ACHILLES:
Our victims need not have taken us on personally, simply getting an appointment is enough for them to be taken out.
HECTOR:
Bankruptcy often brings considerable discomfort to the relatives of the proprietor. He might as well have died. So much has to be wound down between our members’ arms raised up to strike, but we can nimbly tie them together with wool. Only, these fateful threads are completely entangled instead of being sewn up properly.
ACHILLES:
To sum up: he who fails in business, fails in life. The more powerful someone is, the more dangerous his anger, even if he is shipwrecked later on. This anger might also be without consequence. Unlike death. The spirits of the dead are, thank God, always kept separate
to us, in a much colder place, and they demand from us survivors multiples of that for which they once spent themselves. We will however only have access to them when we hear the tinkling of the frozen food van that delivers to our house once a week. Twenty-four schillings per pack of deep frozen quark dumplings, well, that quark was never alive. Fifty-six for the delicious venison, which was once alive. For me they’re both the same thing. Even millions of dead are just like one: inconceivable. The simple column of breath that rises and disappears without trace is not enough for us, as we greedily lean over the latest meal. They want a whole monument to themselves, these stupid dead people! I personally am against it.
HECTOR:
Just look how floppily your bow hangs from your shoulder! You hold your bat in your other hand, the car keys give you access to a completely new weapons system that focuses on deterrence. That this deterrence depends on the quantity of the threatened parking ticket fine seems to be an outmoded concept to you.
ACHILLES:
Have you blackmailed a business woman, corrupted a lawyer, sounded out a writer? Does your time as a shy columnist in our paper belong to the past? Oh dear. And now another imprudent statement leaps from your lips. What’ve you done? You don’t remain silent. Do you know us? You don’t remain silent. Do you want to sit down? You don’t remain silent. You simply don’t remain silent.
HECTOR:
Thank you for this game. Not in vain have our pants and sweatshirts been stacked high as Olympus. If one still had tones, one could use them to colour one’s hair two tones blacker just to look younger. Now our game has ended. I won’t answer any more of your questions. But I don’t want to remain silent either.
Tennis players off.