Sports Play

  I stand up from my seat appalled. The whole lot’s laughing. Shivering, I draw this land around me as if it were a jacket. How nice that there’s no longer any barbed wire on it. Well, take my catalogues of values away from me, I can barely hold them anymore. Today these catalogues are also too heavy, no wonder, since snobs like myself take them on. They destroy the doorsteps, these one-time hooklets, no booklets, they’re now bricks. I do think they could think about removing electrical appliances and microelectronics from these folios. As it is we live entirely under the totalitarian dominance of micro-processors, I mean microprocesses.

  Something snuggles up against a young person’s hand, it is the head of his cat that’s immediately thrown against the wall, the next thing up is his joystick, that at least is subjugated by him and opens up the new world he wanted for his birthday, the lad. At least then there’ll be no more rattling at the door of the world. Another game is no longer in it, in this machine. Macro-processes the next book, the next hall. You’ll find more specific information about the conditions of individual violence at the till, you’ll get information any time from that point without having to pay for it. Collective happenings are only available at the main till on the first floor.

  It was no effort at all for me to write all that down, but now I’d really like to get rid of it.

  What distinguishes the moralist is that he gets worked up today about this, tomorrow about that and cannot find any auspice for an upcoming and yet shrouded answer. I am an idiot, the answer lies in the water, in that sort of darkness.

  One, if not several DIVERS appear out of the floor. They are dragging a very reluctant ELFI ELEKTRA behind them, maybe in a net. As she eventually gets too heavy, or defends herself too hard, they leave her behind.

  Applause! Applause! Good. Thank you. You can stop now, I’ve heard it already.

  DIVER:

  I left the slowly moving ship, not one single immortal’s crying cloud was to be seen in the skies, and what is that here on the green meadow? A spot? At bottom women are a lustful lot – they make such demands as have not been heard before, they challenge me. I prefer to wait until the right one comes along. Nobody remembers their own birth, that’s why women are so unpopular. These weaklings! And yet today even they go in for all sorts of sports.

  For example, my sister Elfi Elektra from Bregenz. (He yanks at the struggling bundle.) I’m allowing her a short rest here. Her problem is that something only appears to be visible to her once it’s concealed in something hidden. She turns over every stone because she absolutely has to find a vipers’ nest. Her sport consists of leaving nothing hidden in its place. But what she is digging up here, like a dog, is something that has been visible the whole time. Why does she imagine she’s the only one who’s seen it? It’s only once absolutely everyone has seen it that she allows it into her thoughts. And now she’s puffing herself up in front of everyone, sits up and begs, just like winter throwing its snow at us. I’ve got better things to do. Us young men. The most of what there is, and there’s still so many of us. Us latelings. I’ve no idea where we should all go, aha, now I see where, no, I still can’t see it exactly, but I can see it roughly, and that’s all I need: out with the individual and in with the mass, so that we can all beat one and the same time before we have time to be beaten down. Main thing is, we age late.

  Wherever you look, everywhere there are some like us and none like you or Elektra Elfi. She always takes everything so seriously. She’s shot her arrows without even one of them having hit. She hears nothing but contradiction and yet she does not and still does not open her legs, because she considers herself alone to be the most magnificent. A child has not been borne of her. She’s cursed and sewn shut. Sun, come on, fall down. Net, tighten up. Cords loosen.

  So many young men and yet not one of us is a puzzle. We’re here and therefore we’re it. But we won’t always have been it. Our childish beginnings and our unchildish and irredeemable ending, who says that? No, we never stop, or perhaps yes, we break off at any point we want to and from anyone we want to, and that means that we’re breaking off with you right now. None of us dies alone in the night. They go along! Young people. Young people. Yoohooo! We’re just getting under our own influence, we’re not listening to other influences. Why not orientate ourselves to the best, to ourselves? Or to nature, that is bigger than us and has just enjoyed crushing someone with a boulder. So of course we have to capitulate to it. Nevertheless, we do really cherish nature.

  It also disposes of us soon enough. No matter. We always want to discover something new. Part of us is covered by trousers. Part of us is watched over by fear. Oh yes, your eyes do not deceive you, there is something in us that’s pulling. I personally wouldn’t call it longing, yet after some time we do notice that it pulls us back into the shoe shop, no, one shouldn’t underestimate this desire. So I buy these and the other shoes for myself: that’s one of the most frequent sentences that I make in connection with myself. According to desire and brand, according to turning radius and turbo, super or supernormal. What, women want to say something on the matter? Well then, knock yourselves out. The city belongs to us. The countries are soon swaying in time to our music in their hips, warming themselves up, warming themselves up more, every police sports team, every fire brigade sports team knows that. We practise warming ourselves up before every deployment and then we put out the fire that we set on ourselves, again, and then we set another fire somewhere else.

  FIRST:

  Yes, when things really heat up, then we shoot off and extinguish. It’s got to change. Each of us can do everything, no one can do nothing.

  ELFI ELEKTRA: (Enters voluntarily now, if somewhat battered from what’s gone on before, but riding her new mountain bike, breathless.)

  Excuse me, I can’t even get off the bike without creating a disturbance. So, let’s keep it brief: my mama buried my father like a dog, entombed without last rites, and before that she, and it really wasn’t necessary, dug him up again and dragged him between her teeth to the asylum, even though he was already dead. So first of all he went into some private home where twelve people had to share a room, as the owners of the home, which was nothing more than a normal family house, albeit one with lovely ten-bedduvets per room, mmmm, yum yum, managed the arrivals, the swallowing of tablets and the shooing. All those disciplines! Sweet Jesus. Smoking is not allowed in the dormitories. Talking to fellow breakfasters is not allowed.

  Screwing discussion partners is also not allowed. Running away during an excursion is not allowed. The lunatics come in hell for leather, they are taken out quite still, weightless articles, less gravity than that them or those. And we then leapt in with new human wares, mama and I. Papa! He didn’t come to an end in the bath because he wasn’t a king either, his end came in a hospital bed. Papi! How is it that you can live without being visible? Super!! I need someone louder than myself, oh, I’ve already got someone louder like me! You will have to atone, mama, so that I don’t have to atone for it. You always cosseted papa if there was an audience around, but then quickly buried him in our self-dug skeleton bunny warren. So that he’d just stop all that babbling and whining. So, the man must leave, nothing to be done! Let’s ring for sister Ismene so that she can give a hand with the burial. If mama cycled she’d get there quicker. Now she’s too old to ride. In earlier times she could manage very well. They went on lovely bike tours but they never got away from her ill-fated family.

  The sister was hated, the step-father was hated, the sister-in-law! Nothing but scoundrels! Just had to get away: into the mountains, to Venice, up the High Venice, no, that turned out to be too high for bikes. She cut papa into little pieces, papa, who had a flaw. It would have been better if he’d fallen in the war but he wasn’t allowed to go there, on dark-raced grounds that are still sold by the parish today because they are so eerie to the community elders – the good grounds, that in fact many more people should dwell on them. So that no one will go missing, just in case some might go m
issing again. No, I’ve gone and over-exaggerated again. But why don’t you listen to what the mayor is saying. He needs to be friendlier and clearer and higher.

  Light, come on in, sit down! And yet this path had been paved so well for my father as a man. His grave could have been some comfort, as was Niki Lauda’s recovery back then, when we all trembled along with him.

  My papa was a king and died like a dog. Instead he should have been forced to rest under my desk defeated by a sword; but instead I, his murderess, sit here and thrash away at the keyboard until the blood comes spurting out from under my nails. Although, I have found a little grain of truth? Oh brother mine, you killed mama, come on, maybe I did have something to do with it, doesn’t matter. No one knew precisely what happened here. So I lie against mama’s breast, a suckling, who sucked her milk sleepily and sluggishly, I am and remain her child, with or without teeth. People don’t like my teeth, but I am a practised old horse fly, which is why I need them, my teeth I mean, but people too, of course. I always need an audience! So my mama took my papa to hospital, she laid his wits alongside him like a chicken’s innards, and now I’m supposed to live in her house right up to the end. Me, with my little pack of brains in the deep freeze. Perhaps mama will make cubes out of them and throw them into a glass so that the relationship between us two old jades is clarified. It’s not surprising that I never thaw!

  It’s fate apparently that papa got so stupid and now she wants to be laid to rest in the same grave that’s already been paid for one hundred years into the future. Even the dead can be bought. Is murder a sport? I think one has to differentiate, not always. Is God an enemy? I think one has to differentiate, not always. Is death nothing more than sleep, so that people can copulate with each other under the earth? I think one has to differentiate, not always. I’m only saying, his entire life long my father’s body was only a knife cut away from my mother’s steel. There’d been nothing going on between the sheets for a very long time. And I’ll say further that I talk the whole time, but it is as if I’m talking to people who’re asleep. Goodbye. (Rides off on her bike wobbling.)

  ANOTHER: (As if nothing had happened.)

  And they watch over us, even in the streets with cameras, so that we don’t gang together.

  They’ve even stamped prison cells out of the ground under the stadium. So that they don’t have to transport us too far.

  We take no notice of these cameras however. Nevertheless they do see us. They always choose an advanced sports stadium for us, in which the sports attendant can slurp the blood out of our living bodies. We crawl intently under stones, our lungs gasp, our sides sting like wasps, yet these competitions are not represented here. We’ll be beat, even if we keep ourselves hidden.

  FIRST: (Kicking him.)

  We camouflage our actions by saying that it’s war. I gift myself to the battle. I gift myself no battle. Just like earlier times when a god demanded my soul, I’m now demanding victims! (To his VICTIM.) Please gift me your body so that I can turn sport, once a ritual act, into a simple yet certainly not uninteresting physical performance that might perhaps, and this is simply blue-sky thinking, amount to something. Provided that we can interest you in it. But of course! Why else did you turn on your box. The red mark on your carpet, yes, that one in front of the television where you spilt wine last week, it’ll soon fade with all the sun that you let in every day. And me, your murderer, do you want to lock me out? You want to nourish me alive? A blue thunderstorm behind your window pane shows that you’ve turned it on. Kick off. The lack of people on the streets at certain times also shows that. What else would have caused a lack of people out on the streets?

  Here you see (He points to the VICTIM.) a piece of spirit that dies and runs out of the corner of its mouth as spittle whilst the arms and legs of its owner twitch like a sleeping dog. Vomit gushes out of him in a slush and lies large and warm and tightly around him, who’s already lying down. Did he really deserve that? Yes, he really deserved that. It was allotted to him in the same way that each of us is allotted to the other. Perhaps later on he’ll live with them quite happily, the German folk singers. The next broadcast is actually coming from South Africa. Another is cheerful but without cheer. He springs out of his hand like his prick when pissing. The hand stays dry. But there’s not a dry eye to be seen. The guilt is washed away, yuch, that’s one of those modern pissoirs where the water is forever running over the stones, accompanied by a stream of quiet music. No one’s going to be infected by a curse. No one’ll be overthrown. Without the obedient there are no commanders who command us: light trot, run backwards, sideways, kick-backs, knee-lifts, walk with circling shoulders, trot, long strides, intensive knee-lifts, intensive kick-backs, short sprints, heel to butt, lunge, leg on bench (straight), leg on bench (sideways), shoulder circles, upper torso twist then: the sequence of events, go through positive or negative exercises mentally. Warm-down, cool-down, follow up on the competition mentally, stretching programme. Unfortunately sometimes the actual capability of the team cannot be revealed fully: too much pressure on the nerves.

  OTHER:

  You mean, the specified victim should spill out his body like Father Christmas does his sack? It’s going to be of no use to him if he does that. For the only thing that defines us is the situation we find ourselves in. We present our hands, the clean ones. So listen: I too have a mother, but it would never occur to me to cut her into little bits with a knife and then place her head in the window display of her small launderette so that she could, perhaps, sing a song that I, her murderer, would probably not like again, as so much about her. This time the accompaniment will not be from me, but from a CD-player. What, she really would have sung if only she’d been able? And it would have been a song of revenge, a song of death that permeated everything? The content of the song would have been about not killing blood relatives, accompanying blind men, and that one should do a bit of bending and stretching before hosing down if one, after applying several times, finally landed in the fire brigade. I don’t know this song. I don’t have this CD.

  I’m of the following opinion: no one should walk alone. We don’t need unifying ideas any more, no emotion, no plans. We need dumb pantomime gestures, the silent glance, a slight hand movement, and, as so often happens – barely has some common interest connected us ever so loosely, with unbelievable speed we line up, push, set off at a run, and in a tempo that our performance development can only be evaluated as positive. I think that blind people don’t care if they have to walk into the dark. I’ll take out one of your eyes, didn’t your father always say, Elfi? That we will become their murderers was clear to all those standing around in the shortest of time, for the lorry is going ahead to accompany them down. They are now finally excluded from our convivial celebrations. There are 80,000 people standing on a sliding mountainside just to listen to a weakish concert that could not stand of its own accord. We, the dregs of this country, advance on ourselves in the same way we can always count on concession. And all these people run away so that they don’t end up under the wheels of our heavy criminal acts, throw up on the way to the lorry, lose their appetite afterwards, but don’t get anything else to eat anyway. The Lord does not need our dishes, he’ll eat us up himself.

  We’re still not afraid of him. Our churches can remain untroubled in our villages. Our victims, as we’ve said, fear us, even though they can see us. They call us bloodthirsty. That really would not have been necessary, as this whole time we will have been somewhere else, just in case someone should ask us in a year or in fifty years’ time. We chase after them, we jump on them, we extinguish them. Yes, all of us together will have been somewhere else. Yes, we were actually somewhere else and besides that, our victim will not have been a person at all. He might have looked like one, but please, he can’t have been one or else we would never have made such a mess of him. Those screams just now, did you hear them? The complaints that they were being killed at the hands of children, did you hear them? Perhaps darkness
fell randomly over the victim’s house and that’s why it can’t be seen any more. Nor us either, who, akin to the mountain lioness, streaks devastatingly, ragingly through the oak grove, and carries out the deed?

  After all, we are all only human beings! We spray apart like Mr Whippy under the stirrer, like Mr General under the commander’s orders, but we won’t let ourselves be stirred and we certainly won’t let ourselves be beaten. We prefer to do the beating ourselves. The only performance that counts are the years of our lives, the fewer years, the more performance one can still achieve. We understand time as a challenge to be as cheerful as possible. It doesn’t take much to be of good cheer. Silently we look into the eyes of the people whose arms we twist round to the back, look for the three significant belt points referring to us, as they provide our own security, and then jerk the steering wheel around because nothing can happen to us, us bloated airbags. We deviate herewith from everything that was specified to us as a path. It could easily turn into a kind of sacrament. Or perhaps more of a ritual? A holy transubstantiation from life to death? But God meant it to be the other way around, that within the transubstantiation he, a dead man, is called back to life. Look: blood flows out of this man through the many wounds that we inflicted on him, and he is in great pain, something he confided in me quite openly in one of his rare moments of quiet. Now he’s not said anything for quite a long time. At least not since we carried out our final hands-on attack on him. Down off the Dachstein. Mighty mountain. Mighty sentence. Oh no, this mighty sentence failed. And if it had succeeded, then it would not have been from me. Well, the rest is okay.