In the meantime why don’t you go over there, that’s where events are being presented in my latest summer collection of horrors, events that’ll probably kill you, which will be of little interest to the public. In first place is motorcycling, followed by white-water rafting, and then two or three sorties where, as far as I’m concerned, you can take yourself to your limits. I, on the other hand, will have to deal with myself.
VICTIM:
Please look here, this thug didn’t even wait to see who would win this match – maybe it was his team after all – when he went for my nuts. Strangely he wears exactly the same uniform as I do, please check for yourself. Exactly the same shoes. You usually spot that sort of thing straightaway, madam author. How on earth can you fight then? Although, he does seem to be quite decisive. Nevertheless, over the past fifty years, which I’ve not fully experienced consciously, much has changed with regards frequency, length, aesthetic as well as athletic categories of war. Only one thing remains the same: the death wish is always there. For women it must be simply terrible, they sort of just die, I don’t want to spell it out or use the box to help – the one I want to appear in, amongst the blinking blue lights. The box will remain turned on all evening anyway, deliveries happen at 7 p.m., and then at 7.30 p.m. It’s all the same to me now, even if it’s not exactly pleasant. I was already his opponent beforehand, in principle a fundamental opponent of death. Without even looking at it in detail, I was already against it. And now I see it for the first time not on a photo, I like it even less, even if I screw my eyes shut so that nothing runs into them.
It’s just gruesome how many people are killed each day. I can already spot signs of insanity appearing in the eyes of my murderers, the only thing missing is that the next time, when the prospect is that I won’t take part, they’ll bring along their wives and children with them. Or perhaps this is how they take a break from them. Isn’t that another lovely big topic for you, madam reporter?
MAN: (Whilst kicking.)
My repression mechanism has run out of power because group dynamic forces are exerting their power, as you wrote in your book. By the way, I’m puzzled by how moderately you wrote. You usually exaggerate so. Your book is looking at me nastily between the lines, because I’m in the wrong and still I opened it. Do you think that I care how your book views me? Killing’s not always funny, I can tell you that. Sadly the thinkers, who cheer us in front of their screens and who on holidays sometimes run onto the field dressed in fantastical football get-up, are genuinely astonished when they step outside and the sun – the brightest thing in existence – comes flying at them, which doesn’t necessarily have to imply war. That’s right, war only takes place in the daytime so that the opponents can look at each other in the mirror, apart from mealtimes, since people can swallow each other whole. Later on someone goes into a pub who, in that lovely house of friendship to the yelling hordes just back from a football match, tries to install windows and door insulation so that he’s protected from the noise, and yet he can still see something. And then he’s astonished by the windows, they are suddenly transparent right down to the bottom, so that he too is completely visible. Well, what was he thinking? That is precisely what he wanted, at the bottom of his heart.
You can’t completely isolate yourself from people, that’s unhealthy. Does he think that the masses are waiting for him, that of all things they’re allowed to view him now? What is it about him? No wonder the masses are seething with rage. Of all people, it is the thinkers who are often the most hostile to the masses. They perish by being silent and I’m still in such a good mood, it’s hilarious. Yes, our thinkers. You don’t need to turn around, you too, yes, I mean you. There’s no one standing behind you, you already spotted that. Apparently I can’t persuade you to the opposite point of view, namely how wonderful it is to belong to the winners, to be recognised, to take advantage of the prestige offers of the winning team. Not even if you were to flatter them until your softened teeth fell out of your mouth, would it be possible to persuade thinkers, who stumble around on the ways and means of their stars in a disoriented fashion because they bought a handbook, whereas they actually needed a footbook...err...it’s simply not possible to persuade these slender starter-motors to respect our power, the power of the all-round rampant and all-grasping masses. Excuse me, when has a thinker ever been a hero? Perhaps you’d like to spend an evening with him as he, together with the womenfolk, carves himself out a fate that others in their turn are obliged to carry out in their bodies. They may serve the recruitment stations, if push comes to shove. But when the going gets tough, it’s always other people who get chosen to be stepped on by our boots, until they finally ask themselves, who these boots might belong to.
To us! To us, my dears, not to you! Us! At home! It’s too late. Thinkers will always be foreign to other people, and therefore they only realise much too late, the thinkers, that the people have all suddenly disappeared. Oh, if only that were to work with one single thought! Justifications will follow later, free of cost. A promotional gift. They’ve thought it all through. Afterwards they can work out the probability of sanctions in peace, and reproach us correspondingly fifty, sixty or seventy years later. Yes, for decades they’ll reproach us for something that they thought up and we concluded. So it was and ever shall be. First of all and yet again we have to do the atoning that is imposed upon us. Us, the looked-at in camouflage gear. In front of their own barricades that they are more than happy to take away, the pent-up. The first barricade blows up, a letter bursts, very good, and so then they burst from all the thoughts that they’ve willingly stuffed inside themselves like into a sausage skin, they explode, our dear concern-conveyors before they’ve even thought who they might give a hand job to today, and tomorrow, with the lovely hand of peace, the female hand. He’s coming. He’s coming. Now you’re coming too. In what sort of container can I collect all this?
Out of my mouth slips these and similar remarks like armour-clad goddesses. They like that, the thinkers, who’ve now turned into pre-thinkers. We’re allowed to marry pop singers. Nevertheless, we definitely have the more beautiful women. Just occurred to me when I spotted you, madam author. What on earth do you look like? And so, simply because we need orders they, the towering colossuses of the mind, can be heard singing on every corner and sawing at the stool legs of the powerful: how they fall, stand up and then set off in another direction, get up out of their beds, get dressed, talk on the radio, light the blood pumps from afar, stroke the pipe bombs, inflame the pandemic! At night, in the evening and in the morning their clanging steps awaken us, they always have to put on their weapons first, and their words ring and bang so terribly that one can’t sleep. Even their dreams make noise. Until the sports fields burst, and blood climbs up out of them like an artesian fly amanita. So many men mustered in places of pleasure, and the ribbon that held the avalanche of people together there was irretrievably knotted. Thousands. Why are sports grounds always used for this? Because people enter them willingly and therefore it causes less work? Because the signs already point in that direction and don’t need to be pre-embossed? The shy belong to the past. The reticent also belong to the past.
Now the powers of the disorderly masses count. They, who are increasingly apathetic and fragmented, want to have their big moment. As do you with me, colleague. No, not with me? The thinkers always isolate themselves, it makes them feel superior, even when they’re watching a non-premier match. Always have to suffer terribly and sit next to each other for ages in Café Shivering Woods. They view us, the masses, as faceless and unimportant. Yet all the time we present our importance without them having to set a foot outside the house. A great obligingness and not-avoidableness. Our service to constant thinkers with Oyster shopping-cards: what they should be thinking about and what not.
VICTIM: (Interrupting.)
Isn’t that Mr Kroll coming this way in his car? And aren’t we all sitting in the same bus that he just sped into, on the victory lane, as happe
ns so frequently? Didn’t he crash into us with the highest start number on the grid? And are we not injured? No, because when you come to think of it, we just appeared out of nowhere. He can’t help it. He couldn’t see us, of course.
We thinkers will now not get round to finishing our football books. We won’t even write our twenty volume history of football today. We might always have watched Formula 1 racing without possessing a driving license ourselves, but nevertheless is it not a mockery that our heads have been knocked against a lorry that was travelling at too high a speed? This is not how we poor children will learn anything, I can tell you that for free. In public transport we wouldn’t dare be caught without a ticket. We’d be embarrassed to the bone.
MAN: (Kicking the VICTIM away, then hitting it.)
Yeah, yeah, thinkers. They only show off their muscles at the lectern or in front of the microphone, where they have no opponent because the auditorium has been thoughtfully dimmed. Just so their light shines all the brighter! Yet millions are following, invisibly, their instructions, shuffled in or clouted in as they walked past. The poets and their peasant victims, the thinkers, whose texts they copy, wouldn’t even recognise us if they ran into our fists, surrounded as they are by the pomp of their own importance. But in front of the television, ready to receive, they throw their beer bottles into the air out of pure joy. Once again we will have to take on the killing for them. Well, at the very end it’ll be their turn. Of course at the end, so that beforehand they can describe everything and bravely caution against us. Then we’ll clear up, falling backwards over our own feet and turning the primal trust on by means of a foot pedal, an additional reverse spotlight, because they’re still standing right behind us, the agitators, who, when it gets to the point, can no longer hop off. For we’ll barricade their safety-exit, should they want to swing down with their skis. We’ll become losers together. No one abseils down a rubber rope. Nobody leaves the alpine area. If they lie, then we’re lying too. If you ask me afterwards, I’ll proclaim your words as if they were my own. And you’ll no longer be there to contradict me, our litanist in our, the Father’s name, amen. They’re celebrating still, but not for much longer, and at the same time they’re lazy. How did it come to pass so quickly that someone is lying there? How did it come to pass so quickly that someone is telling a lie? Was it that person, the one who just told me what I had to do and what I had to be ashamed of?
I don’t know how it all started. Just now I was swimming amongst the crowd, which I parted with my elbows and hips, as Jesus did the water, caught right in the middle of a half-speed breaststroke, as if I’d been nailed to the Cross with my arms extended. But what held me back, not this Cross, became palpably weaker with every second.
Countless lower leg bones are thrown down, on the skeleton feet there are sneakers of all sizes and makes. The feet fall down and are then used as footballs.
ANOTHER PERPETRATOR:
I’m trying to present several examples of how to annihilate human beings, in order to do that it’s important that, how should I put it, it’s important that I take place somewhere else, essentially. Let me briefly describe my almost uncanny series of victories: it’s as if I’m sitting in the control centre of a substation. One handle, one kick, and I can take entire parts of the city out. Suddenly they’ve no juice! Just because I wanted to take advantage of an opportunity for social acceptance by finally suspending the values of society that really are of no value to anyone at all. What are you doing gesticulating like that, you, woman, you’re out of your invalid authorial constitution, where on earth did they let you out? Where were your valuable values produced? Let’s take a look and see if it’s worth opening your door. No, let’s leave it closed. What you bring to me is anyhow just what the newspapers have been bringing me for years, without really allowing me access. These values don’t belong to me. Nor do I want them. Keep them for yourself! I’ve ordered quite different ones. They don’t have to be durable. You’re not durable either, poetess, wife, you’re almost dead and gone, but not as far as the drag lift. Squeeze your fat arse into it, you’ll soon see what happens. You are a cast-off being on a hanger. Why don’t you phone the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and get the lowdown on competition. And then choose a competition where you at least have some chance, or else you’ll be in the downhill race before you’ve even reached the summit.
Even today, years after my first grievous bodily harm, at the time without lethal consequence, this activity holds a particular allure for me. I’ll never tire of it and would accept punishment and other disadvantages for it. At this point, are you hearing the usual engaged artists whining? Well, I didn’t engage them. I engaged a completely different group. Where does this female fighter’s bawling come from? Did you engage them? If I didn’t know where it was coming from, this bawling could force me to flee. It’s coming from one person alone, namely from you, my lady. You consider yourself a siren, but no one’s listening. To a person like you! Are you expecting perhaps that someone’ll be finally tied to a mast because of you? You also want to be part of the hang-gliding and the music-making afterwards. Does anyone have noises for that?
You signed yourself up. Good, so I’ll take you around, see, the noises are coming from here. From your own dismal dreaming mouth. What do you look like? Please, just take a look at my girlfriend, she looks significantly better. Yes, being thirty years younger does make a difference. I call upon the art of narrative not to leave this poetess, she’s got to be left with something, this public prosecutor who every year is re-elected by at least one person.
Take note, there’s more to come, look at me, and write me onto this executioner’s pad that you’re holding on your knees in the hope that someone will finally put their head on it: I am the letter for this slot into which I slide. I’m the nappy for the weight-lifter, needed in case during his activity something comes loose from his marbled façade. Perhaps the pressure exerted on me is making me somewhat sentimental, it almost seems like it. My war will go in my favour; should war be favourable at all, then it is in favour of my comrades who’ll be eaten up by wheels like unredeemed kilometres, like dispossessed benches with a plaque that certain people are not allowed to sit on. It was only then by chance that no one actually sat on it.
Crime is also work, most people apart from the dedicated forget that. That’s why we acquired them, to appreciate our work and sing our praises. They turn us into something. We’d not have half our value without them. They’ve founded a new international organisation of the delicate. Once again they prove to be excellent at complaining, and have done several interviews today. The crime takes place, everyone is filled with war-like sentiments that are expressed sometimes this way, and sometimes that, and this time I will most certainly be there at the forefront. It just won’t work that there’ll be others I’ll have to get upset about. Finally I’m taking part so that I can advance. I’m not leaving. One just falls in love with a sportsman when he’s winning. And what arse has taken away our will again? That was the will to power, it’s what we could have done with. Instead what he’s left us here is the will to confess and regret, and to be looked at askance. It was all only left unsupervised for one moment, but you should have seen how our madam author pounced on it. The only thing missing was a diving platform so she could’ve fallen flat on her face. She’d like to open up all the car cemeteries just to see if she could find a couple of wrecks, hair pieces, dirty cushions with burn marks on, all just lying around so she could complain about them. The will for victory was free for the taking. If you’d seen it, well, you’d have snapped it up like some mustard-gas viper. This woman with her noisy goitre. She’s forgetting one thing though, it’s our energy that disappears as fast as time does. Equally we have little power to persuade our idols to answer our prayers. Even if we stick a knife into a tennis player, it is not us who’ll bleed.
I mean, we all read about this woman who slipped out of the yarn that the newspapers spun about her in order to offer her up a
s a victim. What? You were the victim of rape, and your daughter is the victim of child abuse?
Right, women such as her would be vacuous if we couldn’t read about them – that someone has drilled a hole in her in order to hang up his own picture or any other one. We condemn that. We condemn it heatedly, as we like looking at hot pictures. We also condemn ourselves and are laughed at for it. And in turn we can use that to turn down the judgement that went against us, and in any case we will pre-empt madam author. The opponent is our enemy-deflector. What was that? The enemy is the death-deflector? Not bad either. It’s not important to have been there – apart from at one’s own death – but to win.
VICTIM: (Whilst being hurled around and kicked, is still doing banal everyday tasks, like dusting and putting away, tidying up etc.)
Is it not the case, my Lord, through whose handiwork I’m dying here, that the comradeship within your team exerts the strongest attraction? Although you might have become a policeman on your own, your pregnant wife would never have come up with the idea of watching how my face was cut up, how I was stamped on, and ripped to shreds. Your pregnant wife would never accompany you in normal clothes and with a riding crop. Your wife would never offend common decency. But stop, she’s doing precisely that, I see. But surely that’s purely a man’s competition, is it not? And yet she dares to compete, even though she should be going over to the women’s competition, one battlefield over. Perhaps it was just too far for her. The result is actually not too bad for such a little battle, ten percent of our population eradicated. Madam Everything’s-Fine would be better off using her fiery breath for lighting the gas for us, although one can also, without lighting it, breathe it in directly down a tube. In this fire, fuel becomes heated against me. Us victims are not spared and soon we have to strew ourselves across the earth. Still we’re overlooked because we’re happy to be victims, but soon we won’t be able to be overlooked because this woman will write about us, without ever having known our poor throng. Yes, you’re much better off being perpetrators. Perpetrators don’t have to speak, they don’t need to. I never had the opportunity to be a perpetrator, but there’s no doubt you feel like a million dollars!