Sports Play (17 page)

SPORTSMAN:

You're tormenting and torturing someone who's already on the floor. For that reason you can't have become a nurse, doctor, lawyer or writer! If you'd just hang on a moment and observe your victim, you'd realise that your actions have long since been inscribed on his body in the most natural and direct way there is. Now, on top of that, you can step up to the carve-up, I mean, to the conviction. That means that your group should immediately disperse to the four winds as soon as possible, so that later on it would not even have been there.

He pushes the WOMAN to one side and starts kicking himself
.

Mostly, for once not here, you're massively exaggerating the situation with regards the masses. Please keep going! Please keep advancing! Who really understands anything about contagion and suggestion?

Who really knows why he follows someone? Why are so many life situations quite so unprepossessing? Regressive effects, destructive tendencies, many of those that fear us view all that as a tidal wave heading straight for them. But we're much more harmless than that. We simply want to join in! Anything but remain alone. Besides it's not correct that killing could be stopped if only we knew our victims beforehand. I'm always surprised about that myself: a spontaneous criminal act from our little group can leap out at any time on impulse. A spark, the ringing of a bell, a sideways look at hair that's turning to straw, a posture that seems somewhat indecisive, the cumbersome counting of change at the delicatessen counter, at a bar, at the petrol station. Oh well, one always knows something about someone that can be disclosed and then suddenly that other person comes over unexpectedly. What to do with him now, we hadn't reckoned on him at all? And he just doesn't halt before our high ground. He sits there for a good hour, just there, a smile, a sign of life, tea is made, slices of bread are spread, wine glugs into a glass and the next moment it's said about this man, this homeless man, known as ‘the professor', well why don't we kill him? And no sooner said than done, then there's nothing more to do. That's already the absolute high point. In this way we can spare young people television. By activating them to look into the distance themselves. To become the television themselves, that'd be a thing! Nothing hinders us from anything. Each one of us behaves like a spectator as usual, just more angry, because he or she is a multitude, and each individual alone has more than enough grounds to be angry. Because together we're much stronger than you, the author, has ever disclosed to us, we stumble together into the news in order to be judged, arm in arm. However they don't want to record us there. Okay, let's stumble on, into the thicket of a stranger's body. Finally we are making the headlines. Basically each human as an individual is fairly good-natured. As good-natured as someone who, for example, is just opening a window and throwing out all the garbage in the shape of his representative, the television.
Or like someone who just happens to be passing below at the time. Or someone who is hit by the wind flying across a field. What, you don't believe me? Both those things have happened to me, there's no comparison. I tell you: even a fireman who only wants to help considers a fire that he's meant to extinguish to be his target!

ANOTHER SPORTSMAN:
(Kicking.)

Well I think rather that something in us is switched off when we run out onto the field. A forest of green and white flags rises up in front of us, as if it wanted to advance towards us and our solid body stronghold in which we are bunkered down. Who says that we're as useless as dogs that were squashed by car tyres ten years ago? Once we've started shooting off then our friends are left behind in a cloud of golden smoke. We can only hear their noise from far away, there is not one who we don't know personally, on a Sunday, on some sodden pitch at the edge of the city. And what's more, via our fans' postcards we'll get to know people that we desperately wanted to get to know. Apparently the famous are just like us. So we have no choice but to become prominent ourselves. In order to be treated as a problem!

Anyone we've not got to know, we'll call him to the edge of this pit and meet him there. And whoever we already know, we'll tell others everything about him. We don't even need to disguise our nature's call once we suburban boys become famous. The tender way we love and defend our families is the same tender way we love and defend our comrades of the spearhead here and now. Yet some day one of us will be quite alone and even receive a contract alone. Our numbers are followed by no other, we'll then be one less than all of us. How is it that we can live without being pictured on the sports pages just like the one who got this contract? Will we one day stand there with our legs apart so that at least our thighs, that today are really exaggerating, will never get to know each other?

ANOTHER:
(Kicking.)

In terms of people there are the pliable and the unpliable. The former immediately join in without looking, the latter shut themselves off against the pressure we place on them completely, and obstinately insist on their own observations. They saw a fireman hurling a flaming torch across blooming cities. He, together with his group, was consciously and deliberately contravening performance-competition-regulations and his group provided a naked provocation. The disqualification was decided by the evaluators and spoken by the referee.

ANOTHER:
(Comes up, kicks too. Something is afoot: more and more quickly join in and hit each other, more off target than on, almost unconsciously, casually, in waves that start abruptly but then quickly calm down again.)

What people within their division or within their team don't know is that they can no longer trust their own observations, should they have made them in the group. Well, it doesn't matter, that's why he's there, the referee. Can you believe it, some just can't bear being different to others, or even appearing inferior compared to them? They're off and running and subjecting someone else to their skill, who is then also treated as a problem by the doctors. That's how they arm themselves against a boring evening in the pub.

WOMAN starts kicking too, masculine voice from a tape, repeats: “The distance to my victim is directly created by the fact that I don't know this person personally.”

SECOND:

What I am saying however, is that basically you don't know us, your group, personally. You only know that we won't turn against you because you, in turn represent an addition to our force, which is essential to our self-stimulation. Simply nothing would work in Nature without cruelty. Even paper-based decisions can hit us on the head like a hammer. Suddenly, right out of nowhere, a fire leaps at us, clumsily, awkwardly, embracing us on our balcony like a
carefully-composted plant, a dear animal, a new piece of furniture. Or the unity of rain, which after all also comes along as a multitude, its little hands outstretched just to prove they're not trembling, because it too has entered a competition. The victor is the one who's buried the entire village under him. The loser is the one who slept in this grave once the time had arrived to be woken up and leave the house as quickly as possible.

FIRST:

I'm not satisfied with what you say. You repeatedly forget that we act as a group. I can clearly see a difference between one individual and another individual if he comes as several, as many, as countless. Just open yourself up and fall into my adversity, which I've not finished tidying because out of habit my wife usually does it, and consider what you might find, if anyone did what we might do with this man to your son, with whom you spend every Saturday morning at the track or on the pitch in order to get him to qualify by means of individual training, whilst in the afternoons you join our group, until you yourself begin to twitch like some dreaming dog on the pitch boundary of consciousness, and begin to run along ouch ouch! I shouldn't have said that just now, I've said that far too often!

So what will you do when the ambulance brings home your blood-soaked son and no one opens the door?

Yet again I've not been able to repress this reproach for peace, yes, that one, the new one with the impenetrable plastic core! I just can't keep quiet. This realisation is similar to the one where a peaceable person suddenly becomes a brutal one. Which of the two kinds of appearance of one and the same thing bears more weight? To be peaceful is simply ludicrous. Who wants that? How did it all begin? Why is it that I developed a conscience after reading about a terrible event in the newspaper, but with the next event it no longer seemed to function? I pour it into myself, twice, no, nothing is stirring. Does anyone else have my
conscience maybe? Who broke it for me? He should let me know straightaway. Perhaps I'd be better off putting my foot on the gas. I simply can't find any other way to get myself mentioned.

Where have I put my value spanners, no, my valuable spanners? How little can affect us! By the way, today, more than ever, a thrashing is what it was in the old days, namely a sport of the ruling classes. The time seems to be over when the finer kinds of sport didn't require anyone to get their hands dirty, nor to touch the opponent. When even treason was its own discipline. Just look at my new golden Rolex! I really don't mind what happens to it. It launches itself into my flesh and I hold onto it, tauten my straps and work real wonders in transforming the flesh. This man from just before would never have looked as he does now. In fact, I didn't recognise him at all. How he's changed. First he ate his Sunday roast, and now we're uttering not a word about this man from Lower Austria, from Krefeld, from Gelsenkirchen, who we've done up so much that his own mother wouldn't recognise him. I mean, how should we know him if his mother doesn't even know him? He backed away from us. He shouldn't have done that. In his place, not even we would have pushed forward at any price.

We show him our latest expression of brutality. We ourselves come from the provinces and so know how we need to speak to people, when the television is the only thing that has anything to say to them. We have the power to be silent, the box does not. We have the right to speak, like this box. Just now, when that man said – please don't, as we smashed the beer can out of his hand and instead planted our broken bottle neck into him: we interpreted this request, in silent agreement, as accidental, it thereby assuming a certain evil intent.

If we'd let him go, he would've fetched his cronies. And then two packs would have stood opposite each other, drawing in more and more people, and soon it would've been bellicose, if not belligerent. Our energy would be
freed easily, heating up the politically-engaged people associated with it to a boiling point, and thereby turning it into a real problem. We have to take care that the women don't suddenly swoop down on it again. So, an event of war arrives. And it hadn't even rung our doorbell beforehand. Just come on in. Personal reservation, counselling, camaraderie, loyalty, solidarity, understanding of the cares and duties of others – we demand all of these things. But we forget them upon delivery. Fortunately for us, we nabbed this other one before he could nab us. Quick march, out into the open air, my friend. They've been clapping and yelling for more than ten minutes already! They're about to go mad. Energy. Chocolate bars. A mars a day. I love parties.

OTHER:

All I'm going to say is – Yugoslavia, and then look as embarrassed as everyone else. If its rulers were nearby, then I'd say nothing at all. But I can now confide in you, ladies and gentlemen: that none of the tribes considered themselves to be criminals, I'm absolutely clear about that. Although each of their crimes made a mockery of their own rights as well as the rights of the nations and every kind of non-righteous valuation. And why? Because everyone believed they were right, and so therefore it just couldn't be that they'd done something wrong. And so it happens that the naked affect covers itself with the oilskin of righteousness and then the rain stops as abruptly as it started. And now what do we do with our stupid good skin? If it got burnt, then it can happen that we have to drag it after us like some flabby parachute. Pardon. Oh, if only bad weather had started promptly! Then the umpire, in collaboration with the UN observers, could have called for a break.

Accordingly, if there'd been particularly bad weather about, which might've negatively influenced the result of the war, then the competition could have been delayed to another day. The world's bad conscience goes along, it doesn't matter where to, into mountainous or marshy terrain, and carefully writes up the interim results that
never have an effect on the final result however. Women of the world have already written out their own invoice and are blaming themselves and others willy nilly instead of publishing a volume of new stories, a pack of lies from A to Z. So why create all that work? Someone'll soon tell us what to do.

What, you are stupidly marching around, dedicated women, strengthened by a scouting party of female artists to bring up the rear, from out of the internal forests of your bodies, only sadly, and as ever, in the wrong direction. Coming over to us, instead of going away? We can stomach you better at a distance, when your whining wouldn't be heard so loudly. Your newspapers, printed by hand and hectically choreographed, flutter daily into our houses in their dozens, almost like real flying ducks that have to be prepared in the same way so they can be enjoyed at all. Of course we'll not have read these greyish pages – again. From what would they and their recycled paper have held us back? Why do you believe that you have to subjugate our streets with your banners, with your little household events? Politics is not a kitchen diner. Politics is bigger than your entire flat! The whole house!

Oh, you didn't march at all! The banners were from someone else? Made up of thousands of window panes that got broken with a clinking sound? Not down to you but down to a storm? What, you yourself can't quite see clearly through it all? Well then, let's call the household insurers, who won't give us much. And let's read your book, that won't give us much. What on earth happened? I didn't see precisely because my television is always set to fast forward. After all, it wants to ensure that together with its friend, the video recorder, it can take part in aerobics training daily at 7.30 p.m.