Sports Play (9 page)

Now I'm lying on the floor, as you can see, sadly outside your television set, sorry. I know you'd have liked to have written about it and then closed the book over me. Why won't the camera focus on it? Now that things are interesting. Tomorrow when I myself will appear on this box, well at least my portrait will – sadly not a good photo but an old one from my passport – then I won't exist anymore. So I much prefer this newspaper photo, although the only thing visible is my chalk outline. I'm taking myself on a journey so that I can still get in the picture. There: together with my car I'm glued in an impossible position to the wall of a house. So – it's now or never! That's your call! Your kick! Or should I choose another more spectacular way of dying? I'm still thinking about it. Lights blind me, who will be a hero tomorrow but not gain anything from it now. The heroes believe that they're alone in the world. Yet they're watched by millions of eyes, by those of us growing up, but with very little self-esteem. But that does grow, too, with every passing minute, until we cover a piece of bloody metal with ourselves, in order to be baked like jacket potatoes in our freshly-sprayed cars with their new rally stripes. Yet for now our heroes shall carry out all those deeds in our place. We've got to learn how one day. On the other hand, for as long as I don't belong to them, I'm an embittered enemy of heroes. I hover over
them like an eagle across the morning paper that's quite black from flies. So many dead today again. Terrible!

WOMAN:

One moment! Quiet please! Today it's my turn to totally condemn the killers. I'm ready at any time to ban them and boo them. I always turn my light towards them because I'm a lighthouse and pleasantly pass on each beam of light, but of course I'm the one who actually sees the most. I suffer most terribly under that which is happening all the time! I gather the deepest sympathisers around me so that for once, I will become several. I'd like to belong to the good, that's one of the most basic human needs. I'd like to judge and to report. I don't want to make myself late, I'd prefer to talk beforehand about the grey twilight economy of horror, and count the dead. I unload them in groups of one hundred. I've been appointed and am here professionally as an author. The most obvious feature of the faceless masses is suggestibility – only I don't make suggestions to them – gullibility – they just don't believe me – abundance of good and bad feelings – they just don't like me – I'm copying this down as someone has said it already. For sure, I definitely don't belong to this mass of people but perhaps to another that is also constantly moved, although by something completely different. Thousands waited for me to be really aggrieved again, unfortunately they're not looking my way at present. The shorts suit uniform of the undecided that you're wearing here is always good and practical in principle; your jacket still hangs over your arm, you should've thrown it away in plenty of time in order to keep your hands free. Now I can mock your unsuitable clothing interminably because that's something I understand. But I'm much more interested in your suffering. Excuse me, which is your better side that lends itself so well to description, were you to be of interest to me? Perhaps by tomorrow I'll no longer be able to describe you properly, because I'll have to give in to the great challenge of writing something about myself. I don't
know anything about myself yet, I have to wait until my role model appears on screen.

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 happens 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?