Sports Play Read online

  I presently enter the house and prepare it for the photo. Now I take the pot with deep sympathy off the stove, no, the deep pot with sympathy, and stir them in, the new heroes, against whom I have lots of objections, of course. It might be better if others than I reported about the next lot already pushing for war. After all, my own volumes have been reduced due to illness, loss, humiliation and depression – I could offer a good explanation by pointing to the example of my papa, and may still do so. Despondency. Constantly feeling insulted. Lack of responsibility. I don’t oppose anyone anymore, least of all my neighbours in Austria, who don’t wish to increase their numbers. I deduce that from the fact that they’ve closed their borders, and will only reopen them tomorrow to their own personal car consumption, yum, long live freedom from lead.

  Tell me, is everything being guarded properly? Out with the dead, in with the living! Oh, they’re already in? All the better, now we can close the doors with our life-bestowing spirit again. Nothing but sport and sport and sport on our minds! Our numbers are declining as the majority sit in front of the television, and those who are late are not let in. In the face of this mass of people, the conductor might feel disturbed because they didn’t come to him, and equally we, the audience, we are an overcritical mass, too, standing opposite another mass that is equally critical but is not in the right. But we don’t need to criticise anyone anymore, because these sportsmen and women coming on stage, heavens, are a triumph of will and beauty. I had no idea that bodies could be built. A pity then they lost any sense of depth – apart from the divers. Oh God, my jokes are shallow today! They don’t even dampen my fingers as I turn over my terrible pages for you. Doesn’t matter. Read me anyway! But don’t get too close, because I’m always so angry I’d like to kick someone myself.

  You can no longer say that our masses are growing, and that’s the reason our neighbours on the other side of the border want to fight us. They’re quite quiet now, after all that life was played out underground in extreme conditions, and over the next few years the earth’s surface will have to be re-done so that people can enjoy it again. Tons of rubbish. What sort of a people is that! Layer by layer is being carried away until there’s nothing left of it. Even disappearing is a high-performance sport, perhaps the highest of them all, because performance in this discipline cannot be measured. My papa is no longer leaving an echo, even though he tapped his best side out on my blackboard yesterday, the side he always spoke with. Oh well, he was usually quite quiet. As for mama and myself, we’re at peace now. There’s the offer of some movement. Let’s see. I look questioningly at my mother, because despite the rage in my work I’m not being heard, why not? Now we’ve kept quiet for so long we’ve finally deserved some movement, she says. Why are you such a demanding girlie? Why are you looking into life with such expectant eyes? You’re forgetting the most important thing: giving people pleasure!

  From this moment on, that pile of enemy dead lying around out there somewhere no longer bothers me. No, on the whole I’m not waging war against anyone anymore, apart from mama of course. I’ve finally decided to do it. She’s the red rag in my hand. That Viennese river over there, no, sadly you can’t see it from here, will snuggle into its soft new bed, I guarantee that personally. Now I finally have time to look at it properly, after I’ll have walked for half a kilometre. But if anyone were to steal my elegant clothes, I wouldn’t find that funny! As far as I’m concerned the river, hands on hips, will be weighed in at a steady tempo on scales that on my side have already reached the floor – it really doesn’t go any lower. All others have ultimately been considered too light. Virtually extinct riverside plants are being reactivated from nature’s reserves and marvellously styled, they’ll populate its sleeping quarters, I’ll go and take a look at it all on Sunday. Oh dear, they haven’t even started making a sickbed for the river. The apartment for the fallen fighters however is already ready, the magazine “More Beautiful the Natural Way”, oh, no, I mean of course “More Natural the Beautiful Way” is reporting on it, but only very few people will have actually read it. Of course I’ll read it, I have taste and I hate any rival who also possesses it. Sadly there are women everywhere. It’s appalling that I’m not the only one.

  God’s slain will lie all in a row from one end of the earth to the other. For once I’ve nothing against it. How unbelievably courageously my cheeks glow as I write, how furiously, I could kill you all – once I’ve finished writing and have nothing left to do. Yet if I experienced death myself, I’d see everything a little differently. They’ll be neither lamented nor raised nor buried, the dead. Those who, when alive cowered in a corner of the room shivering, pulling out their hair for fear of going out – well, that’s something those of us in our leather jackets needn’t fear! – they have to lie in the fields and turn to muck. Excuse me please, hopefully that was my final gaffe, and not even my own. It was someone else’s. I’ve only brought this derailment into the game because just here the gravel track has been somewhat eaten away by storms, and my rails got a little eroded without me really noticing. Without these rails I cannot press forward, my knees and my shinbones are too soft. Until something happens I’ll just repeat everything over and over again to make sure. I’m not some far off riverbank, I’m not quite leak-proof! There’s no one left, and so we’ll just leave him lying there until the doctor comes. Too late for Papa, but quite in time for me.

  A WOMAN in her mid forties and a YOUNG SPORTSMAN enter and kick around a bundle lying on the floor, they throw it to each other and hit it with bats.

  The bundle becomes bloody. During the following as it is being hurled around, it continues to do everyday tasks, as long as it is allowed to: it clears up, adjusts something, reads, just everyday things, even tries to watch television. It ought to let itself be annoyed only temporarily, the person-bundle, in between times it should act perfectly normally.

  The WOMAN (the only exception in the play alongside the ‘old woman’ who in terms of clothes is wearing a bourgeois elegant outfit, still trying to look fetching. Just normal). She switches on a silent television set on which we can see masses of people going wild at a sports event. The texts that follow are spoken in whatever manner by male voices, it doesn’t matter, while the people on stage at first only lip-synch with it, or not. It can also be done quite differently. This is just one possibility amongst many, any of them is fine by me.

  WOMAN: (While kicking the bundle.)

  Son, please, son, just this once don’t go to the sports field! I get all worried inside that I won’t see you again. Early this morning – reluctantly as usual – you kissed me, but you felt superior to me while doing so. No matter how sweet you were being I feel you’re eluding me, you’re being snatched away. Yet for ages now I have found ways and means to imprint myself on you, like a piece of paper full of triumphant youth protection measures, even though you grew up a long time ago and tower above me like a wall with signs stuck on it. I squat in front of it now in the hope of being let in, and your skis threaten to fall on top of me from the cupboard. When did we last go skiing together and you injured me with your point of view! You still undertake exciting activities, yet they never refer to me. Your T-shirts portray you as a day-walker, guarded every second by a watch that’s been calibrated to do just that. Soon a handshake will suffice when we meet. One day I won’t hear from you any more because you’ll have had a terrible accident. Dynamic young people are just not the slowest! After your accident I’ll be under the impression of a tragedy. A couple of days previously you’ll have said to your companions, before going up in the ski lift, that you’ve got everything you need for the season, skis, shoes, bindings. Everything will happen so quickly that it’ll be difficult to grasp. On the fast lane to death. You’ll have raced to death on the way home from go-karting. An overtaking manoeuvre will be your doom. Your car will smash against an oncoming bus. Ten bus passengers will be injured, but what’s that in comparison to your death! This victory over your body will not be a one-da
y wonder, but a comeback on a detour via death. You can finally establish yourself at the top and stay there. You lie there whilst the country flies by. Yes. You and your friends. One day you’ll have run round the world and then where do you go? That’s why you work in your ski teams, so that you don’t remain undiscovered.

  Your friends, they’re playing fast and loose with themselves, without the necessary forethought. Now you’re silent, repay maturity with immaturity, as nations were wont to do before they united, just so they could go for each other with greater zest. All of that merges seamlessly with my gentle suffering. Fortunately I’m not aggressive, nor are my girlfriends. We talk about themes and ask for respect, the name of the discount that we apply to the themes after we’ve chosen them. Supra-successful female poets give us lectures. They splash around in themselves because it seems so warm there, and a little lightly-scented foam sprays from around the mouth. They wipe it away. Then they say what they have to say: courage, sorrow, dismay, multiculturalism. Always the same thing. This woman runs her wet index finger along her reading circle and believes that is sufficient sport. Boredom already begins to pull at your cradle, son, and you’re certainly no slacker. You want to get out, if necessary with the dog. Look at this other dedicated woman! She is touching the edges of the mixing bowl that surrounds her. Moreover she’s surrounded by friends, which improves the feedback. A chirpy hearth and housewifely sounds. We women are mainly amateurs, yet we diligently help all to pass on what one of us is saying, we just don’t know who.

  Yes, even amateurs can feel satisfaction if they’re right. Your friends mock my fear of losing you. And you mock with them. At first a reasonable debate amongst yourselves, it often leads to bloody confrontation. I know that. Yet still I drill holes in your defences. As a result I don’t sleep for nights at a time. Although I’m an expert in arguments, I write them up in my notebook and then wipe them away, first with wet tears, then with dry. Why have I suddenly become the enemy in your eyes, how did this come about?

  Where does it come from, your permanent citrus freshness that you use to take my breath away? What, from me, from my own cupboard? I just want to know where you are at this moment. Your sports friends find this ridiculous. You harvest applause from your friends when you mock me. Soon I won’t be allowed to look at you in public. No one looks at where the mother is standing anyway. A mother determines the appropriateness of her children, only then to be disappropriated herself. Sport is at its most effective when it takes place in public – when photos of the stars are emblazoned on the front pages and peep out of the back pages that hide them, only to reveal them all the better. Soon I’ll just catch sight of your heels from behind when you turn up to kick a poor maltreated ball. And the ball came round specifically to visit you. But it wants to head off straightaway, to the midfielder, who is free, unlike you – unlucky. Where you are not, that is where your happiness is. So you think!

  Your early years were better for me. I so want to get to know your friends, but you don’t let me. In my own way I’m also a heroine, you just don’t see it, although I take great care with my clothes, as always. We mothers are either silent heroines or louder heroines. You have blocked the understanding between us like the plughole in a basin, all from a sense of injured love for yourself. You want to keep them to yourself, your companions. It’s as if you’re going to war. I call out frantically – don’t torment me! I don’t doubt your talent to move quickly or to stand still or to equip equipment with yourself, whatever you fancy. Nevertheless you jump around in front of my eyes, a courier with a courier’s bag around his neck.

  And yet we could walk along this lovely stretch easily. You still boss me around at home if you want something. And even that is happening less and less. I feel as if something has been snatched away and yet I would do anything to make you happy. Please carry on living with me and eating my food. Go to bed in your childhood room and sleep close to the wall, so that I can count your breaths and use them to keep time, measuring warring conflicts elsewhere in the world, or rejecting them without knowing their measure beforehand. Why all this trouble with a tape measure if I’m against them anyway? Just because they seem to be too numerous? No thank you, they’ve been rejected lock stock and barrel as they come along, the wars. I wrote you alone as a reckoning into my book, my child, before another could count on you. And I want it to pay off. It can’t possibly be such an effort to be good to me, you’re already good to your sports chums. I pretend to be indulgent, it fills me up from the inside. As long as you, my son, are still there, I feel exalted, shining, worthy of love, but as soon as you slam the door behind you, a feeling of disappropriation comes over me, I have been bereft of you. A carpet, which someone has trampled on and that now lies empty like a calm but permanently resentful sea. Before this stretch, which can cause us harm at any time, not through fire but through water, you stand, saluting and announcing: courier present and correct! The sun comes out, it only shines because of you. You are not at home, so it can go away again.

  THE CHORUS:

  Why did you send your son away to the sports war if you wanted him straight back again? Because of the damage to his posture? Don’t deceive yourself, just look at the posture he gained through his sport! Is it any better? No doubt you thought that this way he’d stay your son much longer, if he had an aim that wasn’t aimed at a person. What? The mother should be exempt from all this? That he trains his strange urges into a void? You were the one who first urged him on, woman! You must have noticed that one, once they’ve entrusted themselves to sports shoes – always one size up from one’s own – for example the American basketball player on the photo there, is that your son? No? There you go. Or that one there with a pole on his shoulder, he’s not your son either, is he? There you go. You can’t just get out of a contract signed in blood and sweat and pain. The one lot cash in on the contract, and sooner or later the other lot hand out their cash to doctors, so that those left standing who stagger into goal, are punished by having a little bit of cartilage cut out of their knees after the timekeepers have packed away their stopwatches. Then they feel much better.

  Here you can see two completely altruistic teams who are serving a higher purpose: television team ORF is playing magazine team Falter. Falter wins hands down. The average age is much younger and the team takes pleasure in a youthfulness it wants to see immortalised. You, woman, you will always be a mother, no matter what. Why don’t you let the young people have their fun? If you’d wanted to create a happy smiling couple with your son, then you should have bought him as a cuddly toy. You’ve no idea what it means when awkwardness suddenly becomes a love affair with oneself, one that excludes everyone else, I mean a physical affair, which always leads straight to the state and its glory. Unless you take the shortcut to war, and by the end you’re in a completely different state to the one that you and your field pack upped and left. Well done for fighting against all this! It must hurt you if it’s to do any good! Why not just let go of the placenta, so that we can cut the cord! Let’s see if he’s any good. Throw the velvet train over your shoulder, your new outfit from Rue Morgue. Changing to this label has not paid off. And it has not paid off for your son to be born. So there!

  He needn’t have bothered coming at all for such a short period, this skipjack from Ginzling, wherever that might be – although you probably know, mama. Always accompanied by a vociferous group of fans, the boy swore: I’ll be back. Up ’til now he’s not kept his word there, in his grave. All the best things take time. We’re still waiting. The mother, I tell you, did not create what was procreated. Within her body the mother provides accommodation for the father’s guest, and in this way protects the entrusted deposit. She can profit from this deposit: the father’s child for God, who will look after it? What, you think that no one can be a father without a mother, better still – be a mother alone? Get rid of papa? Just look here, I can show you someone who wasn’t nourished by a dark womb or motherly night: magnificent, a bright blonde child
, a goddess could not have given birth to better: Franz Linser, the counterpoint to the EU-Commissar Franz Fischler. What do people say about him? He is slim and well-toned and what’s more, an idealist, whereas Fischler could be thought of as a bureaucratic prototype. Or here, further on: Gail Pallas Athena Devers. If you calmly counted her hormones, she might not even count as a woman. Every city she has lived in can consider itself lucky to have been able to host virtually the first modern Olympic Games, so that Gail Devers can host us through it all. So, this body has been formed, now it only has to submit to the sauna and be skinned. How do you make it clear to a young man that he has to go to war if he’s not done any sport before? Your son is vital! We need people who are concerned about their bodies and yet unconcernedly throw away their souls, as Plato said that one single time he worked up a sweat. He couldn’t compose himself for years afterwards.