A stage play, produced as an audio play
ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Company) 2012

The disaster of love. A play about love. In devotion to it, one inevitably discovers how of one human existence cannot comprehend the next one, even the nearest one of all.

How to live with this awareness?

ALINE — waiting for the call from her lover KANT, the man she has loved since her childhhood, whom she seduces and who has abused her — does not ask this question.

Union with Kant, in death, not in life, is the ideal that Aline strives for, her only goal.

In the second part of the play, Aline has carried out her deed and fallen short of her goal. The love-death did not take place.

Kant, cared for by his wife, the SILENT WOMAN, wrangling with fate, enraged and desperate and ill with desire, lives to get Aline back. Compulsively he repeats what has happened to him, what he has suffered, until the “Silent Woman,” the last of his three suns, leaves him and he ends up alone. Thus, it seems, all he has left is darkness.

SILENT WOMAN

(spelling) H — I — HIT. — GRAM. — Mississippi tributary, second letter H. Four letters. A — O — E — Mississippi …

Union for life: MARRIAGE. Longest river in Albania …

KANT

A once-in-a-lifetime commitment, total self-abandonment. Yet I was never in love with her. Yes, I went to bed with her, if she caught me someplace. Back then she was always standing around somewhere, lying in wait for me, in the morning at the coffeehouse and at night outside my house, in a car, for hours on end, just in case I came home alone. I did not take her seriously. Just an infatuated young female. Then she got hold of me. She forced me to love her. For a lifetime. No matter what I do. I can’t get loose.

SILENT WOMAN

… sick. Oast. Desperate.

KANT

I know, darling, you don’t want to hear this. But I am being totally honest. Aline has such a hold on me that I practically can’t live without her. I don’t even want to. That’s just how it is.

SILENT WOMAN

Have you taken your pills yet? I’ll be right there, my little bear.

KANT

It has nothing to do with my love for you.

ALINE

I have done nothing of significance. Except that I made him love me. Yes, there’s that. That I did do. Yes, that was my great deed. My life’s work!

Kant takes out a framed photo of Aline and sets it up.

KANT

All the things have you already engaged in, she said to me, and I have a marble-white body. But when I think back on it, she is the really perverse one.

I will never understand it. I can only keep saying that I didn’t understand it, I didn’t get it. I saw her, but I didn’t see through her. I was an idiot. A fool. If you look at her —

ALINE

By the way, is it true that only deeds count? What about thoughts? Words? Poetry? Can someone who makes art, which is the most superfluous thing of all, the thing that humanity can most easily do without to survive, can someone like that believe exclusively in deeds? The artist, after all, is the exact opposite of a doer.

Translation Geoffrey C. Howes

Ö1 WEBSITE

http://oe1.orf.at/programm/382260