Why are the flags so red? Why are the circles so white? Why are the
sun wheels so black in the white circles? Why are the people so
quiet? Why do they sit so stiffly almost at attention?
The flowers look so innocent. The flowers say: We are what we are and
just as the sun shines over the river and the town without
discrimination, so do we decorate and beautify and ask not what. The
flowers make an almost perfect circle around His picture which comes
up to the very edge of the rostrum.
And the rostrum stands at the very centre of the stage. The stage is
draped in flags….horizontally and up and down. What is the name for
‘up and down’? …Oh yes: vertically.
Horizontally and vertically
Horizontally dead, vertically alive….
The stage is draped in flags, horizontally and vertically. In the
four corners of the stage are flags in bushels.
Children in white shirts and black kerchiefs ‘round their necks
stand at ridiculous attention…their fingers pressed against the
seams of their dark trousers,
Vertically they stand.
And in the centre is the rostrum and against the rostrum leans His
picture, huge, surrounded by an almost perfect circle of
non-discriminating flowers..
There were voices before the curtain had gone up.
Now the voices are dead and the people seem dead in their seats.
Underneath the stage it is dark and dusty. Through cracks and
knotholes in the boards beams of light rush in and dance exuberantly
and in triumph.
The footsteps are amplified and reverberate and even the light beams
shake a little. The foot steps come from behind the stage and cross
it surely and come to rest at the rostrum..
The lights are bright on the stage and they dim now where the silent
people sit and when it is all dark, except for the flag-draped square
of the stage, where the light seems even brighter now, and when all
is dark except for the stage, everybody slumps forward a little and slides down in his chair and
thinks that she will be able to relax.
Where only yesterday, or was it months ago – at any rate, it seems
it was only yesterday, - where only yesterday they were down in the
Salzach, swimming in the ice-clear rushing river, swimming, bobbing,
sinking, rising, swimming; running along the foot path on the river’s
edge, upstream through the bush land, running upstream for miles and
their naked bodies sweating deliciously in the beaming sun, where
only yesterday the ice clear water of the Salzach cleaned them,
bathed them, caressed them, whispered to them, carried them lazily
down to where they had left their clothes, where only yesterday that
clean water which comes from the mountain springs, cleaned their
clean, exuberant bodies and cuddled their free and soaring souls,
today they stand under the Klieg lights and their bodies sweat again
and they stand stiffly at a stance completely foreign to their
bodies, and they absorb with rapt attention and gleaming gleaming
eyes and innocent souls and unprepared brains, they absorb the
message which is the spoiler, the corrupter, the insidious and secret
poisoner.
How many sun-drenched days, how many miles of ice-clear Salzach to
clean them? The river will flow eternally and it will be there and it
will cleanse and the path will again be opened and the debris will
be removed, slowly, partially, slowly, never totally. Never?
And sweating they stand and their attention is so total that the
words sink into their souls without ever having touched their minds.
They stand sweating and they sit and listen and they melt into one
great body which sways and rocks and silently moans in an ecstasy of
non-comprehension.
The word was in the beginning and the word will be in the end. And it
is Sunday and the 10 o’clock ‘Sunday Morning Festival’ has
begun.
another part of "The Deserters"
presented by
Bertstravels
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