Love and Hydrogen (8 page)

The turbines went into their high metallic rush and the blades of the big ship pitched and he counted one, two, three, and broke for the copter, spattering across the gleaming blacktop and into the rotor wash, approaching from the rear diagonally to avoid pilot detection and the tail rotor, and he jumped as the landing gear was lifting up and swaying away from him. He caught one arm around the inside strut and pulled himself up and around, banging his head on the undercarriage. There was no hesitation in the climb so he knew he was okay, and the copter immediately banked out over the Housatonic, and with his head throbbing he swung his legs down, looking past them to the water spinning away below, and then let go, the noise of the rotors filling his ears all the way down.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE he decided to go back to the runway Sunday night. He asked Anne if she wanted to go out to dinner Saturday. Get a sitter for Billy. She loved the idea. When she left the bathroom Saturday night, ready to go, he thought her beauty must increase in some way proportionate to her happiness.

HE'D FIRST THOUGHT of the runway on a Christmas Day. It came to him as a visual image while he was stuffing scattered wrapping paper into a brown grocery bag. Billy was confusing Theo with an orange Nerf basketball by compressing it and hiding it in his fist. Anne was on the phone, in her blue nightgown with the tiny embroidery on the shoulders. He got up, got dressed, kissed her on the cheek, and headed out into the snow. It was very cold. It occurred to him before he reached the airport that they wouldn't have had time to plow yet, but he kept going. Out over the runway the snow had drifted into little ridges that reminded him of the roof of a dog's mouth. There was a bright glare over everything from the morning light. He crossed to where he judged the center of the runway must be, and lay down, sinking and looking up at the sky.

SUNDAY MORNING he bought the papers. He played catch with Billy down the length of the driveway, enjoying the feel of the old Rawlings. He threw Billy grounders, soft line drives, pop-ups.

He had drinks in the backyard with Anne. He helped her with the pork chops for supper. He helped Billy with his homework.

When that was over they joined Anne in the den. She was catching the end of
Moby Dick.
Gregory Peck was nailing a gold coin to the masthead and making speeches.

Anne looked over at him and gave him a smile. He was starting to get fidgety. He said he was going to take a look around. He poured some cranberry juice from the refrigerator and drank it. He washed out the glass in the sink. He took Theo out to let him take a leak, jingling change in his pockets while the dog decided on a bush. Then he let it back in, closed the door behind it, and went down the driveway, enjoying the summer smells and heading down the street at a jog.

ANNE NEVER FOUND OUT about the copter ride, though it had been in the papers (a UPI photographer there to cover another test flight had happened to get a shot of him on the way down, a tiny figure, grainy and blurred; it had caused a minor sensation at Sikorsky security). She knew about other things, including the hangar roof, and when he did things like that she told him she wanted to understand. She also asked if he ever thought about her and Billy. Things like that she expected more from the kind of kids she hoped to keep Billy away from.

He didn't answer because he loved her and wanted to protect her, and also because he didn't know how to explain it without sounding as if he were refusing to explain it.

HE TOOK HIS TIME on the bluffs. The Sieberts' dog kicked up a racket. He imagined he heard another dog answering. He ran his fingers over the chain link of the fence before slipping under it, sliding through the damp smooth hole scuffed in the dirt. Halfway down he stopped and surveyed the runway. Then he leaned out over the slope and cantered down, every step sure, digging his heels in the gravel and slaloming around the bushes and larger stones.

At the bottom he heard the rumble of something big, and a four-engine Allegheny came thundering over the bluffs to his right, close enough that he could see heads in the windows. It swept over the runway, its rear wheels slamming down with a tremendous, murderous screech, right, he estimated as he hurried toward the overrun area in its wake, where he would momentarily be lying.

He stopped at the markings and crouched, looking for security activity, and then crossed to the middle. He found his old mark, measured out from it, and set his new one. He lay back on his elbows, made one last check of the runway around him, and settled in, looking up at the stars. Something rustled in the high grass. He waited.

Far off he could hear cars moving, beyond the tower on the other side of the airport. From that grew another sound.

He looked back for the tower and caught in the gleam of one of its circling beams a Pilgrim Airlines twin-engine banking slowly around toward his strip.

He lay back, trying to keep still, the plane circling gradually in the darkness off to the left, disappearing beyond the bluff as it made its final gliding bank into its approach, its engines still audible. He could feel them getting higher in pitch. He watched the section of bluff visible over his feet, waiting for the red and white lights to explode over it toward him, but felt vibration coming from the opposite direction as well, and twisted around and there were the headlights of the security jeep down by the tower, bouncing along the shoulder of the runway. He got up in a crouch but then hesitated, and turned to face the bluff, the Pilgrim's engines roaring behind it now, and lay back down.

Then he saw Theo.

He picked up movement in his peripheral vision and turned as the dog reached the runway. He shouted something as Billy piled out of the darkness onto the tarmac, too, slipping to his knees. He shot a look back at the jeep while trying to push the dog away, and Billy was shouting something and running toward them, and then the dog cringed and there was a roar as the Pilgrim twin-engine burst over the bluffs. Billy froze looking up at the huge lighted dark shape swinging down toward him, screaming, maybe; Jay couldn't hear. He grabbed Theo by the skin and hair of his neck and dove at Billy, throwing the dog as far as he could, sending him sprawling and skidding off the runway, and hitting Billy in the midsection and driving him hard onto his back as the twin-engine hit beside them, the wing sweeping over, and was gone.

Billy was crying and twisting around in his arms as the jeep pulled up alongside, becoming audible only as the plane taxied farther down the runway. Men in blue vinyl jackets grabbed them. One was chasing Theo around the scrub nearby. Even then and there they were asking questions, which he waved off, trying to indicate he'd answer everything soon. His voice was coming back to him with his hearing. Someone shook him, and he nodded, yes. He was watching Theo, who was all right. He was concentrating on Anne, and on not letting go of Billy.

AJAX IS ALL ABOUT ATTACK

The acoustics of empty stadiums were very beautiful. When a single bird called out, you heard it from wherever you were. In the early morning, or after matches, when the lights were out and the sky was black, from the bench, you heard the wind in the grass. In the Dutch leagues then, the stadium superstructures were skeletal and intimate. The advertising panels were like old friends and smelled of wet wood. The empty balconies overhung the stands so that stray papers blown from above were snared by seat-backs below.

When you took a ball out to the middle of the pitch and struck it once, the thump filled the entire space. The thump seized something in your chest.

My name is Velibor Vasovic and for eleven years I played football, first for Partizan Belgrade and my national team, and then for Ajax. For eleven years I played for money, I should say; football I played my entire life. My brother played with his friends, and when I was old enough to stand I started joining in. I began in goal but could never stay there, and was always running after the ball and upsetting everyone and ruining the game, and eventually they made someone else goalie. We played every day. This was just after the war. When it rained, we played in the cowshed. The cow stood in the rain and watched. Six or so kids in three square meters: you learned precise passing.

We played with anything that was round. Mostly tennis balls; one boy's family had an old box of tennis balls. You developed great technique trying to dribble tennis balls.

At the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland in the group matches my brother played against the immortal Hungarians with their bright red shirts—Puskas, Kocsis, Hidegkuti—the team that had humiliated England 6–3 and 7–1 just months before.

“What was it like?” we asked upon his return. We had followed the match on the radio but the announcer had been at a loss to describe what he was seeing. Crowded around the countertop of the local bar, we'd been informed that Kocsis had entered the penalty area, and stopped, and turned. Then God had been invoked, at a high volume. Followed by a tinny roar. So when my brother returned, one of the heroes of our 2–8 loss, it was as if we had and hadn't been there; as if we did and didn't know what brilliant football was truly like.

After the game, he'd traded shirts with Puskas. He showed the shirt around the bar. It passed from person to person like Achilles' shield. An old man wiped his hands before taking it.

We had to ask my brother our questions many times. Everyone had their own theories as to the secret of the Hungarians' game. Was it their skills? Their tactics? Their size? Their speed? And what was it like in the West?

I thought about his answers when I first came to Amsterdam and saw Johan Cruyff play a thirty-yard cross on a dead run so that the trajectory bent away from the stunned goalie's attempt at a deflection and dropped the ball lightly in front of the right-winger's boot. The right-winger put it in the back of the net as though he'd just happened by. This was in 1966. Ajax's coach and club president both had seen me score our only goal in Partizan's loss to Real Madrid in that May's European Cup final. I was to be the rock around which Ajax would build its defense.

Understand: it was quite a change from Zagubica to Amsterdam in 1966. What was rebelliousness in Zagubica then? Old farmers fondling their donkeys in public. Civil disobedience was refusing to roll out of the lane once you fell over drunk. I arrived in Amsterdam soon after their Liberation Day and thought on the ride in from the airport that there'd been a coup. A revolution. An invasion from space. Thousands of young people were surging about the center of town, arm in arm, singing and shouting something. My interpreter, the Yugoslav wife of a Dutchman, explained that they were shouting, “We want our Bolletjes!” Bolletjes turned out to be a breakfast snack. It was an advertising slogan. Why were they shouting this? They were bored, she told me. Thousands of young people chanting this absurdity! Groups shouted it back and forth to one another. The police stood by, polite, their hands clasped in front of them.

We were imprisoned by the sheer numbers in a large plaza called the Leidseplein. My interpreter apologized for not having anticipated this, but seemed serene about the delay. The taxi driver rested his forearms on the wheel and every so often shouted something good-naturedly to those who stood on his car's bonnet. When our taxi was stopped, young girls pressed their cheeks to my window glass as if the car were an infant relative. Atop a statue of a civic leader, a man dressed as a shaman performed antismoking rituals—he crushed packs of cigarettes, or put cigarettes in his mouth and then broke them and threw them away with wild gestures— while the crowd chanted, “Bram bram! Ugga ugga! Bram bram!”

What did “Bram bram! Ugga ugga!” mean? I wanted to know.

My interpreter shrugged. “Bram bram. Ugga ugga,” she said.

She identified a small man atop a flagpole as Johnny the Self-kicker, who talked himself into a trance and threw himself from high places. Many of the people in white, she explained, were the Provos, anarchists who looked upon playfulness as the key to a better world.

“Playfulness,” I repeated, and she answered, with some defensiveness, “Well, you needn't say it like
that.
”

Understand: I am not political. Everywhere I've gone, people have nodded when those words have emerged from my mouth, as though they understood. And then they've gone right on with plebiscite this and student movement that. “Vasovic doesn't give a rat's ass about anything,” Michels, Ajax's coach, used to say to the reporters and my teammates. It was his highest praise. He meant other than football.

My interpreter that day had been proud of her adopted country. Her face suggested that I was like a visit from a backward relative. She asked about my hometown: what was life like in those hills? It all seemed so wild and remote.

“That was a quiet shithole,” I told her. “This is a noisy shithole.”

The taxi driver asked her a question and she answered with the word for “Welcome,” in my language. “Welcome,” he said to me.

“He's speaking to you,” my interpreter told me. I lit a cigarette. I don't like being scolded.

“This is a time of great change in Holland,” she told me, as if that should affect my smoking.

“Is the currency stable?” I asked.

After that she gave up on me. After a few minutes of silence, the taxi driver made a remark, and she answered in a way which evidently made him sad.

JOHAN CRUYFF WAS political. The same day I was introduced to Dutch politics, I was introduced to Dutch football. I sat between the club president and my interpreter and watched an Ajax home game against PSV Eindhoven. I drank many beers. I noticed their left-winger, a blank-faced beanpole with endless stamina. He ran for ninety minutes and looked at the end as if he could have run to Maastricht and back. And he ran with
purpose:
he continually set up Ajax's offense, flew down the wing, touched off chaos in PSV's penalty area, created space for himself and his teammates. He was envisioning whole geometries while his opponents scurried about like moles. He was a Pythagoras in shorts. I was told he was nineteen. Then I was told I needn't worry about him, because left wing was the position of the club's best player, who wasn't playing at the moment. I stood and started to leave. I told the interpreter, “Tell the president that if they have anyone better than this guy, they don't need me.” They caught up to me halfway up the aisle and returned me to my seat. I met with Cruyff after the game.

He had the same blank expression while he toweled off. His teammates were showering. His towel was the size of a facecloth. At that point the players still had to wash their own kits and provide their own towels and shampoo.

I heard the interpreter mention Partizan Belgrade. Cruyff nodded. He led me back out to the pitch, intercepted a ball boy heading in with a net full of balls, and lined them up at the eighteen-yard mark from the goal. There were nine of them. The interpreter and club president trailed along behind us, making remarks that he chose not to answer. While I watched, he tucked his hair behind his ears and struck each of the first five balls in line precisely against the crossbar. Then he stepped away. In my street shoes, I did the same with the four that were left. Blank-faced Cruyff smiled and the interpreter and club president burst into applause.

When they stopped, Cruyff turned his attention to the club president. They talked, and I felt the need for more beer. The interpreter explained that Johan was always agitating for something.

“What's he want?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said, embarrassed. “It's always something.”

Cruyff spoke to her in a low voice. They looked at one another.

“He wants me to tell you what they're talking about,” she said miserably.

It turned out he was asking why officials were insured on foreign trips and players weren't. Why coaches got meal money and players didn't. She seemed aware that this was a poor strategy for attracting me to change teams. He had what he called his List of Grievances, she confided.

His willingness to be a pain in the ass appealed to me. And only the Dutch had a short transfer period in those years, so they were my ticket to the West.

The club president knew that, as well, so after sitting around a rented room for three days, I signed a contract for half the sum for which I'd been asking.

The Dutch carried on like the Sermon on the Mount but their hearts were ledger books. Merchants squeezed each guilder while giving change.
Does it make you nostalgic?
my brother wrote.
It
makes me feel like I'm home,
I wrote back.

He worked twelve-hour days on one of the recently consolidated collective farms to the south. His career had been destroyed by a clumsy tackle.

That first morning out on the practice pitch with the rest of Ajax, long-haired boys nodded greetings and included me in their warm-up drills. The sun warmed the little canals and cows in the distance. When the coach arrived and blew his whistle, the long-haired boys formed two lines and proclaimed their objective with a little poem:

Open game, open game
You can't afford to neglect the wing.

And then went back to what they were doing. A handprinted translation was provided for me on an index card. I was introduced. Practice began.

Few remember that before Ajax became Ajax, Holland's football record in internationals had been the equal of Luxembourg's. It took all of us—coach, communist, and long-haired boys—all of thirty minutes that first day to realize that what we'd collected was a group of people who
thought
about space. The ultra-aggressive football in which players switched positions and rained attacks from every angle was worked through and worked out on that pitch over the next three years. It was a collective. During rest breaks we all talked. We all listened. Suppose we tried this? What happened when we tried that? We started letting midfielders and defenders join in attacks, and saw the ways in which forwards would have to support such flexibility by flowing back to cover. Position-shifting came easily and provided opponents, once we started playing matches, with a chaos of movement and change with which to deal. The first Dutch word I really learned to speak was
switch.

We built our moves from the back; the goalkeeper only rarely kicked the ball long, instead clearing it to our defenders, and the team moved in set and improvisational patterns from there: if someone came back for a pass, someone else broke downfield. In possession we made the pitch as large as possible, spreading play to the wings and seeing everything as a way to increase and exploit space. If we lost the ball, the same thinking was used in reverse. We talked about space in a practical way. How could you play for ninety minutes and remain strong? If you were the left back and you ran seventy meters up the wing, it wasn't so good if you then had to run back to your starting position. If the midfielder took your place, it shortened the distances. Even then I could see that it was very Dutch to look for the simple solution. And to find the biggest thrill in the even simpler solution.

Cruyff was the genius at this. Good players always found ways of receiving the ball in space, but Cruyff
while playing
saw where
everyone
should be, or go. He was three moves ahead and the moves were all about shaping space. From above—from up in the press box—it was a lesson in architecture.

When we spaced ourselves properly, it suddenly became very quiet. No noise. You heard only the wind. And the ball: the sound it made on the foot, the sound that made clear where it was going, how hard, how low, and how fast.

Suddenly football was not about kicking each other's legs anymore. Fans at our matches came away feeling they'd seen something they could see nowhere else on earth.
You guys really have
something going,
my brother wrote back, after I wrote him about what was happening.

MY PARENTS: they were political. Their Partisan unit during the war had both an antitank rifle and a mimeograph machine, and my mother had lost two frostbitten fingers dragging it over some ridge-lines in heavy snow to keep it from German hands. God forbid. The whole tide might have turned. They each produced for me a wry little smile when I came home, a wildly excited seventeen-year-old, to announce I'd be playing for Belgrade. I hadn't understood why until I realized that they were smiling at the
Partizan
on my shirt.

When I was ten, I asked to be included in the confirmation classes which my uncle, a pastor, was going to conduct for my brother and two cousins. I think I believed that that, at last, would make me a part of the family, or at least a part of a common cause. My uncle agreed to interview me, to measure my suitability. The interview was held in the presence of my grandmother. I failed to answer a single question. My collapse caused my uncle and brother considerable amusement, and my grandmother none at all.