Playing Days (12 page)

It was my job to translate for everyone. Only Liza spoke ein bißchen Englisch. She once asked Hadnot if his daughter drank tea, if she might like a cup with lots of milk in it, and I thought I saw Frankie nodding her head. But when Hadnot put the question to her, she looked at him and didn't answer, and so she didn't get any.

There were dozens of flies. They perched on the wax tablecloth and on the plums and lemons in a bowl of fruit; they cleaned their long legs against each other. Frau Taler kept apologizing for them. ‘It is what you get used to,' she said, ‘when you live on a farm.'

I can't imagine what these people made of Hadnot; he seemed opaque enough even to me. Was there a local equivalent of the southern man? Probably, and the question at least suggested to me the way he might appear to them. Handsome enough, in spite of his thick features and bad teeth. A little unloved. The T-shirt underneath his dress shirt, which was still unbuttoned, had been washed too often among darker clothes: it had faded from white into a color between pink and grey. Quiet spoken and courteous to women. The kind of guy who turns up reliably to work but is less reliable in other aspects of his life.

‘How long have you lived in Germany?' Herr Taler wanted to know. He had taken his boots off and rested his large feet on a child's rocking chair, which he pushed up and down. Liza had gotten her bulk from him.

‘About five years,' Hadnot said.

‘And what do you think of Landshut?'

‘I guess I'd live just about anywhere they paid me to play basketball.'

I didn't translate at once. It struck me as selfish, and I wanted him to make nice – to thank our hosts for the cake and the coffee (Hadnot didn't drink tea) with a few generous sentiments. I had no idea what he expected from the afternoon, but this didn't seem too bad. We were getting a brief look at real life. ‘But what do you think of the place?' I asked him. He stared at me, genuinely puzzled. ‘I mean, the architecture, the food, the people.'

‘I married one of them, didn't I?' he said.

‘So you must have fallen in love with the place, a little?'

‘I fell in love with her. What do you want me to say? I'm stuck here. Did I plan to spend my life here? No. Maybe if I was a better basketball player I'd have ended up somewhere I like more.' Finally he added, shrewdly enough, ‘Tell them what you want me to say. The people are friendly.' So that's what I did.

Liza put on another pot of tea and Frau Taler pushed to the center of the table the bowl of plums, which were from the tree in the garden. ‘What do you mean, you're
stuck here?' I asked. We ate and spat the pits onto our cake plates, among the leftovers.

‘What do you think I mean?'

‘You mean, you're not good enough to get a job anywhere else?'

‘No, that's not what I mean.'

Henrik wanted to know what the most points Hadnot ever scored in a game was. ‘Fifty,' he said, ‘when I was in high school. I missed seven shots all game, and I can still tell you where I missed them from.'

But by this stage his daughter had grown restless. She was sitting between me and Liza, on her own chair with cushions piled on it; from time to time she climbed on my knees to reach the table. The Talers kept a house dog, a terrier, and Frankie tried to feed him the crumbs from my cake. He wasn't allowed any cake, Frau Taler said to her. He would only be sick later and she would have to clean it up; he had a delicate stomach. Frankie threw another bit of cake on the floor next to him. Frau Taler asked her not to, and she giggled, looking at me for approval, and did it again.

I felt sorry for Hadnot – to see the way the rest of us had taken over the management of his child. Maybe he doesn't mind, I thought. But then Hadnot said to Frankie, ‘If you do it once more, young lady, we're taking you home.'

She said, Ich will nach Hause – I want to go home, and reached for my plate, so he came around the table, picked her up like a sack and carried her sideways
around his waist. He was probably ready to leave anyway. She didn't scream, which surprised me, but she didn't help out her father either by clinging on, and he had to let go of her outside the doorway. I found myself apologizing for her as I said goodbye.

‘She is really very pretty,' Liza said. ‘She must look like her mother.'

‘I don't know. I haven't met her mother.'

I remembered to buy a chicken, and Frau Taler went back to fetch one from the ice box. Hadnot was strapping Frankie into her car seat. She was wriggling unhelpfully, and it seemed only decent to give him a little space.

‘How old is she, do you know?' Liza asked.

Henrik had gone out to the barn and was pushing the ball against the rim. He was trying to shoot as Hadnot had taught him to, one-handed, with a roll of the wrist, but wasn't strong enough – the ball kept brushing against the bottom of the net. I saw the tension playing out in him, between the desire to please, to do right, and the simple boyish urge to throw things. Eventually he gave into that urge and wrapped his arms around the ball and sort of jumped with it, letting go as late as he could. Mostly it flew behind him over his head.

‘Three years, I think.' And then: ‘Should she be talking more? They have separated, and she lives with her mother mostly.'

‘I think she understands very well what her father says.'

On the way home, whatever had loosened in him closed up again. He drove with a sort of quiet concentration, as if he didn't want it broken. Maybe he was embarrassed by Frankie's behavior, his inability to control her or communicate with her. God knows what he usually did on his weekends alone with her. I could hardly imagine how they passed the time. She sat in back with her eyes open and looked, in her new silence, very much like her father. Patient, not particularly happy. Then she fell asleep, and I saw that what seemed sullen or stubborn in her was only the beginnings of sleep.

I wanted to say again how confident she seemed with strangers. To reassure him, partly, but also because I wanted him to tell me something like, No, it was you, she was very comfortable with you. But Hadnot didn't strike me as the kind of man to play those conversational games.

He said at last, ‘What are you looking at?' which made me blush.

I had been staring at him and thinking that his is the face she will look for in a lover, when she grows up. After that I watched the countryside go by. The wind had blown away the haze of the day, but a few darker clouds came in on its tail, and these produced, when the sun went through them, an atmosphere of light that looked almost thick enough for you to breathe it in.

To break the silence (I have never been very good at silences), I asked him if he had heard what Karl said to Charlie after the game. I could still feel the blush in my cheeks, as hot as anger. He shook his head. ‘I mean,' I went on, ‘Karl just repeated what Russell said, but in English. Russell said to him something like, Blacks never could shoot straight. And Karl translated it for him.'

‘For Charlie?'

‘Yes, for Charlie.'

‘And what did Charlie do?' But he didn't wait for me to answer. ‘Karl shouldn't have done that.'

‘Why should you keep something like that quiet? If he's a racist.'

‘Because he's a dumb fuck thirty-year-old baby, who lives with his mother. Charlie don't need to know what he thinks, and Karl don't need to tell him.'

‘You just don't like Karl,' I said. ‘Or Charlie.'

‘Me? I got nothing against them.'

‘You've been picking on Karl since you came back.'

‘I wouldn't have come back if it wasn't for Karl. And Charlie's OK. I'm just waiting till the scouts start showing up, that's what I'm waiting for. If he's good enough.'

‘So why are you standing up for Russell?'

But he let it go at that. He only said, ‘Anyway, his name isn't Russell,' leaning out at the crossroads to check both ways, then gunning us up the slope. We drove through the field of high corn at the top of the hill outside Landshut. I could see the spire of the church now, rising far above the low-roofed townscape; and
then the horse-farm outside my apartment. Hadnot offered to drop me off there, but I had to collect my bike from the High Street and volunteered anyway to help him get Frankie out of the car. But she was still asleep; he planned on driving around until she woke up. It was just as good as sitting parked somewhere and waiting.

I said, ‘I'll drive around with you then, I've got nothing else to do.' And then: ‘I forgot how nice it is to have people around you small enough to carry. I have two younger sisters, much younger, and used to carry them everywhere.'

He didn't answer at first, so I went on. ‘It's funny, you spend the first eighteen years of your life learning how to live in a family. Then you go to college and have to learn to live without one again. Once you get used to that . . .' It struck me that this was not the best thing to say to a man in the process of getting a divorce, but Hadnot didn't seem to be listening. The asphalt had given way to cobblestones, and he was driving as carefully as he could to keep down the noise. You could feel them through your seat and against the soles of your shoes – they sounded like rain on a tin roof.

The High Street was never very busy on the weekends. Not much was open and there weren't many people about, just the usual gang of teenagers outside McDonald's, smoking, standing on the public benches, or balancing briefly, jerkily, on their bicycles.

‘The first year's hardest,' he said, pulling up. ‘Don't beat yourself up.'

I couldn't see my bike then remembered I had walked it as far as his house and locked it there. So he drove off again, slowly over the cobbles, and up the hill into the more suburban neighborhoods where we both lived. I guess he changed his mind, because he parked in his own drive and, since Frankie was still asleep, stayed in the car. That's how I left him, without a newspaper or anything, waiting for his daughter to wake up.

When I got home there was a message on my answering machine. I had a voicemail account and the first thing I always did coming through the door was pick up the phone. Usually the first sound that greeted me was a dial tone. The phone jack was beside my bed, which is where the phone was, so I tended to lie down at an angle with my shoes on. Then a minute or two would pass before I could will myself up again. But this time the line of the tone was broken up into urgent segments, and I had the brief satisfaction of something to wait for as I dialed into the service.

My father had called. He had accepted an invitation to a conference in Salzburg, which was in three weeks' time. Salzburg, he said, couldn't be more than two or three hours by train from Landshut; he had looked on the map. Depending on my schedule, I could either visit him there and we could make a weekend of it or he was happy to come up on the train himself to visit me. He suspected there was probably more to do in Salzburg, but he didn't mind.

I had reached the age when every cryptic commu
nication from my parents suggested to my anxieties the careful, portentous announcement of some problem, either medical or marital. But there was only the one message, from my father, and I suspected that if the news were very bad, a flurry of calls would have passed between my brother and sisters, and I would have caught at least some of the family crossfire. Unless it was the kind of news that could only be communicated in person or the source of anxiety was me.

A few times a week, before bed, I added to my journal, some of which had started out as a long letter home. I wrote at my kitchen table on the boxy laptop computer I had carried with me from college. That was always the plan: that basketball would give me time to write. And something to write about. I was also working on a piece of fiction left over from my student days, about a man named Syme, who believed he could prove the earth was hollow. I'd heard about him in astronomy class and had the bright idea of enlisting some friends to contribute a series of essays about his life and times. Mine, unsurprisingly, was the only one that got written, and I hoped to expand it into a novel – during the long afternoons between morning practice and evening practice.

The two files had a way of bleeding into each other. The novel was full of young men with nothing much to do, playing games together and traveling through the countryside; and the journal described the same thing.

A week or so later, I ran into Frankie in the grassy courtyard behind my apartment block. Or rather, she ran up to me. I had a sack of kitchen trash in hand, which I was
taking to the bins lined up by one of the ground floor garages. She offered me the sticky wrapper of an ice- cream cone, which she was still eating. At first I thought she wanted me to throw it away, but she shouted so loudly when I put it in the bag that I had to dig it out again. I stood there stupidly holding the wrapper while her mother walked up to apologize.

Her mother was Anke. She seemed very pleased to see me, in the most natural way, and I must have given her rather a puzzled reception, until it occurred to me that she had no reason to be surprised.

It turned out that she was fully aware of our other connection. Bo had mentioned that we spent the afternoon together, which she was glad to hear, and also somewhat relieved, since Franziska had spoken again and again about daddy's tall friend. She asked me what I was doing now. By this point I had deposited the garbage and was standing there empty-handed.

‘Nothing,' I said, so she said, ‘Why don't you come shopping with us, then? It's such a pretty day, and I could use the help, if you don't mind.'

So that's what I did. I went inside to wash my hands then followed them down hill to the Spar. Franziska refused to be carried or pushed in her stroller, a flimsy pink fold-up, which I ended up dragging most of the way. From time to time, Anke and I took her small hands and swung the child along, crying (as my mother used to cry to me), Eins zwei drei, hopsala! as we lifted her in the air.

Her apartment, Anke explained, also belonged to
the club. It was their version of ‘married accommodation,' and Bo and she had lived there, uncomfortably enough, for several years before their separation. Really, it wasn't large enough for a child. Franziska slept in a storeroom without windows, which meant at least that she slept very late most mornings, especially in summer. The club, however, had proved surprisingly understanding afterwards about the whole . . . they gave him his own place just far enough away for convenience.

‘Was that why he came back to play this year?' I asked. ‘They were covering two rents?'

‘What do you mean? Bo always plays.'

There was something touching in the way she spoke his name, rounding her lips over the syllable, and giving it a clear strange musical intonation. Bo – it was a sound you might make to a child, pretending to frighten him. How did you meet, I asked; it seemed a gentler question than the other one.

Inside the supermarket, Anke let her daughter roam more freely, and she often stopped to work something through in her head, before carrying on. But the story really began before Hadnot came on the scene. He was, she said, only a part of the story, and if I wanted to hear the whole thing, she would have to start earlier, then she put a hand on my elbow and added, ‘You look worried, even so, it isn't much, I mean, not very much has happened to me yet.' She looked at me, and she looked at Franziska, who was sitting on the cold tiled floor with
her skirts hiding her legs, and trying to hide more things underneath them. Mostly tin cans.

I thought, you have a lot of days to get through, and a lot of hours in the day. Otherwise, you wouldn't waste them explaining things to me. I asked her how old she was.

‘Twenty-five,' she said.

‘It seems to me many things have happened to you.'

‘You mean Franziska? No, when you have a baby, you will understand. Many things have happened to her – but to me, not much. That was always the problem, but it doesn't matter, I am still young.'

‘What do you mean, the problem?'

‘I tell you a secret,' Anke said, lowering her voice and speaking in English for the first time. ‘I wanted very much to get out of this fucking place.'

On the way home, Franziska accepted the stroller, and we hung as much of the shopping as we could around the handles. Then I pushed her up the hill. By the time we reached the door to their stairwell, she had fallen asleep – her neck bent against one of the bars, and her lips fat with sleep.

‘Stay a little,' Anke said quietly, so I stopped pushing.

There was nowhere to sit, except the brick wall that supported the raised grass in the middle of the courtyard, so I hitched myself up on that. Anke wheeled her daughter a few yards further along, into the shade of that wall, then reached her hand to me and I pulled her up.
She was very light; her dress might have been filled with rope. Franziska slept for two hours, until the shade of the wall was swallowed by the shadow of the building opposite, and her mother spent most of them talking about herself. But we continued to meet after that day, sometimes unarranged but usually by appointment, on most dry afternoons, and I can't say for sure when she told me what. I asked her questions and Anke wasn't shy about answering them – her life was a topic we both found absorbing enough.