Playing Days (14 page)

I had met her for lunch that day, just the two of us. Twice a week, her mother looked after Franziska, along
with the children she cared for: they had come to an arrangement with the family. And Anke went to work at the TV station.

We sat outside on one of the car park benches that overlooked the river. There was an Italian who sold pizza squares from the back of his van, and we ate first one of his slices, then a second. It was really too cold for sitting outside and the food kept us warm. October clouds moved quickly overhead and left the rest of the sky very blue. It seemed a shame, on our first date, to be talking about Hadnot, but I was used to it by then.

‘Boris,' she said, ‘that's what his father called him. And for a while I called him that, too. Boris Hadnot. Did you know he was a Jew, like you?' Germans can never say the word without sounding daring. For them, it is almost like saying ‘sex.' ‘At least, his father is,' she said.

The family name used to be Hadnovic. Ellis Island simplified it. Mr Hadnot grew up in Albany but got through college on the GI Bill and spent two years stationed in Jackson; he was in the Air Force. He liked the South and fell in love with a Southerner. When he finished his service, he moved back.

‘And do you ever go to—,' she once started to ask him.

‘Every year I pay my membership fee to the Southern Jewish Historical Society. That's what I do,' he said. It seemed strange to him that his son had settled in Germany – not bad, but strange.

‘I haven't met many Jews, but I like them,' she told him.

‘And what did he say to that?'

She had understood me. ‘He didn't mind.'

All this puts me in mind of a funny story – about Hadnot's Jewishness. A few weeks after this conversation, we played a day game in Munich on a Friday afternoon. Some kind of national holiday, I can't remember. Once we were showered and changed, most of the guys wanted to hit the town, and the driver of our coach service agreed, for a little extra money, to stick around till one; the last train left at eleven. No later than one, Henkel said. He wanted us to make use of the free weekend to catch up on sleep.

We arranged to meet up somewhere in Schwabing for dinner, and I persuaded Hadnot on our way out to join me for the shabbas service at my synagogue. He really felt almost no religious identification, but said fine, why not. I think he associated Jews with nerdiness and physical timidity. Maybe he was just being polite, or maybe he felt sufficiently adrift and far from home that even the comfort of a community he had inherited against his will seemed appealing to him. Anyway, he got very excited at the sight of the gunman outside the door – a sleek, fat young man, confident-looking, who rested his machine gun on a strap against his belly. ‘These are my kind of mother-fucking Jews,' he said. But once we were inside, and it was only a handful of old men
davening, he got bored and excused himself after fifteen minutes.

Certainly, for their wedding, he didn't insist on a rabbi or make any objection to the priest Anke had chosen. They were married at the end of summer in the church at Untergolding. From Mississippi, only his parents came. Anke thought it strange; she thought, he has really cut himself loose, and in a selfish way, took comfort from the fact. Anyway, she didn't expect to stay in Landshut long.

Bo hoped to make it to Italy within two years – he was very specific about the time frame. A player like him, he said, who relies on skill, on what he has learned to do and not what he was born with, can easily stretch out a career into his mid-thirties. But it was very hard to move up after you turned thirty. So they had to move now. At the end of two years, Franziska was twenty months old, and they were still in Landshut, though the management had transferred them to the apartment where she now lived, with a storeroom big enough to put a cot in. Something political, which she never understood properly, had happened at the club. The old coach had left, for one of their rivals, and taken two of their best players with him, and not Bo. Perhaps Bo could have gone, too – that is what she didn't understand. By this point, she was twenty-four years old and very unhappy.

I wanted to know what these confidences suggested – about her intentions towards me, to use an old-fashioned word. I sometimes joked about being her confessor. Because of basketball practice, in the morning and evening, all of these conversations took place in the innocence of afternoon.

‘No, you are not like my confessor,' she once said. ‘You are like my' – and she stopped and thought about the next word for a moment. ‘Like my little brother. I want to tell you what the world is like, so you don't make the same mistakes I did.'

‘I don't understand,' I said, digging in. ‘What mistakes did you make? You married a man you loved and had a child by him.'

Sometimes Franziska napped in the afternoons and sometimes she didn't. I felt most awkward when she fell asleep at home, in her cot, because then Anke and I were confined to her apartment. We spoke in low tones, and I had to decide how close to her to sit. It was embarrassing for me to waste the day with her, though I had nothing else to do; I felt it more sharply indoors.

Anke was one of those women whose interest in style, in order, was directed mostly at her clothes and
person. She dressed neatly, in bright and unexpected combinations, and applied a modest, careful layer of make-up to her face. Her apartment, though, was a mess. She never cleared up Franziska's toys, which suggested the aftermath of a terrible plastic war. There were pretty things around, some of which she had picked up off the street, some of which she had spent too much money on. A Nolde print on the wall; a plain wooden sort of Shakerish reading chair. But the place usually stank of wet clothes, which she hadn't had time to hang up; and most of the dry ones were left hanging on the chairs, the dining table, the television set, until they grew stiff.

She was clean, she said, but messy, and I watched her myself take a frantic mop to the kitchen floors. Then I would gather armfuls of washing from the sitting room and drop them in a heap at the foot of her dressing table, which I had seen through my bathroom window. I had entered the rooms I was used to staring at – something imagined had become real, and the thought of that also made me uncomfortable. But Anke liked being at home. She made us tea, and we sat at the kitchen table and talked.

‘What do you mean, mistakes? Did you have an affair?'

She gave me a pitying look.

‘Did he?'

‘There are other kinds of mistakes beside affairs.'

‘I think so, too, but I want to know what they are. Was he a bad father?'

At first, she said, he was a very good father – when Franziska was born. The labor was long and difficult, and after thirty hours of it, the doctors decided on a C-section. (
Kaiserschnitt
is the German word: Caesar's Cut. It sounds much more ancient and visceral.) That laid her up for six weeks afterwards. She wasn't allowed to lift her daughter, and her milk didn't come, which made her feel very anxious. Eventually they put her on a bottle, and Bo did everything: changing diapers, feeding her.

Anke felt terrified by the failure of love. It came out of her as painfully, as meanly, as the milk. The two, in fact, became associated in her mind, and she continued to try to feed Franziska from the breast, even after the baby had a clear preference for the bottle. They fought each other like that, nakedly; she was often in tears, and Bo was extremely patient with her, too. He said to her once, probably more than once, that doing things over and over was what he was good at. And she hated him for that remark: she could see him as he tended Franziska or her, telling himself, this is the kind of thing I am good at. Being patient. Even when she shouted at him, and she shouted a lot, because she was twenty-three years old, and this wasn't the life she had wanted.

Later, she said, ‘Maybe you are right. Maybe they weren't mistakes. Maybe I just fell out of love with him.'

I hated such talk, sentimental, self-important. It occurred to me that Hadnot might have walked out on her. But that's not how she told it. As Franziska grew older,
Bo's patience turned out to be less useful. She had a will of her own, and you had to get down to her level, sometimes, to amuse her; whereas Bo just wanted her to play catch, and when she didn't want to, or when she refused to eat, or anything else, he simply let her cry. The crying made him angry, though, silently angry. She watched him sometimes, kissing her extra gently when she was misbehaving, because he wanted to hit her. And she thought, that's how he kisses me, too.

Maybe I should say a word here about the kind of mother Anke was. Franziska was not yet three years old, but whenever they went out, they spent a few minutes together in front of the mirror deciding what to wear. Franziska also had strong opinions on this subject. She stood by herself on a sidetable and they considered each other's reflections. A tender scene, but uncomfortable-making, especially since I couldn't work out how much the mother was preening for me. Their relations were sisterly more than anything else. They shared fries together when they ate at a café, smearing the ketchup all over the plate with an air of dissipated friendship, on a morning after. I never saw Anke read to her daughter, but they looked at magazines together, happily, by the hour. All of which says something for Franziska's somber good nature and presentability, but less for her mother's maturity.

One of the things that might have happened in Anke's marriage is that she realized, after the first bout of misery, that she had an ally in her baby now and could do without its father.

My attraction to Anke contained a large dose of annoyance. She often made me ‘uncomfortable' for one reason or another, many of them silly; and I wondered if annoyance would always make up a share of my attraction to women. Like Anke, I was in danger of becoming someone for whom stupid was a very important word. Maybe it's one of the things we had in common. Sometimes these conversations brought her to tears, and I sat very still where I was, on the sofa or at the kitchen table, and watched her.

‘There's something childish about you,' she said once, ‘that you don't respond to these signals.'

Her tears had dried up, and I felt instantly on my palms a fine slick surface.

‘What do you mean?'

‘You look me in the eye . . . but don't come over to me. It's like you are scared of being where you really are. Like you are waiting for someone to tell you it's OK, or to take you home again.'

This was the kind of talk that always angered me, but I stood up and tried to kiss her anyway.

‘No, no, you don't understand,' she said, turning her cheek. One always forgets, beforehand, how soft cheeks are – even freckled ones. ‘It is very difficult. I am very grateful to you, and I like you.'

I was perched awkwardly at the edge of the table. It was as if I had offered my seat to an old woman, who had refused it, and I had to choose between the rudeness of
staying where I was or the embarrassment of retreating to my chair. I sat down.

‘Don't make a face like that,' she went on. ‘I know grateful isn't a nice word. But my daughter is asleep just there. I can't take up with anyone I please, even if I want to. And I don't think you will be here very long. Say something.'

‘You just wanted me to tell you how much I like you.'

‘I don't know what I want. It could be. Is that so mean?' And then, when I didn't answer: ‘I am not even divorced yet.'

But I don't want to suggest that all we talked about was her, and afterwards, Anke made a special effort to ask questions about me. Are you a very good basketball player, she said, as good as Bo? I am not anything like as good as Bo. But you are taller than Bo. It isn't only that. I am an amateur; he is a professional. Then what are you doing here, she wanted to know. And maybe because I was still embarrassed by what had happened, and hoped to assert myself, to show off; maybe because writing things down was associated in my mind with a kind of revenge, I began to tell her. I plan to be a writer, I said, and I need experience. (‘Am I experience?' she asked.) After college, I wanted a job that left me time to write, and basketball doesn't take much time. Also, I like playing basketball, I loved it when I was a kid, and there is something childish about me.

From that moment I began to go up in her estima
tion. This was a girl, after all, who sometimes thought of becoming an actress. Thought about it, as one of the things she might possibly do, when she grew up. She dreamed about being ‘discovered.' She wanted desperately to get out of Landshut. Writing and books belonged to the world she aspired to, where she would be recognized as interesting and original. But it might be enough to have an affair with an author; he could do the recognizing for her.

‘What do you write about? Do you write about me?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘When do you write, if you spend all day with me?'

‘I write a little every night before going to bed.'

‘What else do you write about?'

I hesitated a moment, then said: ‘Some of the players. Hadnot.'

But she wasn't offended. ‘Why do you always call him Hadnot? It makes him sound strange. His name is Bo. And he isn't very interesting. All he does is play basketball and think about basketball.'

‘I don't think I've ever seen anybody better at what he does, than Hadnot.'

‘But if he is so good, why is he stuck here?'

‘I don't know. That's what I want to think about.'

This sort of talk is just as embarrassing in its way as my failed kiss, but there is worse. Books are mostly about things happening to people, I said, but nothing ever seems to happen to me. So I want to write books about that.

‘That doesn't sound very interesting,' she said. ‘Anyway, lots of things happen to you. You came here, and you met me on a train, and it turns out I live around the corner. And you are falling in love with me, and I don't let you kiss me. Isn't that enough?'

‘It's enough for me,' I said, but she didn't like that answer, either.

Also, sometimes, when Franziska was asleep, she did let me kiss her. We sat demurely and rather breathlessly side by side, on her sofa at home or the curbs of deserted streets, and every once in a while she pushed me away again with tears in her eyes.

‘It is very difficult for me,' she repeated.

Then I usually made a show of leaving, quite casually, and explaining, in a normal tone of voice, that I didn't mind and could completely understand her position but there wasn't much point in my sticking around if that's how it was, until she drew me by the hands back to her again.

‘You are unfair to me,' she said. ‘It is much harder for me than for you. You will go away again.'

‘But you want me to go away,' I said.

We both became addicted to the intensity of these relations. We stared at each other a lot, and I found it difficult to be around Franziska afterwards. I like to think that she shamed me into a sense of my childishness, but really, Anke used her to ease the pressure of those physical affections building up in each of us. She buried her face in her daughter's belly until Franziska wriggled her
self free again, and I had a sudden view of the three of us, in a photograph perhaps, dated by the passage of time: the woman with a wet face hiding it against the little girl; the man standing somewhat apart and trying to say something. And in that photograph we looked much older and more assured than I thought we were, and the whole thing seemed more serious.

Once I said to her, during one of my literary ‘confessions,' that I wanted to write stories about people who don't have any major flaws, who don't do anything stupid or wrong, and don't suffer from any unusual bad luck.

We had been kissing and Anke felt gentle and encouraging towards me. ‘I think they will be very happy stories.'

But I shook my head, and she pushed herself away.

‘What is going to happen to these people?'

‘The usual things.'

‘And what are those?'

‘The truth is, I don't know yet.'

We still talked about Hadnot, though Anke knew I might write down later whatever struck me as interesting. To her credit, she didn't seem to mind. She may have been vain, but at least she had the courage of her vanity. In fact, she became more open than before, because of our new relationship or because it seemed to her more important to be truthful. Of course, I don't really know how truthful she was. I wanted to go to bed with her, but it was difficult to arrange. Once Franziska was asleep, I had practice. By the time I got home, by the time I
had showered and forced down some food, it was almost midnight, and Anke was unwilling to let me in at that hour. It seemed too desperate, too secretive to her, too much like an affair.

She said to me once, ‘It may surprise you to know, but Bo wasn't all that interested in sex.' Maybe she thought I was jealous of him.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Not just after Franziska was born, but before as well. He was such a . . . strong American man, I expected . . . I don't know what I expected. But it never mattered very much to him, all that. And having a baby didn't help. For the first few months, of course, sex was the last thing on my mind. But after a while, I began to think about it again. I thought, I am twenty-three years old, and
this
is my life. I had worked very hard to lose the weight. I thought, pay attention. I said to him once, you are like a man on an airplane. All you do is eat, sleep, watch TV and go to the bathroom.'

‘And what did he say to that?'

She admitted, ‘Maybe I didn't say it. Maybe I only thought it.'

The idea worked its way into the novel I was writing at the time. The hero was a great man whose greatness never found its true expression, and part of the problem was summed up by his sex drive. People turned out to be unfaithful to him, because they accepted the pleasures and relations he considered beneath him. I have no way of knowing whether Hadnot himself suffered, if suffer is
the word, from a want of sexual appetite. Anke's account of their break-up was the only one I had. Hadnot never mentioned her to me. Maybe he just lost his appetite for her; maybe he had a dozen affairs on the side.