Playing Days (16 page)

My father came a few days later. He was catching a cab from the Landshut train station in the early evening. I had offered to pick him up on my bike, but there was no point, he said. He had a suitcase with him, and besides, wasn't sure what train he wanted to catch: there was a lunch in Salzburg he was supposed to show his face at. If it got too late, I told him, he could pick up a key from a friend of mine in the next building. I had to be at practice by eight.

Anke seemed pleased at the prospect of meeting him. Probably just because of that, I explained to her that she might not see much of me in the next week. My family are very close, I said; they expect a lot of attention.

After lunch, I walked into town to buy a camp bed, which I intended to sleep on. I also bought him his favorite German foods: pepper salami and black bread. Two liters of diet coke. The rest of the afternoon I spent rearranging my apartment, pulling dirty towels off the bathroom floor, letting a little air in. Almost no one came to visit me, and the rooms had acquired the stale personal air of a private space. The bell rang around seven o'clock while I was forcing down a sandwich. It sent my
heart racing – such was the loneliness I had become accustomed to.

Ever since I was seven or eight years old, my father has worn a full beard, which is sometimes long and untidy, in the summers when he isn't teaching and looks like a rabbi, and sometimes clipped and business-like. But he was beardless when I opened the door. For a moment, I hardly recognized him. He looked like a man I had seen only in photographs: my father in his courting days, with a big head of Jewish curls; and later, in the first few years of parenthood, with a baby over his shoulder in the garden of their house in California.

‘Look at you,' I said, as he stood there. Only his hair was thinner on top and not so curly, and his features were perhaps a little finer, narrower.

He goes through great swings in weight. He eats too much for several months, giving in to his fondness for ethnic foods and anything that can be consumed in small repeatable portions, olives, tortilla chips, pastries etc. Then he starves for weeks until he looks like his old self again. I had caught him at the thin end of the cycle.

‘I'm a new man,' he answered sarcastically and pulled his suitcase in.

He stood appreciatively in the middle of my bedroom, which was also my sitting room, and looked around him. And I saw myself again, arriving and tearing the curtains from the window.

‘What do they pay for this place? I mean, the club,'
he wanted to know. ‘Very light. A balcony, even if it overlooks the road. Big kitchen.' He enumerated its advantages. ‘Very nice,' he said again.

I had never entertained my father like this before, as a grown man with a place of his own. His shaven face unnerved me. It suggested some kind of mid-life crisis, a sudden revaluation. In fact, as he explained to me, my mother had only cut away too much, giving him a trim, leaving a bare patch, and there was nothing for it but to shave the whole thing off. And the next time I saw him, after the season was over and I had gone home, the beard was in place again. But for that week it contributed to the strangeness of his presence. I imagined him as he might have been once, without ties or obligations to define him. And saw myself through his eyes, too, a young man, becoming less familiar.

I set up the camp bed in the kitchen and told him to eat what he liked. Practice ran till ten, and I should be home shortly after, but if he was tired and wanted to go to bed, of course he should. I insisted he take the double in my bedroom. The cot was very comfortable.

Outside, in the early dark, I felt relieved to be on my own again and walked slowly to the sports hall carrying the gym bag against my hip. A wet warmish night, with the wetness not falling but in the air. This was often my favorite stretch of day: after the idleness of the afternoon, before the business of the evening. I like loneliness with a margin to it and thought of him moving around my apartment, unpacking. Fixing himself some
supper. Examining my books. Wondering at the life of his son. Sitting on my bed and calling home, reporting back.

In the morning, I woke early – the kitchen windows had no curtains, and one of them faced south. I ate a bowl of cereal by myself, with the door closed to the bedroom. A bad night: my ankles stretched past the edge of the cot and rested awkwardly on the bar. I kept shifting to relieve them and slept shallowly but full of dreams. Over breakfast, I was reluctant to wake my father, to enter his company. It was enough to know he was there, to feel the slight pressure in my head of his perceptions and opinions.

He joined me on the walk to the gym. ‘Not a bad commute,' he said, wearing again the clothes he had arrived in: chinos and leather shoes, a collared shirt, the jacket he liked to teach in. A clear November day with leftover wet darkening pavement and grass. By this point I felt better, and something about the exercise of my own strong tired muscles, the contrast with my father, reassured me. I really was in the best shape of my life, and thought, if I want to look back, years later, on the young man I once was . . .

At the sports hall, I left him to explore and got changed in the locker room. Only Olaf was there, in unlaced hightops, but he had his headphones on and his eyes closed. Another minute to myself. Coming out, I
found my dad on court, jacketless, slapping a ball around and warming up his shoulders. ‘You want me to feed you some?' he said.

‘I usually warm up with another kid. Sure.'

‘Until he gets here.'

‘Why don't you shoot a couple?'

We passed the ball back and forth, and after a few minutes he pulled out the hems of his shirt. I remembered again what his high school coach once told him. ‘Markovits, you may be slow, but you sure are weak.'

Another memory stirred. On the day of his fiftieth birthday, he brought in bagels and cream cheese and made Mexican eggs. A few colleagues came over, and we spent the afternoon outside. March in Texas is sometimes cool enough for picnics, and the mosquitoes hadn't yet arrived. Afterwards, some of the men wandered off to the court with a basketball, and I joined them. I was sixteen years old.

We split up into sides, and my dad said, ‘Let me get number-two son.'

For an hour or so, we went at it – a good hard game, not much talk. I realized pretty soon that if I didn't want him to, he couldn't get a shot off over me. For the past dozen years, he'd beaten me at everything he taught me to do.

At the end, however, I relented and with the game on the line let him squeeze out an eighteen-footer, just over my hand. It went in, and I had the strange sense that but for me all of his shots that day would have dropped.
On the way back to the food, he rested his forearm on my shoulder and nodded his head to my ear. ‘Thanks,' he said. My mother had cut up a watermelon, and I felt very childish with the stickiness of a slice against my face.

I felt childish now, appearing at work with my dad in tow.

‘Dick Markovits,' he said, stretching out a hand to Coach Henkel. He was sweating already with an untucked shirt. ‘Mind if I sit in?' he asked, but he couldn't in fact sit still and stood on the sideline against one of the wall hoops rolling in shots left-handed. When Hadnot arrived, I led him over.

‘I want you to meet my old man,' I said.

They stood face to face for a moment; Hadnot wasn't much taller than my dad. Clean-shaven, my father even bore him a slight resemblance. They both had the strong crooked racial nose, though Hadnot's features were generally thicker and rougher. (Afterwards, I said to my father, ‘He's Jewish, you know.' My father is always on the look-out for unexpected celebrity Jews and takes secret pride in them, especially in the ballplayers. His response: ‘Of course he is.') What he said at the time was, ‘I taught this one everything he knows.'

Hadnot answered, ‘So it's your fault.'

When Karl walked in, I left them together and hunted out a couple good balls. We warmed up as usual, starting at the baseline and working around the arc. Karl was still in high spirits from the game in Würzburg, but they
expressed themselves in a kind of earnestness, in good intentions. He made sure to bend his legs into every shot (Hadnot once said to him, ‘Jump like there's someone in your face') and counted out loudly the makes and misses. Eight out of ten he wanted from each spot and wouldn't shift till he got it. I didn't dare to insist on the same standard for myself, which meant in practice that I spent most of the time chasing down balls.

Karl seemed not to notice the discrepancy. ‘One for one,' he called out. ‘Two for two. Two for three,' and so on.

White light fell through the high stadium windows onto the green gym floor. The hall echoed irregularly. There's a peculiar underwater quality to a basketball court in the morning, especially during the warm-up, before practice begins. A solemn air of self-improvement. Looking over, I saw my father and Hadnot trading jumpshots, too, at one of the side baskets, and felt something like jealousy or embarrassment – as if I had introduced him to a girl I was sweet on.

Years later I wrote a story about a father's visit – to a girl, as it happens, holding down her first job, teaching high school in New York. What I wanted to get right in that story was something of the faint suppression I felt (in which I was complicit and which I partly desired) when my dad came to Landshut. Suppression of what, I ask myself now. The first few shoots of adulthood?

After practice, I took him to lunch at Sahadi's and tried to pay for it. But he insisted, and by the end of the meal had collared the owner, Mr. Sahadi himself, and discussed Turkish market stalls in Berlin.

‘Your son don't visit,' Sahadi said as we left. ‘Every time he come, I give him Kirschwasser on the house. Still, he don't come often.'

‘You drink kirsch?' my father asked, when we were out of earshot.

There isn't much to do in Landshut on a Thursday afternoon – or any other afternoon, for that matter, unless you like beer gardens. We looked into the church on the way home, and afterwards my father sat on my bed with his shoes off and made phone calls. In America, the rest of my family, variously scattered, were just waking up. He spoke to my two younger sisters, still in high school, my mother, and then called my brother in Connecticut and spoke to him for an hour. I heard him say again and again, ‘A very nice place. There's a balcony, though I haven't gone out on it yet. A big kitchen. He's made it very nice.' And then: ‘I met his coach. And a Jew from Mississippi, can you believe it, who doesn't miss.' At the end of each phone call: ‘He seems fine. Happy.' Though every time he said it, I suspected him of holding something back, a private judgment. Even over lunch I felt the slight awkwardness produced by a parent's determination not to say the thing foremost in his thoughts.

My brother had investment matters to discuss with
him, and after a while I muttered in my dad's free ear, ‘I'm just going to step out for a minute to see a friend. There's someone I'd like to introduce to you.' And I went to find Anke.

She was at home watching TV with Franziska, with the curtains drawn.

‘Come in!' she called.

They were huddled coldly together on the couch, lit up by cartoons. I had a brief sense of what I was excluded from, something like happy misery, which they shared, which Anke could draw on when she needed to. But she was also willing to let me open the curtains and take them out of themselves.

‘I want you to meet my father,' I said. She looked at me soberly and nodded.

The four of us spent the rest of the day together. Anke could be very proper and charming when she liked and knew how to act, among other parts, the role of the presentable girlfriend. Franziska also gave us something to occupy ourselves with, a purpose. We took her to the park – the day was just bright and dry enough. My father has always liked children, which is one reason he had so many of them. And he likes to teach, regardless of what or who. It's his job, but it suits him, too, and tests his great patience, which I have inherited to a degree, for repetition. Franzisca had found a small plastic ball in the playground, which she wouldn't let go of, even when climbing – she kept nearly falling over wet bars. My father convinced her at last to let him roll the ball up
the slide instead of down and crouched at the bottom, propping her on his lap. He threw it against the incline, again and again; they watched it bounce towards them. Franziska tried to catch it by clapping her hands together, but mostly she just clapped. My dad repeated to her in his broken salesman's German, ‘Look the ball into the hands' – always shifting, to relieve his back and knees.

Anke said to me, ‘I like your father. He is a very good father.'

‘He's only trying to impress you.'

Around six o'clock, we went to find something to eat. Franziska was hungry, and unless I ate early, the first half hour of practice gave me a pain in the side. My father, on one of his diets, wanted nothing – he tended to eat only one meal a day. Anke misunderstood him. She thought he meant it was just too soon for supper and suggested the Bäckerei in the stretch of shops by the kiosk: they sold cake and tea and savory pastries, too.

I let the confusion stand. Somehow her presence hadn't loosened my tongue, and I explained my silence by saying, over a piece of spanakopita, that the camp bed dug into my ankles. I had hardly slept. My father, of course, offered to change with me, and I refused, until Anke interrupted us both.

‘This is nonsense,' she said. (Quatsch is the German word she used.) ‘You can sleep at mine. There's no point in pretending, is there?'

And that's how I began to spend the nights with
her. After tea, we went back to the apartment block and my father helped put Franziska to bed – he offered, and Anke, to my surprise, accepted. I got changed into shoes and shorts still wet from the morning runaround and headed back down the hill.