Playing Days (17 page)

On Friday, Henkel let us off the evening session (we had a game the next day), so my father and I caught the train to Munich after practice. I expected him to talk about Anke, but we spent the first five minutes of the journey in silence. Outside, a view of fall fields, approaching slowly, departing quickly, according to the strange laws of perspective. The river ran occasionally beside us, and the skies were broken by clouds about as often as the fields themselves were interrupted by trees and hedgerows.

At last I said, ‘How did things go with Franziska last night?' I had seen him only briefly for breakfast on my way to the gym.

‘She's a very attractive child. Good-natured and attentive. Whenever I spoke, she looked at me and waited – she didn't answer but she looked. I watched her in the bath while Anke hung out laundry. Afterwards, she went down without a sound.'

After another minute, I said, ‘And what do you think of Anke?'

‘She seems to be a good mother.' Another pause, and
then: ‘She has a clear pleasant voice. Good features, fine and symmetrical. Excellent posture. I understand why you find her attractive.'

My father has a tendency towards the specific, but even I found his answer odd. I wondered what he was keeping back. He seemed to be grudging me something, and then it struck me, truly for the first time, that as a young man he had also fallen in love with a slim, elegant German girl, a little older than himself. That he might find something painful or suggestive in comparisons.

We were on the local, which stopped at every suburb and farming settlement: Bruckberg, Langenbach, Gündkofen. Another Friday afternoon: the first trickle of weekenders to the city. We watched them get on in groups, mostly boys and girls apart, and probably louder, more openly happy in consequence. Couples tend to huddle quietly.

Eventually my dad said, ‘How well do you know this Hadnot guy?'

‘Not as well as I'd like to. He doesn't give away much. Maybe there isn't much to give. He's Anke's ex-husband, you know. Franziska is his kid.'

He quietly took this in, so I prompted him. ‘And what did you make of him?'

‘You don't shoot like that if you can do anything else.' He was sitting beside me, next to the window – I could see him doubled by his reflection and behind his reflection the traveling landscape.

‘What do you mean?'

He thought it over for a while, pushing his lips inwards and together, a characteristic expression, as if he meant to clean his teeth. Then he said, in the voice he uses for launching into stories, that when he was thirteen or fourteen he started playing a lot of golf.

‘I played everything else till then, but around thirteen or fourteen something changed, which I can't account for myself, because I certainly didn't enjoy golf more than the rest of it, baseball, football, basketball, which kept me out at the park most days till dinner. Maybe because golf was solitary, maybe that suited me. Though I liked company when I was a kid, more than you.'

He waited to see if I would take him up on that, before going on.

‘I won't say there were clubs I couldn't play in . . . but there were clubs I felt uncomfortable. But why do you think a kid like me, a Jewish kid, at that age, decides to pick up golf? Maybe I wanted to belong, especially in those clubs. What I mean is, this was not happy behavior. When it was light enough, I played every day after school for three or four hours. Saturdays, too, before synagogue, to my grandmother's horror. That doesn't leave much time for the other elements of growing up. By high school graduation, I was scratch. Maybe with a driver I could knock the ball two hundred and forty yards. In those days, with the old clubs, but still. Freshman year, I had my golf scholarship, but I didn't make it past freshman year.'

‘Because you realized there were other things in life?'

‘No. Because I realized I wasn't long enough. I wanted to win, and I wasn't going to win at golf.'

‘How come you don't play any more? Why have I never seen you play?'

‘What's the point in getting worse at something?' he said.

By the time we got to Munich I was almost too hungry to stand. Unless I ate every few hours, my hands began to shake.

‘The first sight I plan to see is lunch,' I said.

My father wanted to look around the neighborhood his grandparents had lived in, so we marched vaguely north out of the station, towards Schwabing. All the restaurants we passed appeared unappetizing, for various reasons, and the roads we found ourselves taking seemed almost violent with traffic after the calm of the train. The skin of my temples stretched tight towards the eyes; I felt a clenched fist in my ribs. Finally, we picked up two slices of pizza from the back of a van and carried them down a side street to the sandy oasis of a children's playground, where there was an empty bench.

I asked my father if he had ever been to Munich before. He said, no. I asked him if it meant anything to be here now. He said he wasn't sure yet, he couldn't tell.

Something I have inherited from my father is a love of walking around city neighborhoods. Perhaps because we moved so often in my childhood, wherever I go I have the feeling, This could also be my life. We spent a few happy hours exploring the streets my great grandpar
ents had considered home and failed again to locate the apartment they used to live in. Probably it got bombed. At four I told him I needed to sit down somewhere – those days my back and knees ached from everything but sprinting – and we stopped at one of the bakeries that filled out the ground floor of an apartment block.

My father refused to eat or drink himself but was willing to sit with me. I had a cup of black tea heaped up with sugar. We sat on high stools ranged along a counter that spanned the glass front wall. By necessity we looked not at each other but at the traffic in the street; maybe this made it easier for him to talk.

I knew something already about my grandparents' response to his marriage: they were upset, understandably upset, he said, at the thought of his relationship with a Christian woman. They considered it unlikely that his own children would think of themselves as Jews. ‘They may have been wrong about that, I don't know, but in the long run undeniably . . .'

What he wanted to talk about, though, was their reaction to the fact that his wife was German. ‘It was probably more mixed than you think,' he said.

His mother was a nice suburban kid from Port Jervis. She had Belgian roots but no particular attachment to Europe, or the idea of Europe, and may have picked up a certain amount of anti-German sentiment. But Bill, his father, grew up in a family that still spoke German at home for several years of his remembered childhood, until he was ten or eleven and his own mother died. At
that point his father, who had involved himself more deeply in the life of the community, on account of his business dealings, had no one to speak German to. Bill himself refused to speak German as soon as he reached school age, and eventually forgot all but a few stock words of what was probably his first language.

Yet it gave him, my father said, a kind of pleasure or pride to hear his own grandchildren speak it. He had retained some feeling for Germany, some memory of it, though he had never been and never would visit – ‘even once your mother and I were married.' In the first difficult days of their relationship, my mother and Bill got along personally very well, despite his religious objections and the fact that they had nothing in common but this one thing.

‘And would you care if we married Jews or not?' I asked him.

‘Maybe I would care a little,' he said. ‘It's possible.'

I wondered if he intended some reflection on Anke.

Afterwards, I took him to my synagogue, which was only a few blocks away. I hadn't mentioned to him my habit of going, and he seemed surprised when he recognized our destination – by the guard standing outside with his machine gun. Pleased, too, I thought. He chatted loudly, in his rough German, to the young man who offered us yarmulkes as we walked in.

‘Can you guess how my son makes his living?' he said. ‘I'll give you a clue: look at him.'

His loudness embarrassed me, though I recognized
it as a sign of the fact that he felt more comfortable inside than I could ever hope to. The late afternoon sun moved visibly through the stained glass window above the ark: you could see the paths of different colors in the air. We entered mid-service and groped our way along the first pew by the exit. Below the chanting voices ran the quicker beat of ordinary conversation. I watched my father muttering the prayers. He looked very learned, with his stooped narrow shoulders and sharp narrow face – the latest in a long line of scholars. All I could do was rock back and forth on tired feet and let out from time to time the quiet neutral moan of the occasional Jew. But after a while he stopped praying, and I felt him looking at me, and that embarrassed me, too.

We left before the end of the service – he touched my shoulder and nodded his head. As we came out again, into the twilight, my father said, ‘OK, now I'm ready for something to eat.' So we stopped at a Chinese restaurant which had an early-bird special that included the crispy duck.

It was dark already, dark enough for the street lamps to cast their glow, by the time we caught the train home. Just after eight o'clock: a real November night, with the commuters hurrying and withdrawn at once, on their way to the suburbs and the duties of the weekend. Whatever I had felt in the course of the day, awkwardness, love, enthusiasm, had turned a little sourer by this point. I sat across from my father with my eyes closed and my cheek against the window. As we cleared the sprawl of
Munich, I could hear the train change speed. The noise of it was oddly comforting and made a compartment of the space around us: the conversations of the other passengers seemed to reach us through a thin wall.

After a while, my dad said, ‘Around this time, the jet lag kicks in and I feel wide awake.'

I lifted my head and looked at him. ‘I tell you, I slept better last night than the night before.'

He didn't respond for a minute. My father wasn't used to shaving every day, and a smear of stubble had spread across his cheeks and along his neck; he rubbed it with his fingers. ‘You seem to have gotten yourself in pretty deep here,' he said at last.

‘What are you talking about. She's a nice girl.'

‘They're all nice girls. This one has a kid.'

I thought of saying, ‘Not my kid,' but it struck me as a little childish; then I said it anyway.

‘She is for now.'

Shortly after this I fell asleep. He woke me outside Landshut, by resting his hand on my forehead, and for a moment I felt the strange urge to reach out towards his face. ‘Almost there,' he said. I was deeply confused with sleep and stood up suddenly to look for my bag on the overhead rack. It wasn't there, of course, but I had spent most of that summer traveling on trains and carrying what I needed in a gym bag.

We stepped out into a cold night; the station made a tunnel for the wind to push through. My father said, ‘If you like, I'll pay for a cab; you're tired enough.' This went
against his principles, but there were no taxis, and we ended up walking ourselves warm: along the fields, and through the new developments; into the old town and up the hill to my apartment. I let him in, then picked up a change of clothes and went over to Anke's place.

It's one of my father's more surprising virtues that he doesn't repeat advice, and he didn't bring up again my affair with Anke. He even managed not to ask me if Hadnot knew about it, probably because the answer seemed obvious enough. Anke pretended she didn't care, which left all the worrying to me. ‘Don't tell him,' I said, whenever the subject came up. She would shrug and nod.

My relationship with both of these people involved keeping secret something shameful about myself. I had failed to tell Hadnot that I was going out with his wife, and I had failed to tell Anke that I used to watch her from my bathroom window. What was shameful in both cases seemed the same. There was something detached about me – not so much manipulative as impersonal. I treated people as if I had no effect on them.

This was the judgment, or some version of it, anyway, that I suspected my father of making, of keeping back. The day after our trip to Munich we had a home game against another mid-table team, Breiten-Güßbach. When I arrived with my father at the sports hall, a TV van with a Munich license plate stood in the drive. Two young men unloaded equipment from the back of it.

‘I didn't know you guys were on TV,' my father said. I didn't either.

There were three or four rental cars parked beside it; more Munich plates. The crowd itself, when the game began, looked no bigger than before, but I spotted a new element in the stands: middle-aged men in sports jackets, some of them unusually tall.

Hadnot started on the bench beside me, with the kid Darmstadt on my other hand.

‘I hope we lose bad tonight,' Darmstadt said. I gave him an odd look, and he turned to point behind him among the spectators. ‘Or win bad. I don't care, so long as I get to play. My mother has come tonight for the first time.'

I saw a thin-shouldered woman, slightly stooped, with her son's boyish angular face, holding a program on her lap in two hands. My own father sat a few rows further down and had already struck up a conversation with the guy in the seat next to him: one of the sports-jacket-wearers. I thought, he used to drive a long way to watch me sit down, but he never came this far before.

The TV crew set up at the end of our bench, and I spent much of the first half pretending not to look at them. Hadnot gave Milo a breather, then Milo took Olaf's place, and Karl shifted inside. His jumpshot was off, but nobody could keep him off the boards: he scored most of his points on put-backs. We were down two or three at the break.

Darmstadt spent the halftime shootaround trying to
dunk, just to give his mother something to look at, but the ball kept slipping from his hand. I remembered what my father always told me in high school. ‘Warm up your short game,' he said. So that's what I did, working the elbows back and forth until I could feel the slickness of the nylon on my back. ‘That's it,' I heard him saying, in my mind, ‘That's it.' Back and forth till I was red in the face with anger.

The game stayed close in the second. Darmstadt didn't get in at all – I felt him gradually relax beside me like an old balloon. With five or six minutes left and the score tied, I gave Karl a spell. Charlie came over to me, sweating and palming the sweat out of his eyes.

‘Keep the ball moving,' he said. ‘Box out.'

His face had the concentrated indifference and sincerity of a performer in the midst of his performance. He meant, don't shoot. The first time down, I curled off Olaf and caught a pass on the wing. For a beat or two, I held onto the ball – for the only time all night, the center of attention. Mostly what I felt was anxiety: the anxiety you get when you're about to do something stupid.

My response to that anxiety has always been, not to. Olaf was being fronted so I swung the ball back to Charlie, who drove and scored. Somebody missed at the other end, and Plotzke picked up the rebound but overshot Milo with the outlet. The pass ran all the way to Henkel, who called time out, and when he sent us back on, Karl had replaced me. He hit a three, Hadnot hit a three, and
we pulled away with a minute left. The crowd stood to cheer out the final seconds. Their mood had shifted, and you sensed the subtle elevating effect of the television cameras. Karl raised his hands above his head and applauded in return.

Afterwards, my father met me in the lobby. ‘That wasn't so bad,' he said. ‘You did what they wanted you to – came in tied, played a minute, and came out ahead.'

The same thought had crossed my mind. My father's son in this, though it struck me now as somehow miserly, the way we counted up our small successes. Maybe he felt it, too; he looked a little embarrassed. ‘Anyway,' he went on, ‘there's someone I want you to meet.' He turned around, ‘Where the hell is he?' and walked back into the gym, against the traffic of people, good-natured, buzzing, stretching their legs into the Saturday night.

Eventually we ran him down outside on the stadium steps, having a smoke. One of the men in sports jackets – narrow and pale in the face, with a lane of baldness running between the hair over his ears. He shifted the cigarette to his other hand. ‘Mel Zweigman,' he said, shaking mine. ‘Good win. You guys get a decent turnout for a small town.'

‘You came out here for this?'

He smiled like a crease in the pants. ‘I was telling your father, it's my job. Is there any place to get a sandwich around here at this time? We landed late, and I drove up from Munich this afternoon. When I got here,
the canteen was closed; and now after the game, it's closed again. I don't mind buying you guys a drink – call it a tax deduction.'

There wasn't much near the gym but new-build apartment complexes, so we got in his rental and looked around for something by the river. We ended up at an Imbiss outside a place called the Hollywood Disco, which served Wurst and fries to sweating teenagers coming out of the club for a breather. There was a low wall running along the waterside, and we carried our paper plates through the kids till it was quiet enough to talk, and leaned against it. Normally, I'm not hungry after a game, but I hadn't played much and ate out of restlessness. About eleven o'clock at night, and the beat of the music had nothing to echo against till it reached the far side of the river and drifted back.

Mel did the talking. He scouted for a number of NBA clubs, he said, Cleveland, Orlando, Toronto, Milwaukee, Phoenix – he had a habit of running quickly through lists, as if he felt uncomfortable giving incomplete information. His work depended on relationships, on both sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes he hooked up kids going the other way, too, guys getting cut from the draft camps. Cleveland was where he was based, where he lived, when he got a chance to go home. I had the sense he was something like a free-lance reporter. He got paid retainers for doing particular jobs, but it was up to him also to find the jobs: the players worth scout
ing. He worked with agents, too, and took commissions. Every man was his master, which was just another way of saying (he said), ‘that I'm an independent.' His speech had a salesman's cadences, quick and repeated. Whatever he said, he tended to say a thousand times, and he recited even his personal history with a sort of stale enthusiasm.

Fresh out of Case Western, where he majored in economics, he got a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer covering high school sports. He realized early on you could make more money by spotting the talent than reporting the games; it was only a question of who to sell the information to. He built up contacts among college recruiters and put them in touch with high school coaches. Coverage back then wasn't anything like what it is today. A guy like him could still discover a few gems each year in the graduating classes; these days they've got surveillance on the elementary schools.

Ten years ago, he decided to shift to greener pastures and came over here. Europe now was heating up, too, but he had a decade's worth of relationships to trade on and understood how the club system worked. He never played a minute of high school ball himself. Didn't grow up with a driveway hoop. Couldn't make a free throw to save his life. At Case Western, he managed the basketball team and probably spent thirty hours a week on the job – more than most of the players. He developed along the way a few theories about why some people win
and some people lose. For the past twenty years, he'd gone to two or three basketball games a week in season. Recently, ‘to make it through a hotel evening,' he added them all up: about two thousand games.

Mel continued to smoke and stubbed the cigarettes out on his paper plate, in leftover curry sauce. He smelled like airplanes used to. My father said to him at one point, ‘I don't think much of that Milo kid. Everything he does a little too much of. Shoots when he should pass. Passes when he should shoot. Everything a little bit wrong.'

‘He's OK,' Mel said. ‘He runs around and causes trouble. That's what he's there for. Guys don't like to go up against nuts like him. Am I right?' he added, turning to me.

But my father broke in again. ‘Wait till you see my son play. You think you've seen him play, but you haven't seen him play. He has a strong left-handed move, a very unusual move.'

‘Dad,' I said. ‘Dad.'

But Mel only wanted to talk to me about Karl.

My father and I both wondered if he was some kind of con man – we confessed this to each other after he dropped us home. But I couldn't see any advantage to his taking me in, and my father trusted him for being Jewish. There was also the fact that his presence somehow flattered me. I could imagine already my father telling the story about the NBA scout who flew in to watch me play.

‘Not me,' I would say, demurely. ‘Not me, really.'

My father left a few days later. On his last night, I slept again on the cot in the kitchen – he had an early flight. I dreamt off and on that I was sleeping badly, and that when I got up at last to wake him, he wasn't in his bed. There was a smell of cigarettes coming into the room, and I followed it out to the balcony, where he was standing in the first sunshine and smoking by himself. Now, my father in life has an abhorrence of smoking, which he considers a very stupid habit. It kills you, he thinks, and why would you spend your time on something that kills you? Never mind that in other ways he is perfectly willing to defeat himself.

Anyway, I was shocked to discover him with a cigarette in hand, and when he turned to look at me, he was again clean-shaven. It was like I didn't know him at all. He was a young man and I didn't know him at all. None of the rules he had lived by were binding to me – this was the message he had refrained from giving. Even over breakfast I found it hard to shake off the impression of this dream, and when I saw him into the taxi a few hours later, I hugged him more out of habit than affection. Only when he was truly gone and my apartment my own again did I feel the powerful new absence in my life.