Playing Days (20 page)

Later, we went shopping and bought so much food we needed to take a taxi home. Christmas was still three days off, but we couldn't find any fresh goose at the butcher and eventually settled for a frozen one. Some of the food went into the larder, and some down to the cellar. It smells deeply of the earth underneath stones – among the most vivid of my childhood smells. We were always forbidden from climbing the steps alone. I led Franziska by hand down the corkscrew stairway, telling her to breathe deeply in. She sniffed and looked around her and was glad in the end to be carried upstairs again.

Anke said to me, after the food was put away and we had sat down to another round of cake and coffee, ‘I think you probably didn't play with dolls' houses when you were a child, but I did, and this is much more fun.'

Franziska was building a tower of blocks on the carpet, and Anke pinched quietly the fingers of my hand. As if her daughter might catch us out. Sometimes, among all the other things we were pretending to be and do, Anke and I pretended to be scared of Franziska.

If I had any illusions left about what it meant to inherit a family, they didn't last a day. Franziska refused to nap in her crib, which meant in practice that one of us had to wheel her around in the stroller. Usually, both of us. This, in the depth of winter, with a graveled terrace outside and a rough dirt road above us. It was a ten-minute walk from the house to smooth pavement. Luckily, the weather held, and most afternoons cleared up enough for a good walk. When Franziska was safely asleep, we found a bench to sit on, overlooking wood or water, and talked until we got too cold, and then we kissed. We admitted to being sometimes grateful when the girl woke up. It really was bitter, especially in the wind, and Anke, who was long-limbed and restlessly thin, suffered even from drafts. More than once, she ended up blue in the lips and on the edge of those nervous tears that cold itself can bring on.

Franziska also refused to sleep alone at night. I helped Anke bathe her in the shallow basin of the upstairs shower stall, but then there was little more for me to do but wait. And cook; mostly, I cooked and imagined the progress of the delicate operation going on upstairs. Anke put her in our own bed, among her familiar smells, and read to her with only the hall-light on, then kissed her and gently retreated. Closed the door and waited a minute for the small furtive animal noise of a girl getting out of bed. Then the pressure of her daughter
against the door. Why Anke locked it, I don't know – stupid desperation. After a moment, screaming, and the whole thing began again.

Eventually, she abandoned any hope of getting her to sleep alone and lay beside Franziska on top of the duvet until she seemed sufficiently fast for a quiet escape. But the floorboards were loose, under the carpeting, and the door creaked, and Franziska had an ear cocked and an eye half-peeled for the slightest disturbance, of light or noise. Sometimes, Anke was tired enough that she fell asleep, too, and I had to creep upstairs to wake them both and bring them both down to dinner. Mostly, though, they came down together without me, and Franziska was told to play quietly in a corner if she hoped to stay up with us, which is what she usually did. At nine or ten, she lay down by herself on a comfortable small kelim beside the sofa and fell asleep until we had finished the dishes. Then we all went to bed together.

Anke found her failure to get Franziska ‘down' very embarrassing, especially as she went to bed so easily at home. I don't know how much I minded, though I joked once, by way of reproach, ‘She's keeping her eye on us, that's all.'

‘No, no,' Anke insisted, properly upset by my remark, ‘she only wants to be with us, she doesn't want to be left out.'

There was some truth in this. Franziska wasn't entirely a distraction or a burden. We laughed a lot around her, sometimes falsely, but sometimes also with a deep
good humor I had almost forgotten. Then there was the appetite for physical tenderness and comfort she brought out in both of us. It was a small triumph for me when Franziska, after falling down the flight of broken steps to the garden, stopped crying in my arms. She weighed about thirty pounds at the time. I said to Anke afterwards, a phrase that tested to the limit my childish German, ‘People are much more consolable in small portions.' But you might tell such stories about all children.

My mother once asked me to describe her, over the phone. ‘It's like she's always acting in a silent movie,' I said. Her gestures and way of walking suggested struggles and feelings much larger than herself. For example, she often imitated her mother's interactions with me, pulling at my hand, etc. and when Anke tried to do the same, would shout and push her off. She asked to have her picture taken with me and smoothed the hair off her forehead in preparation.

But Franziska was a slow talker. Certain phrases came out perfectly formed and clear, May I go down, and so on, but she played around with words very little and didn't trust herself to say what she didn't already know how to say. She wanted to be correct in everything. Occasionally, I insisted on speaking to her in English, out of some curious loyalty to Hadnot, and refused to answer or respond to anything but English. No and Thank you was as far as I got, though these words seemed to stir up associations in her, and she offered them to me somberly, as if she understood how gratifying her condescension
was. No, thank you, No, thank you – her English accent was just like her mother's.

Anke also found it hard to avoid comparisons. The house in Flensburg has a kid's bat and a saggy old softball in one of the cupboard benches. On a cloudy afternoon, a little warmer than the days preceding, I carried bat and ball into the garden and tried to teach Anke to hit, without much success. But she liked pitching to me and watching the ball skitter off in the yellow grass – so much so, that she refused to let me go inside, until Anke came out with a cup of heated milk.

‘You are just like Bo,' Anke said to me. ‘You don't mind doing something over and over again.'

His name came up occasionally, and more than I wanted it to. But Anke couldn't help herself. Some thoughts need lancing from time to time, otherwise they begin to ache. There was something flattering in the comparisons, which I understood – Hadnot was the guy she married, after all. But I saw the unflattering angle, too. Anke more or less admitted to me that she had ‘jumped on' the first foreigner who came her way.

‘You mean, I'm the second?'

But I was also German, it wasn't as simple as that. Sometimes she liked to pretend that we were just the same; sometimes she liked to imagine that we were separated by an ocean of differences. Which weren't very hard to find, once you started looking for them, even if you didn't count Franziska. I told her what my mother used to say: that of all the people in the world, she feels
most comfortable around American Jews. ‘This from a German girl who grew up in the war.'

‘But your father,' she said, ‘must also have had his reasons for liking German girls who grew up in the war.'

‘He liked one of them, but it cost him something. His family tried to have him committed.'

‘I don't understand,' she said.

‘Because she was German; because she wasn't Jewish.'

‘I don't understand,' she repeated.

Again and again, we went over our first meeting on the train to Munich, and I also talked about the synagogue I sometimes attended and the evening I spent with Olaf's family. Anke knew Olaf a little, so I told her a story about him.

Once, coming back from another Friday night in town, I spotted him with a white girl standing outside the second nightclub in Landshut. This appealed to a slightly more hard-core element than the Hollywood. (I knew this, not because I had been inside, but because it called itself The Hard Core and refused to admit anyone under eighteen.) Around midnight – a dripping, dispiriting evening that seemed colder and colder the longer you stayed out in it. Even so, a queue had built up outside the club, with a bouncer at the door, the kind of fat-bellied man who has to lean back to keep his balance.

Olaf and the girl stood outside the cordoned line. She was haranguing him; otherwise I would have stopped to say hello. A bus shelter standing between them and the
sidewalk meant I could listen in safely to their conversation. So I listened and pretended to wait for a bus. Olaf had promised he could get her into the club, though she was only seventeen, and she had got all dressed up expecting a night out. Now she was standing out in the fucking cold with nowhere to go. Olaf had nothing much to offer in response but ‘I know' and ‘I'm sorry.' If he knew and he was sorry, she said, why did he promise he could get her in when he couldn't? He got a girl in before, he explained at last. Why don't you take her, she said, if you like her so much?

‘Maybe the other girl was black,' Anke suggested. ‘Nobody cares about two black lovers.'

After a minute, I had heard enough to be sick of all three of us and walked on. Even so, I turned around to get a better look at the girl. Olaf, towering over her, had his back towards me. Her eyes were heavily made up, and she wore the type of fashionable clothes that poor people spend a lot of money on. A tweedy miniskirt that showed off her pale long thighs, covered in goose pimples. Bright knee-high socks; a lamé blouse. A tiny handbag written over with gold lettering. ‘The kind of girl,' I said to Anke, ‘whose main or only expression of ambition is the way she looks.' I had to resort to English for this line, and Anke asked me to repeat it, and afterwards repeated it carefully back to me in German.

She knew just the kind of girl I meant, she said. ‘I was that kind of girl, before Franziska. Maybe I still am.'

‘No, no,' I said, meaning . . . but I'm not sure what I
meant. Anke had real style, even I could see that, and I was beginning to understand this wasn't a quality one should lightly dismiss. With a part-time job and a three-year-old girl, no help at home and unhappy parents, to turn yourself out as she did every day showed more than just an eye for fashion.

For Christmas Eve, Anke wanted to put on ‘a show' (like many Germans, she larded her speech with the odd English phrase), for my sake as well as Franziska's. I grew up in one of those Jewish households where a tree is lit for Christmas, too, and presents exchanged, but for us the whole business was a celebration of the German side of our family, and we sang German carols and used real wax candles instead of electric lights. Germans eat dinner on the twenty-fourth. She took over the cooking herself and sent me down to the beach with her daughter.

I still found it difficult to pass more than ten or fifteen minutes alone with her; after that, I ran out of games to play and got tired of roaring or hiding or throwing her around. Somberly then, we ventured farther afield, as far as the harbor, where my grandfather used to keep a boat, and wandered among the echoing piers looking at the funny yacht names and listening to the clanking of loose stays. I told her about the nights my cousins and I slept over in the cabin, with the boat still moored; how the jellyfish glowed in the water. So we looked for jellyfish. There aren't many in winter, but we found a few, breathing slowly with the waves, and I remember saying
to one of them, in the deep, hokey voice you use with children, ‘You seem to be in pretty deep there.'

Another fifteen minutes gone.

The afternoon was clear and pale and consequently very cold. The sky seemed almost unlit and gave way to darkness by imperceptible degrees. By four, when we turned back again, the coast path was as black as the sea, and we were both so frozen and shrunk inside ourselves that I carried Franziska home just to warm up.

As soon as we reached the terrace, we could see the Christmas lights. The day before we had bought a tree together, from a nearby farm, and dragged it back along the beach. Anke had secretly phoned my mother, who told her where to find candles. The table was laid, and while I admired everything, Anke carried in the food: a pot of potatoes, still steaming when I lifted the lid; a pot of red cabbage. The goose was almost finished in the oven. Anke had set the presents out on each of our plates. Franziska's spilled over on to the table as well, and I spotted among them the shape of the recorder I had brought with me from Landshut to give her. Anke had wrapped it. She seemed as nervous as a performer after the curtain on first night; very pleased with herself, too, wearing my mother's apron, and hurrying back to the kitchen from time to time to check on the bird. The oven had been on all afternoon and the house for the first time that week seemed properly warm. After the goose was carried in, and cooling on its tray, Anke turned off the
table lamp and we looked at the tree together, shifting in its own light. Then we turned on the lamp again and one by one blew out the candles before eating.

She was glad my family put up a tree for Christmas, she said, but she wanted to know what else I celebrated, as a Jew. For much of the dinner I found myself rehearsing half-forgotten Sunday school lessons, about Moses and Judah Maccabee. I told the story my father likes to tell, how he once came in to my elementary school to explain Hannukah to the class. Afterwards the teacher thanked him. How nice it is, she said, to learn how other people celebrate Christmas. Then I explained to Anke why my father found this funny. When the meal was over, we unwrapped presents. I gave Anke a necklace, made of alternating silver and green stone, which I had picked up in a farmer's craft shop on one of my bicycle rides.

‘Necklaces fit everybody,' I told her. This seemed, as she put it on, not quite the right thing to say.

Afterwards, she led Franziska up to bed and I cleared the table and made a start on the dishes. She promised to be down soon. ‘Just once,' she said, ‘I want an evening alone with you.'

When the pots were all clean and dripping on the counter, I listened at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes then put on my overcoat and shoes and headed for the beach. The night was so dark I had to pause at the top of the slope until my eyes adjusted and I could
make out the color of stone steps amid the dirt. Dark but not quiet: I heard, opening the garden gate, the deep, insistent beat of some digitized bass line, more vibration than sound.

There are only two walks to take, as my mother said, towards the pier or harbor, and since I had spent the afternoon at the harbor, I made for the pier. It is known for some reason locally as the Big Bridge and extends outwards from the wide stretch of sand at the eastern end of the bay, where the water is too shallow to swim in but good for children. In summer, this beach gets very busy and colorful with towels. A playground abuts it, on the landward side, and the city has set up a couple of poles in the sand for volleyball nets. I noticed as I walked that some teenagers had stretched a line between the poles and hung a disco ball off it, the cheap plastic kind you find in toyshops. They had also pushed a litter-bin under the ball and started a fire inside it.

I sat down on one of the benches lining the footpath and watched them. The kind of scene I was never a part of in my own youth: ten or fifteen kids, all of them with beers in hand or something to smoke. Their voices carried to me, as voices do on a beach, between the beats of the music, though I couldn't make out much of what they were saying. A teacher's name came up from time to time: Herr so and so. Sometimes they danced. Mostly it was the girls dancing, briefly, by themselves, before a boy strode heavily over and pushed them into the sand. After a while one of them spotted me. I saw her pointing
me out to someone else and was suddenly flushed by a sense of shame, not unmixed with stupid fears and a dim association of these girls with Anke. Maybe because I first saw Anke from the darkness of my bathroom window.

Two or three of them began waving at me, and calling something – ‘Do you want a beer?' – and I had the strong, childish conviction that if I didn't move the trouble would go away. They were making fun of me, for watching them; it was a joke, the idea that I could join in. ‘Are you shy?' one of them called, with a smile in her voice. ‘Don't be scared.'

After a few minutes, feeling very young, I braved the laughter of the teenage girls and walked home. Of course, no one laughed; they had forgotten me. Anke was waiting in the sitting room, upset if not yet angry.

‘I'm sorry I took so long,' she said. ‘Where have you been? Well, at least, we can have a few quiet hours together.'

But the color of the evening had somehow changed. We sat on the couch together and kissed, but Anke sensed my reluctance and suggested a game instead. On Christmas Eve, as a girl, she always played games. ‘There are games in that cupboard by the dinner table,' I said, pointing, and she spent a few happy minutes looking through them. But there was something settled and heavy in my mood she couldn't shift. What had happened on the beach was too vague and ridiculous for me to mention, but I couldn't think of anything else to talk about. Also, Anke, in my thoughts, was lumped together with those girls.

Eventually she said, ‘You are just like Bo. You only talk because you want to.'

‘Isn't that what everyone does?'

‘No, most people just like talking. They don't have to think about it.'

Shortly afterwards we went to bed.

A few days later we took the long train home again. My slight withdrawal also cleared the way for certain necessary conversations, which we had been putting off. Anke asked me if I intended to play another year. I didn't know; it depended in part on whether the club would re-sign me. She asked me if I would consider moving in with her, or if I could imagine in the future such a thing happening. My brother had moved in with Martha only after five or six years, and even then they drifted apart afterwards. The problem was they began too young.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘but you are not your brother.'

He's a little shorter, I joked, and can't go left.

She accused me of playing games with her, so I shot back, ‘Who was it talking about dolls' houses earlier on?'

‘That's just what I mean,' she said inconsequently. ‘You act as if none of this matters very much.'

But we also spoke more calmly and sensibly about other things. Her marriage, for example. On the last night, Franziska went to bed quietly by herself, and Anke and I stayed up late talking, openly, as strangers
sometimes do. ‘He was very sure of himself, of me,' she said. ‘I was quite unhappy before he came, and after he came, too, and found it hard to resist him. At first. When I was shy of him, I was still in love; but when I wasn't shy of him anymore, I don't know how much was left.' She added, after a moment: ‘I think I was shy of him for about a year.'

‘What happened after that?'

‘Franziska was born.'

‘Is that really why you got married? Because of Franziska?'

There was a silence, which lasted about a minute, while she took this in. To break it, she said, ‘You ask me that as if it would explain everything.'

‘It explains a certain amount.'

With a curious and affecting tilt of her head: ‘What does it explain?'

‘How little you see of each other – and for no good reason I can tell. How easy it seems for you to walk away, even with a child. If it was . . . an accident from the first all of this makes sense.' She said only, in a kind of undertone, ‘I am happy it is easy,' but I was still talking and she waited for me to finish. ‘But I don't see why you would be embarrassed about telling me. Isn't this the kind of thing that happens all the time?'

‘Yes' – she had got her color back – ‘to poor stupid little girls. To the kinds of girls who smoke cigarettes outside McDonald's all their lives. Even with their strollers.'

‘Not just to them.'

Somehow this new angle on their relationship comforted me. At least I could assign to the strangeness of their marriage and separation a reasonable cause, and one which played to my suspicions of adult life – that adults weren't particularly good at it. Or not good enough; that's why they ended up the way they did. So I said, ‘What I don't understand then is why Bo still cares so much about staying together. If it was an accident in the first place.'

‘Does he care so much?' And she went on: ‘He is very conventional. If his father has stayed married, he wants to, too. Also, it is like basketball with him. He hates losing. He thinks, all I need to do is practice more. What do you want me to do? I will get better. I tell him, sometimes it is still no good.'

Something about the way Anke held herself then moved me very much. Her small pretty face on its long neck, with her faintly slanted eyes – an elfin effect she liked to exaggerate with make-up. Pretty and brittle she looked; somewhat consciously brave. Look, she seemed to say, how I expose myself for you. There were times I felt that all my reservations about her were really only the hesitations you suffer from in the face of something inevitable, that they would all be resolved as soon as I gave in to it. Maybe, in fact, we had already fallen in love, and this is what it's like. Tell him, she had said. I would have preferred her to use the past tense.

Later I discovered how much she was still capable of keeping from me. Anke had known all week that Hadnot's contract would not be renewed, and that the club had asked her to move out of her apartment by the end of January.