Playing Days (22 page)

After a moment, he said, ‘Ah.' And then: ‘Are you looking to convert as well? Is that what this is about?'

But Anke broke in. ‘I don't understand. Why should he convert? He is already Jewish.'

I could only look away while he answered. ‘I don't
want to say, some people are more Jewish or less Jewish. But as far as we're concerned, Jewishness is passed down through the mother. And according to this thinking, your friend is no more Jewish than you are, no matter how Jewish he feels. I should add, this is a common reason people choose to convert.' For the first time I felt the difference between him and the young academics I had met at those law school parties: the religious difference, which allowed him to treat certain subjects without irony, a useful skill. ‘Conversion itself can be a rewarding process, which puts you in touch with aspects of your culture you had forgotten or in some cases never known. And it can be especially rewarding for a couple to undertake it together.'

Anke turned to me and made me look at her. I feared she would think that I had intentionally made a fool of her, for reasons it was only too easy to guess; but instead she saw something else. That I was just as adrift as she.

‘Tell me again why you want to do this?' the rabbi asked, in a professionally tender voice I found surprisingly moving. Even at that stage in his career, he had seen something of the variety of human troubles; our situation was not unusual.

‘I only wanted to make it easier for him. But I think I make it harder.'

She seemed on the edge of tears but unreproachful, and afterwards she told me, over dinner, she felt only very sorry for us both. (Then she added, ‘I did not like the way he kept saying Jew, as if it was such a wonderful,
strange thing.' She expected this to enlist my sympathies and did not notice that it failed to.) When we came out into the air at last, out of the backroom corridors and stained-glass hall, past the man with the gun, the afternoon had darkened and you could feel the homeward pull in the foot traffic, even in the cars on the street. Then Anke did a sweet thing. She took my arm in her hand and said, ‘I feel terrible. Let's go spend some money.'

Hadnot's departure had an effect on my professional life, too. I got to play more basketball. Henkel had no one else to turn to on the bench, if Karl tired or Milo lost his head, and consequently I could count on a good ten or fifteen minutes of action each game. This makes a great difference; I stopped looking over my shoulder. Also, it's possible my father's visit had some influence, and it's possible I had learned to play as Hadnot had taught me to play, angry. Meanwhile, we kept winning basketball games. Five out of six after Christmas, and by mid-February we sat comfortably in second place behind Würzburg in the league table.

It turns out that playing for a winning club is kind of wonderful. No matter what else is going on in your personal life, you're always a little bit happy. Not deeply happy, of course, but as happy as you might be in the first few weeks after buying a new convertible. It's enough on a sunny afternoon to be driving around in it with the top down, to be publicly visible.

One small story from this period. On Wednesday evenings, the local American news channel ran a weekly roundup from the NBA that finished as practice began.
One night we all showed up late: Michael Jordan had just scored fifty-odd against New York. One of the nights he couldn't be stopped, when a game of ten men became an instrument for his individual fancy. We all came to work slightly drunk on him, talking loudly, saying the same things. Shouting over each other, desperate to persuade, though everyone already agreed. ‘It's what I've been telling you,' Milo said, to no one in particular. ‘These people, they are not like us, like you and me. And Michael Jordan, he is not like them.'

After practice, Charlie started a dunk competition. Like a high school prom, it had a theme: the moves of Michael Jordan. Milo tried to launch himself from the foul line. He looked like a man losing speed on a surfboard and ended up on his hip. Everyone tried his luck. Plotzke took three steps in from the three-point arc and dunked without leaving the ground. When Karl's turn came he lined himself up carefully at the far end of the court, measuring his strides in reverse. The warm-up Jordan had gone through at the '88 All Star game to stir up the crowd. Then he set off. A few of us beat time during the run-up, increasing speed as he increased his speed. But the ball slipped out of his palm and he had to pull violently down at the rim, empty-handed, to catch his balance. Olaf said to me afterwards, he was almost relieved. ‘It wouldn't be right,' he said. ‘If even he can do it, what's the point of all this?' I think he meant, this honorable mediocrity.

Most of us followed Hadnot's games in the league newsletter you could pick up from Angie at reception. Würzburg continued to win, but there were days Bo failed to score a single point. I remember the word Milo used, astonished: genullt. It means to zero, or be-nil. Other days he scored thirty. It isn't easy fitting in to a new offense midseason, and like a lot of bench players, Hadnot rolled with the fortunes of his first few shots. If he missed them, he might easily spend the rest of the half watching the game go by; but some days he didn't miss. I found myself getting caught up in his failures and successes and used to hang around Angie after Thursday's practice till the newsletter arrived. Taking drinks from the office fridge and generally wasting the day. When it came I turned first thing to last week's box scores. Bo had become, at that distance, a character, and I felt for him as simply as you feel for any protagonist.

At the beginning of March, I returned from dinner with Anke to find a message from him on my service. Würzburg had a game in Munich at the end of the week, and he intended to stay on a few days to see his daughter. He wanted to know if he could crash at my place. ‘Stick me in the bathtub,' he said. ‘I don't care.'

I didn't call back at first and by the time I saw Anke again, they had worked out their own arrangement. He
would sleep on her parents' sitting-room couch. This had the advantage of putting him on the scene when Franziska woke up in the morning. He could also help get her to bed. I can't say I liked the arrangement, and I suggested to Anke her daughter would find it confusing to have her father in the house again. But I liked even less the prospect of entertaining him myself. My sense of guilt was stronger than my sexual jealousies. Even so, from Sunday onwards I tried to stay out of my apartment as much as possible. Anke and I had agreed not to see each other while he was in town, but I didn't want to hang around the phone waiting for her call.

On the Tuesday, after lunch, I headed back to the gym to work on my shot and found Hadnot there. No one had turned the lights on, and for a minute I stood in the tall twilight of the sports hall watching him, about twenty feet away. He was working hard; his T-shirt, heavy with sweat, hung loose around his neck and shoulders. Harder than I had seen him work. He moved sharply between the lines and chased down each ball in strong steady strides. It occurred to me he was preparing for the playoff in a few weeks' time. Würzburg had already qualified and they were likely to face us, giving him a shot at revenge. Karl was the reason he came back to play in the fall, and Karl was the reason he got cut. But Karl gave him a shot at other things, too: dozens of scouts would come, from the major European clubs as well as the NBA. Hadnot was thirty years old, with a bum
knee and a reputation as a troublemaker. This was probably his last chance of making it into the basketball big leagues.

Of course, whatever he was doing he had done a hundred thousand times before, planting his feet, lining his elbow up and following through. Watching the ball go in or out and starting from scratch. How much would it help him to practice a thousand more? But you do it anyway, just in case, or maybe because you prefer it after all to the real thing. I started to count the makes and misses, then gave up and just counted the misses. There weren't many. He clapped his hands every time a shot rimmed out, but mostly what you heard was just the echo of the ball and the squeak of his shoes, and sometimes, softly between them, his breathing.

There's something about being unobserved that charges the atmosphere. When he noticed me, it seemed to affect him, too. ‘How long you been standing there?' he said.

‘Not long.'

‘Tell you what, since you're here. Why don't you feed me some shots.'

So I did and after a few minutes, he took my place under the net. Some of my childhood friendships consisted of nothing but this: standing around on an empty summer morning, taking turns with a basketball. Not that he would ever have called me friend. Maybe I should have asked about his daughter, but I knew more
than I should have and felt shy of pretending ignorance. Eventually I said, ‘How's life in Würzburg? I follow you sometimes in the newspaper. In the box scores.'

‘Same as it is anywhere else. I get up and go to the gym.'

‘You've had some good games,' I said.

‘I'm a good basketball player.'

To break the silence that followed, I told him, ‘I'm not sure yet what I'll be doing next year.'

We continued to pass the ball back and forth, exchanging shots. For the first time, I felt a little angry towards him. All year long I had shown him nothing but curiosity, but I couldn't think of a single question he had put to me – that any of them had put to me. Hadnot was just as bad as the rest of them, Charlie, Olaf, Henkel, Karl. They gave me advice, they told me what to do, sometimes they even expressed their sympathy. But around them, I was always the one with the questions. I thought, there are worse things than curiosity. Then he said, ‘I hear you're writing a book about me,' and my heart began to beat a little quicker.

‘Where did you hear that?'

He didn't answer and I wondered if Anke had told him anything else. We had agreed not to mention our relationship, at least till the end of the season – until we had come to a decision about it. But Hadnot was sleeping on her parents' couch, and I hadn't seen Anke or spoken to her in three days. He walked up to me and put the ball in my hands, and I turned slightly away from him. ‘How
are you gonna write the book,' he said, ‘if you don't know a damn thing about basketball?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You want me to show you?' he said.

So he did.

There was an old coach at Kansas who opened camp every season with the question, When was the first time somebody really guarded you? Just to make the freshmen scared. Freaks of physical precocity, who had outgrown, in talent as well as height, everyone they knew: parents, brothers, high school teammates. He wanted to remind them: somebody out there is better than you. All year long I'd had the truth of this drummed into me, but Karl was lazy on defense, and guys like Charlie and Milo belonged to the same physical class as I did. What it feels like really to be shut down I had no idea till that afternoon.

We started to play. Hadnot was in better shape than when he left the club. The lazy-footed, strong-arm tactics he used against Karl he had no need of here. I took a hard stride to my right, then cut the ball back between my legs. The same move I used on Charlie at the beginning of the season. Another dribble, and a half-second's hesitation at the top of the bounce. Planting my left foot, I ran straight into Hadnot, who had his chest puffed out like a toy soldier's. Then he brought both hands down hard on the ball and took it away. ‘Got to be strong,' he said. ‘Got to be strong.'

So it went on. By this stage it was clear he was angry, too, and I had a pretty good idea what he was angry
about. Dribbling lightly, advancing, he watched me back off. Just to show there was no point wasting energy, he called out ‘headfake, jumpshot' and I bit on the first and watched the second drop softly in. ‘Ball up,' he said. ‘Winners out.' As soon as I passed it to him, he bent his legs into another shot. ‘Got to be quick,' he said, as the ball touched net. ‘Got to be quick.'

Everything he did, he told me what he was going to do first, and sometimes he told me what I was going to do as well. If you can win so easily there should be no pleasure in it. And to be fair, he seemed to take little pleasure. ‘You gonna write about this, too?' he said. ‘You gonna write about this?' After a few minutes I was too tired to talk, but he kept up his end of the banter until I picked up the ball and started to walk away.

‘What are you doing?' he called.

‘Taking my ball and going home.'

I didn't see him again until the championship game.

There was a two-week break after the regular season finished, and most of us went a little crazy waiting for the playoff. Henkel, for the only time all year, insisted that we wear a jacket and tie on the team bus to Würzburg. (They had the better record, which gave them home court advantage.) Several of the players, including Karl and me, didn't own either, and there wasn't a shop in Landshut that could fit us. So a few days before the big match, Henkel organized a coach to take us into Munich for the afternoon, and we went shopping – one of those strange, light-hearted afternoons that seem unconnected to the days surrounding it.

Milo complained much of the way then found an oyster-colored seersucker jacket that reminded him of Don Johnson from Miami Vice. Nothing fit Karl. Eventually, he picked out something in unlined linen with a few extra inches on the arms, and the saleswoman recommended a tailor who could lengthen it while we waited. Henkel brought out his credit card at the till and paid for all of us.

‘This league is a hobby,' he said to us, ‘but the first division is a job. You should dress like it.'

It's a six-hour bus ride from Landshut to Würzburg. I refused to let Anke see me off, but she spent the night before at my place, and I left her at dawn half-asleep in my bed – an image that stayed with me much of the journey north. We all looked slightly odd waiting at the sports hall for the coach to show up: a dozen oversized men in badly fitting jackets and ties we had chosen ourselves. Somehow impressive, too, and I remember the pride I occasionally felt walking around in a pack. A form of racial pride, itself not very different from the pleasure my mother sometimes admits to taking in the sight of her two tall sons.

Milo was in manic spirits and talked much of the way. I sat one row ahead of him and he kept leaning over to explain things. ‘Young man,' he said at one point, ‘understand this. In the first division, everyone plays on wooden floors!' And so on. He was convinced that a great deal hinged on this game. That the vague drifting quality of his early career had been brought at last to a sharp point.

Olaf finally interrupted him. ‘I played in the first division. It is not so different, except that you spend more time on the bench, and when you do play, you have to do exactly what you're told, otherwise everything goes to shit. There is no room for having fun – the other players are too good.'

‘Yes, but did you play in the Super Liga?' (It's hard to
convey, in cold ink, the childish exuberance of this word in German. It sounds like a jet taking off.) ‘Barcelona, Milan, Athens. Spanish girls, Italian girls, Greek girls. Even if they don't like basketball, girls have a natural respect for TV, for men who are on TV. It is a question of evolution.'

The Super Liga is a knock-out tournament for some of the top European clubs. It runs alongside the regular national leagues, but pays much better, if you win, and attracts more media attention. German basketball players very rarely become household names: if they do, it's because of their performances in the Super Liga.

‘I played in the Super Liga,' Olaf said. ‘Once.'

‘And did you win?'

‘Let me explain it to you. It is called the Super Liga because everybody is better than you . . .'

Outside Ingolstadt, the rains set in and followed us through the forests of Altmühltal, covering the windows so thickly with water I could only see the blurred green of trees. But the noise allowed me to retreat into my own silence, and I thought of Anke and tried to sleep. We arrived under a lifting sky in time for lunch, and afterwards Henkel gave us a few hours off to get comfortable in our rooms.

In fact, I ended up staying with him, at the house of Würzburg's club president, a man named Eberhart. Eberhart was famous in the small world of German basketball and one of the founders of the Bundesliga. He used to teach history and fell in love with the sport in the
sixties during a sabbatical at Berkeley. Everyone called him Herr Professor. His house had a couple spare bedrooms in the basement, which he offered to Henkel, along with any other player who cared to join him. Henkel picked me, because he considered me the most presentable or the most dispensable, I don't know. My bedroom itself was windowless and institutional, with a rugged beige carpet and cheap furniture. It looked like the kind of room strangers passed through. But the house itself was more attractive, modern and full of gadgets. Glass sliding doors opened from the sitting room onto a narrow deck. Below, the townscape glittered like a beach.

I met Eberhart only briefly as I settled in, a tall, elderly, childish-looking man. He shook me by the hand, a firm grip though slightly wet from something, a fact that contributed to the distaste I always felt for the touch of old people. I wondered when he'd last used the bathroom. Then Henkel claimed me for a late afternoon practice and an early team dinner – just a walk-through and a plate of spaghetti.

Everyone was quiet. Even Milo's high spirits had worn off. Henkel and I shared a cab back together, and I squeezed myself against the window and tried not to look at him. There was something about his decent, assured looks that brought out in me a filial shyness. My father once praised a man for being ‘virile, in an attractive way – not in the least a show off.' I was struck by this comment, as evidence of what he admired, and never forgot it. He might have had Henkel in mind.

‘When I was younger,' he said, as the car pulled up, ‘before all the big games I used to think, this might change my life. They never did.' Getting out, he added, ‘But maybe. Maybe.'

Eberhart invited us onto the balcony for a good night drink. He himself always took a glass of mint tea to bed with him, and he offered me the same. Really, it was still too cold to sit outside, even with the door to the sitting room open, but he brought three rugs out and laid them across our laps. He apologized for the smell: his dog used to sleep on them.

For a few minutes we sat looking out at the view, made up now entirely of strings of light. Then Eberhart and Henkel exchanged companionable complaints. Recently, Eberhart had given up jogging; his knees couldn't stand it any more, and even walking up hills caused him pain. ‘You probably don't know it,' Eberhart shifted the conversation, ‘but twenty years ago Herr Henkel used to play for me. I had a short experiment with coaching; it didn't last long.' After another pause: ‘I've never seen anyone who liked winning as much as your coach.'

Henkel said, ‘I would like very much to win tomorrow.'

‘Tomorrow or next year, it doesn't matter. Some day with that young man you will win.'

‘It matters to me. I don't think we can keep him another year if we lose.'

‘Is he as good as that?' Then Eberhart turned to me. ‘A long time ago, I lived in California, outside San Fran
cisco. Sometimes on a Friday morning I used to drive down to Los Angeles just to watch a basketball game. A full day's journey, then back again the next day. I had not many friends at first and such trips were an excuse to look around. I bought a second-hand Ford and learned to drive in one day; in Germany, nobody had a car. A very exciting, lonely period in my life. There were wonderful players then: Gail Goodrich, Jerry West. Oscar Robertson. I never thought in my lifetime anyone would come out of Europe who could touch them. But the day is not far off now; it almost saddens me.' He looked at Henkel. ‘For a few years, I thought that you might be good enough to play in America, but they had a prejudice then against German players.'

‘I was too small. One of my brothers is five inches taller. If I had been born like my brother.'

‘And what about this one?' Eberhart asked, pointing at me. ‘Is he any good?'

‘Yes, a very good Dolmetscher,' Henkel said.