Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  Charlie tried to find other means of getting his own back. Once, on a break, he saw Hadnot back-pedaling and led Karl with a lofted pass just shy of the rim. Hadnot took Karl’s legs out – he ended up on his rear five feet behind the baseline – then walked straight over to pick him up. The Kid was too dazed by the violence of the foul to retaliate. He had become used to my defensive tactics, which operated more or less on the principle of appeasement. I’ll let you score if you don’t hurt me. Maybe it pleased Henkel to see Karl’s mettle tested. As it happens, he gave into bullying as quickly as I did, though Hadnot’s example inspired in all of us a few stubborn and rebellious gestures.

  He had told me to stick my knee into Milo if he tried to go baseline and that’s what I did. ‘Junge, Junge,’ Milo complained each time, with a great theatrical frown on his face, as if he smelled something rotten. Until I caught him just above his own knee where the muscles of the thigh begin to tighten. He collapsed in a heap and came up limping with his arms stretched out for my throat. ‘Cold cock’ him Charlie had advised me. What I did was close my eyes and stick out my hands defensively, but these found his sweaty face, so I pushed. It was over in a second. We flailed at each other; one of my fingers might have got stuck in his eye. But Charlie, to my great relief, stepped in to separate us, though Milo made a show of resistance and had to be held back in the end by Olaf and Plotzke. He spent the rest of the night hobbling and taking bad shots.

  We won three out of the first four, though Hadnot began to tire in the second hour and Charlie took on himself the burden of their scoring. Darmstadt couldn’t keep him out of the lane. Krahm, who was stubborn and sharp-elbowed, and Arnold, who was merely clumsy, fouled him as much as they could, but it wasn’t enough. He had a wonderful way of disappearing inside a forest of legs and arms. Speed wasn’t the secret of it. He simply moved between the rhythms of other people and caught the defense perpetually out of step. The basketball itself makes up the beat of the game; it’s easy to become enslaved to it. Like an actor who can turn a line of blank verse into ordinary speech, Charlie had mastered the art of being natural.

  Even his jumper, that awkward irregular invention, began to fall. ‘One at a time,’ he said, as the shots dropped. ‘That’s all I need to make: one at a time.’

  When he wasn’t scoring, he set up Olaf and Plotzke for lay-ins and dunks. ‘Unselfish’ – that was the other thing he called out, at every successful pass. A strange sort of immodesty, another little dig. We finished the night all square. Hadnot, bent double, pulling his shorts over his knees.

  Afterwards, in the showers, Arnold began to sing. Something Italian, an aria familiar from an ice-cream commercial that was running on German TV. He looked very pink and plump in his altogether, very large and very young at the same time. We mocked him for singing, though it more or less expressed what we all felt. A return of high spirits. Hadnot, with his feet still taped, stood perfectly straight and closed his eyes against the fall of water. I could see he was going bald; his hair fell thinly across his forehead. Krahm began to clap his hands in time to the music. He had long arms and long fingers and looked like a string-puppet; the bones of his face and figure had a wooden mechanical correctness. Most of the first team had gone home by this point. Only Olaf had stayed behind to shower – to protect me, he joked, in case Milo was hanging around. Later, as we were drying off, he asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. He could never sleep after practice but stayed up too late with the television on, lying in bed, watching the two o’clock reruns of the twelve o’clock talk shows.

  ‘Are you trying to recruit me, too?’ I asked, and we set off together into the cool clear night, amid the glow of streetlamps.

  9

  A week before the season began, Henkel gave us Friday night off. He sometimes let us out early for the weekend, if (as he said) we had been ‘good.’ The truth was, Olaf once told me, that his family lived in Regensburg, two hours away by car, and he was desperate to get home himself. He had only recently retired from playing. Regensburg belonged to the third division, whose clubs, as a general rule, can afford only one or two full-time professionals. Henkel, in his day, had starred in the first; but he recognized at the age of forty the need for new ambitions and took the Regensburg job as a player/coach because it would allow him to get into management. Landshut was the next step up, and his first year out of uniform, as it were. His wife and two young daughters had stayed behind in case things didn’t work out. The team gave him an apartment near the gym, in the Neustadt, as it was called, and for five nights a week he batched it alone. Which partly explained his insistence on evening practice: he had nothing else to do with himself.

  I sometimes used those free afternoons for going into Munich. It was a ten-minute cycle ride to the train station, across the river and through the flat lands outside town, where the battle between farms and suburbs and industrial estates was still being played out. Eventually I found a route that took me, in that late summer, through fields of high grain; these excursions into the big city offered me really nothing sweeter than that short journey on two wheels. The road was mostly downhill, and I could exercise as I liked the play of new muscles in my legs or let them rest. I have little enough nostalgia for that year of my life, but what I have is aroused most often by trains. Not by the smell of them or the sight of them – just by the waiting involved. I remember very clearly my outlook on the world as I bought my ticket and stood at the platform: lonely, unexpectant, cheerful.

  Nothing, I supposed, would ever happen to me in Munich to change the steady slow course of my days, though it was in the hope that it might that I continued to make my way into the city.

  That Friday Olaf had invited me to dinner at his parents’ house. He had gone up after the morning practice, and I followed a few hours later, after lunch and a nap. It had been raining all week, hot summer rains that left everything sticky to the touch, but the afternoon was dry enough and a little cooler. A low white density of air hung over the trees and looked more like the sky itself than a cloud. The bike shed had flooded and reflected the pale day back at us; I locked my bicycle among a bright multiplicity of spokes. A man in a moustache and tie stood at the cobbled entrance to the train station and applied a long hose to the driveway, spraying the water back into the road. He just paused as I passed him.

  The train was fuller than usual but I managed to find a seat at one of the dining tables, facing the wrong way. I didn’t expect to stay the night and had brought nothing along but my book, a taped-over copy of Three Men on the Bummel from the local library. Also, folded in the pocket of my jeans, a leather yarmulke.

  On my first trip to Munich, I looked up the neighborhood where the Jewish side of my family once lived: Schwabing, an area that has now become fashionable. It may always have been, though I doubt very much whether my great-grandparents were among those progressive Jews whose spiritual and intellectual experiments gave to the culture of turn-of-the-century Germany its radical and modern tone. No, I suspect, from what I know of that side of my family, that they had always been argumentative, curious and entrepreneurial, but essentially conservative people. The tall streets of stuccoed apartment blocks, as I wandered among them for the first time, conveyed a sense of pleasant cosmopolitan comforts: wrought-iron balconies adorned by flowers and bicycles; and behind them, tall French windows, which always suggest to me breakfast and newspapers and dressing gowns, and idle rainy days. There were still bakers among the shops that occupied the wide ground floors of the apartment buildings, not to mention newsagents, tobacconists and restaurants dark with potted plants.

  My father had told me the street number of the block his grandparents lived in, and I spent a very happy Friday afternoon trying to track it down. It was a long street, leafy, curving, cobbled. But the numbers must have changed; at least, I couldn’t find theirs.

  What I did find, or rather, stumble across, was a fat young man with a machine gun at his hip, standing guard outside an otherwise unremarkable doorw
ay on one of the quieter side streets. I had spent two years of my childhood in Berlin and knew what he signified: there was a synagogue inside.

  My own relationship to Jewishness has never been straightforward. My mother is not only German, but Christian. Though I was raised as a Jew and bar mitzvahed (by a rabbi who snuck to his car during the party afterwards to check the radio for updates of the Texas-Oklahoma football match), my knowledge of German and the war stories I listened to at bedtime, of deprivations and narrow escapes, belong to the Christian half of my family history. When I got to college, something ambiguous about my claim to Jewishness prevented me from stopping by Hillel on a Friday night, or showing up to high holiday services. Lots of college students drift away from their religions, just as many turn towards them again. I suppose I was always likely to be one of the drifters, too much of a mongrel to take comfort from a sense of community. But there was a time, around my fifteenth birthday, when I remember wanting just such comfort – when I encouraged my father to light a candle on Friday nights and say a few words in a language that has remained to me incomprehensible.

  Shabbas, I guessed, is what they were celebrating inside. A man at the door in a black suit and tie asked me for some kind of identification. I took out my driver’s license. The irony, of course, is that the name of a Jew, if not Jewishness itself, is passed down from father to son. I had inherited both his name and his face: narrow, angular, a little hungry-looking. Markovits and a strong nose were enough to get me in. Another young man, this time in a tallis, which he wrapped around himself in a cozy, almost feminine manner, offered me a choice of yarmulkes from a wicker basket. I picked out the leather one for its heaviness, since I didn’t have a clip, and ducked under a low doorway into the red dusk of the synagogue itself.

  All I could see by the light of a stained glass skylight was old men and not very many of them either. Rows of wooden benches, with an aisle down the middle, had been set up under the simple ark, which stood open. The men were davening in front of it, tirelessly, and the comfortable repeated motions of their backs and heads reminded me strangely of one of the warm-ups Charlie used to make us do before practice: rolling from toe to heel and back again, in order to stretch the Achilles tendon and strengthen our calves. In fact, my knees and ankles began to throb a little as I joined them, with a bent head and my hands clasped in some embarrassment across my stomach. I had hoped to sit down.

  It was their voices that kept me going, the low continuous echoing voices of their prayers, which afflicted my own throat with aching sympathies. Their prayers were different from the ones I’d grown up with, softer, more sibilant, and the cadence of their chanting seemed older and less musical. Even so, something about the blind urgency of their singing, which wasn’t quite singing, seemed familiar. The Sunday school I used to go to, until the class times interfered with football season, treated Hebrew as a language to be repeated rather than understood. I had no doubt that the men rocking on their feet in front of me could speak Hebrew, but the words they chanted had broken down into something more basic than meaning: into tones and beats.

  By this point in the preseason everything ached, not least my heart, with homesickness and the sense of failure. Exhaustion had on me the effect of sentimentality – I began to cry.

  Nobody noticed. In any case, such a congregation probably had enough to grieve about; they wouldn’t wonder too much at a few tears. The Holocaust had always struck me, in my American childhood, as a symbol of something terrible: both of the evil people were capable of committing and of the suffering they were capable of enduring. It seemed so powerful as a symbol. For the first time it struck me as a fact, which made it much worse.

  Most of the men before me were survivors; they must have been roughly my age at the end of the Second World War. Their parents might have known my grandfather’s parents – might have tried to dissuade them, a generation before, from emigrating to New York. Munich had once had a prominent and lively Jewish community, but most of the synagogues were destroyed in the war along with the Jews who had prayed in them. This makeshift temple had been carved out of a postwar apartment block, hastily erected in the gap a bomb had made between the taller, older and grander buildings on either side. The first and second floors had been removed. All that was left of them was a narrow gallery running along three of the walls. It was there the women prayed. I spotted them for the first time, leaning over and looking down, when I finally had a chance to sit.

  I suppose the men there were as various as any other set of old men, but to my eyes they seemed mostly short and a little fat. It was something of a relief, after a week devoted to the perfection of the body, to spend an hour or two among people who had long ago accepted the eccentricities of their own. Besides, I didn’t want to understand the prayers; incomprehensibility was a part of their charm. We bowed and ducked and shouted and mumbled. Sport is the art of repeating meaningless and tiny acts: I liked the idea of a God who required a similar duty in his people.

  In fact, it was the idea of that God, presiding over his dying congregation, which I developed in the hour or two of each service, and which kept me coming back. Success didn’t matter to him. (It was hard not to imagine a him with the women sequestered above.) Bad luck and losers were also among his creations. He did not intervene. The business I was in depended on percentages and probabilities, but I had never seen so vividly demonstrated, by the men who had survived to reach that shabbas, the terrible operation of chance.

  Of course, this is just loneliness talking. Loneliness theorizes. The truth is, it was a place to go and sometimes sit down in a strange city on Friday evenings among people who seemed familiar, and who accepted me. I kept (or stole) the yarmulke they had given me and remembered to bring it along whenever I got the train into Munich, just in case.

  Olaf’s parents lived in Schwabing, too, and I wondered whether I had time, before dinner, to stop in on the service. What surprised me is the mild rush of disappointment I felt at the thought of missing it. I had taken the soft leather cap from my pocket and begun to twine it in my fingers.

  The train was making local stops: young farmers from Bruckberg, from Langenbach, got on. A Friday night crowd was heading into the city, in clean jeans and buttoned shirts; a few of them had already opened tall cans of beer. I began to feel a little self-conscious and stubbornly resisted the urge to put the yarmulke back in my pocket. It might misrepresent me, as the kind of Jew who ordinarily wore one, but that wasn’t the thought that made me a little uncomfortable.

  Not that I had ever experienced anti-Semitism in Germany. The Germans of my acquaintance were much too afflicted by their parents’ history to acknowledge even that Jews existed – I mean, as a group with distinguishing features. ‘We’re all the same’ was the lesson they had too faithfully learned. But the Germans of my acquaintance were mostly northern and middle-class. I wondered if Bavarian farmers might show a different curiosity. At the same time it struck me as a measure of my loneliness that I could waste any headspace on such fantasies. Not only headspace: I glanced around to see if anyone was staring at me.

  Nobody was, of course; but then, a girl in one of the backing seats across the aisle gave me a sympathetic smile. My first thought was to hide the yarmulke again. My second, that she looked familiar. She carried her small head with great assurance on a long neck; she had freckles and sandy hair, and blue, slightly unblinking eyes.

  Just as I recognized her, with a hot blush of shame, she leaned over and said, ‘Do we know each other? I have been trying to catch your eye since Gündkofen.’

  She was the girl from the window, and I wondered for a second if she had seen me spying on her. ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ I said. ‘At least, in person.’

  In fact, that doubt stayed with me for the rest of our conversation: that she knew I sometimes watched her preparing for bed. There are girls who might be flattered by such attention, who might think they deserved it. It’s not entirely to her credit that she gave me the i
mpression of being one of them. She seemed very sure of herself, of her looks, for one thing, and treated me with a kind ironic condescension that suggested she knew my secret. But then, pretty girls often have that air. The secret they can be sure of guessing is that young men, however shyly, are attracted to them.

  ‘Are you very famous, then?’ she said, smiling. There was a seat free next to her, and she began to pat it, nervously enough. ‘Is that what you’re saying? Would I have seen your picture on TV?’

  She was teasing me, I thought, so I said, ‘Not yet, but maybe in the newspaper.’

  At which she clapped her hands together. ‘You don’t mean the Bauernblatt? I work for the Bauernblatt.’

  ‘Yes, that’s probably what I do mean.’

  ‘No, but I have seen you more – personally than that.’ After a pause: ‘Do you live on Kardinger Weg, in one of the apartment blocks?’ It was cruel to tease me this way, if she knew, but she went on. ‘That must be it then. You see, I live there, too. We’re neighbors.’ And she held out her hand, stiffly, across the aisle. ‘I’m Anke.’

  To reach it, I had to stand up, and afterwards, it seemed as easy to sit down beside her as return to my seat. She had noticed the yarmulke in my other hand and took it from me, a gesture that annoyed me only when she put it on her head. One can grow tired of the presumptions of pretty girls.

  ‘It will be simpler for me to wear it on the way home,’ she said, ‘after I get my hair cut. That’s why I’m going into Munich, to get it cut. Nobody in Landshut understands my hair.’

  Such talk came easily to her, self-mocking and boastful at once. After a silence, which I did nothing to break, she took a fistful of her own hair in hand and asked, ‘What do you think? Should I cut it all off?’

  ‘Why do you want to cut it at all?’

  ‘Are you very Jewish?’ She had grown bored already of her own self-absorption.