‘I usually bike these roads,’ I said. ‘There isn’t really anywhere to get to. Just a few farms.’
‘I don’t mind driving, day after. Most of me hurts a little.’ After a pause: ‘Maybe she’ll fall asleep.’ As if his highest ambition was just to pass the time with her.
He pulled out and steered us under the tracks again and up the crest of my hill. Reaching the top, we left the city behind us, and thick corn, standing tall as a basketball team, stretched away on either side. The earth it grew out of dry and broken into large clumps. It seemed to me strange, to be sitting beside him, with his daughter in the back seat. My teammates rarely confessed to a private life, unless it involved women. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me along for, unless he really meant, for translation. The few times I had spoken to Frankie, in English, she looked at me with light grey intelligent eyes and said nothing.
We had come through the fields, and I told him to cross over the highway ahead of us and keep going. The farm road followed the curve of the hill down and away. A stand of pines rose up in sharp contrast to the tilled earth and printed a heel of dark brown shade against it. In late afternoon, when I rode there, the shadow stretched over the road, and I felt the double cool of shadow and wind as I coasted down. But now all was grey and dusty in the heat of day.
‘I always get homesick in this kind of weather,’ I told him. ‘You know, in Texas, when it’s really too hot to play, and you shoot for a bit then come inside and cool down, till you get a headache in the air conditioning, then you go out again and shoot a bit more.’
‘I worked on my shot before school,’ Hadnot said. ‘My old man spotted me, over the Caddy in the driveway. That’s why I don’t miss short. If I bounced one off the Caddy it was time for school. Hot days mom made us come in for a shower before heading to class, which was about every day after March one.’
He went to the same high school in Jackson where his father taught and was later promoted to vice principal. But they lived about a half-hour drive out of town. His mother, he said, was a gardener; his father, a tinkerer, and collected old cars which he left on the grass of the front yard and occasionally ‘messed around with.’ Every day they drove in together, and during basketball season, when he stayed after class for practice, they came home together, too. In the spring he played baseball, but the baseball field was a bus ride away in the wrong direction, and afterwards the school bus dropped everybody off, including the kids who lived in the middle of nothing, like he did. But even in spring they got up early and worked on his shot for an hour before breakfast.
‘Did the neighbors complain?’
‘Is she asleep back there yet?’ he said, so I turned around and looked at Frankie, who looked back so solemnly I almost blushed.
‘No, she’s still looking.’
After a minute he went on. ‘Not about the mornings. Sometimes at night after watching a game, I’d go out there. If my team lost, just to work it off. The guy who moved in over the road had a baby. One night he got out his gun and shot off the garage light.’ Hadnot turned on me then with a happy smile; his buckteeth, as they sometimes did, caught briefly on his lip. ‘I guess I’d just about do the same.’
We had come to a junction at the bottom of the valley. Farm roads either side in the middle of cabbage fields, cool and powdery in the light; the next hill rose ahead of us.
‘Doesn’t much matter where you go now,’ I said. ‘Might as well keep straight. You must have wanted to step out into the driveway last night.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind losing so much anymore.’
We followed the road till it leveled out, and below us on the right the landscape briefly appeared: a series of dips and rises, greens and browns, that darkened sometimes almost to purple. I thought I saw in the distance the flat light over a river – the Isar probably, running south to Munich. But then the hedges swelled again on either side of us, and all we could see was the tangled suggestive glimpses of rural summer: between leaves, down lanes. In the next valley, the road passed by a tin-sided barn and then curved sharply with a dirt drive running off the bend.
‘Is this one of those farms you talked about? If she’s not sleeping we might as well have a look.’
A few weekends before I had bought a chicken from the farmer’s wife, whom I vaguely remembered: a short, small-waisted woman with pins in her hair. ‘I came here on a Saturday last time. There’s weddings around here all over the countryside in summer. I must have biked past two or three.’
‘I don’t buy into all that now,’ he said. ‘Making faces when you lose. All that Milo bullshit. I went six for eight and scored fifteen points. In about fifteen minutes. I did fine.’
He stopped and swung the car round and drove slowly over the ridged, gritty surface. Then parked at an angle beside a heap of something pungent covered in tarp and tires. We got out, and I was affected almost physically by memories of my sisters when they were two or three years old, as I helped him lift Frankie from the car. She raised her arms over her head, as children do when they want to be set down, and I felt the narrow cage of her ribs under her armpits. Hadnot tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the opened doors of a barn by the side of the house. There was hay tumbled down inside it, which is what I looked at first; then I spotted over the doorway a cheap plastic backboard nailed in with a bent rim hanging off it.
‘My kind of court,’ he said.
Frankie followed me to the farmhouse, a few paces behind. When I turned back to check if Hadnot was coming I saw her standing like a dancer with her feet together and looking up at me. She rang the bell – I had to lift her just a half foot off the ground. When the door opened it wasn’t the farmer’s wife: this woman was younger and taller and altogether smoother and rounder. Her breasts sloped outwards to either side under a loose-knit jumper, and I wondered if she was nursing. She looked inquiringly up.
‘I bought a chicken here a few weeks ago. Maybe from your mother. It was very good. Ich möchte noch eins kaufen.’
German is my mother-tongue, my first language, but I speak it childishly. Short simple sentiments and sentences. This has an effect on me, on the way I think. I begin to consider the world through the adjectives at my disposal for describing it: warm, cool. Pleasant, uncomfortable. Good, bad.
‘Yes, probably from my mother. We’re all just finishing lunch.’ She looked at me a moment. ‘You know, it’s a Sunday.’
But then Frankie said to me, also in German, ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’
‘Does she want to go to the bathroom?’ Hadnot called. He had found a rubber basketball in the yard, gone soft, and was holding it in his hands. The woman in the doorway stared at us.
‘I want to go with you,’ Frankie said to me, but in the end the farmer’s daughter took her by the hand. Hadnot by this time had joined me on the porch. The front door opened onto a narrow hall, made narrower by the coats piled up on hooks and the boots on the floor. We caught a glimpse of a kitchen behind it, with a marbled linoleum floor and bright wallpaper. Flies settled and unsettled in the hallway.
‘She’s very confident,’ I said, remembering a phrase I had heard women use of other women’s children.
He said, ‘Let’s play H-O-R-S-E.’
Hadnot was wearing a collared cotton shirt, tucked into his jeans, and he untucked the hems of it as we walked over to the barn door. His first shot, from about fifteen feet, hit the back of the iron and came out over the bent front rim. He looked at the hoop as I chased down the ball.
‘It’s low,’ he said. ‘About two inches low.’
I jumped up and dunked the ball, which was very easily palmed, one-handed.
‘Big man, big man,’ he said.
Then I passed it out to him and watched him shoot, standing under the basket to catch the made shots and feed them back. He knocked down about ten in a row this way, unmoving, while we waited for the woman to bring his daughter out. It was hot enough in the sunlight that I could feel the sweat gathering and staining the
neck of my T-shirt, which then grew cool and clung to the skin of my chest. The sense of strangeness returned. After meeting Anke on the train to Munich, I told my mother over the phone about the pretty girl who had introduced herself to me with the line ‘I have been trying to catch your eye since Gündkofen.’ My mother laughed and said something like, ‘I never thought Gündkofen was written into your stars at birth.’ I had that feeling strongly now: that this scene was not written into my stars at birth. That I had come a long way from home to get here, waiting for a girl to come out of the bathroom while I passed a ball back to her father in a barnyard outside of Obergolding.
‘How much English does she understand?’ I said at last.
‘I don’t know. She won’t tell me.’
After a minute the woman emerged with Frankie, who was still holding her hand. From my position under the basket, I could see them pause in the doorway. Hadnot had his back to them and continued to shoot. It was almost like a habit with him – he might have been drumming on the table. He caught the ball, lowered it to his right hip, then lifted his elbow and unbent it, following through with his wrist; and the shots dropped in.
‘Wait here,’ the woman suddenly called, and after another minute reappeared with a boy under her hand, as fair as herself, with the kind of pale yellow hair that sheds a soft light on the face beneath it. He looked about ten years old. He stared moodily at Hadnot, who must by this point have known he was being watched. ‘Will you show me how you do that?’ he said at last.
‘There’s a kid behind you who wants to know how to shoot a basketball,’ I repeated.
Hadnot looked around and saw his daughter still standing in the doorway with them. ‘Tell him to come out here and I’ll teach him,’ he said.
Afterwards, they invited us in for tea and cake. The boy was named Henrik; he lived with his mother in Landshut, but they came out together every Sunday for lunch at her parents’ farm. His mother introduced herself to us as Liza. There were no babies inside, to bawl or suck at her, and the heaviness I had noticed struck me in a different light.
Henrik’s father had been a handball player in his twenties, and Henrik still hoped to grow as tall as him, almost two meters, though he hadn’t shown any sign of it yet. I got the sense that his parents were divorced or separated. There was something about Liza’s excitement at meeting us that suggested the enthusiasm a single mother might feel about the chance to participate in one of her son’s passions.
‘Look who I introduce you to,’ she said, when Hadnot took her boy by the elbow and taught him how to hold a ball, on the upturned palm of his hand, how to follow through. ‘You didn’t expect that when you woke up this morning? For all your complaining.’
We sat in the kitchen, which was rather a dark room – what light there was came in through a window in the backdoor – and even at three in the afternoon, on a summer’s day, the hanging lamp over the table had been switched on. The cake was very good. Frau Taler, the tidy hair-pinned woman I had met before, had baked an apple tart made up of overlapping slices of apple; there was fresh cream from the farm, too. Hadnot and I had several pieces each. I made an excuse of the fact that I had to give so much of my cake away to Frankie, who asked for it, like a bird, with her mouth open, and a little cry of nochmal, nochmal.
It was my job to translate for everyone. Only Liza spoke ein bißchen Englisch. She once asked Hadnot if his daughter drank tea, if she might like a cup with lots of milk in it, and I thought I saw Frankie nodding her head. But when Hadnot put the question to her, she looked at him and didn’t answer, and so she didn’t get any.
There were dozens of flies. They perched on the wax tablecloth and on the plums and lemons in a bowl of fruit; they cleaned their long legs against each other. Frau Taler kept apologizing for them. ‘It is what you get used to,’ she said, ‘when you live on a farm.’
I can’t imagine what these people made of Hadnot; he seemed opaque enough even to me. Was there a local equivalent of the southern man? Probably, and the question at least suggested to me the way he might appear to them. Handsome enough, in spite of his thick features and bad teeth. A little unloved. The T-shirt underneath his dress shirt, which was still unbuttoned, had been washed too often among darker clothes: it had faded from white into a color between pink and grey. Quiet spoken and courteous to women. The kind of guy who turns up reliably to work but is less reliable in other aspects of his life.
‘How long have you lived in Germany?’ Herr Taler wanted to know. He had taken his boots off and rested his large feet on a child’s rocking chair, which he pushed up and down. Liza had gotten her bulk from him.
‘About five years,’ Hadnot said.
‘And what do you think of Landshut?’
‘I guess I’d live just about anywhere they paid me to play basketball.’
I didn’t translate at once. It struck me as selfish, and I wanted him to make nice – to thank our hosts for the cake and the coffee (Hadnot didn’t drink tea) with a few generous sentiments. I had no idea what he expected from the afternoon, but this didn’t seem too bad. We were getting a brief look at real life. ‘But what do you think of the place?’ I asked him. He stared at me, genuinely puzzled. ‘I mean, the architecture, the food, the people.’
‘I married one of them, didn’t I?’ he said.
‘So you must have fallen in love with the place, a little?’
‘I fell in love with her. What do you want me to say? I’m stuck here. Did I plan to spend my life here? No. Maybe if I was a better basketball player I’d have ended up somewhere I like more.’ Finally he added, shrewdly enough, ‘Tell them what you want me to say. The people are friendly.’ So that’s what I did.
Liza put on another pot of tea and Frau Taler pushed to the center of the table the bowl of plums, which were from the tree in the garden. ‘What do you mean, you’re stuck here?’ I asked. We ate and spat the pits onto our cake plates, among the leftovers.
‘What do you think I mean?’
‘You mean, you’re not good enough to get a job anywhere else?’
‘No, that’s not what I mean.’
Henrik wanted to know what the most points Hadnot ever scored in a game was. ‘Fifty,’ he said, ‘when I was in high school. I missed seven shots all game, and I can still tell you where I missed them from.’
But by this stage his daughter had grown restless. She was sitting between me and Liza, on her own chair with cushions piled on it; from time to time she climbed on my knees to reach the table. The Talers kept a house dog, a terrier, and Frankie tried to feed him the crumbs from my cake. He wasn’t allowed any cake, Frau Taler said to her. He would only be sick later and she would have to clean it up; he had a delicate stomach. Frankie threw another bit of cake on the floor next to him. Frau Taler asked her not to, and she giggled, looking at me for approval, and did it again.
I felt sorry for Hadnot – to see the way the rest of us had taken over the management of his child. Maybe he doesn’t mind, I thought. But then Hadnot said to Frankie, ‘If you do it once more, young lady, we’re taking you home.’
She said, Ich will nach Hause – I want to go home, and reached for my plate, so he came around the table, picked her up like a sack and carried her sideways around his waist. He was probably ready to leave anyway. She didn’t scream, which surprised me, but she didn’t help out her father either by clinging on, and he had to let go of her outside the doorway. I found myself apologizing for her as I said goodbye.
‘She is really very pretty,’ Liza said. ‘She must look like her mother.’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t met her mother.’
I remembered to buy a chicken, and Frau Taler went back to fetch one from the ice box. Hadnot was strapping Frankie into her car seat. She was wriggling unhelpfully, and it seemed only decent to give him a little space.
‘How old is she, do you know?’ Liza asked.
Henrik had gone out to the barn and was pushing the ball against the rim. He was trying to shoo
t as Hadnot had taught him to, one-handed, with a roll of the wrist, but wasn’t strong enough – the ball kept brushing against the bottom of the net. I saw the tension playing out in him, between the desire to please, to do right, and the simple boyish urge to throw things. Eventually he gave into that urge and wrapped his arms around the ball and sort of jumped with it, letting go as late as he could. Mostly it flew behind him over his head.
‘Three years, I think.’ And then: ‘Should she be talking more? They have separated, and she lives with her mother mostly.’
‘I think she understands very well what her father says.’
On the way home, whatever had loosened in him closed up again. He drove with a sort of quiet concentration, as if he didn’t want it broken. Maybe he was embarrassed by Frankie’s behavior, his inability to control her or communicate with her. God knows what he usually did on his weekends alone with her. I could hardly imagine how they passed the time. She sat in back with her eyes open and looked, in her new silence, very much like her father. Patient, not particularly happy. Then she fell asleep, and I saw that what seemed sullen or stubborn in her was only the beginnings of sleep.
I wanted to say again how confident she seemed with strangers. To reassure him, partly, but also because I wanted him to tell me something like, No, it was you, she was very comfortable with you. But Hadnot didn’t strike me as the kind of man to play those conversational games.
He said at last, ‘What are you looking at?’ which made me blush.
I had been staring at him and thinking that his is the face she will look for in a lover, when she grows up. After that I watched the countryside go by. The wind had blown away the haze of the day, but a few darker clouds came in on its tail, and these produced, when the sun went through them, an atmosphere of light that looked almost thick enough for you to breathe it in.
To break the silence (I have never been very good at silences), I asked him if he had heard what Karl said to Charlie after the game. I could still feel the blush in my cheeks, as hot as anger. He shook his head. ‘I mean,’ I went on, ‘Karl just repeated what Russell said, but in English. Russell said to him something like, Blacks never could shoot straight. And Karl translated it for him.’
Playing Days Page 10