Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘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.

  25

  I spent New Year with a college friend living in Brussels. When I got back, it took me a few hours to adjust again to the facts of my life: the bed in the middle of my room, the view from my window (of horses in a field, across a road); the prospect of the days ahead. Not to mention, the self-assessment that is our constant companion, and which had shifted slightly over the long hours of the journey home. In Brussels, I was a young man drifting out of university, vaguely ambitious and dissatisfied, with an appetite for talking things through. In Landshut, I was a bench player for a minor league basketball club, who was getting paid more than he was worth. Also, something of a cold fish. And it occurred to me that people become who they are after a process they have some control over.

  At practice the first day back I couldn’t find anyone in the locker room, so I wandered on court in street clothes. Lights off, and the hoops still pinned against the walls; mats left over from aerobics class on the gym floor. No one there either. For a minute or two I nursed the childish hope that I had gotten the day wrong. At reception, Angie, the judge’s wife, was talking to Charlie, who seemed to have dressed up for the occasion in a button-up shirt and jacket. He called me over and rested a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Our turn next,’ he said. ‘Bo’s putting his case to Coach, and then it’s our turn.’

  Frau Kolwitz had decided not to take up the option on his three-month contract, and Charlie wanted everybody to talk it over. The rest of the guys were waiting in what was called the conference room, a windowless office space with blue carpet and blue-upholstered chairs and sofas scattered around. Charlie and I carried in drinks from reception, bottles of Lucozade from the staff fridge. The room stank of cigarettes and the central heating vents. Milo first complained of the smell and then bummed a cigarette from Angie and lit up.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, Henkel and Hadnot came in with a young man I had never met before. He wore a well-cut suit without tie and had the kind of face you see slotted inside store-bought picture frames, handsome without being memorable. Later, I realized this was only a first impression. His curly hairline was receding, and during a brief coffee break, he talked to me about his skiing trip, which he had just come back from, and I noticed on his cheeks the faintly rough, unhealthy reddening of a winter sunburn. His name was Kaspar Schrenkman, and he worked in some vaguely defined capacity for Frau Kolwitz, who was the mother of a friend from school. He didn’t speak any English.

  This partly accounts for the state Hadnot was in. In their private session, he must have relied on the coach to put his case, but Henkel spoke only a kind of basketball pidgin. Rich in words like ‘backdoor’ and ‘zone,’ but not so good for negotiation. I imagine that he more or less ignored whatever he was told to say; that Hadnot retreated into silence. By the time the three of them came in, Bo had built up a head of steam that could be seen in his face. His clothes also seemed to make him uncomfortable. He wore his wedding suit to the meeting; it was his only suit. It surprised me to see him dress up, even for a conference that would decide his future, but athletes learn young at their coaches’ hands a faith in formal uniforms, and are often required to don jacket and tie on game days, from high school onwards. Add to this his suspicion of moneymen and a natural competitive desire to meet an opponent on equal terms. But the suit only made him look nervous. You took from him generally the impression of a muscular middle-aged man suffering under strong constraints.

  ‘Ben,’ he said, as soon as he saw me, ‘explain to this cocksucker what I’ve been trying to tell him. You heard what they trying to do?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Well, tell him.’

  ‘What do you want me to tell him?’

  ‘Whatever I say, that’s what you tell him.’

  And so on. This is how I came to act as Dolmetscher, that ugly German word which describes what it means to be caught in the middle between two languages.

  Hadnot was arrogant rather than boastful. He had a strict if somewhat strange sense of propriety; it didn’t suit him at all to blow his own horn. I mean, it really cost him something to plead his case – it upset his pride, as much as anything else. Only dishonest people try to get their way by argument. Throughout my childhood I had a vivid sense of the private, the significant, the unsuccessful side of life, where self-importance breeds. Where we say to ourselves, don’t they know who I am? But only to ourselves. Hadnot had been forced to ask the question publicly.

  Much of what was said was said in German, and I sat at Hadnot’s side, translating, with Charlie listening in. Milo, always confident in his opinions, explained to Herr Schrenkman that it was ‘self-evidently’ in the interests of the team to keep Hadnot on – adopting the air, which I find oddly charming, of car mechanics, plumbers, accountants the world over, experts and bringers of bad news. Self-evident, in English, sounds high-falutin’, but in German it’s a familiar, comfortable sort of word. Hadnot was our second-leading scorer, you had only to look at the team stats; but there were other things Herr Schrenkman would not have the eye to appreciate. For example, that as a shooter alone, he opened up a great deal of space inside.

  ‘What’s he saying? What’s he saying?’ Hadnot muttered in my ear. And I was embarrassed for his sake to translate praise.

  Olaf simply looked at Schrenkman, who stood perhaps five feet ten in
ches tall in his dress shoes, disdainfully. ‘What have we to say to this man?’ he asked Milo.

  For most of the guys this was a kind of tribal occasion, in which we could enjoy righteously our physical superiorities – over the fattening middle managers who determined our incomes, the cars we drove and the apartments we lived in. Righteously, because we never got our way and would not now.

  ‘Ich verstehe, ich verstehe,’ was Schrenkman’s answer. ‘I understand.’ Nodding his head and smoothing the air with his hands. ‘But he had a three-month contract, and we have no money.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about money, I know they got money,’ Hadnot said, on the half-beat, after one of my translations. ‘The way she lives. Don’t talk to me about contracts, either. We had an understanding. You win some ballgames and we’ll see you through. Well, we’re winning, aren’t we?’

  Another pause, as I explained all this to Schrenkman. At the end he gave me a look that made me suddenly complicit: it said, yes, but why are we winning? Not because of him. Even I know enough to see that. That in this respect someone like Kaspar Schrenkman could see clearer than Hadnot seemed somehow awful to me: what a shameful thing is the personal point of view. I had the impression the others felt the same, and that Hadnot had said the wrong thing. Don’t take the credit for winning, that’s not what you should take credit for.

  Karl, for one, kept quiet the whole way through, and his quiet was a kind of commentary. ‘Don’t look at me,’ it said. ‘None of this matters to me.’

  Hadnot must have noticed the look. In any case, something prompted him to say what we all sometimes want to say in our own defense, the private angry boast we learn to keep down and control, like the sex impulse or any other bodily function.

  ‘I’m the best damn player on this team. I’m probably the best damn player in this shitty league. Tell him that, Ben. Tell him that.’

  Almost blushing, I repeated: ‘He says he is the best . . . and probably the best etc.’ Just the act of translation added a kind of irony to his claim, which made me feel disloyal. Afterwards I wondered, on the strength of the evidence, whether a reasonable man could reasonably believe what he said to be true. Yes, he could, just about. So why did Hadnot seem so exposed? By this point embarrassment had driven everyone else to silence, and he had the floor to himself.

  ‘Let me tell you about these people,’ he said. ‘They don’t give a damn about loyalty. All they care about is what they can use you for. Five years in this god damn league. You think you make it up to the first division one of you guys has a contract here? Come on. TV revenue, magazine promotions. They can buy much better talent than you. All you need is a little more money. A little more money always buys someone better than you. That’s what this game teaches. You playing to get fired, that’s what you playing for. Think about that next time you step on court. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Tomorrow morning I’ll sign a deal with somebody else. There are people in this league who know how to appreciate Bo Hadnot. You all will see me again.’ A nod to Karl. ‘I got my eye on this one right here. Then you can make up your own mind how much money I’m worth.’

  Charlie put a soft hand on my knee. It meant, you don’t have to translate all that. I wish it had ended there, but we had another hour of talking things over before everyone was so angry they really had nothing left to say.

  26

  A week later, he was gone and more or less everything he promised turned out to be true. Hadnot signed on with Würzburg, rejoining old teammates Chad Baker and Henrik Lenz, and moving by this step from third place in the league to first. Of course, he also moved six hours by car from his estranged wife and his three-year-old daughter.

  The most immediate effect on my life was that Anke had to clear out of the club apartment. In the end, she moved home with her parents, about a twenty-minute bike ride away. I helped her clear out, which is how I first came to know her father, one of those retired old men who dresses in a jacket and tie every morning and afterwards does very little else. Most of the furniture belonged to the club, but he packed everything that didn’t into the back of a small sedan, a process which took perhaps an hour longer than it needed to. Meanwhile, Anke wept quietly in her empty kitchen. I left her to cry; it didn’t seem the kind of unhappiness I could console her for, either because I had caused it myself or because it had nothing to do with me.

  Our relationship had changed, that much was clear, though in some ways it only became more conventional. Living at home, Anke could go out as much as she liked in the evenings, even very late, and she often met me after practice for a late drink and something to eat. Her mother was always around to look after Franziska, and so I saw much less of the girl. I missed her, more than I expected to, but I did not miss the air of fraught, responsible adult life she carried with her. Anke and I began to ‘date,’ and it struck me at first as something else to be grateful for, in Franziska’s absence, that dating was less intimate than whatever it was we had been doing before. The smell I associated with my girlfriend was no longer the smell of warm milk. I made conversation with her; we went to movies. Sometimes, we went to bed together, too, and never worried about waking in the night to deal with the kind of insistent childish fear that makes all other emotions and desires seem temporary and insignificant.

  It became clear to me only slowly how unhappy Anke was. What I felt, instead, was that somehow in our relationship I had acquired an advantage. Anke began to depend on me, often sweetly and lovingly, and liked to claim me in little ways all the time – by taking my hand for example, when she met me outside the sports hall, even though I had asked her not to. No one from the club knew about our relationship and we had decided to keep quiet about it. Still, she took my hand. Advantage is an ugly word to use in this context, but I felt it as clearly as you feel, on the basketball court, an edge in quickness or strength. I had freedoms with her that she did not have with me. But they also carried with them a kind of constraint. We were playing a game together, the sort of game you play with kids, when you let them push you to the ground; and I was letting her win.

  As the year wore on, she pressed me more and more over various decisions. The season ended in March, and unless the club renewed my contract, I had nowhere to live all summer. Even if they did ‘pick up the option,’ as it was called, I had nothing to do for five months and no reason to stay in Landshut. Anke wanted to know what my plans were.

  ‘I tend to do things out of laziness or stubbornness,’ I said to her once, ‘whichever turns out to be stronger.’

  ‘How lazy are you feeling?’

  We were sitting in a bar at the bottom of my hill, in a window booth by the front door, which was the only free space. Every time the door opened all the outside February air blew in. It was one of those evenings when nothing turns out quite right, but you stick at it because going home seems worse.

  ‘Well, I’m not feeling stubborn,’ I said. Bockig is the German word, the kind of word you use to chastise children. ‘But a little restless,’ I went on. ‘Most of the people like me, the people I know, come here to go traveling. They don’t stick around a small Bavarian market town all summer.’

  ‘No, I can see that.’

  Later, on the wet walk back up hill, she explained that there wasn’t much to keep her in Landshut either, until Franziska went to school in the autumn, and somehow we spent a very happy night together imagining the places we could travel together. I don’t know how likely or real it seemed to her, or me.

  At one point, I raised the question of conversion. Maybe to put her off. My father, I told her, would prefer his sons to marry Jews.

  ‘But he married a Christian himself!’ she said, baffled.

  Afterwards, though, she kept returning to it, with a seriousness and persistence that amazed me, and almost the worst part of this whole business was the fact that I let her talk me into consulting a rabbi together about what was required. Henkel sometimes gave us Monday evening off if we had won the Saturday before, which
we almost always did. And so, on a bright, windy, late winter afternoon, Anke left her daughter at home and met me at the Landshut train station. It was a journey that could only suggest to us the memory of our first meeting, and for the hour or so it took us to reach Munich, I remember very vividly thinking, Maybe it will be OK. We were in such high, irresponsible spirits that everything seemed ridiculous, and it didn’t worry us particularly that the reason for our trip into town seemed especially so.

  I hadn’t made any appointment, which is one reason I felt so light-hearted. Most likely we would have to come back some other time, giving us a free afternoon in the city to play around with. But as soon as she saw, outside the entrance to the synagogue, the young man with a machine gun propped against his belly, her mood changed. She recognized the seriousness of the occasion. There was no one in the vestibule, and no one in the prayer hall behind it; I could see as much through the front doors. In any case, we had the guard to get past first, and I ended up by asking him what turned out to be a difficult question. Anke had retreated, as she sometimes did, into a still, physical sort of silence, and I had forgotten the German word for conversion. So I said to him: ‘She wants to become a Jew. Do you know who she should talk to?’

  He stared at me; a bony-shouldered, Israeli-looking young man with a shaved brown head. ‘I don’t understand what you’re asking,’ he answered, in a rough East German accent.

  ‘Is there anyone inside we could talk to?’

  ‘I never go inside, except to use the bathroom.’ But he gave us a kind of nod and turned away, so we went in.

  The afternoon was bright enough that the stained-glass windows over the ark cast a strong, red, living light as we wandered towards it. The rest of the hall was plain and undistinguished. Two stories high but otherwise much like any other kind of institutional waiting room. Such spaces are always a little oppressive, but the light had the strange effect of making such oppressiveness seem to count for something.