Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘I don’t know that it’s something you can be less or more of . . . No, not very.’

  ‘Otherwise you would wear this all the time on your head and not give it to girls?’

  ‘I didn’t –’

  There was more in this line; it looks even worse on the page than it sounds in life. Aside from the shame I felt – at having stumbled in broad daylight, as it were, over a guilty secret – which never left me till the train reached Munich and we separated, I was conscious of a slight but affecting disappointment. So this is she, I thought. Hers is the life I had imagined stepping into.

  She picked up my book and pretended to read it for a minute. ‘Are you English?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were only a little stupid.’

  So I made a show of interest in her own book, which bulked out of her bright red handbag: a copy of Sophie’s World. It was the summer that everyone seemed to be reading Sophie’s World. The novel had begun to irritate me, as an example of popular literature that had been packaged to appeal to our pretensions of higher taste. I had the sense, though, to hold my tongue. The fact was that I did find her attractive, in spite of or perhaps because of her little presumptions. A bead of sweat trickled along my ribs. My heart had already increased its speed, as if I had run a lap or two, warming up. She was the first woman I had talked to in over two months.

  After her haircut, she planned to meet a girlfriend for a drink; she gave me the name of the club. I should come along: her girlfriend was very nice, and pretty. And loved basketball. I had told her by this point what brought me to Landshut. Anke had made a face; the line about her friend was a kind of apology for it.

  Munich had begun to appear, the flat white faces of its suburbs. In the distance, the jumble of low red roofs promised an older and lovelier city. As we entered the slow descent, she turned to me suddenly with her hand on my sleeve and said, she was getting her hair cut because – she had a daughter – and she was cutting her hair because – her daughter was two years old – and she was tired of letting her pull it. She supposed I would find out in any case. ‘I hope you can join us,’ she repeated. ‘This is my big night off.’

  10

  I walked past the synagogue on the way to Olaf’s apartment. The fat young man with the machine gun had a way of standing and shifting on his feet that kept the foot traffic moving; he seemed to direct you with the tip of his gun. For once, I let him turn me away.

  Many of the avenues were bordered by tall lindens. Their leaves, sticky with summer, left a green film over the parked cars. Olaf’s parents lived on a road with lindens. The bark of these trees I always find very attractive: plain and brown, but yellow underneath. Their flakes look like the dappling of water. Some of the trees reached the tops of the apartment blocks; their branches entangled themselves against the iron balconies.

  When I rang the bell, nothing happened for a minute, then I heard Olaf’s voice drifting down from one of these balconies. The buzzer was broken, but he was sending his sister to let me in. I waited another minute or two, and then Olaf himself appeared at the front door in what I recognized immediately as his city clothes: a pair of fashionably torn jeans and a thin white linen shirt half unbuttoned. He had the sheepish, almost resentful air of a boy introducing you to his parents.

  There was no elevator, which meant we had to walk the five flights to their apartment. Basketball players hate walking. By this point in the season everything hurt, my knees, my back, the balls of my feet; running at least provided a drug to ease the pain of motion. Steps were particularly painful, and my breathing echoed upwards in the broad, tiled stairwell. To hide the noise of it, I told him that I might want to go to a club later on and mentioned the name Anke had given me.

  ‘Nobody goes there,’ he said, ‘only middle-aged women.’

  We climbed the rest of the stairs in silence. The door at the top was open; Olaf’s sister was lying on a pale leather sofa watching television. She shifted, resting her arm over the sofa back, and leaned out inquiringly when we came in. ‘Lazy sack,’ Olaf said, by way of introduction. And then: ‘This is Brigitte.’ She was about half his size, with short brown curly hair and a wide mouth, which she twisted into a forced smile. She was also white.

  Olaf had never mentioned that he was adopted. His mother came home shortly after with a bag of groceries under one arm. She was a doctor and had the kindly neutral worn-out air of a woman who has spent the day dealing gently with strangers. Katrin, she asked me to call her, taking my hand somewhat limply before unpacking the food and beginning to cook. She looked like her daughter, only thinner and flat-haired. Brigitte, in fact, was in the midst of applying for a residency and had come home to await results. Her house-share had broken up over the summer; she seemed embarrassed about living with her parents. Wohngemeinschaft was the word she used, which means a commune, though it sounded more conventional than that.

  ‘I’m the big sister,’ she explained at one point, reaching up to pat Olaf’s shoulder. ‘He’s my little brother.’ The pleasure she took in his size was touching. Their relations seemed to me collegiate, almost flirtatious.

  A large purple painting above one sofa was the only splash of color in the room, aside from the windows. These took up most of a wall and looked out on tall trees, whose branches, heavy and green in that late summer, seemed almost ornate with silence. The gardens below it included a children’s playground and a stone ping pong table. A group of teenagers were sitting and smoking on it.

  ‘We used to smoke there, too,’ Brigitte said to me, looking down. ‘Or rather, I smoked and Olaf tried to play ping pong.’

  When the food was ready, his father emerged from his study; he had been at home all along. Herr Schmidt was tall and slender and carried himself well – upright without stiffness. His curly hair was receding and he had let it recede. From time to time he brushed the stray locks behind his ears. ‘Olaf gets his height from me,’ he joked, ‘and his hairline, too.’

  ‘Have you been working?’ I asked, after Olaf introduced me as a friend from the team.

  ‘I used to be a lawyer,’ he said, ‘but I have given up the law. Perhaps I could most pompously describe myself as a radio personality, which means that I work two hours a week and spend the rest of the time reading newspapers and keeping up to date. At my age, that is work.’

  Over dinner he presided very naturally. I had not talked so much since graduation and had to resist the urge to mention my writing; he was pleased, among other things, to hear where I had gone to university. I didn’t want Olaf to think our friendship depended on my curiosity. With Charlie, it didn’t matter, but Olaf and I had made a joke of drifting together. We played basketball because it seemed a pleasant way of not doing anything else. In fact, I could tell his career was a source of anxiety to his mother. It didn’t seem to her the kind of thing that could ‘go anywhere.’ Besides, you can’t keep it up much beyond thirty. She asked me how long I expected to play basketball, someone with my education.

  ‘I’m afraid that someone with my education,’ I said, ‘isn’t really fit for any kind of profession at all. Apart from teaching, and I don’t really want to teach.’

  But Katrin couldn’t help herself. ‘At least you have an education,’ she said. ‘That’s something.’

  It was Herr Schmidt who introduced the subject of Olaf’s adoption. They were children of the sixties, he confessed, and had all of the wonderful illusions and ideals of their generation. Katrin had very much wanted a child, to give birth to a child, but it seemed to both of them, given the state of the world – well, he supposed I could guess the conclusions they had come to. Now, of course, Germany had a very different problem. Middle-class couples weren’t reproducing nearly enough to sustain the economy, which depended more and more on the supply of skilled workers from the former Soviet satellites. The culture was beginning to – he didn’t want to say suffer, but perhaps it was kindest to put it this way, to dilute. But Germans, German Germans that is, if he might be forgiven a simplific
ation, were too attached to their lifestyles to give up so many years of it (twenty was a conservative estimate, for two children) to a family. ‘In this respect, they differ entirely from your countrymen,’ he said, ‘who consider their children to be a necessary part of the all-American lifestyle.’

  When Brigitte was born, they moved to Schwabing – to this same block, as it happens, though to a different apartment. The neighborhood was very mixed at the time: Africans, Turks, and, of course, poor Italians. The building itself was in a terrible state. All of this more or less suited their ‘ideals.’ But then something began to happen, both to the neighborhood and to their own lives. Most of their friends, it seemed, and not only their friends, but the kinds of people who might have been their friends, the kinds of people, in fact, who became their friends, had had similar ideals. Together, they moved up in the world.

  Katrin began earning as a consultant; his law practice found its feet. The wonderful cooperatives, which they had set up to foster a sense of community, did their jobs too well. They became exclusive. Property values climbed and the poor moved out. Katrin and he had feared that Brigitte would grow up in the ignorance of privilege. She wanted another child, but they really couldn’t justify such an addition. To have one may be a right, but two seemed an indulgent luxury. That’s how they thought at the time.

  Olaf was a happy compromise. Katrin had been volunteering in a community center for African immigrants, and one of the case workers put her in touch with an adoption agency connected to the Ivory Coast. That’s where Olaf was born; they had been encouraging him lately to seek out his birth-father.

  ‘You have been encouraging him,’ Katrin said.

  I asked Brigitte if her parents’ plan had worked, if she had grown up in the ‘ignorance of privilege.’

  ‘As far as that goes,’ she said, ‘privilege in the eighties mattered much less than being cool. And there was nothing cooler than having a black kid brother.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Olaf had looked up at last. ‘Being black was only cool in gym class. The rest of the time they called me names. And before I got too big for them, they did worse; I was always getting into fights.’

  Brigitte put her hand on his wrist, in careless sympathy. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘I had forgotten. They called me names, too, though mostly they told dirty jokes about Katrin. In fact, that’s how I learned about sex: from the jokes that nasty boys made up about my mother.’

  ‘Oh oh,’ Herr Schmidt broke in, from sheer good humor. This sort of talk amused and pleased him.

  ‘When did you get to be too big?’ I asked.

  ‘By my fourteenth birthday,’ Olaf said, ‘I was almost two meters long and weighed a hundred kilo. I could buy beer from a supermarket. When you can buy beer, everybody wants to be your friend.’

  Katrin cleared our plates away and Herr Schmidt sat back in his chair. ‘What people never understand,’ he said, ‘is that prejudice is practical. People become tolerant when it’s no longer in their interest to be racist. The trouble with immigration is that it produces a society in which a number of minority groups have an interest in scoring off each other: it’s really nothing more than the guild system brought up to date. The middle classes are always tolerant because it’s always in their interest to be so. Immigration brings them cheap labor and good food. Of course, all of these discussions in Germany are complicated by the question nobody asks: what did your father do in the war?’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Olaf said again. ‘It’s complicated by sports, too. In sports, being black is like a style, but in the rest of life, it’s just a fact.’

  His father stood up to prepare himself an espresso from one of those bright monotone Italian coffee makers that look like a child’s toy. Like a toy, too, it made a burst of ugly noise. I guessed this was his particular role in the kitchen, the maker of coffee, and he offered each of us a shot. Only Brigitte accepted. When he was finished he continued standing, enjoying the freedom of thinking on his feet with a cup in his hand. ‘That’s because in sports,’ he said, ‘it’s to the advantage of white children to play with their black friends – if they want to . . .’ But he had seen where his own argument was going and hesitated for the first time.

  Olaf completed his thought. ‘If they want to win?’

  ‘That’s just fascism,’ Brigitte broke in – one of her favorite words. ‘Whites always say blacks are better at sports, so that they can claim to be better at other things. That’s where their self-interest lies.’

  ‘No,’ Olaf said. ‘It’s not in their self-interest, at least as far as basketball goes. Being black is just a style in sports, a very popular style. If you have two players, one white and one black, the black one will always have an advantage with the coach, because of his style, even if the white player is just as good or even better.’

  ‘Are you thinking of Hadnot?’ I asked. ‘Hadnot and Charlie.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of them, but they’re a good example.’

  What he was thinking of involved him in a longer story, in which Katrin took a particular interest. She was one of those women in whom tiredness brings out, like opening buds, her worries; and she was tired that night and struggling to hide it. For whatever reason, Olaf had remained a source of guilt and concern to her. The conversation about race had been making her uncomfortable, but she was glad when her son took the floor.

  A few years ago, he told me, he had accepted a scholarship at a college in San Francisco. To play basketball. He was beginning to get bored of club sports and had half a mind to study medicine, like his sister. The family had once made a holiday to Yellowstone, his only visit to the United States. San Francisco seemed a little like Munich. Not too big or too small; very hip, but quite rich, too, and safe and pleasant.

  When he got there, his coach arranged for a tutor to help him. The assistant manager gave him a list of professors who were known to be sympathetic to the basketball team. Few of the players had any kind of academic ambitions. One of the big men, a white guy, as it happens, was majoring in pre-med, and Olaf became friendly with him, which was actively discouraged.

  ‘By the coach?’ I asked.

  ‘Not just by the coach, even if he was behind it. By the other players, by the black players. It wasn’t what they said; it was what they made me feel. That we should stick together. But in America, I didn’t feel very black. It was just one fact about me, not the whole story. I don’t know what the coach had to do with it, but he didn’t like the idea of me studying medicine. It would take up too much time. He said it as if he thought I should be pleased, that he had such ambitions for me, that he wanted me to play from the start. I told him I had even bigger ambitions – that I wanted to become a doctor. He decided pretty soon I was a problem character. For the rest of the guys, it was the most important thing in the world to play college basketball. But I showed him some things were more important to me.’

  He paused for a minute to eat, as if that were the end of the story. So I pressed him; for some reason the job was left to me.

  By the time the season started, his friend, whose name was Wally Thrupp, was in the doghouse with him – that was Coach Hatton’s word. Wally hardly ever got off the bench. It was his senior year; he hoped to play for a club in France, where his family spent their summer holidays. He asked Olaf lots of questions about European basketball. Wally took his benching quietly for a few games, then on Monday morning he went up to Coach Hatton before practice and told him he was going to sue him for racial discrimination if he didn’t play the next week. Hatton left him on the bench, and Wally sued. His father was a big-shot lawyer in Berkeley. The story made it into all the papers: it was the first time a white player had accused a white coach of discrimination. Hatton, it turned out, had said a few stupid things in the heat of the moment, and there were fans in the front rows (all of them white) who were willing to give evidence for Wally.

  Olaf was asked to testify, not only on the subject of these remarks but about
the overall atmosphere of Hatton’s locker room. This put him in a tough spot. Most of the team had rallied around their coach, who was well-liked across campus and admired in the media as an old-school disciplinarian with a talent for getting his players to graduate. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a big feature on Wally Thrupp, which painted him as the spoilt child of privilege, trying to win in a court of law the recognition he had failed to earn on the basketball court. Olaf was caught in the middle. If he refused to testify, he had a chance to salvage his relations with the coach and the rest of the team; he might be able to start over. Wally, on the other hand, was his only friend in the locker room, and one of the few he had made on campus since arriving in September.

  His girlfriend, to whom he was engaged, had taken a shine to Olaf. The three of them used to have a regular pasta date before game days, to load up on carbs. She had promised to set him up with one of her sorority sisters.

  Olaf, though he never admitted as much, must have been terribly lonely – for female company as much as anything else. What he said was this: that the white girls on campus were scared of him for being big and black, and the black girls thought of him simply as a foreigner. In Germany, he had always been the black son of a white family – there never seemed to be a contradiction in that. But in America, he was neither white nor black; he was nothing. The Hatton case gave him a chance to take sides, but the fact was, the coach had said what Wally claimed he had said. It was a simple question of telling the truth.

  ‘Most of the coaches I know,’ I said, ‘shout things like Get that white boy on the bench, but they would play him, too, if he deserved it.’

  ‘If he deserved it, maybe. But sometimes it is hard to deserve something in the wrong situation.’

  ‘So what did you do? What did you say to the lawyers?’

  He hesitated a moment, and I wondered if he was leaving something out. ‘It was an impossible situation (unmöglich). I did the only thing I could do. I went home at Christmas and didn’t come back.’