Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘For Charlie?’

  ‘Yes, for Charlie.’

  ‘And what did Charlie do?’ But he didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Karl shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Why should you keep something like that quiet? If he’s a racist.’

  ‘Because he’s a dumb fuck thirty-year-old baby, who lives with his mother. Charlie don’t need to know what he thinks, and Karl don’t need to tell him.’

  ‘You just don’t like Karl,’ I said. ‘Or Charlie.’

  ‘Me? I got nothing against them.’

  ‘You’ve been picking on Karl since you came back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have come back if it wasn’t for Karl. And Charlie’s OK. I’m just waiting till the scouts start showing up, that’s what I’m waiting for. If he’s good enough.’

  ‘So why are you standing up for Russell?’

  But he let it go at that. He only said, ‘Anyway, his name isn’t Russell,’ leaning out at the crossroads to check both ways, then gunning us up the slope. We drove through the field of high corn at the top of the hill outside Landshut. I could see the spire of the church now, rising far above the low-roofed townscape; and then the horse-farm outside my apartment. Hadnot offered to drop me off there, but I had to collect my bike from the High Street and volunteered anyway to help him get Frankie out of the car. But she was still asleep; he planned on driving around until she woke up. It was just as good as sitting parked somewhere and waiting.

  I said, ‘I’ll drive around with you then, I’ve got nothing else to do.’ And then: ‘I forgot how nice it is to have people around you small enough to carry. I have two younger sisters, much younger, and used to carry them everywhere.’

  He didn’t answer at first, so I went on. ‘It’s funny, you spend the first eighteen years of your life learning how to live in a family. Then you go to college and have to learn to live without one again. Once you get used to that . . .’ It struck me that this was not the best thing to say to a man in the process of getting a divorce, but Hadnot didn’t seem to be listening. The asphalt had given way to cobblestones, and he was driving as carefully as he could to keep down the noise. You could feel them through your seat and against the soles of your shoes – they sounded like rain on a tin roof.

  The High Street was never very busy on the weekends. Not much was open and there weren’t many people about, just the usual gang of teenagers outside McDonald’s, smoking, standing on the public benches, or balancing briefly, jerkily, on their bicycles.

  ‘The first year’s hardest,’ he said, pulling up. ‘Don’t beat yourself up.’

  I couldn’t see my bike then remembered I had walked it as far as his house and locked it there. So he drove off again, slowly over the cobbles, and up the hill into the more suburban neighborhoods where we both lived. I guess he changed his mind, because he parked in his own drive and, since Frankie was still asleep, stayed in the car. That’s how I left him, without a newspaper or anything, waiting for his daughter to wake up.

  When I got home there was a message on my answering machine. I had a voicemail account and the first thing I always did coming through the door was pick up the phone. Usually the first sound that greeted me was a dial tone. The phone jack was beside my bed, which is where the phone was, so I tended to lie down at an angle with my shoes on. Then a minute or two would pass before I could will myself up again. But this time the line of the tone was broken up into urgent segments, and I had the brief satisfaction of something to wait for as I dialed into the service.

  My father had called. He had accepted an invitation to a conference in Salzburg, which was in three weeks’ time. Salzburg, he said, couldn’t be more than two or three hours by train from Landshut; he had looked on the map. Depending on my schedule, I could either visit him there and we could make a weekend of it or he was happy to come up on the train himself to visit me. He suspected there was probably more to do in Salzburg, but he didn’t mind.

  I had reached the age when every cryptic communication from my parents suggested to my anxieties the careful, portentous announcement of some problem, either medical or marital. But there was only the one message, from my father, and I suspected that if the news were very bad, a flurry of calls would have passed between my brother and sisters, and I would have caught at least some of the family crossfire. Unless it was the kind of news that could only be communicated in person or the source of anxiety was me.

  14

  A few times a week, before bed, I added to my journal, some of which had started out as a long letter home. I wrote at my kitchen table on the boxy laptop computer I had carried with me from college. That was always the plan: that basketball would give me time to write. And something to write about. I was also working on a piece of fiction left over from my student days, about a man named Syme, who believed he could prove the earth was hollow. I’d heard about him in astronomy class and had the bright idea of enlisting some friends to contribute a series of essays about his life and times. Mine, unsurprisingly, was the only one that got written, and I hoped to expand it into a novel – during the long afternoons between morning practice and evening practice.

  The two files had a way of bleeding into each other. The novel was full of young men with nothing much to do, playing games together and traveling through the countryside; and the journal described the same thing.

  A week or so later, I ran into Frankie in the grassy courtyard behind my apartment block. Or rather, she ran up to me. I had a sack of kitchen trash in hand, which I was taking to the bins lined up by one of the ground floor garages. She offered me the sticky wrapper of an ice- cream cone, which she was still eating. At first I thought she wanted me to throw it away, but she shouted so loudly when I put it in the bag that I had to dig it out again. I stood there stupidly holding the wrapper while her mother walked up to apologize.

  Her mother was Anke. She seemed very pleased to see me, in the most natural way, and I must have given her rather a puzzled reception, until it occurred to me that she had no reason to be surprised.

  It turned out that she was fully aware of our other connection. Bo had mentioned that we spent the afternoon together, which she was glad to hear, and also somewhat relieved, since Franziska had spoken again and again about daddy’s tall friend. She asked me what I was doing now. By this point I had deposited the garbage and was standing there empty-handed.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, so she said, ‘Why don’t you come shopping with us, then? It’s such a pretty day, and I could use the help, if you don’t mind.’

  So that’s what I did. I went inside to wash my hands then followed them down hill to the Spar. Franziska refused to be carried or pushed in her stroller, a flimsy pink fold-up, which I ended up dragging most of the way. From time to time, Anke and I took her small hands and swung the child along, crying (as my mother used to cry to me), Eins zwei drei, hopsala! as we lifted her in the air.

  Her apartment, Anke explained, also belonged to the club. It was their version of ‘married accommodation,’ and Bo and she had lived there, uncomfortably enough, for several years before their separation. Really, it wasn’t large enough for a child. Franziska slept in a storeroom without windows, which meant at least that she slept very late most mornings, especially in summer. The club, however, had proved surprisingly understanding afterwards about the whole . . . they gave him his own place just far enough away for convenience.

  ‘Was that why he came back to play this year?’ I asked. ‘They were covering two rents?’

  ‘What do you mean? Bo always plays.’

  There was something touching in the way she spoke his name, rounding her lips over the syllable, and giving it a clear strange musical intonation. Bo – it was a sound you might make to a child, pretending to frighten him. How did you meet, I asked; it seemed a gentler question than the other one.

  Inside the supermarket, Anke let her daughter roam more freely, and she often stopped to work something through in her head, before carrying on. But the story rea
lly began before Hadnot came on the scene. He was, she said, only a part of the story, and if I wanted to hear the whole thing, she would have to start earlier, then she put a hand on my elbow and added, ‘You look worried, even so, it isn’t much, I mean, not very much has happened to me yet.’ She looked at me, and she looked at Franziska, who was sitting on the cold tiled floor with her skirts hiding her legs, and trying to hide more things underneath them. Mostly tin cans.

  I thought, you have a lot of days to get through, and a lot of hours in the day. Otherwise, you wouldn’t waste them explaining things to me. I asked her how old she was.

  ‘Twenty-five,’ she said.

  ‘It seems to me many things have happened to you.’

  ‘You mean Franziska? No, when you have a baby, you will understand. Many things have happened to her – but to me, not much. That was always the problem, but it doesn’t matter, I am still young.’

  ‘What do you mean, the problem?’

  ‘I tell you a secret,’ Anke said, lowering her voice and speaking in English for the first time. ‘I wanted very much to get out of this fucking place.’

  On the way home, Franziska accepted the stroller, and we hung as much of the shopping as we could around the handles. Then I pushed her up the hill. By the time we reached the door to their stairwell, she had fallen asleep – her neck bent against one of the bars, and her lips fat with sleep.

  ‘Stay a little,’ Anke said quietly, so I stopped pushing.

  There was nowhere to sit, except the brick wall that supported the raised grass in the middle of the courtyard, so I hitched myself up on that. Anke wheeled her daughter a few yards further along, into the shade of that wall, then reached her hand to me and I pulled her up. She was very light; her dress might have been filled with rope. Franziska slept for two hours, until the shade of the wall was swallowed by the shadow of the building opposite, and her mother spent most of them talking about herself. But we continued to meet after that day, sometimes unarranged but usually by appointment, on most dry afternoons, and I can’t say for sure when she told me what. I asked her questions and Anke wasn’t shy about answering them – her life was a topic we both found absorbing enough.

  15

  Her father was an engineer for the local Hitachi firm. They were one of the sponsors of our basketball team, and it’s possible she first met Hadnot at a company function. Every summer there was a team picnic on the grounds, which are just outside Landshut, into the hills. She would have been a schoolgirl still; in any case, she didn’t remember.

  Eight years ago her father had come down with a mysterious illness. He felt tired most of the time; his head hurt him, not like a headache but like he’d been struck, and he suffered a lot in his bowels. When she was younger she didn’t like to hear about his symptoms, but now, after childbirth and motherhood, she didn’t mind. He ate less and less and slept more and more. His doctor thought that the problem was his diet and tried him on various foods. They were never a family that thought very much about what was in the kitchen, but suddenly they had all sorts of strange packets in the cupboard, and cartons of soya milk, etc. in the fridge.

  None of it helped, or only temporarily. He saw a number of specialists, and eventually one of them gave his condition a name. But the name didn’t help either. He retired from the firm several years early, with disability benefits, and for a while her mother nursed him at home, but this turned out to be very bad for their relations, and he shouted at her, and she cried around the house whenever she thought she had a minute to herself, though really she wanted Anke to see her cry.

  Eventually they decided to hire a nurse, which meant her mother had to go out to work again. She hadn’t had a job in thirty years. The only thing she was fit for was looking after children. One of the younger management types at Hitachi had two small girls, and his wife commuted every day to Munich, where she worked in a law firm, so Anke’s mother looked after their girls. This was embarrassing for her father, but on the whole it was better for everyone. Except that Anke hated the nurse.

  It’s not that she was pretty or young and had supplanted her mother or anything like that. She was middle-aged, with thick legs and thin hair, which she dyed a strange vegetable-like color of purple. Frau Sawalloch; Anke said the name as if it meant ‘bad smell.’ She was just one of those women, one of those typically German middle-aged mothers, who thought it her business to tell every child on the street what to do. Anke was seventeen at this point, with enough troubles of her own, at school and with boys, besides the unhappiness at home. It wasn’t her sense of it (Anke’s own phrase) to take Frau Sawalloch’s constant corrections lying down.

  Anyway, the pressure of all this came out in a few silly incidents at school. Around this time she was also caught cheating on one of her exams. Now this was especially stupid. Everybody cheats at exams in Germany, and everybody knows it. In fact, she was only caught helping out a few of her classmates, for a little money – it wasn’t as if she had cheated ‘for herself.’ Anke never needed to, that’s just how she was: things came easily to her. But on top of those other incidents, the authorities decided to suspend her for the rest of the year, and just to show them how stupid they were, Anke decided never to go back.

  Stupid, I learned, was a very important word for Anke. (She liked the sound of the English.) The world was full of stupid people: ugly men who made passes at her, doctors who pretended to know what was wrong with her father, parents who told her how to raise her child. Sometimes she was even stupid herself, and this, she admitted, was one of those times. But she wanted to move out of the unhappiness at home, which had become very boring to her. She wanted to move to Munich and find a job. Instead, she stayed at home and worked part-time at the local TV station, as a secretary.

  This turned out to be OK. They were desperately short-handed and even the secretaries got to do a number of interesting things: researching stories, sometimes ‘on location,’ and helping out in the studio, with lights and booms. Meeting guests: mostly farmers and civil servants. Well, she was the only secretary. The older brother of an ex-boyfriend of hers had taken her on, out of kindness and because he wanted to go to bed with her. For about three years she was flattered, and tempted – he had been to university and lived in Munich, and he had only come back home to start a career in television.

  Three years seems like a long time for this sort of thing to stretch on, but you’d be amazed (she said to me), how it makes life interesting at work, and how people can keep something like that going, even when they’re no longer attracted to each other, which was the case in her situation. At least, she was no longer attracted to him. Who knows, if nothing had happened, she might have given in anyway, and now they would be married still, with his child, and she wouldn’t be working there anymore.

  She added, ‘I guess we could still end up like that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  We were watching Franziska try to stand up on a swing and turn around to face the other way, towards where we were sitting, in the corner of a public playground about five minutes’ walk from our apartments. Anke hated going along to anything that resembled a mothers’ klatch, but she tolerated the playground, even if she made a point of sitting on the loneliest bench and pulling a floppy sunhat low across her brow.

  ‘Well, he’s still my boss,’ she said, ‘even if he is engaged.’

  That last part was intended to shock, so I ignored it. ‘I mean, what happened the first time?’

  ‘What do you think? I met Bo.’

  Hadnot moved to Landshut about five years ago, and the coach at the time (it wasn’t Henkel) picked him to represent the team for a short preseason puff on local TV. He had come from a French club somewhere, which had just gone bankrupt. Landshut offered him a lot of money: he was a first division player signing up to a second division club. Lower league teams making a push for the top flight tend to overpay for star talent; then they get stuck with big contracts if they fail to go up. But it’s a risk for th
e talent, too. Hadnot needed a larger showcase than the Zweite Bundesliga Süd if he ever hoped to make it back to the States, or even to the high-paying Serie A in Italy. If Landshut failed to reach the first division, he’d be stuck playing small town ball during the crucial back half of his twenties, which is what ended up happening.

  Anke didn’t understand much of this then or later. She was twenty years old and saw an American who had just come from France and was passing through on his way to bigger and better things. Since Hadnot didn’t speak a word of German, her boss at the studio needed to find an interpreter. This was the kind of role Anke had begun to take on, and if she hadn’t married Hadnot and had a kid, she might have made for herself a career that satisfied her sense of ambition. There was still time, of course. She was pretty and looked it on camera, and her speaking voice, though childish and a little sweet, was very clear. In person it came across as flirty and ironic, and she could have learned to project these qualities for TV. The Hochdeutsch, or high German, of her class and – education, in her case, isn’t the right word; aspirations comes nearer – had been inflected by a decent local broadening. She seemed, in short, the sort of nice girl a mother would want to listen to, and her son might want to take out.

  Hadnot almost asked her out on TV. The pedant in me, by which I mean my father, wanted to know how you could almost ask someone out.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he asked me, and then they edited the question out afterwards. I said yes, it was very funny, I blushed bright red and said yes, in English, and if you look closely at the rest of the interview, you can see how red I am.’