Playing Days

by Benjamin Markovits

  He was physically very restless and had no interest at all in sticking around once he had his answer. But he sat there dutifully and said yes and no as required. She thought at the time, how forward he was, and gallant, and such things, but he wasn’t at all. He just didn’t care about being on TV. Most people, even very confident people who think they are above it, care a little, but he didn’t care one bit. OK, it was only a small station, in Bavaria, watched by farmers after they milked their cows, God knows, but she had seen it happen a thousand times, if you put a camera on, people change. She wished later that he had been playing up to it a little. He wasn’t even flirting; he just wanted to know the answer to a question.

  ‘What was his question?’ I said, and she shifted her face around to express his manner: ‘Do you want to get something to eat afterwards?’

  There was always a point in these conversations when I was forced to expose my interest in her. I mean, Franziska would wake up or fall asleep. We would reach their front door, and I’d set down the shopping or fold up the stroller, because Anke’s hands were full with Franziska, and rest it against the closet inside. She would read her daughter a book or make her something to eat. Anke had much more to do, on those empty afternoons, than I did – she had many more calls on her attention. While she was busy I waited, quietly, feeling the pressure to leave rising in me, if only for the sake of my dignity, though I had nothing to go home for. I felt that Anke would respect me more for going, that I suffered somewhat in her estimation for having the patience of women.

  Bo had somehow decided that he wanted a wife and a child, and he had somehow decided that the wife he wanted was her. It seems too ridiculous, even to repeat it, but he said to her more than once that when his father was his age, his mother had him; and she sometimes thought he married her just because of that. ‘For someone like Bo,’ she said, ‘who is really very old-fashioned, living up to your father means more than it should.’

  Once, before they were married, he took her out to meet his parents in Mississippi. She was twenty-two years old. She had never crossed an ocean before. She was so excited she could hardly sit still, but she had to sit, of course; it was a long flight. She ate everything they gave her to eat on the plane and then threw it up after they landed. Then his mother meets them at the gate, and she smells of vomit and can hardly put two steps together. And she looks so pale: it was like he brought home an invalid or a ghost. And she thought, this is what they think Germans are, these big Americans.

  ‘You have no idea what kind of a place that is,’ she added.

  ‘You forget, I’m from Texas.’

  No, you are from nowhere like that, she insisted.

  ‘Like what? He told me a story about a neighbor and a shotgun.’

  ‘Neighbors, there are no neighbors. There is another house and then there are fields and telephone poles. His parents don’t have flowers in the garden, they have dead cars. And it is so hot in the summer no humans can survive. At least, not white women, that’s what his mother told me once, and she was right.’

  I didn’t know what to say to this, so I said nothing.

  The worst of it was, what Bo turned into when he got home. A fifteen-year-old boy. She thought of him as confident and forceful, even if silent. Very much his own man. But around his father, he hardly said a word. What passed between them as communication was more than anyone else could understand, including his mother.

  In the mornings, while it was cool enough, they went out into the driveway and took it in turns to shoot that silly ball. Anke was expected to pass the day with Mrs. Hadnot. They talked about baking and children and what babies men were, that kind of thing. All day, between clearing the breakfast and getting the lunch ready, then clearing the lunch up and going shopping for dinner.

  ‘I was twenty-two years old,’ she said. ‘I had no opinions about any of these things.’

  In the evenings Bo took her sometimes into Jackson, and they had a drink together in front of a TV at a bar. Once, he took her dancing, and she got so excited she cried on the way home. She had spent her whole life wanting to get out of Landshut and the first place she came to was Mississippi.

  ‘Why did you marry him then, if it was so bad?’

  She sat demurely with her hands between her legs and her head bent, a pose of sorts, to express the fact that she was still defending herself against these blows of memory.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I was never more in love with anyone in my life. If he left the room, even for a minute, I felt it here, in the ribs. Like I feel it now when Franziska cries in the night: you have to hold me by the feet and hands to keep me away. It was so hot all the time, all I could think of was sex. Of course, I couldn’t sleep in his room, but every night I crept into bed with him, with my heart pounding, into his single bed, which he had when he was a dirty boy, and I lay there with him, like I was his sister almost. I know that sounds crazy, but I mean, like I grew up there, too, with him, in that house. Like I was fifteen years old. We had to be quiet anyway, so it didn’t matter he doesn’t talk much. But he made me go back every morning, around one or two, so we didn’t fall asleep and forget, and I lay in my own bed till it was light, thinking of him down the hall. When he asked me to marry him, the night before I left, what could I say? He was staying behind another month or so, and I thought, if I say no, I will never see him again.’

  All that talk of feeling it in the ribs, and holding her down, etc., left me cold. She liked to see herself as the victim of irresistible forces. I said, ‘You don’t marry your boyfriend to make sure he comes back home with you.’

  ‘But you see, I liked his father very much. The high school teacher. In fact, that’s what I wanted him to be: my history teacher. He wasn’t a bit like Bo. At least, he talked easily and asked questions and listened. Not that Bo doesn’t listen, but Mr. Hadnot was much more of a gentleman. That’s not what I mean, either. Bo opens doors for you and waits to sit down, and all that he learned from his father. But Mr. Hadnot had a way of talking, like a politician, as if he wanted especially to know you and also might need you for something later. That was very flattering. Old men always flirt with me, but some do it only because it seems to them respectful, and he was like that. I thought, if Bo grows up like his father, it will be OK. You see how I was thinking: if Bo grows up . . .’

  I had met her for lunch that day, just the two of us. Twice a week, her mother looked after Franziska, along with the children she cared for: they had come to an arrangement with the family. And Anke went to work at the TV station.

  We sat outside on one of the car park benches that overlooked the river. There was an Italian who sold pizza squares from the back of his van, and we ate first one of his slices, then a second. It was really too cold for sitting outside and the food kept us warm. October clouds moved quickly overhead and left the rest of the sky very blue. It seemed a shame, on our first date, to be talking about Hadnot, but I was used to it by then.

  ‘Boris,’ she said, ‘that’s what his father called him. And for a while I called him that, too. Boris Hadnot. Did you know he was a Jew, like you?’ Germans can never say the word without sounding daring. For them, it is almost like saying ‘sex.’ ‘At least, his father is,’ she said.

  The family name used to be Hadnovic. Ellis Island simplified it. Mr Hadnot grew up in Albany but got through college on the GI Bill and spent two years stationed in Jackson; he was in the Air Force. He liked the South and fell in love with a Southerner. When he finished his service, he moved back.

  ‘And do you ever go to—,’ she once started to ask him.

  ‘Every year I pay my membership fee to the Southern Jewish Historical Society. That’s what I do,’ he said. It seemed strange to him that his son had settled in Germany – not bad, but strange.

  ‘I haven’t met many Jews, but I like them,’ she told him.

  ‘And what did he say to that?’

  She had understood me. ‘He didn’t mind.’

&nbs
p; All this puts me in mind of a funny story – about Hadnot’s Jewishness. A few weeks after this conversation, we played a day game in Munich on a Friday afternoon. Some kind of national holiday, I can’t remember. Once we were showered and changed, most of the guys wanted to hit the town, and the driver of our coach service agreed, for a little extra money, to stick around till one; the last train left at eleven. No later than one, Henkel said. He wanted us to make use of the free weekend to catch up on sleep.

  We arranged to meet up somewhere in Schwabing for dinner, and I persuaded Hadnot on our way out to join me for the shabbas service at my synagogue. He really felt almost no religious identification, but said fine, why not. I think he associated Jews with nerdiness and physical timidity. Maybe he was just being polite, or maybe he felt sufficiently adrift and far from home that even the comfort of a community he had inherited against his will seemed appealing to him. Anyway, he got very excited at the sight of the gunman outside the door – a sleek, fat young man, confident-looking, who rested his machine gun on a strap against his belly. ‘These are my kind of mother-fucking Jews,’ he said. But once we were inside, and it was only a handful of old men davening, he got bored and excused himself after fifteen minutes.

  Certainly, for their wedding, he didn’t insist on a rabbi or make any objection to the priest Anke had chosen. They were married at the end of summer in the church at Untergolding. From Mississippi, only his parents came. Anke thought it strange; she thought, he has really cut himself loose, and in a selfish way, took comfort from the fact. Anyway, she didn’t expect to stay in Landshut long.

  Bo hoped to make it to Italy within two years – he was very specific about the time frame. A player like him, he said, who relies on skill, on what he has learned to do and not what he was born with, can easily stretch out a career into his mid-thirties. But it was very hard to move up after you turned thirty. So they had to move now. At the end of two years, Franziska was twenty months old, and they were still in Landshut, though the management had transferred them to the apartment where she now lived, with a storeroom big enough to put a cot in. Something political, which she never understood properly, had happened at the club. The old coach had left, for one of their rivals, and taken two of their best players with him, and not Bo. Perhaps Bo could have gone, too – that is what she didn’t understand. By this point, she was twenty-four years old and very unhappy.

  16

  I wanted to know what these confidences suggested – about her intentions towards me, to use an old-fashioned word. I sometimes joked about being her confessor. Because of basketball practice, in the morning and evening, all of these conversations took place in the innocence of afternoon.

  ‘No, you are not like my confessor,’ she once said. ‘You are like my’ – and she stopped and thought about the next word for a moment. ‘Like my little brother. I want to tell you what the world is like, so you don’t make the same mistakes I did.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, digging in. ‘What mistakes did you make? You married a man you loved and had a child by him.’

  Sometimes Franziska napped in the afternoons and sometimes she didn’t. I felt most awkward when she fell asleep at home, in her cot, because then Anke and I were confined to her apartment. We spoke in low tones, and I had to decide how close to her to sit. It was embarrassing for me to waste the day with her, though I had nothing else to do; I felt it more sharply indoors.

  Anke was one of those women whose interest in style, in order, was directed mostly at her clothes and person. She dressed neatly, in bright and unexpected combinations, and applied a modest, careful layer of make-up to her face. Her apartment, though, was a mess. She never cleared up Franziska’s toys, which suggested the aftermath of a terrible plastic war. There were pretty things around, some of which she had picked up off the street, some of which she had spent too much money on. A Nolde print on the wall; a plain wooden sort of Shakerish reading chair. But the place usually stank of wet clothes, which she hadn’t had time to hang up; and most of the dry ones were left hanging on the chairs, the dining table, the television set, until they grew stiff.

  She was clean, she said, but messy, and I watched her myself take a frantic mop to the kitchen floors. Then I would gather armfuls of washing from the sitting room and drop them in a heap at the foot of her dressing table, which I had seen through my bathroom window. I had entered the rooms I was used to staring at – something imagined had become real, and the thought of that also made me uncomfortable. But Anke liked being at home. She made us tea, and we sat at the kitchen table and talked.

  ‘What do you mean, mistakes? Did you have an affair?’

  She gave me a pitying look.

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘There are other kinds of mistakes beside affairs.’

  ‘I think so, too, but I want to know what they are. Was he a bad father?’

  At first, she said, he was a very good father – when Franziska was born. The labor was long and difficult, and after thirty hours of it, the doctors decided on a C-section. (Kaiserschnitt is the German word: Caesar’s Cut. It sounds much more ancient and visceral.) That laid her up for six weeks afterwards. She wasn’t allowed to lift her daughter, and her milk didn’t come, which made her feel very anxious. Eventually they put her on a bottle, and Bo did everything: changing diapers, feeding her.

  Anke felt terrified by the failure of love. It came out of her as painfully, as meanly, as the milk. The two, in fact, became associated in her mind, and she continued to try to feed Franziska from the breast, even after the baby had a clear preference for the bottle. They fought each other like that, nakedly; she was often in tears, and Bo was extremely patient with her, too. He said to her once, probably more than once, that doing things over and over was what he was good at. And she hated him for that remark: she could see him as he tended Franziska or her, telling himself, this is the kind of thing I am good at. Being patient. Even when she shouted at him, and she shouted a lot, because she was twenty-three years old, and this wasn’t the life she had wanted.

  Later, she said, ‘Maybe you are right. Maybe they weren’t mistakes. Maybe I just fell out of love with him.’

  I hated such talk, sentimental, self-important. It occurred to me that Hadnot might have walked out on her. But that’s not how she told it. As Franziska grew older, Bo’s patience turned out to be less useful. She had a will of her own, and you had to get down to her level, sometimes, to amuse her; whereas Bo just wanted her to play catch, and when she didn’t want to, or when she refused to eat, or anything else, he simply let her cry. The crying made him angry, though, silently angry. She watched him sometimes, kissing her extra gently when she was misbehaving, because he wanted to hit her. And she thought, that’s how he kisses me, too.

  Maybe I should say a word here about the kind of mother Anke was. Franziska was not yet three years old, but whenever they went out, they spent a few minutes together in front of the mirror deciding what to wear. Franziska also had strong opinions on this subject. She stood by herself on a sidetable and they considered each other’s reflections. A tender scene, but uncomfortable-making, especially since I couldn’t work out how much the mother was preening for me. Their relations were sisterly more than anything else. They shared fries together when they ate at a café, smearing the ketchup all over the plate with an air of dissipated friendship, on a morning after. I never saw Anke read to her daughter, but they looked at magazines together, happily, by the hour. All of which says something for Franziska’s somber good nature and presentability, but less for her mother’s maturity.

  One of the things that might have happened in Anke’s marriage is that she realized, after the first bout of misery, that she had an ally in her baby now and could do without its father.

  My attraction to Anke contained a large dose of annoyance. She often made me ‘uncomfortable’ for one reason or another, many of them silly; and I wondered if annoyance would always make up a share of my attraction to women. Like Ank
e, I was in danger of becoming someone for whom stupid was a very important word. Maybe it’s one of the things we had in common. Sometimes these conversations brought her to tears, and I sat very still where I was, on the sofa or at the kitchen table, and watched her.

  ‘There’s something childish about you,’ she said once, ‘that you don’t respond to these signals.’

  Her tears had dried up, and I felt instantly on my palms a fine slick surface.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You look me in the eye . . . but don’t come over to me. It’s like you are scared of being where you really are. Like you are waiting for someone to tell you it’s OK, or to take you home again.’

  This was the kind of talk that always angered me, but I stood up and tried to kiss her anyway.

  ‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ she said, turning her cheek. One always forgets, beforehand, how soft cheeks are – even freckled ones. ‘It is very difficult. I am very grateful to you, and I like you.’

  I was perched awkwardly at the edge of the table. It was as if I had offered my seat to an old woman, who had refused it, and I had to choose between the rudeness of staying where I was or the embarrassment of retreating to my chair. I sat down.

  ‘Don’t make a face like that,’ she went on. ‘I know grateful isn’t a nice word. But my daughter is asleep just there. I can’t take up with anyone I please, even if I want to. And I don’t think you will be here very long. Say something.’

  ‘You just wanted me to tell you how much I like you.’

  ‘I don’t know what I want. It could be. Is that so mean?’ And then, when I didn’t answer: ‘I am not even divorced yet.’

  But I don’t want to suggest that all we talked about was her, and afterwards, Anke made a special effort to ask questions about me. Are you a very good basketball player, she said, as good as Bo? I am not anything like as good as Bo. But you are taller than Bo. It isn’t only that. I am an amateur; he is a professional. Then what are you doing here, she wanted to know. And maybe because I was still embarrassed by what had happened, and hoped to assert myself, to show off; maybe because writing things down was associated in my mind with a kind of revenge, I began to tell her. I plan to be a writer, I said, and I need experience. (‘Am I experience?’ she asked.) After college, I wanted a job that left me time to write, and basketball doesn’t take much time. Also, I like playing basketball, I loved it when I was a kid, and there is something childish about me.