Milo had been at the club a few years. I didn’t know if he could recognize Anke, though even the sight of me with a girl, a girl with a kid, was enough to make him gossip. But I heard nothing from him at practice that evening, or in the showers afterwards; and nothing the next day. With relief I decided, he probably didn’t see us. Even an innocent relation with Hadnot’s wife might have been awkward for me, given their public separation and my friendship with Hadnot. We were becoming known as the Americans.
Then, a few days later, I beat Milo for the first time at a suicide shuffle. That was when he complained about my cheating – he had seen me skip one of the repetitions. Out of laziness or tiredness, I don’t know; it surprised me as much as anyone when I finished first. Milo always hated losing, but I heard in his protest a little more warmth than usual.
‘Ben cheats,’ he said to Henkel. The German word is schummeln, which sounds to my ears almost Yiddish, and especially hateful and vivid. ‘He can’t be trusted.’ Turning to Olaf: ‘Somebody must have seen him.’
‘Calm down, it doesn’t matter. Who cares about these things, anyway?’
Not exactly the defense I hoped for, though it was true: nobody did care. Except Milo and me. But if Milo knew something about Anke, I never heard any more about it.
Once I asked Hadnot what he thought about while going up to shoot. We were feeding each other baseline jumpers, running out at the shooter with stretched arms. ‘Screw you,’ he said at first, and for a second I thought he meant me, that he knew about Anke. But all he meant was, in a general way, when he played basketball he thought, fuck everybody. You don’t succeed at sports unless you have a certain reserve of blind anger. I was building mine up.
18
We traveled to Würzburg on Saturday and the night before the club laid on a special dinner at the gym canteen. Thomas Arnold, Charlie, Henkel all wore jacket and tie; some of the others showed up in sweat pants. One of the administrators, a woman named Angelika, whom I once heard referred to as the Judge’s wife, served us – cold meats for starters, and after that, as much pasta as we wanted from large hot tureens. No wine, but a few of the players, when the meal was over, pushed back their chairs and lit cigarettes.
The occasion was a visit from ‘our owner,’ as she was introduced to me, a widow named Frau Kolwitz. Very small, with colorless straight hair cut like a schoolgirl’s. She rarely spoke, and even when I saw her open her mouth, little sound came out. She had the air of a woman who confided only in trusted advisers, clustering at her elbow, and Henkel, in fact, spent much of the evening with his ear lowered to her lips.
Milo, who was sitting opposite, leaned over and told me what she was worth. Eight or ten million, he claimed, though he had a tendency to exaggerate, especially about money. He believed such stories established him as someone with inside knowledge. Herr Kolwitz, he said, had made his fortune by providing processing services for various companies; they outsourced their factory work to him. He had developed a number of buildings for flexible use, in Bavaria. It was all very sophisticated, technologically; these factories brought a great deal of work to the region. When he died, a few years ago, the papers carried his picture on the front pages. His wife used to be his secretary.
She wore rimless glasses, with gold ear-hooks, and instead of her eyes, I saw mostly squares of candleshine. I tried to imagine her as an attractive woman. Russell, I heard, was in some way her responsibility.
The club itself had been her husband’s pet project. She wanted particularly for us to beat Würzburg, and I heard again the story of our rivalry. A coach and two of our best players had deserted – Chad Baker, an American, and a big German point man named Henrik Lenz. Hadnot wanted to go, too, Milo said, but the league stepped in. Teams often folded, and there were rules about the number of players that could be absorbed by any one club in a single year. Landshut appealed, and Hadnot got stuck where he was. Even so, Frau Kolwitz had never forgiven him. The episode was connected in her memory with the difficult last years of her husband’s life: he had taken these desertions personally. A certain amount of ill-will between the teams was only natural and sporting given the circumstances, but this had a trace of real blood in it.
When dinner was over, Henkel stood up and made a short speech. ‘There are a few people here tonight,’ he said, ‘who don’t know me well, and I want to explain something important about myself. I am one of five brothers; all of us played basketball. We used to want to play football, but my mother got tired. She couldn’t make eleven.’ A little pause for laughter. ‘But we took over the local club. I was the youngest and my idea about the right way and the wrong way to play basketball comes from that team. A team is family. Maybe you fight like cats with each other at home, but against everyone else you fight much worse, like – tigers.’
This was really the way he talked. He had two small children and doted on them. He had the childishness of a young parent. Besides, here was a man who had devoted his life to the game his brothers taught him as a kid. ‘The head of this family,’ he said, ‘is Frau Kolwitz, to whom we all owe so much.’ And we lifted what was left in our mugs of coffee and toasted her.
Afterwards, Frau Kolwitz moved slowly around the table and introduced herself to us one by one. She wasn’t much taller on her feet than we were sitting down, so we only had to turn our heads. It would have been rude to stand up. Sometimes she rested her hands briefly on an arm or a pair of shoulders, and I had the strange sense that something sexual had occurred, a kind of assessment. You could see the satisfaction she took in us. Look at all my boys, she might have said; at all this meat. But she didn’t stop at Hadnot’s chair, and he didn’t look up to see her pass.
I heard Karl say in a recent interview that he dates the beginning of his career from his eighteenth birthday, and the game he played in Würzburg the night before it. Some of his high school friends were studying at the university there, and he remembers feeling strange on the long coach ride north, as if he were traveling to visit himself. The person he might have been without basketball. The season had been going badly, and he was disappointed by his own play. Everyone on the club was frustrated; there was a lot of infighting. Perhaps, he thought, I have made the wrong decision, to live this life. Before the Würzburg game, he told himself to have fun, he didn’t care. Afterwards, he was going to get drunk with his buddies anyway, so what did it matter. And that’s what he did.
But on the coach ride over he sat in the back with his headphones on. He liked to claim the last row for himself and stretch out; there was a seat in the middle that made it as good as a bed. A six-hour journey spent in the shade of his sweatshirt hood. The rest of us, though, were in good spirits.
Charlie started teasing me about the beard I was trying to grow. ‘Cut that thing off,’ he said. ‘It takes a certain kind of courage to make yourself uglier than you already are. Is somebody paying you to grow it? Whatever they paying isn’t enough. I’ll pay you twice as much to shave it.’
Even Hadnot joined in. I offered him a sandwich, and he said no, but he wouldn’t mind a hand of cards; he’d brought some along. So we played rummy on the tray table over his seat, until Arnold and Plotzke asked to get in the game, and by the end of the journey I had switched places to a window across the aisle, and four or five guys crouched around Hadnot and his cards.
Between deals he was telling them how to beat Würzburg. ‘The problem with Chad Baker,’ he said, ‘is that he’s a nice guy.’ All you got to do is piss him off, playing mean or dirty, and he loses his head. Lenz is tough, but Lenz is a little slow, too. He has his positions on court, where he likes to get comfortable, and if you double him out of those spots, he tends to pass. They’ve got a new kid, some black kid called Robert something, out of Alabama, exchanging the point with Lenz. ‘Don’t know much about him; he’ll be Charlie’s problem.’
Somebody suggested playing for money, and for the next two hours, they talked nothing but poker. Plotzke cleaned them all out. He had a masters in econ
omics and was getting his MBA, by correspondence, from Berlin.
Hadnot kept saying, ‘What you got in those cards, big man?’ Friendly but suspicious, too. He seemed genuinely surprised to be losing. He couldn’t believe that a guy that stiff on court could beat him at anything.
We arrived in Würzburg as the late autumn sun spread the red of the rooftops over the white walls of the town. My first visit. The highway descended gradually from the hills, with plenty of weekend traffic. I stared out the coach window, taking the sunset in. A very beautiful city, ordered, modest, prosperous, packed squarely around a river. It suggested old German virtues, civic contentment, decent isolation. Then we reached the level of the streets, and these were only ordinary streets, with advertising on the shop fronts and bike racks stapled into the pavement.
The coach parked a few blocks from the sports hall, closing off a narrow medieval road, and we got out quickly bag in hand and watched it drive away. You could feel the river damp. There was always a problem, arriving early enough to eat, and Henkel led us directly to one of a chain of chicken restaurants that we found at the end of the street. We changed an hour before tip off in the visiting locker room, and the pace of life slowed down again; conversation lagged. Already we could hear the crowds arriving, the pressure of their voices in the gym, reaching us through closed doors.
Würzburg had a long basketball history. The club president was one of the founders of the league, and the students came out in numbers to support the team. There wasn’t much else to do on a Saturday night, and they filled the Kneipen afterwards with pent-up spirits and plenty of drinking energy. Before the game, they put on the usual firework show, and a guy with drums sat behind the home team’s basket and banged away between explosions. The refs held up play for three or four minutes while the smoke settled and insisted the drums be removed. There must have been three thousand people in the stands. It didn’t get much quieter when the whistle blew.
Coach put Hadnot on from the tip, for once. He worked free for a couple early jumpers; each hit the back iron. Maybe he was rushing, or had too much juice in him. Lenz took him on both ends of the court, and they knew each other well. He had a couple inches and twenty or thirty pounds on Bo. A classic German basketball player: strong in all his limbs, clean-cut, technically good. Not especially quick, and he couldn’t jump much, but he held his ground and took up smart positions.
Milo, sitting on the bench beside me, said, ‘This man don’t get out of bed for less than a hundred thousand a year.’ One of his favorite lines. Success for him was always measured in what it would take to get you out of bed.
Lenz played defense like Hadnot did, with muscle rather than speed. He spread his knees and held his arms wide. Wherever you moved, you moved against him, or some part of him, and had to fight your way around his obstructions. Hadnot picked up an early foul trying to push through him, and then another, pettily, reaching in on a drive. Five minutes into the game and Henkel had to sit him down; we were down already by five.
Then Charlie swung the ball to Karl in the corner. Lenz switched over but was too short to bother his shooting hand, and Karl quietly knocked down a three. Baker answered inside against Olaf. A long-haired, leggy American, he moved his head more than was strictly graceful but could hold his pivot through any number of up-and-unders, and score with either hand. Olaf and Plotzke spent the whole game trying to pin him down. Charlie drove hard at the other end, got stuck inside, and kicked the ball out to Karl, who had drifted to the top of the key. Karl drained another three. Then Lenz finished off a drive by the other American, the kid from Alabama, named Tressell, a short muscular two-guard who played running back in college. He was much too strong for Charlie, but the real problem was that Karl never boxed out. Henkel nagged at him all the way down court, following him up the sideline and past the scorer’s table.
‘OK, OK,’ Karl said.
He called for the ball on the wing, and Lenz pushed up against him. Karl held the ball for a moment one-handed above his head, then strode suddenly past Lenz’s shoulder, a single step, and pulled up. Lenz scrambled to make up the ground, and by the time he got his feet back another three had slipped in.
By this stage, a few of Karl’s friends in the Würzburg section were standing and shouting at him, mostly good-natured abuse. The score was tied. ‘Let me in, coach,’ Hadnot said. ‘I’m ready to go back in.’
But Henkel never looked at him and only repeated, ‘In a minute, in a minute.’
I’d like to paint this as a sea-change in Karl’s play, but the truth is, already against Langen he had decided to shoot whenever he got the ball. The difference was, against Würzburg the shots went in. It was like watching the big boy at a birthday picnic take all the cake: he had realized there was no one who could stop him. The next time down, Lenz tried to keep him off the ball, and Karl cut backdoor. Charlie found him with the bounce pass, Baker came late on the rotation, and Karl ended up sitting on his shoulders with his elbows at the rim. Even in Würzburg the crowd responded, with a kind of happiness; people were laughing.
After a while, they didn’t care anymore who won, or rather, it’s not that they didn’t care, but that they wanted Karl to score more than they wanted their club to come back. ‘I’m glad they aren’t our fans,’ Hadnot said, sitting beside me. Karl scored seventeen straight for Landshut in one stretch and finished the half with thirty. By the end most of the people were on their feet – they cheered us on our way to the locker room.
‘Well,’ Hadnot said, as we sat down among the showers, ‘I guess this is what we all been waiting for.’ He led a brief round of applause, which maybe came across as ironic.
Karl said something like, ‘You are all assholes,’ and blushed.
I think he was actually a little embarrassed. We had caught him out in a kind of boast. He had more or less confessed, this is how good I think I am. Of course, he was right, but he looked like a boy who had been discovered kissing the prettiest girl at the party: proud and somehow ashamed at once.
In the second half, Würzburg quit trying; it was impossible to play through the laughter of their own supporters. The only question was whether Karl would get his fifty, which he did, on two free throws, with six or seven minutes left. After that, Henkel sat him down (to a standing ovation) and gave me a chance to work off the nerves I had built up watching him from the bench. Mostly scrubs left by that point. We won by twenty-odd.
Hadnot and Karl stayed in town overnight – Henkel gave them dispensations. I remember seeing Bo, after the game, touch fists with Baker and Lenz, who introduced him to the kid from Alabama. Briefly, I saw him crouch into his defensive stance, with his hands up; I wondered if he was talking about Karl. This is how you defend him. Like this. The rest of us showered and filed out shivering slightly under a sky cold with stars. Happy in victory, but not especially happy. The coach was parked several blocks away, down unlit cobbled medieval streets. Far enough that we were glad of its close, upholstered air as we climbed in. We all felt that something had happened and that it wasn’t really to do with us.
19
My father came a few days later. He was catching a cab from the Landshut train station in the early evening. I had offered to pick him up on my bike, but there was no point, he said. He had a suitcase with him, and besides, wasn’t sure what train he wanted to catch: there was a lunch in Salzburg he was supposed to show his face at. If it got too late, I told him, he could pick up a key from a friend of mine in the next building. I had to be at practice by eight.
Anke seemed pleased at the prospect of meeting him. Probably just because of that, I explained to her that she might not see much of me in the next week. My family are very close, I said; they expect a lot of attention.
After lunch, I walked into town to buy a camp bed, which I intended to sleep on. I also bought him his favorite German foods: pepper salami and black bread. Two liters of diet coke. The rest of the afternoon I spent rearranging my apartment, pulling dirty towels off the
bathroom floor, letting a little air in. Almost no one came to visit me, and the rooms had acquired the stale personal air of a private space. The bell rang around seven o’clock while I was forcing down a sandwich. It sent my heart racing – such was the loneliness I had become accustomed to.
Ever since I was seven or eight years old, my father has worn a full beard, which is sometimes long and untidy, in the summers when he isn’t teaching and looks like a rabbi, and sometimes clipped and business-like. But he was beardless when I opened the door. For a moment, I hardly recognized him. He looked like a man I had seen only in photographs: my father in his courting days, with a big head of Jewish curls; and later, in the first few years of parenthood, with a baby over his shoulder in the garden of their house in California.
‘Look at you,’ I said, as he stood there. Only his hair was thinner on top and not so curly, and his features were perhaps a little finer, narrower.
He goes through great swings in weight. He eats too much for several months, giving in to his fondness for ethnic foods and anything that can be consumed in small repeatable portions, olives, tortilla chips, pastries etc. Then he starves for weeks until he looks like his old self again. I had caught him at the thin end of the cycle.
‘I’m a new man,’ he answered sarcastically and pulled his suitcase in.
He stood appreciatively in the middle of my bedroom, which was also my sitting room, and looked around him. And I saw myself again, arriving and tearing the curtains from the window.
‘What do they pay for this place? I mean, the club,’ he wanted to know. ‘Very light. A balcony, even if it overlooks the road. Big kitchen.’ He enumerated its advantages. ‘Very nice,’ he said again.
I had never entertained my father like this before, as a grown man with a place of his own. His shaven face unnerved me. It suggested some kind of mid-life crisis, a sudden revaluation. In fact, as he explained to me, my mother had only cut away too much, giving him a trim, leaving a bare patch, and there was nothing for it but to shave the whole thing off. And the next time I saw him, after the season was over and I had gone home, the beard was in place again. But for that week it contributed to the strangeness of his presence. I imagined him as he might have been once, without ties or obligations to define him. And saw myself through his eyes, too, a young man, becoming less familiar.
Playing Days Page 14
