I set up the camp bed in the kitchen and told him to eat what he liked. Practice ran till ten, and I should be home shortly after, but if he was tired and wanted to go to bed, of course he should. I insisted he take the double in my bedroom. The cot was very comfortable.
Outside, in the early dark, I felt relieved to be on my own again and walked slowly to the sports hall carrying the gym bag against my hip. A wet warmish night, with the wetness not falling but in the air. This was often my favorite stretch of day: after the idleness of the afternoon, before the business of the evening. I like loneliness with a margin to it and thought of him moving around my apartment, unpacking. Fixing himself some supper. Examining my books. Wondering at the life of his son. Sitting on my bed and calling home, reporting back.
In the morning, I woke early – the kitchen windows had no curtains, and one of them faced south. I ate a bowl of cereal by myself, with the door closed to the bedroom. A bad night: my ankles stretched past the edge of the cot and rested awkwardly on the bar. I kept shifting to relieve them and slept shallowly but full of dreams. Over breakfast, I was reluctant to wake my father, to enter his company. It was enough to know he was there, to feel the slight pressure in my head of his perceptions and opinions.
He joined me on the walk to the gym. ‘Not a bad commute,’ he said, wearing again the clothes he had arrived in: chinos and leather shoes, a collared shirt, the jacket he liked to teach in. A clear November day with leftover wet darkening pavement and grass. By this point I felt better, and something about the exercise of my own strong tired muscles, the contrast with my father, reassured me. I really was in the best shape of my life, and thought, if I want to look back, years later, on the young man I once was . . .
At the sports hall, I left him to explore and got changed in the locker room. Only Olaf was there, in unlaced hightops, but he had his headphones on and his eyes closed. Another minute to myself. Coming out, I found my dad on court, jacketless, slapping a ball around and warming up his shoulders. ‘You want me to feed you some?’ he said.
‘I usually warm up with another kid. Sure.’
‘Until he gets here.’
‘Why don’t you shoot a couple?’
We passed the ball back and forth, and after a few minutes he pulled out the hems of his shirt. I remembered again what his high school coach once told him. ‘Markovits, you may be slow, but you sure are weak.’
Another memory stirred. On the day of his fiftieth birthday, he brought in bagels and cream cheese and made Mexican eggs. A few colleagues came over, and we spent the afternoon outside. March in Texas is sometimes cool enough for picnics, and the mosquitoes hadn’t yet arrived. Afterwards, some of the men wandered off to the court with a basketball, and I joined them. I was sixteen years old.
We split up into sides, and my dad said, ‘Let me get number-two son.’
For an hour or so, we went at it – a good hard game, not much talk. I realized pretty soon that if I didn’t want him to, he couldn’t get a shot off over me. For the past dozen years, he’d beaten me at everything he taught me to do.
At the end, however, I relented and with the game on the line let him squeeze out an eighteen-footer, just over my hand. It went in, and I had the strange sense that but for me all of his shots that day would have dropped. On the way back to the food, he rested his forearm on my shoulder and nodded his head to my ear. ‘Thanks,’ he said. My mother had cut up a watermelon, and I felt very childish with the stickiness of a slice against my face.
I felt childish now, appearing at work with my dad in tow.
‘Dick Markovits,’ he said, stretching out a hand to Coach Henkel. He was sweating already with an untucked shirt. ‘Mind if I sit in?’ he asked, but he couldn’t in fact sit still and stood on the sideline against one of the wall hoops rolling in shots left-handed. When Hadnot arrived, I led him over.
‘I want you to meet my old man,’ I said.
They stood face to face for a moment; Hadnot wasn’t much taller than my dad. Clean-shaven, my father even bore him a slight resemblance. They both had the strong crooked racial nose, though Hadnot’s features were generally thicker and rougher. (Afterwards, I said to my father, ‘He’s Jewish, you know.’ My father is always on the look-out for unexpected celebrity Jews and takes secret pride in them, especially in the ballplayers. His response: ‘Of course he is.’) What he said at the time was, ‘I taught this one everything he knows.’
Hadnot answered, ‘So it’s your fault.’
When Karl walked in, I left them together and hunted out a couple good balls. We warmed up as usual, starting at the baseline and working around the arc. Karl was still in high spirits from the game in Würzburg, but they expressed themselves in a kind of earnestness, in good intentions. He made sure to bend his legs into every shot (Hadnot once said to him, ‘Jump like there’s someone in your face’) and counted out loudly the makes and misses. Eight out of ten he wanted from each spot and wouldn’t shift till he got it. I didn’t dare to insist on the same standard for myself, which meant in practice that I spent most of the time chasing down balls.
Karl seemed not to notice the discrepancy. ‘One for one,’ he called out. ‘Two for two. Two for three,’ and so on.
White light fell through the high stadium windows onto the green gym floor. The hall echoed irregularly. There’s a peculiar underwater quality to a basketball court in the morning, especially during the warm-up, before practice begins. A solemn air of self-improvement. Looking over, I saw my father and Hadnot trading jumpshots, too, at one of the side baskets, and felt something like jealousy or embarrassment – as if I had introduced him to a girl I was sweet on.
Years later I wrote a story about a father’s visit – to a girl, as it happens, holding down her first job, teaching high school in New York. What I wanted to get right in that story was something of the faint suppression I felt (in which I was complicit and which I partly desired) when my dad came to Landshut. Suppression of what, I ask myself now. The first few shoots of adulthood?
After practice, I took him to lunch at Sahadi’s and tried to pay for it. But he insisted, and by the end of the meal had collared the owner, Mr. Sahadi himself, and discussed Turkish market stalls in Berlin.
‘Your son don’t visit,’ Sahadi said as we left. ‘Every time he come, I give him Kirschwasser on the house. Still, he don’t come often.’
‘You drink kirsch?’ my father asked, when we were out of earshot.
There isn’t much to do in Landshut on a Thursday afternoon – or any other afternoon, for that matter, unless you like beer gardens. We looked into the church on the way home, and afterwards my father sat on my bed with his shoes off and made phone calls. In America, the rest of my family, variously scattered, were just waking up. He spoke to my two younger sisters, still in high school, my mother, and then called my brother in Connecticut and spoke to him for an hour. I heard him say again and again, ‘A very nice place. There’s a balcony, though I haven’t gone out on it yet. A big kitchen. He’s made it very nice.’ And then: ‘I met his coach. And a Jew from Mississippi, can you believe it, who doesn’t miss.’ At the end of each phone call: ‘He seems fine. Happy.’ Though every time he said it, I suspected him of holding something back, a private judgment. Even over lunch I felt the slight awkwardness produced by a parent’s determination not to say the thing foremost in his thoughts.
My brother had investment matters to discuss with him, and after a while I muttered in my dad’s free ear, ‘I’m just going to step out for a minute to see a friend. There’s someone I’d like to introduce to you.’ And I went to find Anke.
She was at home watching TV with Franziska, with the curtains drawn.
‘Come in!’ she called.
They were huddled coldly together on the couch, lit up by cartoons. I had a brief sense of what I was excluded from, something like happy misery, which they shared, which Anke could draw on when she needed to. But she was also willing to let me open the curtains and take them
out of themselves.
‘I want you to meet my father,’ I said. She looked at me soberly and nodded.
The four of us spent the rest of the day together. Anke could be very proper and charming when she liked and knew how to act, among other parts, the role of the presentable girlfriend. Franziska also gave us something to occupy ourselves with, a purpose. We took her to the park – the day was just bright and dry enough. My father has always liked children, which is one reason he had so many of them. And he likes to teach, regardless of what or who. It’s his job, but it suits him, too, and tests his great patience, which I have inherited to a degree, for repetition. Franzisca had found a small plastic ball in the playground, which she wouldn’t let go of, even when climbing – she kept nearly falling over wet bars. My father convinced her at last to let him roll the ball up the slide instead of down and crouched at the bottom, propping her on his lap. He threw it against the incline, again and again; they watched it bounce towards them. Franziska tried to catch it by clapping her hands together, but mostly she just clapped. My dad repeated to her in his broken salesman’s German, ‘Look the ball into the hands’ – always shifting, to relieve his back and knees.
Anke said to me, ‘I like your father. He is a very good father.’
‘He’s only trying to impress you.’
Around six o’clock, we went to find something to eat. Franziska was hungry, and unless I ate early, the first half hour of practice gave me a pain in the side. My father, on one of his diets, wanted nothing – he tended to eat only one meal a day. Anke misunderstood him. She thought he meant it was just too soon for supper and suggested the Bäckerei in the stretch of shops by the kiosk: they sold cake and tea and savory pastries, too.
I let the confusion stand. Somehow her presence hadn’t loosened my tongue, and I explained my silence by saying, over a piece of spanakopita, that the camp bed dug into my ankles. I had hardly slept. My father, of course, offered to change with me, and I refused, until Anke interrupted us both.
‘This is nonsense,’ she said. (Quatsch is the German word she used.) ‘You can sleep at mine. There’s no point in pretending, is there?’
And that’s how I began to spend the nights with her. After tea, we went back to the apartment block and my father helped put Franziska to bed – he offered, and Anke, to my surprise, accepted. I got changed into shoes and shorts still wet from the morning runaround and headed back down the hill.
On Friday, Henkel let us off the evening session (we had a game the next day), so my father and I caught the train to Munich after practice. I expected him to talk about Anke, but we spent the first five minutes of the journey in silence. Outside, a view of fall fields, approaching slowly, departing quickly, according to the strange laws of perspective. The river ran occasionally beside us, and the skies were broken by clouds about as often as the fields themselves were interrupted by trees and hedgerows.
At last I said, ‘How did things go with Franziska last night?’ I had seen him only briefly for breakfast on my way to the gym.
‘She’s a very attractive child. Good-natured and attentive. Whenever I spoke, she looked at me and waited – she didn’t answer but she looked. I watched her in the bath while Anke hung out laundry. Afterwards, she went down without a sound.’
After another minute, I said, ‘And what do you think of Anke?’
‘She seems to be a good mother.’ Another pause, and then: ‘She has a clear pleasant voice. Good features, fine and symmetrical. Excellent posture. I understand why you find her attractive.’
My father has a tendency towards the specific, but even I found his answer odd. I wondered what he was keeping back. He seemed to be grudging me something, and then it struck me, truly for the first time, that as a young man he had also fallen in love with a slim, elegant German girl, a little older than himself. That he might find something painful or suggestive in comparisons.
We were on the local, which stopped at every suburb and farming settlement: Bruckberg, Langenbach, Gündkofen. Another Friday afternoon: the first trickle of weekenders to the city. We watched them get on in groups, mostly boys and girls apart, and probably louder, more openly happy in consequence. Couples tend to huddle quietly.
Eventually my dad said, ‘How well do you know this Hadnot guy?’
‘Not as well as I’d like to. He doesn’t give away much. Maybe there isn’t much to give. He’s Anke’s ex-husband, you know. Franziska is his kid.’
He quietly took this in, so I prompted him. ‘And what did you make of him?’
‘You don’t shoot like that if you can do anything else.’ He was sitting beside me, next to the window – I could see him doubled by his reflection and behind his reflection the traveling landscape.
‘What do you mean?’
He thought it over for a while, pushing his lips inwards and together, a characteristic expression, as if he meant to clean his teeth. Then he said, in the voice he uses for launching into stories, that when he was thirteen or fourteen he started playing a lot of golf.
‘I played everything else till then, but around thirteen or fourteen something changed, which I can’t account for myself, because I certainly didn’t enjoy golf more than the rest of it, baseball, football, basketball, which kept me out at the park most days till dinner. Maybe because golf was solitary, maybe that suited me. Though I liked company when I was a kid, more than you.’
He waited to see if I would take him up on that, before going on.
‘I won’t say there were clubs I couldn’t play in . . . but there were clubs I felt uncomfortable. But why do you think a kid like me, a Jewish kid, at that age, decides to pick up golf? Maybe I wanted to belong, especially in those clubs. What I mean is, this was not happy behavior. When it was light enough, I played every day after school for three or four hours. Saturdays, too, before synagogue, to my grandmother’s horror. That doesn’t leave much time for the other elements of growing up. By high school graduation, I was scratch. Maybe with a driver I could knock the ball two hundred and forty yards. In those days, with the old clubs, but still. Freshman year, I had my golf scholarship, but I didn’t make it past freshman year.’
‘Because you realized there were other things in life?’
‘No. Because I realized I wasn’t long enough. I wanted to win, and I wasn’t going to win at golf.’
‘How come you don’t play any more? Why have I never seen you play?’
‘What’s the point in getting worse at something?’ he said.
By the time we got to Munich I was almost too hungry to stand. Unless I ate every few hours, my hands began to shake.
‘The first sight I plan to see is lunch,’ I said.
My father wanted to look around the neighborhood his grandparents had lived in, so we marched vaguely north out of the station, towards Schwabing. All the restaurants we passed appeared unappetizing, for various reasons, and the roads we found ourselves taking seemed almost violent with traffic after the calm of the train. The skin of my temples stretched tight towards the eyes; I felt a clenched fist in my ribs. Finally, we picked up two slices of pizza from the back of a van and carried them down a side street to the sandy oasis of a children’s playground, where there was an empty bench.
I asked my father if he had ever been to Munich before. He said, no. I asked him if it meant anything to be here now. He said he wasn’t sure yet, he couldn’t tell.
Something I have inherited from my father is a love of walking around city neighborhoods. Perhaps because we moved so often in my childhood, wherever I go I have the feeling, This could also be my life. We spent a few happy hours exploring the streets my great grandparents had considered home and failed again to locate the apartment they used to live in. Probably it got bombed. At four I told him I needed to sit down somewhere – those days my back and knees ached from everything but sprinting – and we stopped at one of the bakeries that filled out the ground floor of an apartment block.
My father refused to eat or drink h
imself but was willing to sit with me. I had a cup of black tea heaped up with sugar. We sat on high stools ranged along a counter that spanned the glass front wall. By necessity we looked not at each other but at the traffic in the street; maybe this made it easier for him to talk.
I knew something already about my grandparents’ response to his marriage: they were upset, understandably upset, he said, at the thought of his relationship with a Christian woman. They considered it unlikely that his own children would think of themselves as Jews. ‘They may have been wrong about that, I don’t know, but in the long run undeniably . . .’
What he wanted to talk about, though, was their reaction to the fact that his wife was German. ‘It was probably more mixed than you think,’ he said.
His mother was a nice suburban kid from Port Jervis. She had Belgian roots but no particular attachment to Europe, or the idea of Europe, and may have picked up a certain amount of anti-German sentiment. But Bill, his father, grew up in a family that still spoke German at home for several years of his remembered childhood, until he was ten or eleven and his own mother died. At that point his father, who had involved himself more deeply in the life of the community, on account of his business dealings, had no one to speak German to. Bill himself refused to speak German as soon as he reached school age, and eventually forgot all but a few stock words of what was probably his first language.
Yet it gave him, my father said, a kind of pleasure or pride to hear his own grandchildren speak it. He had retained some feeling for Germany, some memory of it, though he had never been and never would visit – ‘even once your mother and I were married.’ In the first difficult days of their relationship, my mother and Bill got along personally very well, despite his religious objections and the fact that they had nothing in common but this one thing.
Playing Days Page 15
