‘I think I have to sit down,’ Anke said, and so we pushed along one of the pews towards the middle. ‘Maybe I’m pregnant, I feel a little funny.’ This was one of her persistent worries, and I treated it always the same, with simple contradiction. Then she lifted her hand and pointed. ‘What do you call that, that tall cabinet?’
‘The ark.’
‘And what’s inside it?’
‘The Torah.’
‘And what’s the Torah.’
But it didn’t seem like a question, and I wasn’t quite sure how to answer her anyway. ‘The truth is,’ I said, after another pause, ‘I’m not sure if you’re supposed to be here. Only the men sit here. The women look down on us from the gallery upstairs.’
‘So I wouldn’t be allowed to sit with you?’
‘Not here.’
Then, rousing herself: ‘OK, let’s go.’
I thought for a blessed moment she meant leave, but she began walking towards the back of the hall, where a corridor opened on to a set of stairs. I don’t know if I can explain why the whole thing struck me as so awful, and why it seemed a real act of cowardice not to put a stop to it. Maybe it’s clear enough. Anke had gone ahead, and by the time I caught up to her, she had found the rabbi’s office. Next to the stairs, and behind the ark, was a row of doors, and one of them had the name Rabbi Henry Roswald printed on it. Henry isn’t a German name, and the voice that answered her knock called ‘Come in!’ at first. Then he made a mouthful of ‘Komm rein.’
He sat in a windowless room, brightly lit, whose walls were covered in heavy, legal-style volumes. It hadn’t occurred to me before that rabbi was a job for ambitious young men. Beside his desk, in the only clear space of wall, he had hung a number of framed testimonials: several in Hebrew, which I couldn’t read, but also a certificate from Harvard, awarding him a masters in economics. He looked about thirty years old, fattening and pale. I hadn’t met him before or seen him deliver any of the services. A sparse, uncomfortable-looking beard grew along the line of his cheeks and down his neck.
‘I haven’t seen you before,’ I said to him in English.
‘Nor I you.’ His voice had the finicky nervous pleasure in it I associate with my father’s relatives.
‘I don’t know if you’re the right person to talk to.’
‘Don’t tell me that. That’s what I love to hear. That’s what makes me send you along to somebody else.’
I learned later that a younger element in the congregation, many of them American, the children of immigrants, returning to Munich for business reasons, had brought in Roswald to oversee the expansion of the synagogue. He turned out to be a good administrator and fund-raiser; so far, he had taken on few pastoral duties. His German was still very basic, for which he apologized. He apologized also for the fact that there was only one extra chair and gestured for Anke to sit down in it. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘setzen Sie sich.’ I stood throughout. This irritated me, too much, although in those days I found it difficult to stand still for any length of time. My back ached and then the ache moved down to my knees. Also, I felt that some part of his response to us was colored by the fact that Anke was a pretty girl.
She left it to me to explain our situation, which, with several hesitations, I did.
‘Let me hear it from the young lady herself,’ he said. And then, in faltering German, ‘If you speak slowly, I’ll understand you.’
I found it embarrassing how quickly he could adopt this tone with us – pastoral, superior. He seemed to me the kind of young man I used to meet at my parents’ law school parties: a little awkward socially, but also ingratiating. Maybe he even knew my father, who teaches economics as well as law and spent a semester in the early nineties at Harvard. I did not ask him. His figure was womanish and he carried himself, sitting back in his chair, with the delicacy some men show to women. Soon he would look middle-aged and perfectly natural in any position of authority.
Anke said that she wanted to convert. She sat with her hands folded across her lap, as demure as a nun – probably because she considered it an appropriate pose.
‘Can I ask you a question? Can I ask you why?’
Her first husband was Jewish, she said, the father of her daughter. It didn’t matter very much to him but it mattered to me (pointing). ‘I don’t know,’ she added, feeling herself this fell short of what was necessary, ‘it suits me somehow.’ Irgendwie, paßt es – it was the phrase you might use to explain how you named your cat. After a pause, she continued, responding still to the gentleness of his tone, ‘Can I ask you a question. Can I ask you how long it takes?’
He hesitated, and I could imagine the different ways he considered answering. Then he said: ‘Three years.’ Maybe it was only the limits of his vocabulary, but it seemed to me he had decided on the simplest way of putting her off. I disliked him for that, too.
‘I didn’t know it took so long.’ She seemed genuinely surprised but recovered herself. ‘I learn very quickly when I put my mind to something. Is it possible sometimes to do it quicker?’
‘Sometimes it’s possible for the whole thing to take a lifetime.’ He lapsed into English again. ‘Will you explain it to her?’ – as if he and I shared a closer understanding. ‘If the question is, what does it take to be a Jew, what makes me a Jew, and then, as a Jew, what are my duties and obligations . . .’ This was a discussion in which he liked to stretch his legs, and he talked for several minutes along these lines. I’m familiar with this kind of talk, philosophical and practical at once, and often find it appealing. But translating the gist of it for Anke, I found I left out most of what was characteristically Jewish: the delight in these questions for their own sake. She wanted to know only the prayers and ceremonies she was expected to learn. Roswald concluded at last, ‘She should understand, it’s a lot harder to become a Jew than to be a Jew. She should understand that.’
‘No, no, I understand well enough,’ she interrupted, speaking in English herself. Something had set her off. ‘You don’t want me, that is clear.’
‘It isn’t a question of what we want.’
‘Then I don’t understand why you make so much difficulty. I have told you what I want.’
He smiled at this, a smile peculiar to teachers of all kinds, enjoying the struggles of a precocious student. ‘Maybe it won’t take you quite as long as I thought,’ he said. Turning to me: ‘I’m sorry I don’t have a chair for you. All this has been temporarily fixed up. Which means I’ll probably be here two years. Are you a member of the synagogue? I’m new here and still don’t recognize most of the other kids. Where are you from?’
I told him that my father was born in New York, but that his family came over from Munich before the war.
‘Is that why you speak German? Lucky you; it’s like learning all over again to eat with a knife and fork. I keep making messes of myself.’
‘No, my mother is German.’
‘And when did her family make it out?’
This is not the kind of thing you can lie about, though I would have liked to at the time, very much. ‘They didn’t make it out; they stayed put. My mother is Christian.’
After a moment, he said, ‘Ah.’ And then: ‘Are you looking to convert as well? Is that what this is about?’
But Anke broke in. ‘I don’t understand. Why should he convert? He is already Jewish.’
I could only look away while he answered. ‘I don’t want to say, some people are more Jewish or less Jewish. But as far as we’re concerned, Jewishness is passed down through the mother. And according to this thinking, your friend is no more Jewish than you are, no matter how Jewish he feels. I should add, this is a common reason people choose to convert.’ For the first time I felt the difference between him and the young academics I had met at those law school parties: the religious difference, which allowed him to treat certain subjects without irony, a useful skill. ‘Conversion itself can be a rewarding process, which puts you in touch with aspects of your culture you had forgotten
or in some cases never known. And it can be especially rewarding for a couple to undertake it together.’
Anke turned to me and made me look at her. I feared she would think that I had intentionally made a fool of her, for reasons it was only too easy to guess; but instead she saw something else. That I was just as adrift as she.
‘Tell me again why you want to do this?’ the rabbi asked, in a professionally tender voice I found surprisingly moving. Even at that stage in his career, he had seen something of the variety of human troubles; our situation was not unusual.
‘I only wanted to make it easier for him. But I think I make it harder.’
She seemed on the edge of tears but unreproachful, and afterwards she told me, over dinner, she felt only very sorry for us both. (Then she added, ‘I did not like the way he kept saying Jew, as if it was such a wonderful, strange thing.’ She expected this to enlist my sympathies and did not notice that it failed to.) When we came out into the air at last, out of the backroom corridors and stained-glass hall, past the man with the gun, the afternoon had darkened and you could feel the homeward pull in the foot traffic, even in the cars on the street. Then Anke did a sweet thing. She took my arm in her hand and said, ‘I feel terrible. Let’s go spend some money.’
27
Hadnot’s departure had an effect on my professional life, too. I got to play more basketball. Henkel had no one else to turn to on the bench, if Karl tired or Milo lost his head, and consequently I could count on a good ten or fifteen minutes of action each game. This makes a great difference; I stopped looking over my shoulder. Also, it’s possible my father’s visit had some influence, and it’s possible I had learned to play as Hadnot had taught me to play, angry. Meanwhile, we kept winning basketball games. Five out of six after Christmas, and by mid-February we sat comfortably in second place behind Würzburg in the league table.
It turns out that playing for a winning club is kind of wonderful. No matter what else is going on in your personal life, you’re always a little bit happy. Not deeply happy, of course, but as happy as you might be in the first few weeks after buying a new convertible. It’s enough on a sunny afternoon to be driving around in it with the top down, to be publicly visible.
One small story from this period. On Wednesday evenings, the local American news channel ran a weekly roundup from the NBA that finished as practice began. One night we all showed up late: Michael Jordan had just scored fifty-odd against New York. One of the nights he couldn’t be stopped, when a game of ten men became an instrument for his individual fancy. We all came to work slightly drunk on him, talking loudly, saying the same things. Shouting over each other, desperate to persuade, though everyone already agreed. ‘It’s what I’ve been telling you,’ Milo said, to no one in particular. ‘These people, they are not like us, like you and me. And Michael Jordan, he is not like them.’
After practice, Charlie started a dunk competition. Like a high school prom, it had a theme: the moves of Michael Jordan. Milo tried to launch himself from the foul line. He looked like a man losing speed on a surfboard and ended up on his hip. Everyone tried his luck. Plotzke took three steps in from the three-point arc and dunked without leaving the ground. When Karl’s turn came he lined himself up carefully at the far end of the court, measuring his strides in reverse. The warm-up Jordan had gone through at the ’88 All Star game to stir up the crowd. Then he set off. A few of us beat time during the run-up, increasing speed as he increased his speed. But the ball slipped out of his palm and he had to pull violently down at the rim, empty-handed, to catch his balance. Olaf said to me afterwards, he was almost relieved. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ he said. ‘If even he can do it, what’s the point of all this?’ I think he meant, this honorable mediocrity.
Most of us followed Hadnot’s games in the league newsletter you could pick up from Angie at reception. Würzburg continued to win, but there were days Bo failed to score a single point. I remember the word Milo used, astonished: genullt. It means to zero, or be-nil. Other days he scored thirty. It isn’t easy fitting in to a new offense midseason, and like a lot of bench players, Hadnot rolled with the fortunes of his first few shots. If he missed them, he might easily spend the rest of the half watching the game go by; but some days he didn’t miss. I found myself getting caught up in his failures and successes and used to hang around Angie after Thursday’s practice till the newsletter arrived. Taking drinks from the office fridge and generally wasting the day. When it came I turned first thing to last week’s box scores. Bo had become, at that distance, a character, and I felt for him as simply as you feel for any protagonist.
At the beginning of March, I returned from dinner with Anke to find a message from him on my service. Würzburg had a game in Munich at the end of the week, and he intended to stay on a few days to see his daughter. He wanted to know if he could crash at my place. ‘Stick me in the bathtub,’ he said. ‘I don’t care.’
I didn’t call back at first and by the time I saw Anke again, they had worked out their own arrangement. He would sleep on her parents’ sitting-room couch. This had the advantage of putting him on the scene when Franziska woke up in the morning. He could also help get her to bed. I can’t say I liked the arrangement, and I suggested to Anke her daughter would find it confusing to have her father in the house again. But I liked even less the prospect of entertaining him myself. My sense of guilt was stronger than my sexual jealousies. Even so, from Sunday onwards I tried to stay out of my apartment as much as possible. Anke and I had agreed not to see each other while he was in town, but I didn’t want to hang around the phone waiting for her call.
On the Tuesday, after lunch, I headed back to the gym to work on my shot and found Hadnot there. No one had turned the lights on, and for a minute I stood in the tall twilight of the sports hall watching him, about twenty feet away. He was working hard; his T-shirt, heavy with sweat, hung loose around his neck and shoulders. Harder than I had seen him work. He moved sharply between the lines and chased down each ball in strong steady strides. It occurred to me he was preparing for the playoff in a few weeks’ time. Würzburg had already qualified and they were likely to face us, giving him a shot at revenge. Karl was the reason he came back to play in the fall, and Karl was the reason he got cut. But Karl gave him a shot at other things, too: dozens of scouts would come, from the major European clubs as well as the NBA. Hadnot was thirty years old, with a bum knee and a reputation as a troublemaker. This was probably his last chance of making it into the basketball big leagues.
Of course, whatever he was doing he had done a hundred thousand times before, planting his feet, lining his elbow up and following through. Watching the ball go in or out and starting from scratch. How much would it help him to practice a thousand more? But you do it anyway, just in case, or maybe because you prefer it after all to the real thing. I started to count the makes and misses, then gave up and just counted the misses. There weren’t many. He clapped his hands every time a shot rimmed out, but mostly what you heard was just the echo of the ball and the squeak of his shoes, and sometimes, softly between them, his breathing.
There’s something about being unobserved that charges the atmosphere. When he noticed me, it seemed to affect him, too. ‘How long you been standing there?’ he said.
‘Not long.’
‘Tell you what, since you’re here. Why don’t you feed me some shots.’
So I did and after a few minutes, he took my place under the net. Some of my childhood friendships consisted of nothing but this: standing around on an empty summer morning, taking turns with a basketball. Not that he would ever have called me friend. Maybe I should have asked about his daughter, but I knew more than I should have and felt shy of pretending ignorance. Eventually I said, ‘How’s life in Würzburg? I follow you sometimes in the newspaper. In the box scores.’
‘Same as it is anywhere else. I get up and go to the gym.’
‘You’ve had some good games,’ I said.
‘I’m a good basket
ball player.’
To break the silence that followed, I told him, ‘I’m not sure yet what I’ll be doing next year.’
We continued to pass the ball back and forth, exchanging shots. For the first time, I felt a little angry towards him. All year long I had shown him nothing but curiosity, but I couldn’t think of a single question he had put to me – that any of them had put to me. Hadnot was just as bad as the rest of them, Charlie, Olaf, Henkel, Karl. They gave me advice, they told me what to do, sometimes they even expressed their sympathy. But around them, I was always the one with the questions. I thought, there are worse things than curiosity. Then he said, ‘I hear you’re writing a book about me,’ and my heart began to beat a little quicker.
‘Where did you hear that?’
He didn’t answer and I wondered if Anke had told him anything else. We had agreed not to mention our relationship, at least till the end of the season – until we had come to a decision about it. But Hadnot was sleeping on her parents’ couch, and I hadn’t seen Anke or spoken to her in three days. He walked up to me and put the ball in my hands, and I turned slightly away from him. ‘How are you gonna write the book,’ he said, ‘if you don’t know a damn thing about basketball?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You want me to show you?’ he said.
So he did.
There was an old coach at Kansas who opened camp every season with the question, When was the first time somebody really guarded you? Just to make the freshmen scared. Freaks of physical precocity, who had outgrown, in talent as well as height, everyone they knew: parents, brothers, high school teammates. He wanted to remind them: somebody out there is better than you. All year long I’d had the truth of this drummed into me, but Karl was lazy on defense, and guys like Charlie and Milo belonged to the same physical class as I did. What it feels like really to be shut down I had no idea till that afternoon.
Playing Days Page 21
