EPILOGUE
For several years after leaving Landshut, I had dreams about leaving Landshut. Like school dreams, full of anxiety. Often the train station featured, half buried in snow. In fact, when I did move out in mid-April, it was one of the first warm days of the year, overcast and very still. I look the long train north to Hamburg and stayed with my uncle for a few days, making in reverse the journey that had brought me from college in the first place.
But in these dreams, something always went wrong. The train stalled in the station or I missed it altogether. There were also cars that broke down. Franziska appeared occasionally: we had left her behind and needed to go back for her. Sometimes Anke and I were stuck together, but not always. And other people pushed their way in: Milo, laughing at me; Hadnot with his face in the window; Darmstadt offering very sweetly, if I needed a place to stay, to put me up at his parents’ house for the night. Some of the dreams grew out of the violent dreams of my playing days, and I woke from them almost breathless, with a quickening heart.
It took me about two weeks to clear out. A few days after the playoff, once the celebrations were over and the long summer began to stare us in the face, Henkel sat each of us down one by one. Hadnot was right. Only Olaf and Karl survived our promotion to the first division. It’s a very different business, Henkel explained to me, and frankly he didn’t think I was ready. If I wanted to sit at the end of the bench, year after year, all right, that was one thing. But what I needed was a chance to play, etc.
Sometimes I wonder, if we had lost that game and stayed in the old league, would I have stuck around? Franziska will be fourteen years old this summer. Anke is approaching forty. Laziness and stubbornness, I told her, account for most of my decisions. It really would have taken a fair dose of one or the other to keep me in Landshut without a job. Henkel offered to let me stay on in the apartment till July, but I said to him, ‘If I’m going to go, I should just go,’ and the way he accepted my answer suggested he knew a little about my personal situation, too.
Anke blamed the club bitterly for its disloyalty. ‘If only you had lost,’ she said. It was easier for both of us to blame the club, but the truth is, I was ready to leave and I don’t think losing would have made much difference. Even for Olaf and Karl and the rest of them.
Nothing, of course, could have kept Karl in Landshut very long, and the first division failed to. One year later he made his way to the NBA, and the rest is not my story to tell. You can watch him a few times a week from October to June on national TV, looking more or less as he looked when I knew him. Although these days his large flat face is partly hidden by a beard. He earns fifteen million dollars a year for doing our old job – we used to make the same money.
Promotion didn’t mean much to Olaf, either. Recently, I looked up the names of my former teammates on the internet and was stunned to see how little their lives had changed. Henkel did not follow Karl to a coaching job in the NBA, and Landshut subsequently dropped down a division. He got fired and ended up at Langen, one of the clubs we used to play against. I scrolled down their roster and found a few familiar names: Olaf, Milo, both in their midthirties; even Krahm and Darmstadt still play for our old coach. I felt a brief chill, as if the forces preserving them there, so perfectly, in the distant past of my own life, had leaked out of the screen. Maybe Anke was right. Sometimes it’s very easy for nothing much to happen.
Charlie proved harder to track down; there are a lot of Charles Golds. But then I remembered he had a sister in Peoria. He got a job coaching high school basketball there, and a few years later his name came up in the Journal Star, a local newspaper. One of his players had accused him of making what was referred to as ‘improper advances,’ and Charlie lost his job. He sued the school on the grounds of discrimination. What he was really fired for, his lawyer claimed, was being a gay, black high school coach with access to a locker room of young men. The boy’s story would have been laughed out of any court of law. He had recently been cut for repeated violations of team rules; various students and teachers testified to the fact that he was a problem kid. There was no evidence of any advance. The boy’s father had seen a chance to get his own back and played on the anxieties of some of the other parents to put pressure on the school principal. The case settled out of court, and Charlie returned to his job.
Mel Zweigman had dismissed him as a third-rate talent and a bully. ‘At least he knows what he is,’ Mel said. It struck me that the real test of his personal qualities had nothing to do with the eight months I played beside him.
As for me, I spent the summer at home and then moved in with a high school friend, who was finishing up a PhD., and began a masters in literature. A few years later I married the daughter of one of my father’s colleagues, an English girl, and we ended up in London following a stint in New York. My first novel, The Syme Papers, came out in 2004, after several draftings and redraftings. Some of the work I did in Landshut survived these.
I never saw Anke again. On the eve of my departure, we fought stupidly. Franziska was ill at home, running a fever, and though we went out for a quick meal, Anke refused to spend the night in my apartment. It wasn’t fair, she said, to let her mother do everything. She spent all week taking care of children, at her age, and her father was worse than useless and needed looking after himself. You have done it a hundred times before, I complained. But she only shook her head, contracting her face, the way Franziska used to when she refused to eat. As if to say, I am all sealed up and self-sufficient. I said, This is very reasonable and mature. You are withdrawing from me already so that I can’t withdraw from you. You want to land the first punch. Punch, punch, punch, she repeated angrily, picking up as she sometimes did on one of my English words. But so childishly, that there was nothing I could say to her. And we parted this way, Anke silent and stiff-necked, and me with the air of someone who says, I wash my hands.
In the morning, she came with me to the station, not because we had made up, but because she was going into Munich for one of her haircuts. Franziska was feeling a little better; the fever had passed. We waited on opposite platforms with a train between us, and I stared at that train, bound for Bielefeld, for five hard minutes, hoping it would rumble off. With Anke out of sight I felt very suddenly the fact that she was gone. Something casual had become permanent; her brief absence had taken on a hundred pounds of weight. I told myself, she’s still standing there, not twenty feet away. Thinking who knows what thoughts. She is still within reach.
Only she wasn’t. When the train between us pulled out the platform behind it was empty. I consoled myself with the fact that we planned to meet up later in the summer, when my family made its annual trip to Flensburg. But then my mother became ill and the trip was postponed. By the time I returned to that trim post-war house on the beach, where we had once spent Christmas, Anke and I had dropped out of touch.
I’m not sure what happened to Hadnot. When his final shot drifted wide, I knew he had missed by the way he turned his head. But I didn’t see the shot till later, on the coach-ride home; Henkel had already got a copy of the video. You can watch me at the end of it, carried forward by momentum, falling into Hadnot’s shooting arm. For a moment we have to hold each other up. Most of the guys on the bus were still a little drunk from the night before, and as the ball caromed away, off the inside rim and over Karl’s head, they shouted again – as if there had been any doubt about the outcome, second time around.
Würzburg stayed put in the second division, and Hadnot probably stayed put with them. Most of his sporting achievements, such as they were, pre-dated the internet, and whatever he’s doing now isn’t the kind of thing to get a mention online. There’s a black kid called Bodie Hadnot who transferred out of Nashville State Community College to Chattanooga in 2006. He averaged 3.7 points a game his junior year. The alumni network for the university is particularly strong and runs a number of fan websites. Even bench players have columns devoted to them. Whenever you type Bo Hadnot into Google,
Bodie comes up.
For five months after coming home I didn’t touch a basketball. Instead, I learned to drive stick, surging around the shaded streets of my childhood in the old family Subaru, a second car, for the sake of a little independence. By September, I still had no plans. My father said to me, ‘You can’t sit around the house all day. What are you going to do with yourself?’ But he didn’t press me. Instead, he kept me busy with small tasks – rarely more than one or two a day. For example, he asked me to pick up my sisters from school, my old high school. While you’re at it, he said, why don’t you look in on your coach. He’ll be pleased to see you.
So I set off early on a late September afternoon. Under a clear sky the heat had dropped to the tolerable levels of high summer anywhere else. Five years after graduation, the route had already become unfamiliar. But I found my way eventually, off the sun-bright strip mall (one of the arteries running through town) into the low curbless suburban neighborhood that surrounds the school. The main campus differs from the rest of the house-plots only by having a wider lawn. There is also a stretch of undeveloped green opposite the car park, where the school has no jurisdiction, and some of the older kids go to smoke and drink between bells. The present class of dropouts looked no different from the kids I used to stare at from the portico, waiting for my father to pick me up after basketball practice. Though I had more sympathy for them now. One year out of college I had no idea what to do with the rest of my twenties.
I found my old coach in his office, an old storage closet next to the training room, and near enough to the gym you could hear the echo of basketballs. He was chewing peanuts when I walked in, reaching into his pocket and spitting the shells vaguely in the direction of the gray standard-issue bin. Possibly part of an attempt to get off tobacco, I don’t know: among the odd life facts he once explained to us, from the pulpit of his health class, was the right way to pronounce Pall Mall. I was a little worried about what to call him – I had never called him by his name. This turned out not to matter. I called him coach.
Six years makes a great difference in a young man’s life, but he looked more or less unchanged. The same muscular bald head and trunk-shaped arms; his light-skinned humorous black face had heavy-lidded eyes. It’s often hard, even for a cynical kid, not to attribute to his high school coaches sharp moral vision. They see you every day for what you are: lazy, shirking, selfish, scared. In fact, I was still a little scared of him and remembered again my strong, childish desire not to disappoint him.
He was shorter than me – I noticed that when he stood up to take my hand. What I wanted to tell him is that I had made it, in a small way, that I had overcome whatever it was that had held me back before.
‘Is that so?’ he said, when I gave him my news. ‘Is that so?’ Pleased; not especially surprised. He didn’t often meet my eye. It struck me that now we were equally shy of each other.
Coming home, I nudged my shoes off and switched on the TV set – as I used to, coming home from school. Then, after a minute, stood up again and went outside looking for a ball. There was often one lying around, under a tree, in the bamboo fence, by the bicycles. Afternoon shadows had just begun to stretch out. The concrete of my father’s court was still too hot for bare feet, but I took a couple shots anyway and chased them down quick-footed. Then a couple more, counting out the tally of makes and misses. Feeling the roughness of the paint on my soles. Remembering Hadnot’s advice: bend your legs, jump straight in the air, and keep your elbow in. Follow through.
For the next two hours, while the sun descended behind the car park wall next door, and the ground cooled, I worked on my jumpshot. Some of the shots went in and some of them didn’t, but I tried to repeat each motion faithfully regardless. When I was a kid on that court I used to imagine some future in which all these shots would matter.
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About the author
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Meet Benjamin Markovits
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Behind the Book
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An Excerpt from You Don’t Have to Live Like This
About the author
Meet Benjamin Markovits
BENJAMIN MARKOVITS grew up in London, Oxford, Texas, and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study Romanticism. Since then he has taught high-school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and published six novels, including a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron. Markovits, who has lived in London since 2000 and is married, with a daughter and a son, is the only American to be included in Granta magazine’s “Best of Young British Novelists.”
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About the book
Behind the Book
ON THE TUESDAY after I graduated from college, I flew to Hamburg to stay with one of my uncles who had an apartment in Altona. My plan was to play basketball for some midlevel European team, and I spent the rest of the summer on trains, traveling around Germany and trying out at various clubs. Eventually I landed a job in the second division in Landshut, a town maybe forty-five minutes northwest of Munich. The club was sponsored by Hitachi and offered to pay me 1800 marks a month; it would also give me an apartment to live in. I was twenty-two years old, and this was my first real job.
Playing Days is a novel about that experience. Much of it is literally true; some of it is less true. At the time I knew that I wanted to be a writer even more than I wanted to be a basketball player. Basketball is hard labor, but it doesn’t take up much of your day; between practices, I used to work on a novel I had started in college. I also wrote long letters home describing what I felt and saw: the guys I played with; the empty shelves in the supermarket in Pezinok, Slovakia, where we went for training camp; how hungry I was all the time; what it felt like to lose.
Afterward I used these letters as the basis for a memoir, which I called Leagues Away. It eventually went through four drafts and attracted the interest of a producer at the BBC and an editor at Random House, yet it was never published or broadcast. Somehow my struggles as a writer seemed connected to my struggles as a basketball player. Even after years of writing and rewriting several different manuscripts, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. My parents started to worry about my job prospects, but the truth is I was also having a pretty good time, writing a lot, keeping in shape, falling in love.
At the age of thirty, within a couple of months of each other, I got married and published my first novel—twelve years after I had first put pen to paper, or fingertip to keypad. Things were looking up. And one child and three novels later, I decided to take another look at Leagues Away. But the ground was somehow still contaminated by failure. The manuscript had been through too many drafts; it had been written by somebody who seemed a slightly different writer.
The experience itself was still very important to me, it had left a deep mark, and if I wanted to write about it, I needed to start from scratch. Still, there was something about the tone of those early drafts that I wanted to keep, the awkward personal voice of a young man trying to explain himself. Most novels have a mix of truth and untruth in them; in my other books I had worked hard to make the true parts sound more like the fictional ones. Here I decided to reverse the process.
This approach turned out to be helpful, for a couple of reasons. In the first place, more than ten years had passed. I’ve always been suspicious of memoirs that include much dialogue or description of moods or weather. Who can accurately remember such details? There are years of my life that I hardly remember at all. But this kind of recall doesn’t bother me in novels, even in novels that are written to sound like memoirs. It’s part of the convention that everything, even the past, seems to happen on the page in some kind of immediate present.
Second, as Ronald Reagan once said (I think it was a slip of the tongue), facts are stupid things. It’s dangerously easy if you
write memoir, or even if you write historical fiction, to include some details just because they happen to be true—not because they are interesting or revealing or important. Turning the experience into a novel let me include different kinds of facts too. Most of my teammates from Landshut have made it into this book. But there were other guys I had played with whom I wanted to write about if I was going to write about basketball. Some of them are in this book too.
At the same time, I tried to stay faithful to what seemed to me the heart of my experience, that first long summer after college. The experience of a world in which incredibly talented people worked extremely hard at what they do, even though none of them could turn their talents into a life that would satisfy them. My teammates were stuck in the second division of a mediocre European league, and even years later, and long after I have quit playing basketball, I still hold them up as a standard for what it means to be good at something.
Read on
An Excerpt from You Don’t Have to Live Like This
AROUND FIVE O’CLOCK Gloria wanted to go home. She had seen the president, she had stood in the room with him, and it was enough. It was our first date, and I didn’t know what my report card would look like. Maybe a B and not for lack of effort either. Somehow there had been too many people, people she didn’t know, and I had let them take her away from me. Partly because I liked seeing her talking without me, getting along, standing short and straight in her green wool dress. She had a good face, very dark skinned, somehow bright black, and made eye contact and reacted naturally in conversation. Although I couldn’t actually tell if she liked them much—my friends, I mean. Sometimes I didn’t know if I liked them myself.
Playing Days Page 24
