by McSweeney's
Someone got a chair for me and put it inside the circle, so that everyone could watch me talking to my mother.
“This is so stupid,” I said.
Somebody tutted, probably because I’d been rude to the president.
“I’ll ignore that last remark,” she said.
“Is it right that you gave Monsieur Grimandi permission to bring me here by force?” I asked.
“I knew he wouldn’t have to,” she said. “You’re a sensible boy.”
I looked at her. I didn’t want to have an argument in front of everyone, but I wouldn’t forget it.
“You know why we’ve asked you to come here?” she said.
“I wasn’t asked. I was ordered.”
“I’ll ignore that, too,” she said. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“I guess because of the football,” I said.
“You guess right,” said my mother the president. “Because of the football. You have been given the honor of representing your country, and you said no. Is that correct?”
“That is correct.”
“And you’re aware that if you don’t play, nobody can play?”
“I suppose.”
“And you haven’t changed your mind?”
“No. I hate football, and I’m rubbish at it. As you know,” I told her.
I noticed my shoelace was undone, so I spent as much time as I could tying it up again.
“Sometimes,” the president said, “we have to do things we don’t want to do. In wartime, young men have to go to war, and they don’t want to.”
“This isn’t a war,” I pointed out. “It’s a dumb football match, and football sucks.”
“Right,” said my mother. “Okay then. Will you wait outside for a few moments, please, Stefan? The council needs to talk in private.”
I stared at her, saw that she was serious, and left the café. They closed the door behind me so I couldn’t hear anything.
When I was let back in, I could see that my mother had a very serious expression on her face, and for a moment I almost believed that she was a president.
“Stefan,” she said. “We respect your decision not to play for our national team. But you must understand that living in our small country … Well, as a citizen of Champina, you’re entitled to many things, things you probably take for granted. You attend our school. You use this café. You buy candy and cookies in the shop. You walk on our roads and paths. Those rights are now withdrawn.”
For a moment, I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“You mean… I can’t go to school?”
“No.”
You might think that was no big deal, but it was. The only library was in the school, for example, and if I wasn’t allowed to borrow books, I’d go crazy.
“You’re not joking?”
“No.”
“You’re not going to let me walk on the roads?”
“No.”
You couldn’t walk by the side of the road, at least, not between our house and the center of the village. There were old stone walls on either side, and on the other side of the walls, private gardens. And anyway, if I wasn’t going to be allowed to use the school, or the café, or the shop, then there was nowhere for me to go anyway. I’d been given a prison sentence. I’d be stuck in my house forever.
“I’m sorry if this seems unkind, or unfair,” my mother said. “But when you live in a small place, you have responsibilities. What you choose to do, or choose not to do, has much more of an effect than it would in a bigger country. We don’t think you should be allowed to take without giving something back.”
My other shoelace had come undone. I tied it up.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m in. I’ll play. But only because no one gave me a choice.”
They didn’t hear the last part, though, because they were all clapping.
* * *
I didn’t have to train. I told them I wasn’t going to, and that was the one thing they let me get away with. The rest of the team met every Tuesday evening—outside on the football pitch in summer, and inside, in the school hall, in the winter, when it was dark. They always ran a couple of miles first, though, summer or winter. They usually jogged up the hill into Switzerland. (We can’t even go for a run inside our own country, because it’s too small. Unless you want to run round and round the field.) I mean, I know I should have gone to training. I hadn’t kicked a ball since I was about three, and anyway it wasn’t like I was super-fit. But I didn’t want to have to think about football until I actually played the stupid game.
When you play for a team for the first time, they call it your “debut.” Well, I made my debut against San Marino, as if you couldn’t have guessed. Champina hardly ever played anyone else. The last time we’d played them, we’d lost twenty-eight–nil, but the general feeling was that it might be even worse this time. No one said this was because of me, but I could tell that’s what they were all thinking.
It was a home game, which meant that we changed in our homes. The San Marino players changed in the toilets at the café. My father gave me his red-and-white-striped shirt, and I found a pair of white shorts. I didn’t have any boots, so I wore sneakers. Then I put on my denim jacket and walked down to the field with Dad.
“You might enjoy it,” he said. I laughed.
“You don’t have to watch,” I told him. “It’s going to rain. Why don’t you go home?”
“Everybody watches,” he said. “The whole village. The whole country.”
“I’ve never watched before,” I told him.
“No,” he said. “You were the only one.”
That made me feel bad. I felt bad that I didn’t know everyone else always watched the team, and I felt guilty that I’d never made the effort. It wouldn’t have killed me to do something everyone else did, once in a while. I couldn’t even remember Mum and Dad asking me to watch, so that was another reason to feel bad. They must have thought that it wasn’t worth the effort.
When we got to the field, Dad patted me on the back and wished me luck, and I went to stand with my teammates in the middle of the pitch. I was the youngest player, and Monsieur Grimandi, who was a bit younger than Dad, was the oldest. The only one who really looked like a footballer was Monsieur Blanc, who worked at a fitness center in Italy. He was tall and slim, and he could do that thing with the ball where you keep kicking it and you don’t let it touch the ground. He was our captain.
“Stefan,” he said. “Welcome.” He shook my hand. “We thought we’d play you midfield. Wide right.”
I didn’t understand a word, and I stared at him with my mouth open.
“You know your left from your right, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So. You stand on the right-hand side of the pitch. You see Michel there?” He was pointing at Monsieur Flamini, who’s a painter and gardener. “He’s the right back. Stand about twenty meters ahead of him, and try to help him if he needs help.”
I nodded, but I didn’t understand what he was talking about. What sort of help would he need? I didn’t think it was a good idea to ask any more questions, though, and in any case, it was time for the game to start. I knew I wasn’t going to be any good, and I knew we’d lose the game, but I was still nervous.
We let in a goal after about a minute. It wasn’t my fault, because everything happened over on the other side. The tall chap who played in the middle of their defense sort of wandered forward with the ball, and then gave it to another man who was standing right on the edge of the pitch, near where my dad and the rest of the country were standing. And this edge-man ran very fast with the ball toward our goal, and Monsieur Grimandi, our goalie, ran toward him. So the edge-man just passed it sideways, and someone else, a little guy who didn’t seem to do much apart from score goals, kicked the ball into an empty goal.
About three minutes after that, the same thing happened. Tall chap, to edge-man, to little goal-scoring guy … goal. And then again, and again. San Marino
scored thirteen times in the first half of the game, and nine of those goals came in the same way. Ten, if you count the one they scored from a penalty, when Grimandi knocked the edge-man over.
I only touched the ball once in the first half. Monsieur Flamini got the ball and passed it to me, very gently, because he knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything if he kicked the ball hard. I stopped it with my right foot—well, I nearly stopped it, anyway—and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, and every single part of me was ringing, as if I were a bell. My head hurt, my back, both my legs, one of my arms… I knew that in football people could be told that they weren’t allowed to play any more. They call it a “red card,” because that’s what the referee shows you when he’s angry with you. But I thought that a red card might not be enough for the person who had done this to me. It seemed to me that this man, whoever he was—I hadn’t seen him coming or going—might not be allowed to play football ever again. He would probably have to go to prison for a week or two. I almost felt sorry for him.
But when I picked myself up and looked around, no one cared. The referee wasn’t going to give him a red card, or even a yellow card. He wasn’t even going to give our side a free kick. None of my teammates was interested in whether I was hurt or not. Everyone was just playing on as if nothing had happened.
When there was a break in the play, I said to Monsieur Flamini, “Did you see that?”
“What?”
“What happened when you gave me the ball.”
“Yes. You lost it. You gave it away.”
“I didn’t give it away. Someone came in and smashed me to the ground and took it from me.”
“It’s called a tackle, Stefan. Get used to it.”
So that’s what it’s like being a grown-up, I thought. People can just knock you down whenever they feel like it, and no one says anything. It made me wish that I was getting younger every year, not older.
At halftime, we stood on the pitch, because there was nowhere to go. Monsieur Blanc gathered us around him.
“Well,” he said. “It’s obvious what’s going wrong. We have to stop that little guy from scoring all the goals somehow. We’re not marking him properly. He’s got too much room.”
I didn’t say anything. I just listened.
“I know what we should do,” he said, “We’ll have to stop worrying about the left side and pull Michel into the middle.”
Michel Garde was an accountant who lived in the village with his mother. He was the one who was supposed to stop the edge-man, the man who was giving the ball to the goal-scorer all the time. He wasn’t doing a very good job of it, obviously, but it seemed crazy not to have anyone on the left at all. I suddenly realized that, even though I was the worst player in the team, the rest of them didn’t understand what was happening in the game. They really couldn’t see it. So what was I supposed to do? I was new to the team, and useless at the game, so nobody would listen to me. But if I kept quiet, we’d let in even more goals. If I kept quiet, we could lose by fifty or sixty goals, and everyone would say it was my fault.
There was something else I’d noticed. Monsieur Blanc was our captain and our best player, but he didn’t do anything. He was always standing too far away from the action, with his hands on his hips. I couldn’t understand it. He was twenty-six, and tall, and very fit, and he was happy to watch everyone else do all the work. It didn’t make any sense.
He saw me looking at him.
“Something on your mind, Stefan?”
“Not really, no,” I said.
“Any tactical changes you want to make?”
Everyone else laughed at his joke, and that annoyed me.
“Yes,” I said.
What did it matter? The worst that could happen was that they wouldn’t ask me to play again. And seeing as I didn’t want to play on their stupid team, the worst that could happen really wasn’t so bad.
“It’s not the little guy who scores all the goals we should be worrying about,” I said. “It’s the edge-man.”
“The edge-man? Who’s the edge-man?”
I looked over to where their players were standing chatting and laughing, and spotted him. “Him. There. The one drinking out of the water bottle now.”
“Why is he the edge-man?”
“Because he plays on the edge of the pitch.”
“The winger,” said Monsieur Blanc, as if I were stupid. “What about him?”
“He’s the one that gives the goal-scorer the ball. Without him, the goal-scorer couldn’t so anything.”
Monsieur Garde nodded.
“He’s right. He’s been running past me all game, and I can’t stop him. I need help.”
Monsieur Blanc looked annoyed. He thought I was going to say something ridiculous, and instead I’d seen something he hadn’t.
“Anything else, Stefan? Seeing as you’re the expert?”
“I’m not an expert,” I said. “I just noticed some things.”
“Oh, well, tell us some other things you’ve noticed.”
I shrugged. “Okay. I’m not being rude, but … what do you do? On this team?”
“I’m the striker. That means I’m supposed to score the goals.”
“But we’re never going to score a goal,” I said. “We never have the ball, and we’re never at the right end of the field.”
This time, a couple more people nodded, and I saw Flamini smile to himself.
“But if you wanted a job to do, you could stop the tall man.”
“Which tall man?”
“The tall man who plays in defense. He’s the one that gives the ball to the edge-man. Every time. So if you, I don’t know, got in the way or something … it might make it harder for them.”
It was weird. I knew I was right. I play chess a lot, and sometimes you can see things, shapes and patterns. And also, I take things apart to see how they work. It had never occurred to me that you could take football apart in the same way. I thought people just kicked the ball toward the goal.
But there was still no reason for Monsieur Blanc to listen to me.
Just when I was about to give up and tell them to forget it, my mother the president walked onto the pitch to give us some encouragement.
“Bad luck, lads,” she said. “You’re playing well.”
We all looked at her as if she was mad.
“It could be worse, anyway.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. It could be thirteen–nil.”
“It is thirteen–nil,” I said.
“Oh. I thought it was only twelve. Okay, then it could be fourteen-nil. Things could always be worse than they are. Any plans to change things in the second half?”
“We’re going to double up on the right winger,” said Monsieur Blanc. “And I’m going to work harder to close down their center-back. Cut off his supply.”
It took me a little while to work out that these were my ideas, because I didn’t understand the words he was using. But when I understood, I looked at him to see when he’d tell her that these were my ideas.
“Very good,” said my mother. “Sounds very sensible.” And then she walked off again.
I tried to catch Blanc’s eye, but he wouldn’t look at me.
The second half was really exciting, because we didn’t let another goal in for ages and ages. Every time the tall defender got the ball, Monsieur Blanc ran over to him and stood right in front of him, and quite often he had to turn and give the ball back to the goalkeeper. So the edge-man, the winger, didn’t get the ball very often, and when he did, he had to run past two players, not just one, and the second player, Zizou the mechanic, was sometimes able to take the ball away from him. And even though San Marino were winning thirteen–nil, the longer they went without scoring again, the more embarrassed they became. The tall defender and the winger even had an argument.
And we all started to run faster, and jump higher, and tackle harder. Most of us did, anyway—I was too tired to run, and I can�
��t really tackle. The crowd got excited, too, when they saw that things had got so much better. They knew we couldn’t win, and they knew that we weren’t even going to get a goal. But as we went fifteen minutes, and then twenty minutes, even nearly thirty minutes of the second half without letting the other team score, you could tell that they were proud of us. They even started chanting and clapping.
We made three stupid mistakes in the last fifteen minutes, and let in three goals. But when the referee blew the whistle for the end of the game, there were a lot of smiles on our team. Losing a second half three–nil was Champina’s best-ever international result.
“Just think,” said Grimandi. “If we could play like that in the first half and the second half…”
“… We’d lose every game six–nil,” laughed Flamini.
I knew what Grimandi meant, though. Six–nil felt like a football score. Good teams, teams you’ve heard of, lose six–nil sometimes. Nobody ever loses twenty-six–nil, though.
As we walked off the pitch, the whole crowd—the whole of my country—cheered us. And then my teammates did something I will never forget. They walked quickly to the side of the pitch, stood in two lines, and clapped as I walked between them. Even Monsieur Blanc joined in. It must have looked strange to my mother and father. As far as they knew, I had done nothing, apart from fall over once, in the first half.
That was the last time I ever had to play. The next game, they used Grimandi’s ten-year-old son Robert in my position, and he was better than me. I was told to watch, and tell them where they were going wrong—I became the coach. “You’ve got brains,” Grimandi said. “We haven’t.”
In my first game as coach, we lost twelve–nil. At the end of the game, the team did a lap of honor.
LARS FARF,
EXCESSIVELY FEARFUL
FATHER AND
HUSBAND
BY GEORGE SAUNDERS
Illustrated by Juliette Borda
Lars Farf had not always been excessively fearful. Originally, he was just normally fearful. Then one day he came in from the fields and found his house reduced to a pile of smoking ash.
