Playing Days (11 page)

With a minute to go we had our first lead of the game. Muller put down his head at the other end and kept pounding the ball till a path cleared. On the way up, he caught Olaf with an elbow in the eye, which spent the next week going from black to purple to brown, but nobody was going to call it at that stage in the game and nobody did. The shot hit the rim twice, going up and down, first on the outside and then on the inside, and we were trailing by one with thirty-two seconds to play.

Then everything stopped. Henkel called the boys over and we stood around them, feeling their heat in the smell of them, while coach got down on his knees and drew up a mess of lines on the green floor. I was grateful that none of it applied to me.

He said, ‘I want you to take the shot, Karl.'

Karl nodded. The features of his face seemed too large for expression, except when he squinted against a run of sweat. He might have been indifferent or terrified. We were going to run the play for Hadnot in the corner. Karl would set the screen for him, then peel off baseline and come off Olaf's backpick hard at the rim. Charlie would show towards Hadnot then float a pass to Karl at the basket, who was supposed to climb up and get it and
‘do whatever you call it what you do.' And that's more or less what happened, except that Charlie made the pass to Hadnot in the corner, and Hadnot rushed it just enough to beat the stretched arm of Hans Muller roaring at him, and rattle the shot home. ‘No no no no no good,' Henkel said, and slapped his hand against his clipboard.

Nürnberg still had time to run a play, and Jurkovich, as soon as the shot went in, fired a quick inbounds to Torsten, who was just as surprised as the rest of us and let it bounce off his fingers. Charlie tracked down the loose ball and after that all they could do was foul. Torsten wrapped him up in two arms.

We couldn't hear ourselves shout and Henkel hid a little smile under his moustache. He was very relieved and couldn't stand still anymore, but paced up and down in front of our bench, so that I didn't see Charlie miss his first free throw. There were two seconds left. Then Charlie missed the next one, too, and Muller pulled it in and sent a long pass football-style down court to Jurkovich, who was standing just outside the center circle, about thirty-five feet from the basket. He caught it and turned and shot, in one motion, and the horn sounded loudly just as the ball went in.

After that the silence was sudden and almost meteorological. Something irretrievable had happened, and even though it didn't matter terribly to most of the people there – who would go home talking about it, then prepare for another Saturday night – the sadness of that fact made itself felt. What was done couldn't be
undone now. We had lost, quite against the grain, and for a minute nobody knew what to say.

Then Olaf picked up a chair at the scorer's table and threw it against the wall.

In the locker room afterwards, a low sullen anger prevailed. I wondered at Olaf – caring too much was never his public style. But he made a great noise about everything he did, flinging his bag down, kicking off his shoes, etc. until he hit the showers, which he turned on very hard. Charlie sat with his back against the wall and sucking on his lip. He looked puzzled, with an air of concentration: he looked like a man who might have left his oven on. Hadnot, as he passed by him, rested his large-fingered hand on Charlie's bald head. Thomas Arnold and Darmstadt hadn't played and were uncomfortably dry and restless; they chattered to relieve their pent-up energies. Darmstadt wouldn't shut up about Jurkovich, and then, with a sudden contrition almost comically transparent, began to apologize to Charlie, who ignored him.

There was something unpleasant about the whole scene – I mean, more than unhappy, though it was that, too. And I wondered if top-flight players, in their air-conditioned locker rooms, dressing after a game for a night on the town, would take losing so hard. Maybe not. The truth was, most of these guys weren't where they wanted to be, and every loss reminded them of the fact that they belonged where they were.

Outside, through one of the high windows built
into the bathroom stalls, we could hear the Nürnbergers climbing onto their bus. They weren't singing, or anything like that. I guess they were tired enough, with a two-hour bus ride ahead of them. But I could hear in their voices the sweetness of the summer evening. Some of them might have picked up a few beers from the canteen on the way out – that's what they sounded like. Like people who had heard some good news. The contrast must have struck Charlie, too, for he shook his head and rubbed his thumb against what might have been a smile. Quiet but very public demonstrations: it was important for him to look the part. Rueful, surprised. In control.

Russell came in dragging a couple of laundry sacks. He began to pick up wet uniforms from the floor. This took him no more than a minute, and he stood in the doorway waiting for the rest of us to undress. Obediently, feeling a little childish, I stripped off jersey and shorts and stood up in bare feet. Eventually he said, ‘Die Schwarzen können eh' nicht gerade aus schiessen.'

Olaf was still in the shower or he wouldn't have said it. Charlie looked up at him and suddenly my vague sense of unpleasantness had sharpened to a point. ‘What'd he say?' Charlie asked. ‘What'd that fat fuck say?'

He looked at me, and I guess my eyes got wide and I shook my head, because he tilted his own, as if to wait me out. ‘He said,' it was Karl who broke the silence, in English, in an accent deeper than his native tone, but perfectly clear, ‘the blacks never could shoot straight.' Then, by way of apology, ‘That's what he said.'

Charlie raised his right hand, in a gesture of disgust, but Russell was on his knees again, pulling shorts off the floor. Then Henkel walked in, glancing over his notes. He looked set for one of his speeches, so Charlie picked himself up and headed for the showers. It occurred to me for the first time that there might be something wrong with our team, something unhappy about us. But maybe that's what everybody thinks, after losing.

I met Hadnot around noon the next day, outside the McDonald's on the High Street. He came out, a few minutes late, carrying on his hip a small girl, who had her hands around a paper packet of fries. ‘We were early so I got her some lunch,' he said. ‘I don't have a kiddy-seat, whatever you call it.' I must have stared at him, because he continued, ‘I thought you wanted to go for a bike ride.'

‘We can do that, or we can do something else.'

‘Well, I guess we can drive.'

He had come by foot into town, so I followed him back out again, off the High Street and into the hills. The girl wanted to walk some of the way, so he set her down, but she stopped and picked things up from the ground and turned back as much as she went forward. Patiently, he lifted her in his arms again, over her protests, which were mild, and we managed to progress a block or two, before he relented and the whole business started from scratch. Her name was Frankie; at least, that's what Hadnot called her. Franziska, I guess.

She had the skinniness of small girls, very touching, which is reproduced in some women after motherhood in middle age. Stringy little legs, a long neck. Someone else had dressed her, I supposed: she was wearing quiet
yellow stockings and a blue summer frock. Only her face was plump, with the blurred, rounded look of something not quite awake yet or softened by sunshine. Eventually I had the bright idea of setting her on my bike, which I was pushing beside me. She let me pick her up, and we went along much better.

Not since I was a kid myself had I spent much time with kids. My mother, rather late in life, gave birth to twin girls. As the youngest son, I spent a lot of time looking after them. There's a photograph of me on my mother's desk: I'm wearing shorts, a red raincoat and a fireman's helmet, with a girl on each brown bony knee. I thought of it suddenly, pushing Frankie up the hill. You spend your whole life living inside of a family and then you get to college and have to get used to living outside of one. Then you get used to that, and after a while you get married and have kids and have to get used to the other thing again.

After a short walk we arrived at his car, one of the blue two-door Fiats most of the team drove. It was parked outside a large apartment house with the kind of new glazed windows that look like they've never been opened. Grey smooth walls. A large grey concrete drive in front. A flowerbed beside it containing some evergreen municipal bush. Hadnot didn't bother going in. I chained the bike to a lamp post and he strapped Frankie in her car seat, leaning over with the seat-back down. She seemed very docile; maybe she was just shy of me.

‘I usually bike these roads,' I said. ‘There isn't really anywhere to get to. Just a few farms.'

‘I don't mind driving, day after. Most of me hurts a little.' After a pause: ‘Maybe she'll fall asleep.' As if his highest ambition was just to pass the time with her.

He pulled out and steered us under the tracks again and up the crest of my hill. Reaching the top, we left the city behind us, and thick corn, standing tall as a basketball team, stretched away on either side. The earth it grew out of dry and broken into large clumps. It seemed to me strange, to be sitting beside him, with his daughter in the back seat. My teammates rarely confessed to a private life, unless it involved women. I wasn't sure what he wanted me along for, unless he really meant, for translation. The few times I had spoken to Frankie, in English, she looked at me with light grey intelligent eyes and said nothing.

We had come through the fields, and I told him to cross over the highway ahead of us and keep going. The farm road followed the curve of the hill down and away. A stand of pines rose up in sharp contrast to the tilled earth and printed a heel of dark brown shade against it. In late afternoon, when I rode there, the shadow stretched over the road, and I felt the double cool of shadow and wind as I coasted down. But now all was grey and dusty in the heat of day.

‘I always get homesick in this kind of weather,' I told him. ‘You know, in Texas, when it's really too hot to play,
and you shoot for a bit then come inside and cool down, till you get a headache in the air conditioning, then you go out again and shoot a bit more.'

‘I worked on my shot before school,' Hadnot said. ‘My old man spotted me, over the Caddy in the driveway. That's why I don't miss short. If I bounced one off the Caddy it was time for school. Hot days mom made us come in for a shower before heading to class, which was about every day after March one.'

He went to the same high school in Jackson where his father taught and was later promoted to vice principal. But they lived about a half-hour drive out of town. His mother, he said, was a gardener; his father, a tinkerer, and collected old cars which he left on the grass of the front yard and occasionally ‘messed around with.' Every day they drove in together, and during basketball season, when he stayed after class for practice, they came home together, too. In the spring he played baseball, but the baseball field was a bus ride away in the wrong direction, and afterwards the school bus dropped everybody off, including the kids who lived in the middle of nothing, like he did. But even in spring they got up early and worked on his shot for an hour before breakfast.

‘Did the neighbors complain?'

‘Is she asleep back there yet?' he said, so I turned around and looked at Frankie, who looked back so solemnly I almost blushed.

‘No, she's still looking.'

After a minute he went on. ‘Not about the mornings. Sometimes at night after watching a game, I'd go out there. If my team lost, just to work it off. The guy who moved in over the road had a baby. One night he got out his gun and shot off the garage light.' Hadnot turned on me then with a happy smile; his buckteeth, as they sometimes did, caught briefly on his lip. ‘I guess I'd just about do the same.'

We had come to a junction at the bottom of the valley. Farm roads either side in the middle of cabbage fields, cool and powdery in the light; the next hill rose ahead of us.

‘Doesn't much matter where you go now,' I said. ‘Might as well keep straight. You must have wanted to step out into the driveway last night.'

‘Oh, I don't mind losing so much anymore.'

We followed the road till it leveled out, and below us on the right the landscape briefly appeared: a series of dips and rises, greens and browns, that darkened sometimes almost to purple. I thought I saw in the distance the flat light over a river – the Isar probably, running south to Munich. But then the hedges swelled again on either side of us, and all we could see was the tangled suggestive glimpses of rural summer: between leaves, down lanes. In the next valley, the road passed by a tin-sided barn and then curved sharply with a dirt drive running off the bend.

‘Is this one of those farms you talked about? If she's not sleeping we might as well have a look.'

A few weekends before I had bought a chicken from the farmer's wife, whom I vaguely remembered: a short, small-waisted woman with pins in her hair. ‘I came here on a Saturday last time. There's weddings around here all over the countryside in summer. I must have biked past two or three.'

‘I don't buy into all that now,' he said. ‘Making faces when you lose. All that Milo bullshit. I went six for eight and scored fifteen points. In about fifteen minutes. I did fine.'

He stopped and swung the car round and drove slowly over the ridged, gritty surface. Then parked at an angle beside a heap of something pungent covered in tarp and tires. We got out, and I was affected almost physically by memories of my sisters when they were two or three years old, as I helped him lift Frankie from the car. She raised her arms over her head, as children do when they want to be set down, and I felt the narrow cage of her ribs under her armpits. Hadnot tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the opened doors of a barn by the side of the house. There was hay tumbled down inside it, which is what I looked at first; then I spotted over the doorway a cheap plastic backboard nailed in with a bent rim hanging off it.

‘My kind of court,' he said.

Frankie followed me to the farmhouse, a few paces behind. When I turned back to check if Hadnot was coming I saw her standing like a dancer with her feet together and looking up at me. She rang the bell – I
had to lift her just a half foot off the ground. When the door opened it wasn't the farmer's wife: this woman was younger and taller and altogether smoother and rounder. Her breasts sloped outwards to either side under a loose-knit jumper, and I wondered if she was nursing. She looked inquiringly up.

‘I bought a chicken here a few weeks ago. Maybe from your mother. It was very good. Ich möchte noch eins kaufen.'

German is my mother-tongue, my first language, but I speak it childishly. Short simple sentiments and sentences. This has an effect on me, on the way I think. I begin to consider the world through the adjectives at my disposal for describing it: warm, cool. Pleasant, uncomfortable. Good, bad.

‘Yes, probably from my mother. We're all just finishing lunch.' She looked at me a moment. ‘You know, it's a Sunday.'

But then Frankie said to me, also in German, ‘I need to go to the bathroom.'

‘Does she want to go to the bathroom?' Hadnot called. He had found a rubber basketball in the yard, gone soft, and was holding it in his hands. The woman in the doorway stared at us.

‘I want to go with you,' Frankie said to me, but in the end the farmer's daughter took her by the hand. Hadnot by this time had joined me on the porch. The front door opened onto a narrow hall, made narrower by the coats piled up on hooks and the boots on the floor. We caught
a glimpse of a kitchen behind it, with a marbled linoleum floor and bright wallpaper. Flies settled and unsettled in the hallway.

‘She's very confident,' I said, remembering a phrase I had heard women use of other women's children.

He said, ‘Let's play H-O-R-S-E.'

Hadnot was wearing a collared cotton shirt, tucked into his jeans, and he untucked the hems of it as we walked over to the barn door. His first shot, from about fifteen feet, hit the back of the iron and came out over the bent front rim. He looked at the hoop as I chased down the ball.

‘It's low,' he said. ‘About two inches low.'

I jumped up and dunked the ball, which was very easily palmed, one-handed.

‘Big man, big man,' he said.

Then I passed it out to him and watched him shoot, standing under the basket to catch the made shots and feed them back. He knocked down about ten in a row this way, unmoving, while we waited for the woman to bring his daughter out. It was hot enough in the sunlight that I could feel the sweat gathering and staining the neck of my T-shirt, which then grew cool and clung to the skin of my chest. The sense of strangeness returned. After meeting Anke on the train to Munich, I told my mother over the phone about the pretty girl who had introduced herself to me with the line ‘I have been trying to catch your eye since Gündkofen.' My mother laughed and said something like, ‘I never thought Gündkofen
was written into your stars at birth.' I had that feeling strongly now: that this scene was not written into my stars at birth. That I had come a long way from home to get here, waiting for a girl to come out of the bathroom while I passed a ball back to her father in a barnyard outside of Obergolding.

‘How much English does she understand?' I said at last.

‘I don't know. She won't tell me.'

After a minute the woman emerged with Frankie, who was still holding her hand. From my position under the basket, I could see them pause in the doorway. Hadnot had his back to them and continued to shoot. It was almost like a habit with him – he might have been drumming on the table. He caught the ball, lowered it to his right hip, then lifted his elbow and unbent it, following through with his wrist; and the shots dropped in.

‘Wait here,' the woman suddenly called, and after another minute reappeared with a boy under her hand, as fair as herself, with the kind of pale yellow hair that sheds a soft light on the face beneath it. He looked about ten years old. He stared moodily at Hadnot, who must by this point have known he was being watched. ‘Will you show me how you do that?' he said at last.

‘There's a kid behind you who wants to know how to shoot a basketball,' I repeated.

Hadnot looked around and saw his daughter still standing in the doorway with them. ‘Tell him to come out here and I'll teach him,' he said.

Afterwards, they invited us in for tea and cake. The boy was named Henrik; he lived with his mother in Landshut, but they came out together every Sunday for lunch at her parents' farm. His mother introduced herself to us as Liza. There were no babies inside, to bawl or suck at her, and the heaviness I had noticed struck me in a different light.

Henrik's father had been a handball player in his twenties, and Henrik still hoped to grow as tall as him, almost two meters, though he hadn't shown any sign of it yet. I got the sense that his parents were divorced or separated. There was something about Liza's excitement at meeting us that suggested the enthusiasm a single mother might feel about the chance to participate in one of her son's passions.

‘Look who I introduce you to,' she said, when Hadnot took her boy by the elbow and taught him how to hold a ball, on the upturned palm of his hand, how to follow through. ‘You didn't expect that when you woke up this morning? For all your complaining.'

We sat in the kitchen, which was rather a dark room – what light there was came in through a window in the backdoor – and even at three in the afternoon, on a summer's day, the hanging lamp over the table had been switched on. The cake was very good. Frau Taler, the tidy hair-pinned woman I had met before, had baked an apple tart made up of overlapping slices of apple; there was
fresh cream from the farm, too. Hadnot and I had several pieces each. I made an excuse of the fact that I had to give so much of my cake away to Frankie, who asked for it, like a bird, with her mouth open, and a little cry of nochmal, nochmal.