Playing Days (13 page)

Her father was an engineer for the local Hitachi firm. They were one of the sponsors of our basketball team, and it's possible she first met Hadnot at a company function. Every summer there was a team picnic on the grounds, which are just outside Landshut, into the hills. She would have been a schoolgirl still; in any case, she didn't remember.

Eight years ago her father had come down with a mysterious illness. He felt tired most of the time; his head hurt him, not like a headache but like he'd been struck, and he suffered a lot in his bowels. When she was younger she didn't like to hear about his symptoms, but now, after childbirth and motherhood, she didn't mind. He ate less and less and slept more and more. His doctor thought that the problem was his diet and tried him on various foods. They were never a family that thought very much about what was in the kitchen, but suddenly they had all sorts of strange packets in the cupboard, and cartons of soya milk, etc. in the fridge.

None of it helped, or only temporarily. He saw a number of specialists, and eventually one of them gave his condition a name. But the name didn't help either. He retired from the firm several years early, with dis
ability benefits, and for a while her mother nursed him at home, but this turned out to be very bad for their relations, and he shouted at her, and she cried around the house whenever she thought she had a minute to herself, though really she wanted Anke to see her cry.

Eventually they decided to hire a nurse, which meant her mother had to go out to work again. She hadn't had a job in thirty years. The only thing she was fit for was looking after children. One of the younger management types at Hitachi had two small girls, and his wife commuted every day to Munich, where she worked in a law firm, so Anke's mother looked after their girls. This was embarrassing for her father, but on the whole it was better for everyone. Except that Anke hated the nurse.

It's not that she was pretty or young and had supplanted her mother or anything like that. She was middle-aged, with thick legs and thin hair, which she dyed a strange vegetable-like color of purple. Frau Sawalloch; Anke said the name as if it meant ‘bad smell.' She was just one of those women, one of those typically German middle-aged mothers, who thought it her business to tell every child on the street what to do. Anke was seventeen at this point, with enough troubles of her own, at school and with boys, besides the unhappiness at home. It wasn't her sense of it (Anke's own phrase) to take Frau Sawalloch's constant corrections lying down.

Anyway, the pressure of all this came out in a few silly incidents at school. Around this time she was also
caught cheating on one of her exams. Now this was especially stupid. Everybody cheats at exams in Germany, and everybody knows it. In fact, she was only caught helping out a few of her classmates, for a little money – it wasn't as if she had cheated ‘for herself.' Anke never needed to, that's just how she was: things came easily to her. But on top of those other incidents, the authorities decided to suspend her for the rest of the year, and just to show them how stupid they were, Anke decided never to go back.

Stupid, I learned, was a very important word for Anke. (She liked the sound of the English.) The world was full of stupid people: ugly men who made passes at her, doctors who pretended to know what was wrong with her father, parents who told her how to raise her child. Sometimes she was even stupid herself, and this, she admitted, was one of those times. But she wanted to move out of the unhappiness at home, which had become very boring to her. She wanted to move to Munich and find a job. Instead, she stayed at home and worked part-time at the local TV station, as a secretary.

This turned out to be OK. They were desperately short-handed and even the secretaries got to do a number of interesting things: researching stories, sometimes ‘on location,' and helping out in the studio, with lights and booms. Meeting guests: mostly farmers and civil servants. Well, she was the only secretary. The older brother of an ex-boyfriend of hers had taken her on, out of kind
ness and because he wanted to go to bed with her. For about three years she was flattered, and tempted – he had been to university and lived in Munich, and he had only come back home to start a career in television.

Three years seems like a long time for this sort of thing to stretch on, but you'd be amazed (she said to me), how it makes life interesting at work, and how people can keep something like that going, even when they're no longer attracted to each other, which was the case in her situation. At least, she was no longer attracted to him. Who knows, if nothing had happened, she might have given in anyway, and now they would be married still, with his child, and she wouldn't be working there anymore.

She added, ‘I guess we could still end up like that.'

‘What do you mean?'

We were watching Franziska try to stand up on a swing and turn around to face the other way, towards where we were sitting, in the corner of a public playground about five minutes' walk from our apartments. Anke hated going along to anything that resembled a mothers' klatch, but she tolerated the playground, even if she made a point of sitting on the loneliest bench and pulling a floppy sunhat low across her brow.

‘Well, he's still my boss,' she said, ‘even if he is engaged.'

That last part was intended to shock, so I ignored it. ‘I mean, what happened the first time?'

‘What do you think? I met Bo.'

Hadnot moved to Landshut about five years ago, and the coach at the time (it wasn't Henkel) picked him to represent the team for a short preseason puff on local TV. He had come from a French club somewhere, which had just gone bankrupt. Landshut offered him a lot of money: he was a first division player signing up to a second division club. Lower league teams making a push for the top flight tend to overpay for star talent; then they get stuck with big contracts if they fail to go up. But it's a risk for the talent, too. Hadnot needed a larger showcase than the Zweite Bundesliga Süd if he ever hoped to make it back to the States, or even to the high-paying Serie A in Italy. If Landshut failed to reach the first division, he'd be stuck playing small town ball during the crucial back half of his twenties, which is what ended up happening.

Anke didn't understand much of this then or later. She was twenty years old and saw an American who had just come from France and was passing through on his way to bigger and better things. Since Hadnot didn't speak a word of German, her boss at the studio needed to find an interpreter. This was the kind of role Anke had begun to take on, and if she hadn't married Hadnot and had a kid, she might have made for herself a career that satisfied her sense of ambition. There was still time, of course. She was pretty and looked it on camera, and her speaking voice, though childish and a little sweet, was very clear. In person it came across as flirty and ironic,
and she could have learned to project these qualities for TV. The Hochdeutsch, or high German, of her class and – education, in her case, isn't the right word; aspirations comes nearer – had been inflected by a decent local broadening. She seemed, in short, the sort of nice girl a mother would want to listen to, and her son might want to take out.

Hadnot almost asked her out on TV. The pedant in me, by which I mean my father, wanted to know how you could almost ask someone out.

‘Well,' she said, ‘he asked me, and then they edited the question out afterwards. I said yes, it was very funny, I blushed bright red and said yes, in English, and if you look closely at the rest of the interview, you can see how red I am.'

He was physically very restless and had no interest at all in sticking around once he had his answer. But he sat there dutifully and said yes and no as required. She thought at the time, how forward he was, and gallant, and such things, but he wasn't at all. He just didn't care about being on TV. Most people, even very confident people who think they are above it, care a little, but he didn't care one bit. OK, it was only a small station, in Bavaria, watched by farmers after they milked their cows, God knows, but she had seen it happen a thousand times, if you put a camera on, people change. She wished later that he had been playing up to it a little. He wasn't even flirting; he just wanted to know the answer to a question.

‘What was his question?' I said, and she shifted her
face around to express his manner: ‘Do you want to get something to eat afterwards?'

There was always a point in these conversations when I was forced to expose my interest in her. I mean, Franziska would wake up or fall asleep. We would reach their front door, and I'd set down the shopping or fold up the stroller, because Anke's hands were full with Franziska, and rest it against the closet inside. She would read her daughter a book or make her something to eat. Anke had much more to do, on those empty afternoons, than I did – she had many more calls on her attention. While she was busy I waited, quietly, feeling the pressure to leave rising in me, if only for the sake of my dignity, though I had nothing to go home for. I felt that Anke would respect me more for going, that I suffered somewhat in her estimation for having the patience of women.

Bo had somehow decided that he wanted a wife and a child, and he had somehow decided that the wife he wanted was her. It seems too ridiculous, even to repeat it, but he said to her more than once that when his father was his age, his mother had him; and she sometimes thought he married her just because of that. ‘For someone like Bo,' she said, ‘who is really very old-fashioned, living up to your father means more than it should.'

Once, before they were married, he took her out to meet his parents in Mississippi. She was twenty-two years old. She had never crossed an ocean before. She
was so excited she could hardly sit still, but she had to sit, of course; it was a long flight. She ate everything they gave her to eat on the plane and then threw it up after they landed. Then his mother meets them at the gate, and she smells of vomit and can hardly put two steps together. And she looks so pale: it was like he brought home an invalid or a ghost. And she thought, this is what they think Germans are, these big Americans.

‘You have no idea what kind of a place that is,' she added.

‘You forget, I'm from Texas.'

No, you are from nowhere like that, she insisted.

‘Like what? He told me a story about a neighbor and a shotgun.'

‘Neighbors, there are no neighbors. There is another house and then there are fields and telephone poles. His parents don't have flowers in the garden, they have dead cars. And it is so hot in the summer no humans can survive. At least, not white women, that's what his mother told me once, and she was right.'

I didn't know what to say to this, so I said nothing.

The worst of it was, what Bo turned into when he got home. A fifteen-year-old boy. She thought of him as confident and forceful, even if silent. Very much his own man. But around his father, he hardly said a word. What passed between them as communication was more than anyone else could understand, including his mother.

In the mornings, while it was cool enough, they went out into the driveway and took it in turns to shoot
that silly ball. Anke was expected to pass the day with Mrs. Hadnot. They talked about baking and children and what babies men were, that kind of thing. All day, between clearing the breakfast and getting the lunch ready, then clearing the lunch up and going shopping for dinner.

‘I was twenty-two years old,' she said. ‘I had no opinions about any of these things.'

In the evenings Bo took her sometimes into Jackson, and they had a drink together in front of a TV at a bar. Once, he took her dancing, and she got so excited she cried on the way home. She had spent her whole life wanting to get out of Landshut and the first place she came to was Mississippi.

‘Why did you marry him then, if it was so bad?'

She sat demurely with her hands between her legs and her head bent, a pose of sorts, to express the fact that she was still defending herself against these blows of memory.

‘You don't understand,' she said. ‘I was never more in love with anyone in my life. If he left the room, even for a minute, I felt it here, in the ribs. Like I feel it now when Franziska cries in the night: you have to hold me by the feet and hands to keep me away. It was so hot all the time, all I could think of was sex. Of course, I couldn't sleep in his room, but every night I crept into bed with him, with my heart pounding, into his single bed, which he had when he was a dirty boy, and I lay there with him, like I was his sister almost. I know that sounds crazy, but
I mean, like I grew up there, too, with him, in that house. Like I was fifteen years old. We had to be quiet anyway, so it didn't matter he doesn't talk much. But he made me go back every morning, around one or two, so we didn't fall asleep and forget, and I lay in my own bed till it was light, thinking of him down the hall. When he asked me to marry him, the night before I left, what could I say? He was staying behind another month or so, and I thought, if I say no, I will never see him again.'

All that talk of feeling it in the ribs, and holding her down, etc., left me cold. She liked to see herself as the victim of irresistible forces. I said, ‘You don't marry your boyfriend to make sure he comes back home with you.'

‘But you see, I liked his father very much. The high school teacher. In fact, that's what I wanted him to be: my history teacher. He wasn't a bit like Bo. At least, he talked easily and asked questions and listened. Not that Bo doesn't listen, but Mr. Hadnot was much more of a gentleman. That's not what I mean, either. Bo opens doors for you and waits to sit down, and all that he learned from his father. But Mr. Hadnot had a way of talking, like a politician, as if he wanted especially to know you and also might need you for something later. That was very flattering. Old men always flirt with me, but some do it only because it seems to them respectful, and he was like that. I thought, if Bo grows up like his father, it will be OK. You see how I was thinking: if Bo grows up . . .'