Playing Days (18 page)

Zweigman to a certain extent filled the gap my father left behind. Most of the week he spent driving up and down the country, talking to coaches and agents, looking in on scrimmages. Then Fridays he returned to Landshut and stuck around for two nights to watch the game. Friday afternoon he took me out. Karl was his main target and he justified time wasted on me by referring to me as his ‘inside man.'

‘Consider yourself on retainer,' he said. ‘Two bucks a day.'

I have an inherited interest in German cakes and he was willing to trail me across town sampling the possibilities. He ate like my father, too – either not all, or whatever was left, no matter how much.

One of the things I liked most about Zweigman: he was a basketball fan. I realized in his company something I had just about forgotten after four months in the game. All fans are created equal. It's only the players who have to put up with inequalities.

For two hours a week I talked about basketball again as if it was something I loved. We argued about guys like Plotzke and Olaf, followed the NBA through day-old newspapers, remembered past players and games.
He shared my passion for statistics and together we bent over sheets of numbers and discussed which numbers mattered the most. Mel knew much more about the game than I did and could break down an offense or defense at a glance, naming them by code: motion 2, triangle with a high post pivot, that kind of thing. These suggested to me a world in which all the apparent variety of play was little more than a few basic patterns dressed up. A depressing idea. I wonder if this is how we appear to psychologists – if we offer the kind of cheap selection you get at a convenience store. But Mel still turned to me for ‘inside knowledge.' I could describe for him what it was like to feel Hadnot pin you on his hip, to keep you off his ball hand, before rising and turning to shoot.

On most other aspects of the business, though, he enlightened me. It wasn't just his job to find talent, he also had to assess ‘how ripe it was.' Drafting a European, if you could sign him away from his club, gave you three years of rights to him. Maybe in those three years, with a lot of work, he becomes a useful NBA player, just in time for somebody else to snatch him up as a free agent. So, you wanted guys who could step in right away, or you wanted guys who were loyal. Loyal was hard to measure. Sometimes you looked at kids with particular relationships to their club coaches. Then you brought the coach in, too, and him you could sign up for as long as he was willing – and often he was very willing. Not that such contracts mattered much in the event; mostly, after three years, the kids get sick of their old coaches anyway. Then
you're stuck with them, though these guys don't cost much in the scale of things.

Mel wanted to know what I thought of Karl personally. ‘Personally,' I said, ‘personally . . . he strikes me as somebody who is going to be a famous man.'

‘That's not a quality,' Mel said.

‘I didn't used to think it was, either.'

The clubs themselves were another part of his problem. Sometimes they got very ‘selfish' with their talent, very possessive. Mel also had to work out what approach to make. Most of the small-market teams had money issues, which were easily resolved by the kind of people he reported back to. But sometimes you get a small club with a rich local owner who doesn't see it as a money-making business. He likes wandering around the locker room and putting his arm around the players, that sort of thing. If he finds he's got a ‘live one' under contract, he holds on. Mel spent a fair amount of time hanging around the front office, talking to Angie, the judge's wife. The good thing was these small-market operations tended to be careless with their financials. The secretary is a friend of a friend. The accountant went to school with the boss's son. And so on. Angie gave Mel information he probably wasn't meant to see, and Mel passed some of it on to me. This was how I found out what kind of money the guys were on.

Hadnot was the highest paid player on the team. He made three thousand marks a week in season, without taking into account the company car, the family apart
ment for his daughter and separated wife, and the bachelor studio for himself. Charlie came next, at about two and a half, car included, though he had a special clause in his contract allowing him to pick his own apartment. Olaf had first division experience and took home a grand a week, about twice what I made, with a few incentive clauses thrown in. Then there were a bunch of guys on more or less the same contract: Milo, Plotzke, me. Karl. He had signed up at fourteen for five years and never bothered renegotiating. Money didn't matter to him: he was the son of a millionaire.

Landshut had him under contract for another two seasons. They hoped to ride him into the first division and then establish themselves in the European league, where the real money is. Of course, any NBA team could compensate Frau Kolwitz financially for his loss, but money might not be able to buy the kind of influence Karl could have on the club fortunes. If she wanted to turn Landshut into a serious European player, Karl was her best shot.

In other words, there was no reliable correlation between what we got paid and what we contributed, both measurable quantities. Karl and I made the same money. As Mel ran down the income-list, I started feeling uneasy and said to him, ‘Probably I shouldn't hear these things. Money is private.'

But this had nothing to do with my reluctance. I had been assessed at a certain value and had failed to live up to that assessment. It was almost as if I had been caught
lying. Mel, with characteristic blindness and bluntness, said, ‘No, Henkel only made a mistake. The fault's his. What are you getting so worried about? They have to keep paying you.'

‘That's not what I mean. It's just that I'm not worth what I seem to be worth. At first you can't tell, but then it becomes pretty clear.'

‘Oh quit being so subtle. Call it a rough start. Think of yourself as an investment, if you want to. A long-term investment.'

Something else turned up in his inquiries. Hadnot was on a three-month contract; it ran out a few weeks into the new year. According to Mel, this was unusual but not unheard of. Clubs, ambitious clubs, sometimes invested more than they had up front at the start of a season, hoping to win a few games early and attract the sponsorship that would see them through. It was a gamble, but small-town outfits had to gamble if they wanted to grow, and such practices explained why so many of them ended up going under. What was unusual, maybe, was just that Hadnot had been around at the club so long. Mostly they signed up new players to these short-term contracts. Guys had an incentive to go along with it only if they were trying to move up a league, or over a league, and wanted to prove themselves against stiffer competition. Athletes are basically delusional human beings. Every one he ever met, worth his salt, figured on winning whenever he stepped on court.
They see it as a pay raise and forget they've only cut their salary into fewer slices.

‘So what does that make me? You think they'll re-sign him?'

‘Would you?'

‘Sure.' Then the personal implication struck me.

In fact, I heard shortly after from Anke something that seemed to bear on all this. Bo had asked her whether she might consider, in the new year, taking him in again and giving their relationship a shot. She seemed shocked by his suggestion, though I wondered whether she also had her reasons for telling me about it. ‘And you say this comes completely out of the blue?' I said.

‘How can you ask me that, when you come here every night?' But it seemed to me some of her anger was worked up in advance.

‘I only ask you. And what did you say to him?'

‘What do you think I said?' Then she changed tack. ‘You take it very easy.'

‘How should I take it? A minute ago you accused me of distrusting you.'

This also didn't satisfy her, but I decided to keep from her what I knew, that Hadnot had no guarantee of work after the Christmas break. In this light, his question sounded less strange and abrupt. Maybe he was considering going home and wanted to know his chances
before committing himself. I wondered even whether he thought of approaching the club with an offer of economizing: a pay cut, and only one apartment, etc. Getting back together would make his life less expensive.

Anyway, his question had its effect on me. Anke, one afternoon, complained about the prospect of her first Christmas since Franziska was born stuck at home with her parents. They used to go over for dinner on the twenty-fourth, but it was only dinner, and this year her mother expected them both to stay the night. By this point in the year it was mostly too wet and cold to go out for any stretch of time, and the three of us made do, as well as we could, with the entertainment possibilities of Anke's sitting room. Cheerless days, and Franziska's fits of temper expressed only what we all felt: cooped up, tied to one another by affection and fear of loneliness.

‘What's wrong with Christmas at home?' I asked, partly provoking her.

‘I'm not such a daddy's girl as you,' she said.

Later, relenting, she added, ‘I thought when she was born my life would change. But nothing has changed, really. Instead of going to school, I look after her. You don't know what it's like to be an only child. Your parents can't be happy without you, so you spend every holiday with a sick old married couple who are not even happy for more than an hour when you do come home.'

Franziska had discovered she was tall enough to reach the toaster in the kitchen; I noticed her trying to pull it out of the socket by the cord. Anke moved quickly to lift
her away, and the girl slapped her mother's face, not hard but deliberately. Usually, at such displays, Anke sent her to her room, but this time she let herself be slapped, only averting her face from side to side with her eyes closed. ‘No,' she said, ‘no, my love.' I wondered for a minute if she was trying to goad herself to tears, but Franziska gave up after that minute and the atmosphere remained unrelieved.

We had a two-week break for Christmas, and my mother had been angling for me to come home; she offered to buy the plane ticket. But I asked her instead if the house in Flensburg was empty – the house she grew up in, a few hours north of Hamburg on the Danish border, and to which we returned most summers in my childhood. I had been there in winter only once before. The sun appeared for no more than a few hours each day, but the view of the sea from the terrace was unobstructed by leaves; you could see, across the grey fjord, a stretch of Denmark as wide as your arms. The house itself, built shortly after the war, was plain and comfortable, and the glasshouse in the garden had an old-fashioned space-heater that was rusty but powerful enough. You could spend every mealtime surrounded by trees and water.

My mother, with a catch of envy in her throat, exclaimed how much she loved being there in winter, with nothing else to do all day but shop and cook and walk to the harbor in the morning and the pier in the afternoon. By the end of the conversation, with some reluctance, she agreed to let me spend Christmas there, with my
girlfriend and her daughter. And when I invited Anke I was touched and surprised by how pleased she seemed. Bo was spending the two weeks off in Mississippi, and she could do what she liked with Franziska until new year. For the next few days she kept bothering me about plans: what train should we take and how long should we stay? Was there a cot there? And so on.

I never mentioned our affair to Mel, though sometimes Anke came up when we were talking about Hadnot. I asked him once what would happen to his wife's apartment if the team let him go. ‘What do you know about his wife?' he said, but the conversation turned easily enough to other subjects.

Sponsorship money was beginning to come through, though Mel doubted Frau Kolwitz would spend it on her fattest contract. Hadnot had struggled to get court time since Karl's emergence; meanwhile, we continued to win. By mid-December, our record was seven and three and we sat comfortably third in the league tables: within reach of the playoff. In the last game before the Christmas break, we beat Nürnberg on the road by seventeen, revenge that left Henkel in expansive spirits. Karl had scored thirty for the fourth time in five games, and Bo had put in what was becoming a typical performance: ten points in fifteen minutes, five for eight from the field.

‘A super sub,' Henkel called him on the bus ride
home, to placate him. ‘What is it they call him? The microwave. Very quick hot . . .'

Hadnot didn't look up. I sat in the aisle opposite, with my winter coat bunched against the window, and pretending to sleep. From time to time I allowed myself in the dark of the coach to stare at Bo through half-closed lids. He rested a leather jacket on his lap and kept his hands warm inside it. At one point he said, vaguely in my direction, ‘Man, I ain't tired enough to sleep.' A two-hour ride back to Landshut.

The next morning Mel found me at home in bed and offered to buy me lunch. He had seen what he needed to see. There was no point coming back in the new year, and he wanted to ‘take his leave' of me – sometimes his conversation showed an old-fashioned, bookish turn. He spent a lot of time on the road reading bad novels. I stood in my boxer shorts and invited him in, showered and then dressed in front of him, feeling how strange it was, such familiar proximity with an older, professional man. We walked down the hill and through town, along the High Street as far as the river, until we reached Sahadi's.

It was spitting rain, but we made it in before the heavens emptied and sat just inside the door by the window, in the green shade of a potted plant, watching the water come down. Early lunch, and nobody else was around. Mr. Sahadi himself waited on us, and I was embarrassed by the fact that he mistook Mel for my father.

‘I guess all Jews look alike to him,' Mel said quietly to me. This also displeased me.