Read Online Playing Days by Benjamin Markovits - Free Book Online Page B

put it on her head. One can grow tired of the presumptions of pretty girls.
    â€˜It will be simpler for me to wear it on the way home,’ she said, ‘after I get my hair cut. That’s why I’m going into Munich, to get it cut. Nobody in Landshut understands my hair.’
    Such talk came easily to her, self-mocking and boastful at once. After a silence, which I did nothing to break, she took a fistful of her own hair in hand and asked, ‘What do you think? Should I cut it all off?’
    â€˜Why do you want to cut it at all?’
    â€˜Are you very Jewish?’ She had grown bored already of her own self-absorption.
    â€˜I don’t know that it’s something you can be less or more of . . . No, not very.’
    â€˜Otherwise you would wear this all the time on your head and not give it to girls?’
    â€˜I didn’t –’
    There was more in this line; it looks even worse on the page than it sounds in life. Aside from the shame I felt – at having stumbled in broad daylight, as it were, over a guilty secret – which never left me till the train reached Munich and we separated, I was conscious of a slight but affecting disappointment. So this is she, I thought. Hers is the life I had imagined stepping into.
    She picked up my book and pretended to read it for a minute. ‘Are you English?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were only a little stupid.’
    So I made a show of interest in her own book, which bulked out of her bright red handbag: a copy of Sophie’s World. It was the summer that everyone seemed to be reading Sophie’s World. The novel had begun to irritate me, as an example of popular literature that had been packaged to appeal to our pretensions of higher taste. I had the sense, though, to hold my tongue. The fact was that I did find her attractive, in spite of or perhaps because of her little presumptions. A bead of sweat trickled along my ribs. My heart had already increased its speed, as if I had run a lap or two, warming up. She was the first woman I had talked to in over two months.
    After her haircut, she planned to meet a girlfriend for a drink; she gave me the name of the club. I should come along: her girlfriend was very nice, and pretty. And loved basketball. I had told her by this point what brought me to Landshut. Anke had made a face; the line about her friend was a kind of apology for it.
    Munich had begun to appear, the flat white faces of its suburbs. In the distance, the jumble of low red roofs promised an older and lovelier city. As we entered the slow descent, she turned to me suddenly with her hand on my sleeve and said, she was getting her hair cut because – she had a daughter – and she was cutting her hair because – her daughter was two years old – and she was tired of letting her pull it. She supposed I would find out in any case. ‘I hope you can join us,’ she repeated. ‘This is my big night off.’

10
    I walked past the synagogue on the way to Olaf’s apartment. The fat young man with the machine gun had a way of standing and shifting on his feet that kept the foot traffic moving; he seemed to direct you with the tip of his gun. For once, I let him turn me away.
    Many of the avenues were bordered by tall lindens. Their leaves, sticky with summer, left a green film over the parked cars. Olaf’s parents lived on a road with lindens. The bark of these trees I always find very attractive: plain and brown, but yellow underneath. Their flakes look like the dappling of water. Some of the trees reached the tops of the apartment blocks; their branches entangled themselves against the iron balconies.
    When I rang the bell, nothing happened for a minute, then I heard Olaf’s voice drifting down from one of these balconies. The buzzer was broken, but he was sending his sister to let me in. I waited another minute or two, and then Olaf himself appeared at the front door in what I