The Bet I Won
When I returned from the front, I took the most direct route to the hotel room that Cora, the preacher’s daughter, had booked for us. No, that’s not one hundred percent true. The taxi stopped at the marble stairs leading up to the entrance of the hotel; the driver waited while I sorted through my duffel, feeling for a sheaf of bills secured with a paper clip. No doubt the driver had seen his share of passengers hunched down in the rear seat, surreptitiously scrolling through contacts on a phone or arranging a last-minute revision to some dubious rendezvous. No doubt the driver, too, had been asked, as I asked, to pull away from the entrance and make his way to a less conspicuous dropping-off point. I instructed the driver to proceed discreetly to the corner of the Platz diagonally opposite the entrance—farthest from the bustle spilling into the street at the hotel corner of the Platz. The driver, obligingly restarting the meter, deftly nosed the taxi through the bustle, made a half-circle around the oblong square, and dropped me beneath the tallest and leafiest of the lindens that shade the benches facing inward from the square’s perimeter.
The doctors had warned me not to cross my legs. I crossed my legs, pigeons milling at my feet, uproar at the far corner of the Platz, a crowd gathered around the table, jeering and cheering, a boisterous and engaged crowd, growing in size as I watched, no one leaving even during the short lulls which I took to mean the score had reached a waypoint and the adversaries were switching sides. A familiar discomfort crept into the hollow just beneath my left set of ribs. I realized that I had relaxed into a familiar slouch, a new reflex. I sat upright and the discomfort sharpened.
The pain, as it came on, took the shape of an arrowhead such as can be seen in a museum, though in the imagery the surgeons had shown me it looked distinctly like a dented bottle cap, the cap from a bottle of mineral water, perhaps used for target practice from a distance. Our bodies distort pain when it arises from a source within us, the surgeons had said. Safer to leave the bottle cap in for now, was the verdict. Count your blessings. Once you’re home, find a surgeon who will open you up and has the expertise to extract a jagged bottle cap.
I rested my right index finger on my left wrist and waited for my pulse to slow, as it did when the pain reached its full amplitude. What I’d found was this: if I crossed my legs—the compact cross, left upper calf resting on right knee—my pulse slowed gradually to an absurdly leisurely pace, the wait before each next beat erratic, but trending longer and longer. At first, the slowing unnerved me; I’d involuntarily tense up and, despite the pain, my heart would return to its ordinary cadence. Once I got the knack of it, though, I relaxed and eased into the lengthy in-between anticipation. And every so often, during one of these drawn-out pauses, a floaty, sentient part of me left my body and ascended. My heart stood still, healthy, in momentary abeyance; meanwhile, I floated off until the instant that my heart kicked back into action and I was drawn abruptly back into my battered flesh and bones, my wound.
A brown bird darted upward into its grotto in the tapering stucco roof of the residential building across from the hotel; a breeze set into motion the leaves of the lindens; a pair of terriers raced across the Platz pursued by a toddler.
I willed my heart to slow, and it did slow, a quick transition now that I’d become adept at simultaneously hurting and slowing, setting apart the pain and its bite in my midriff and the decelerating thumping under my finger, in my wrist. Slow down, slow down. The next beat took forever in arriving. I felt the peculiar sensation of indifferent triumph that I’d come to associate with the moment before I floated off.
Then the sensation itself floated off, inexplicably, as it sometimes did, leaving me in my body, in a berth, on a cot, a bench.
Cora and I stood side by side at the hotel window, watching the raucous crowd at the corner of the Platz below. Two men, rackets in their hands, squared off across a weathered table. The shorter of the two men served. The Loss Leader returned the serve.
The ball cleared the webbed metal net by an infinitesimal fraction of an inch and landed on the other side. It didn’t bounce. It bound itself to the green-gray surface as if magnetized. It neither wobbled nor slid back toward the net. It held its place. The crowd cheered raucously, a unanimous burst of admiration. The ball was so near the net that the Loss Leader’s opponent was obliged to lean awkwardly across the green-gray surface to retrieve the celluloid sphere.
The Loss Leader’s mouth was moving, trash talk no doubt, the Loss Leader’s friendly trenchant brand of trash talk which I knew well from having watched the man at work, not that he played much, but every so often he would grace me with a game at the table in my sister’s basement that did double duty as the Loss Leader’s home office.
The next serve was a rocket. But of course the player must have known what he was doing to go up against the Loss Leader. In height alone, the Loss Leader had an enormous advantage. Moreover, he projected the sense of nonchalance that goes along with formidable ability. His wingspan, too, would make it hard to speed a serve, even a blur of a serve, at an angle beyond his reach.
My able brother-in-law fielded the serve from a good six feet away from his end of the table, drawing back his racket like a court tennis pro winding up to slam a forehand. “Watch this,” said Cora, caressing the nape of my neck. The racket struck the ball and sent it in the wrong direction. Instead of heading toward the net, it flew toward the spectators nearest to the eco-landscaped interior of the Platz. The spectators ducked, but the ball would have easily cleared their heads regardless. I noticed then for the first time the open windows in the office building across the street from the side of the Platz where the ball now was traveling in an upward arc. Office workers at their windows followed the trajectory of the ball, which then dipped abruptly without losing speed. It made impact with the back of the skull of the bust of the Prussian historiographer after whom the Platz is named. Rebounding off this personage’s marble pate, the ball in level flight shot clear across the Platz again, above the patchy indigenous grasses abandoned by the sunbathers and their animal companions who had joined the crowd; tracked toward a clump of shrubs at the northwest corner of the Platz, evading the scruffy vegetation that partially hides a stonework monument at the center of the clump; tapped the stonework lightly; ricocheted away at exactly the angle to allow it to zip above the pavement along the hotel edge of the Platz on its way back to the table where, once again, the crowd in its path ducked. The ball would have collided with the Loss Leader had he not, with casual flair, the elegant, aloof gesture of a dancer or bullfighter, tilted slightly aside to let it pass. It cleared the net and grazed a far corner of the table. Still in play, a last contrivance of spin or hocus-pocus caused it to stop short and plummet vertically to the concrete, thwarting the Loss Leader’s doomed challenger who lunged but arrived too late, to the delight of the onlookers.
“This is how he spends his days,” said Cora.
“All day? Every day?”
“Some afternoons I’ve seen him leaving for what I assume is a training run, but he always returns within an hour, at most.”
“So he’s not cheating on my sister.”
“I wouldn’t think so, no.”
“And in the evening? Does he play then as well?”
“Yes, until it’s too dark to play.”
“And what then? You’ve been keeping an eye on him, correct?”
“But of course. What else have I to do? Did you suppose I would fall off on the job? I watch your sister’s brother and I take notes. That is my entire life at present.”
“Does he meet with anyone, have visitors, socialize with anyone in particular in the Platz?”
“He keeps a strict routine. In the evening he takes his meals at the restaurant downstairs. After his dinner he moves on to the bar. He has quite a following at the bar. I would characterize it as an innocent following. Your brother-in-law seems to enjoy being the center of attention. I have seen many hotel guests buying him drinks. I have also seen him buying drinks for the entire bar. He himself drinks very little. If you would like an accounting of his alcohol consumption, you can find it in my notes. The bar is quite a lively place when your brother-in-law is buying drinks.”
“Yes, that’s my sister’s husband in his natural element.”
“A raconteur with good intentions.”
“A social animal. But tell me, when he’s at the table, playing, is he hustling?”
“Perhaps my English isn’t so good after all.”
“Have you seen any money changing hands?”
“Much money changes hands. Bills are circulating constantly in the crowd. Paper changes hands. I assume that wagers are being placed on the matches. I doubt it is a large quantity of money as many of these boisterous spectators are students. Perhaps in the office across the way larger sums are being won and lost. I have never seen your sister’s husband involved in any transaction. Some of the games are over very quickly, however, which I find odd. Does that imply an element of hustling?”
“Probably not. Not if he isn’t handling money himself. Most likely not. I imagine he spots his opponents points and then dispenses with them quickly.”
“If he were hustling, he would be making money, and that would be a reason for him not to want to leave for the front.”
“Something like that. Not the money, but the novelty. He’s discovered that hustling suits him. Good honest labor suddenly lost its allure. He’s moved on into a new phase of life. He didn’t plan it that way, but perhaps that’s part of the allure.”
“But he can’t stay here forever.”
“That does put him in a bind. It’s not as if he can go home and make a living as a table tennis hustler.”
Another challenger stepped out of the crowd, wielding a racket in a gleaming aluminum case. He and my brother-in-law negotiated briefly while the crowd looked on, the challenger bouncing the ball adroitly against the table with his racket while he spoke words inaudible to us, five floors up. Without interrupting the flow of his bouncing, he shifted his feet, spun the racket in his hand, and launched a backhand serve, the racket hardly seeming to move, the ball, though, whipping across the net as if he’d wound up with the full extension of his arm. The ball darted toward my sister’s husband’s backhand quadrant. Everything the Loss Leader does he makes look easy. With his backhand, he flicked the ball upward, a return that might have seemed a botched, desperate attempt merely to make contact, to connect the face of the racket with the celluloid of the ball. The ball ascended on a nearly vertical path. It rose and rose and rose, and if I hadn’t seen a version of this shot before, I would have followed it as it rose beyond our floor and up and up and up, the spectators shielding their eyes against the sun as the ball dwindled and kept rising and shrank to a dot, a point, a barely visible speck, before vanishing altogether. The ball would never come down. It would come down, but not before everyone who was waiting for it had long given up on it. This was the twist that made the shot: after everyone had given up, they’d return and discover the ball dead center on the table, flush with the net, on the centerline, on the side that counted as a point. Score one for the Loss Leader.
“Come to bed,” said Cora.
I awoke when it was still dark out: I’d caught the sliver of darkness that passes for a whole night in early summer at a latitude one hundred miles north of Lviv. As people were so fond of saying at the time, the distance from Lviv to Berlin is no greater than the distance from Berlin to Paris.
Both the weighty beige drapes and the sheer, sunlight-filtering curtains behind them had been tucked behind the ends of the radiator to expose the night sky. The hotel room cost a fortune, but it was being paid for out of the Loss Leader’s bank account, indirectly, via my sister. Whatever the Loss Leader was doing by dawdling in Berlin, whatever financial arrangements he’d made to tide himself over, he could afford an outlay of funds to support a few days of covert surveillance of himself, arranged by his spouse. Because: whatever else could be said about the Loss Leader, he was a moneymaker.
A dark shape, a night bird, flashed diagonally across the window’s frame, diving after prey, diving out of pure joy. Even as I recognized it as a night bird—what else could it be?—I felt my heart pounding, my pulse racing in my wrist. I carefully removed my hand from the inside of Cora’s thigh. I willed my pulse to slow, a nonmarketable skill that I’d become adept at, but I was wide awake, and I’d learned to do without sleep.
Before I left the bed, I wondered if the Loss Leader, in the many elegant hotel rooms he’d occupied for a night or two in the many great capital cities of the world, at the peak of his career as the Loss Leader, had been visited by some quiet sense of contentment verging on joy when, jet-lagged, he met his curfew and lay in bed, not sleepy, still in another time zone, sipping from a bedside bottle of mineral water to maintain allegiance to his hydration regimen.
A quarter moon the color of the flesh of a ripe melon loomed over the skyline to the east, the unruly east. The pigeon spikes on the outside sill glistened. Among the spikes I could make out crumbs of the Walnusswecke and Franzbrötchen that Cora snacked on, leaning with her thighs against the radiator as she surveilled the agile giant who had been chosen by my sister as her life partner. The Platz itself slept in darkness, the better for the eco-landscaping to flourish after a day of sunlit renewal. Enough illumination fell upon the outer edges of the square, from the avenues’ streetlamps, to reveal activity around the table.
What was my brother-in-law doing in the middle of the night, scampering around with a racket in his hand? From what I could tell, his accomplices were teens, or possibly young adults made to look like adolescents on account of the discrepancy in height. With my brother-in-law they formed a party of four, and they were on the move, scrambling around the table: evidently the object was to strike the ball from one end of the table, yield your place to another in the party who would parry the return from your shot, then be in position at the opposite end of the table to return the parry. All of this happened in frenetic haste, the rapidity of the exchange of places and the demands of coordinating both a sprint around the corners of the table and a successful shot to the opposite court pushing at the limits of stamina and ability: such was the game, to push at the limits until, after a minute or two at most, the limits asserted themselves and chaos reigned. But my sister’s husband was never the player who failed to keep up.
My father was a dreadful man who married my mother’s best friend the day after my mother’s funeral. His sermons were the best part of him; that, and his singing voice. Often, in his sermons, he conveyed, in his sonorous baritone, the exhilaration he must have felt at his desk, searching for the cadences that would unite his flock on the holy day of the week—one could almost see a radiance of purpose and sacred bliss in his gestures as he spoke at the pulpit, though on the whole, he was physically, gesturally, more awkward than otherwise. In my own life, I have given much thought to the sacredness of exhilaration, an interior gift granted not to everyone, or perhaps granted but not realized, actualized. Exhilaration, hochgefühl, euphoria, the welling up of an oceanic or, one might say, cosmic presence and perfection. In my lover’s sister’s husband it is this presence and perfection I recognize when I take my post at the window and observe. Hochgefühl. There is beauty in the euphoria we find within ourselves, and there is beauty in the euphoria that resonates within ourselves on the rare occasions when we are privileged to witness the silence and stillness of the world as it pays homage to the euphoria of a gifted athlete, a soaring bird, a graceful convoy of slowly drifting clouds.
“He’s enjoying himself,” I said to my other sister, the sister on the opposite coast. It helps to have two sisters in two different time zones. “It’s completely innocent enjoyment. He’s having some fun and not doing anyone harm. Spreading his wings. Getting a feel for being back in the Old World. Not the old Old World, but the Old World where he’s the king. Give him a few days, a week. Cut him some slack. He has a rough road ahead of him.”
“Or he’s having second thoughts.”
“I’m watching him at this very instant. He does not look like a man who is having second thoughts.”
“But table tennis? Really? Where’s the gravitas? Is he smiling? Does he look like a man who is seriously preparing himself for combat?” said my sister who became an attorney after a false start as an emergency room physician.
“Tischtennis. A much different form of recreation. You’re thinking of Ping-Pong, the game played in a basement after a Thanksgiving dinner. Much different here—nearly every Platz has at least one table. A cultural signature of sorts. What is a Platz? A civic space considered sacrosanct as a focus of community, integrity, and solidarity. A site of remembrance, an affirmation of historical continuity. Landscaping with meaning, a meaningful disruption in the urban grid, an intersection of work and play that gives back by breaking up the flow of work and traffic. In the Platz where our brother-in-law is currently trouncing his latest challenger, there are no less than three sculpted monuments to events of world-historical significance. These monuments don’t just spring up overnight. Committees agonize over them for years. They become landmarks, featured prominently in guidebooks. Art installations with community resonance are sited in the Platz. When I arrived, an installation was in place that consisted of scattered, makeshift, tent-like structures built from urban scrap wood and strips of rainbow fabric. Shelters. The concept is shelter, the dire importance of shelter for refugees displaced by war. shelter. Unfortunately, all the structures have been trampled by students walking back and forth from the cafeteria across the street to the table where our brother-in-law is putting on a show. Much of the fenced-off landscaping has been trampled as well. Landscaping into which went years of planning, monuments that speak to horrors of the past, art addressing the horrors of the present—and then the space devoted to a game.”
“That’s just the point. It’s a game, whatever the cultural differences. He’s stuck. He got lucky. He expected to stop over and move on. Instead, he found himself a game.”
“But put yourself in his shoes. The years he spent, touring the great capital cities of the world. Touring, losing. One great capital city after another, one loss after another. Being paid to lose. Mastering the art of losing. Perfecting loss as a vocation. A member of a team that never wins, a skill set built up of variations on ways to lose. To win would be the ultimate loss. Being applauded for coming up short. Entering the arena to applause, knowing that the applause is for a foregone conclusion. Always being on the short end of the stick. Gaining accolades for sticking to the script, finessing the buzzer beater that just falls short. Raucous applause! Another triumphant loss. Money in the bank. Success gained by outright failure. Next night another venue, another inventive defeat. He earns his pay by playing out a storyline that always ends the same way. What’s that quote, ‘Losing isn’t everything; it’s the only thing’? Discovers in himself a talent for the performative aspects of losing. Didn’t know he had it, capitalizes on it, turns it into capital. Rises through the ranks, ends up being appointed captain. Captain, capital. Captain of the team that slinks away from the great capital cities of the world in glorious disgrace. Wins himself the ultimate accolade: a bobblehead. A bobblehead and a place in the Hall of Fame.”
“He’s not a loser, though. Just the opposite.”
“Of course. We don’t marry losers.”
“He’s so much not a loser that he’s willing to put his life at stake for a cause he believes in and comes by honestly.”
“I don’t disagree. If my grandfather had been an upholsterer in Kyiv, and I was a gifted former athlete who could pivot into the role of soldier, I’d do the same thing. Prove my mettle by putting myself in harm’s way. Defending my ancestral land. Risking my life to win the big win.”
“But he’s not proving anything except that he can win at table tennis.”
“But he’s winning at table tennis in one of the great capital cities of the world where he once wore the uniform of a loser, the word ‘Loser’ stitched across his barrel chest. In itself, that’s a kind of redemption that I wouldn’t underestimate. Even if you and I know that in his essence he’s not a loser, just the opposite as you say, we can’t presume to have any idea of the damage done to his ego by touring the great capital cities of the world, knowing that the mission is to lose, even if it’s to lose in style and be paid for it. We can’t presume to know that even he himself had any idea of the damage, until he revisited one of the great capital cities of the world, thinking that it was nothing but a stopover. I wouldn’t underestimate the meaningfulness of the Platz. There are squares and there are squares. A certain kind of square is like a capital city within a capital city. Think of the sense of redemption that he must feel, cheered on by a crowd gathered in a venerable Platz, a powerful venue. The acclaim erases the losses in the venues of the past. At some level, he recognizes this and soaks it up. He’s just biding his time here until the crowd convinces him it’s impossible for him not to win.”
“Either that, or he’s having second thoughts.”
“We don’t marry people who have second thoughts.”
I was wrong. A lack of clarity of observation afflicts me if I don’t have my camera in my hands or strapped around my neck. Camera-less, I’d mistaken the rainbow fabric of the structures for the walls of makeshift tents, lean-tos. In fact, the rainbow bands are sleeping bags hung side by side. In the early morning a woman crosses to the middle of the Platz and peels a bag from a crushed heap of rainbow silk and sand-hued wood. She walks off with the bag, perhaps as the artist intended in the first place.
Already a crowd has gathered around the table, not yet raucous; the cooing of the neighborhood doves, perched on ledges, an urgent morning cooing, or calling, is the loudest sound in the vicinity. Who are you to know what it means to win or lose, lose, lose, who are you, you, you, croon the doves, perched alongside gargoyles and caryatids.
I cross my legs and the unpredictable, unwillable, damaged magic happens: that floaty, sentient part of me abandons my body and ascends, my body which I gladly leave behind, having spent the night in pain, curled with my back to Cora and my knees drawn up as near to the bottle cap in my flank as I can bring them, a fetal curl that brings me some relief, though barely enough to sleep.
Farewell for now, war-wounded body, count your blessings, lucky to be wearing shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes. A difference of a millimeter and you’d be in the news, news, news. Zipped into a bag.
I circle around the bust of the Prussian reformer whose sculptor locked him for eternity into an expression of virulent disapproval. Getting my bearings, I turn a tight corner around the monument to the victims of Stalinism—“den opfern des stalinismus.” One last swooping bank around the memorial built from the stone blocks of a local house of worship destroyed during a pogrom. Emerging from the bower that encloses the memorial, I pass the upright signage for the art installation—the signage is all that remains upright—and stop on a dime, like a phantom hummingbird or dragonfly, an inch away from the sun-bronzed ear of the flesh-and-blood version of the bobblehead.
My sister’s husband’s father was a tall man too. As my sister’s husband tells it, even among the numerous tall denizens of Kyiv, the upholsterer was an outlier, so tall that he confounded the seabirds of Kyiv, their wings brushing his broad shoulders as they misjudged his height when he walked the streets of Kyiv, personally delivering books of custom sample swatches of his own design. His talent lay in innovation.
Hovering within whispering distance of the Loss Leader, I took a moment to appreciate the view of the table from an unaccustomed altitude. Altitude would seem to confer an advantage, a more expansive scope, a steeper angle from which to slam, the psychological edge of seeming to tower over. But then again, some of the Loss Leader’s most impressive challengers were preteens, launching arcing shots with complicated spins from below the level of the table. The Loss Leader’s current opponent looked to be no more than twelve, yet kept up a brisk volley of line drives that just cleared the net, interspersed with erratically wobbling floaters which I realized, watching the white sphere closely, were the equivalent of knuckleballs, struck with a practiced soft touch that deprived the sphere of its incoming spin, sending it on its way to be jostled by the eddies and subtle gusts of the urban airflow streaming into the Platz and down the avenue.
“I’m in pain,” I said to the Loss Leader.
It wasn’t what I’d planned to say. When I was still in my body, I’d rehearsed a jaunty, family-oriented appeal to the Loss Leader’s sense of responsibility, his duties to his kids and spouse that were at odds with an overlong sojourn planned merely as a stopover. It was meant to sound like it had been urged upon me by my sister and I was embellishing it with buddy-buddy touches to ironically underscore the essential seriousness. My body sat quietly on the bench, watching me flub my own duty to my sister, or at least start off on the wrong track.
“I’m in pain,” I said again. “I hurt. I can’t sleep. My legs are painfully cramped from trying to sleep in a fetal curl. Sex is Schmerz. Qual. I know your German language skills are rudimentary, but look at the face I’m making. That’s the face I have to disguise every time Cora and I have sex.”
“I live with pain every day,” said the Loss Leader, not moving his lips, casually thwacking a sharp but not unkind smash toward the preteen’s backhand.
“This isn’t everyday pain. What do you think I’m doing here, floating around outside my body? Have you ever floated around outside your body? Were you ever injured so badly that you left your body to escape the pain? Did your body ever cast you out as a coping mechanism? Is that something that happens on the professional pay-to-lose circuit?”
“You’re whining.”
“I’m making a serious appeal to you as a family member and someone who knows their way around pain.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to be grateful that you’re still alive?”
“I am grateful. I plan to go on and live a happy and productive life, once the bottle cap is out. I give thanks every morning that I woke up and I’m still in the world, doing what I love. Are you doing what you love?”
The ball coming back hard at the Loss Leader, I hovered alongside him as he took a long stride backward, dipped adroitly into a crouch, meeting the ball inches from the textured concrete, lofting it high into a soft lob that set the preteen up for a brutal smash, a vicious putaway shot which the Loss Leader answered by extending his muscular Hall-of-Fame-forehand arm to its full length and flicking the ball back in exactly the same lofting, leisurely arc as his previous lob, a duplicate lob that looked to match the previous lob’s trajectory and velocity with such precision that I would put money on the exactness of the duplication. And perhaps there were students of aerodynamic engineering among the spectators who were laying wagers on what, to the eye, looked like precision. All you would need is a camera and a lab to go back to, to study the film.
“What are you taking now, for the pain?” said the Loss Leader.
“That’s just the thing. More than I should. I’m supposed to be taking two pills every six hours. I’m taking six pills every two hours.”
“What kind of pills?”
“The kind of pill they give you in a field hospital where they reserve the hard stuff for the serious cases.”
“Advil?”
“Something like that.”
“Advil is cotton candy,” said the Loss Leader in his affable regional sales manager’s voice, second-career voice, the voice of a successful and competitive captain of a sales team who has proven himself, paid his dues, established a track record of winning plum accounts after his first-career-demonstration of leadership aptitude, albeit as a leader of start-to-finish losers. Rose up through the ranks again, this time as a solid gold winner. A double winner. Had he not risen to the ceiling, he would have risked becoming a cliché, just another youthful has-been filling out a suit, lugging a mobile office sales cart from one physician’s waiting room to another, in itself a kind of ersatz team travel, an endless series of away games, complete with competition, rivalries, trash talk, a soft focus on physical culture. Backbiting. Big fish, little fish. Not every yearning for competition can be satisfied by a weekend of balling recreationally at LA Fitness or the Y. In much the same way, a natural evolution for the hoi polloi of surfers who aspire as groms to land a sponsor and strut their stuff along the Bank Vaults on the Mentawais, but fall short, takes the form of morphing into firefighters. Similar adrenaline rush, with a nontrivial chance of biting the dust; plus, the vocation fosters continuity by providing a uniform that protects against another of the four primal elements; moreover, a firefighter is never far from water.
“What do you suggest?” I said.
“Man up. Take the pain.”
“That would not be my first choice.”
“Does it hurt when you’re outside your body?”
“Not at all, but most of the things I enjoy require a body to make them happen.”
“If you call that a body,” said the Loss Leader, glancing over at the bench.
Now we were getting somewhere, falling into comfortable, familiar banter such as accompanied games of horse or pig in the driveway of the spacious house, when the Loss Leader moved the company car onto the grass and tidied up the lawn, talking trash from the sidelines while my two sisters sank trick shots from the street or from inside the garage.
“You’ve put on weight,” I said.
“A bakery on every corner will do that.”
“Look, I know you must have come prepared. All I’m asking for is something to bridge the gap until I get home and they cut me open.”
“You’re family, and you know I love you, but if I dip into my supply of what you really need, you’ll go and get yourself addicted, and then your sister will kill me if I don’t die at the front first.”
“Why are you still here, anyway? Why aren’t you at the front? What’s the holdup?”
“I’m brushing up on my hand-eye coordination and my reflexes.”
“Are you worried that you’re stuck inside your body? By body I mean bobblehead, the trophy on your trophy shelf. Everyone is under the impression that you extricated yourself from that shelf, or self, when you put on a suit and tie. Is there some lingering self-doubt? Do you still have dreams where you’re wearing your captain’s jersey? Finessing the buzzer beater that doesn’t beat the buzzer? Bricking the foul shot that cements the loss?”
The Loss Leader didn’t answer. He returned another line drive with a nimble lunging slice which the preteen handled expertly, reading the ball’s spin, chopping at it with his backhand, imparting an opposite spin, a potent topspin that caused the ball to rise so steeply that the Loss Leader had to extend his arm to its full length to execute his shot, a slam that drew a gasp from the early-morning spectators, a brusque northern European gasp of surprise at the turbocharged intensity of the backswing and the smash. The preteen leaped, but the ball shot past his outstretched racket, flew past the curb, stopped just short of a well-appointed third-floor balcony where a long-haired dachshund snapped at it; then reversed direction and sped back toward the preteen, loitered for an impossibly prolonged grace note before dropping slowly into the ideal position to be struck hard by the preteen’s racket, still outstretched.
“He’s running a scam,” I said to the more wayward of my two sisters—wayward until she’d married the Loss Leader and turned her life around. “The good news is it’s a good scam, a scam you can be proud of.”
I’d discovered that if I stacked pillows on the radiator, climbed up on the stack, and brought my knees up to my chest in a tight curl, I could watch the action in the Platz and give Cora a chance to catch up on her sleep, Schlaf nachholen, without disturbing her by letting a loud grunt or groan escape involuntarily.
“You were right, he’s hustling,” I said, “but it’s a benevolent form of hustling. Money is changing hands, lots of money. He never loses. Loss, winning or losing, doesn’t enter into the picture. The outcome is always win, win, win. Are you sure he hasn’t been playing hooky in that basement office of his, practicing trick shots when he should have been brainstorming how to undermine the competition? Planning the next motivational retreat? The more I watch, the more amazed I am. Your husband is a beast. Hear that? That’s the sound of highly serious, deeply committed future technocrats skipping out on their classes to take part in the scam your husband is running. Clink, clink, clink, silver being passed from palm to palm. Those ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ are tributes to acrobatic, I take that back, balletic showmanship. Wham! Have you ever seen a double-clutch backhand flick? Hasn’t lost a step, same old impressive flexibility of the wrist. The man is going to kill it at the front. It’s no wonder they’re recruiting him so hard, his eager volunteering notwithstanding. I’d like to see him grow a chin beard and catch on as a featured warrior, playing table tennis in a trench on a table improvised from salvaged planks. He has the kind of baby face that sets off a chin beard nicely. ‘LossLeader’ would make the perfect catchy callsign. You had better prepare yourself for media attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if you received an invitation to pay a visit to Kyiv itself. One of the great capital cities of the world. He’ll come back from the front unscathed, and you and he will walk the streets of Kyiv, tracing the same route that your father-in-law walked when he called upon his loyal clientele with his sample case of custom swatches.”
“You’re rambling. Please tell me you’re not using. You haven’t talked him into anything you’ll be sorry for later?”
“I’m just short on sleep. Try sleeping with a bottle cap digging into your innards. I so badly want to come home and be opened up and have this bottle cap out. I look forward to one good night of sleep. And after that we can all have a big family reunion in Kyiv.”
Down in the Platz, where the Loss Leader had been at the table since before dawn—and in that month, even for the unscathed, the interval between dusk and dawn was scarcely long enough to catch forty winks—I watched a workperson with an implement that resembled a corkscrew approach the fenced-in garden of indigenous, endangered lindens that abutted the concrete between the table and the avenue. Most of the fence had already been battered down by onlookers when the crowd swelled in the afternoon. The workperson made a grimace of fastidious disapproval and crossed the avenue in the direction of the hotel bar’s patio.
The scam was a clean scam, a scam in name only, a charitable hustle. By now the crowd had evolved into two distinct factions. There was a core of insiders who’d been admiring the Loss Leader since his first day at the Platz: students, office workers who left their desks, pensioners, dog walkers, hotel staff, sunbathers, off-duty Polizei, pedestrian commuters whose path took them across the Platz, postal carriers who made their rounds on bicycles, neighborhood eccentrics. Supplementing these regulars were the passers-by, drawn to the Platz by the raucous cheers and chants. Please excuse me for a moment while I writhe in agony.
To continue: after the first couple of days of putting on a show, the Loss Leader, an old hand at working a crowd, not to mention a prodigy of charismatic social affability, approached the insiders with a proposition. They would place wagers with the newcomers. The odds would be difficult to resist. The Loss Leader, for example, would spot his opponent twenty points. Twenty points! One slipup and the Loss Leader’s streak of wins would screech to a halt. Money changed hands. The Loss Leader never slipped up; the newcomers emptied their pockets. But all for a good cause. The insiders pooled their winnings at the end of each day, then the funds went to a charity that found housing and employment for refugees displaced by the war. The hustle, such as it was, hung together with the theme of the art installation, that each person’s home is their shelter, no matter how humble, no matter how deep the gloom. Excuse me once more; when the pain intensifies, I tend to lapse into rhyme as a coping mechanism.
None of this was true. All the money that changed hands, freely and copiously, stayed with the winners of the wagers. The Loss Leader’s own hands were clean, as far as I could tell. He played for reasons of his own. The betting was a sideshow.
I justified the untruth to myself on the grounds that it comforted my sister. Why shouldn’t I comfort her, when the alternative was that she would worry herself sick? My sister worrying herself sick was a first step, I feared, on the path back to waywardness. A worst-case scenario presented itself: my sister turning her life around the other way, reverting into troubled, pre-nuptial misbehavior, while her husband, losing a single game by chance, would backslide into being on good terms with loss; even worse, begin reproving himself for winning. What were the odds, given the sheer volume of matches he played, and the narrowness of the margin he gave himself in the stunt matches where he spotted points, that he wouldn’t slip up just once, a freak gust carrying the ball into the leafy bower, a cyclist accidentally bumping up against the table? The question deserves to be answered by a statistician.
I have been meditating on physical euphoria and its connections to spiritual fulfillment. But I’ve been daydreaming too.
A gifted former athlete volunteers for combat in a country to which he has a deep family connection. He is not only physically gifted but socially charismatic; his charisma knows no bounds. In the course of combat, his squadron, or platoon, or unit, loses its way in territory occupied by the enemy. All the inhabitants of the territory have either been killed, or fled, or were sympathetic to the enemy to begin with. Extremely dangerous territory in which to be lost. One by one, the volunteer soldier’s companions are captured or killed. The volunteer hikes through the forest at night until he reaches a village spared by the enemy because its inhabitants have always been deeply sympathetic to the enemy—they are the enemy, in all but their location on the map. They begin by mocking him. They mock his baby face and the unflattering chin beard. The chin beard, especially. The chin beard smacks of trying too hard. They laugh at it. He wears it like a tourist in a traditional folk smock at an airport. The elders in the village make mocking gestures, stroking their chins. It is as much an object of derision as the ceremonial spear that my father brought back from Papua New Guinea after his early stint in missionary training, and which incongruously stood in a corner of his study, working hard year after year to fit in among the other sacred and semi-sacred accessorial elements of his holy calling, awkwardly striving to maintain its dignity in the face of much family mockery.
The volunteer, exposed to constant mockery, bound by livestock rope to a post outside the bustling village money transfer storefront, knows that his fate is sealed, that the villagers will defile him with cow dung, guffaw at his chin beard until they have their fill of mockery, then will parade him up the main street to the village café, cut him up, and feed him to the sheep. Mockery.
Naturally, there can be no possible optimism in such a plight. Still, the volunteer’s access to a sense of fairness and hope, and human kinship, the kinship of all humanity, is so innately strong that it remains unquenched. Rather than enduring the taunts and well-aimed cow flops stolidly, he banters with the villagers. He has the resilience of a warrior steeled in loss. His command of the language of his forebears is weak, and at first the villagers mock the absurdity of banter when the foregone conclusion is so dire. They imitate his language gaffes which become running jokes. Mocking idiomatically, teens and preteens launch jibes that go over his head. They sculpt sheep dung into spheres the size of medicine balls and pelt him with a barrage from all sides at the distance of a foul line from the basket. Instead of uttering imprecations, he critiques their pelting. “Sculpt me a sphere and move that trash pail thirty paces farther away,” he says, using his hands to speak, “and let’s place a wager.” His friendly appeals are humble and have the tone of a beloved camp counselor. “If I land a shot from fifty paces, all I ask for is a bowl of cheese. If I miss, you can pelt me to your hearts’ content. You can pelt me from the rooftops. Win or lose, I will gift you the collection of bobblehead replicas of my teammates and me that are still prominently on display in the Palace of Sports, in one of the great capital cities of the world.”
“You are on the wrong side,” he says, “and I speak from experience, I speak as one who is familiar with defeat. In another few weeks or months it will seem to you that all is lost, but in fact your whole lives lie ahead of you, if only you recognize the value of mercy and creative intervention. I can negotiate on your behalf. Negotiation is in my skill set. I will sell the advancing battalions on the merits of forgiveness. Untie me and I’ll cut a deal you’ll savor forever. Send along an emissary of your own if you’re skeptical. Make haste, though, as the battalions are approaching.”
Hochgefühl.
A young boy pushed his way through the crowd which had settled down as it did in the short breaks between matches when money changed hands, the spectators on the wrong side of wagers paying up. Unslinging a black bag from his shoulder, the boy placed the bag on the concrete in the shade of the lindens. How many rackets were in the bag? Six? Eleven? Some care would need to go into an estimate, as the child’s size made the bag look large. Conversely, a wager about age would want to take into account the appearance of the bag insofar as it potentially distorted the appearance of the child.
“Here comes trouble,” I said to the Loss Leader. “The pro community is playing the ace it had up its sleeve.”
When the Loss Leader didn’t answer, I said, “Listen, in case we don’t have a chance to speak again, I just want to tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done for my sister, the two of you making such a solid life for yourselves. Helping her to find her way, how you’ve been there for her, lifted her up. The family you’re growing, your success, her success, your career path, her career path—it’s been so gratifying to watch, how the two of you support each other and have moved forward side by side. How you’ve lifted each other up. You’re both such special people, such a perfect couple. You’ve brought out the best in her. Keep bringing out the best in her, lift her up even more. What a joy it’s been to watch her blossom. You should be proud of yourself.”
“You’re catastrophizing needlessly.”
“No, it really does feel different this time. Like the beginning of something new, a new floaty feeling, like I could float forever, like time isn’t passing, like I don’t even have a body to go back to, even though I can see my body curled up on the windowsill.”
“Nonsense. You’ll float back into your body and go on to live a long and happy life. In fact, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I have a name to give you. I made some calls. I called in a favor. You would have done the same for me if I needed a pair of world-class, skilled hands. Surgeon for the hometown team. Best in the business. It took some doing, but you’re already on the schedule.”
As we spoke—as I hovered and the Loss Leader spun his racket so that it became a blur between his thumb and other fingers—the young boy unzipped a side compartment of the black bag and brought out a plastic sport jug, which he set down at one corner of the table, in the shade at the base of one of the table’s arched steel legs. The boy, round-faced, blond, fleshy, dressed in track pants and a windbreaker, left the bag where it was and strode back into the crowd. By now the crowd packed the Platz so densely that its far edges swallowed up the memorial to the Prussian civil servant and diplomat. Spectators had climbed onto the narrow top face of the marble base and were perched precariously around the weathered bust that sprouted from the center of the marble, their knees and calves pressed up against the open collar, the wrinkled brow, the swept-back hair along the temples; palms resting for stability on the top of the head which had never received a morning touch-up with a trimmer. The crowd was packed so densely that the boy was obliged to wedge his way back in, even though an effort seemed to be made to defer to him and allow him entry.
This particular great capital city of the world, I thought, hovering, is so fond of memorials that surely one day it will cram yet another monument into this very Platz, a decade from now, after committees have met to consider the question, have disbanded and been replaced by innovative next-generation ephemeral noncommittees, committees with rosters changing daily, accelerating the making of a decision such that finally, after a baker’s dozen of years, no more, the Loss Leader’s visit to the Platz will be suitably commemorated with a bust, not a standard bust that would truncate the Loss Leader’s barrel chest, but a colorful acrylic-and-polycarbonate three-quarter-scale model of the power forward’s full body, racket in one hand, rock in the other: a playful but somber bobblehead.
Once again, the crowd moved as if to make room, if only there had been room.
Out from the afternoon spectators stepped the young boy, holding by the elbow a very old man who appeared barely capable of surviving the difficult extrication. He looked no less fragile than the very old men who at any hour could be seen putting themselves through their paces at the edges of the Platz, counting off laps, hobbling, sometimes with the assistance of canes, sometimes stopping to catch their breath at each corner and shake their heads at the tumult which had displaced them out beyond the rectangular pebbled walkway onto the narrow sidewalk. Sometimes they would pause and lift their canes with both hands at arm’s length above their heads, and hobble for the length of one edge of the Platz with raised canes and expressions of severe determination.
The boy and the fragile old man paused, then began to hobble toward the table.
“Former coach of the Olympic squad, Cold War era, escorted by his new star protégé,” I said, in Thanksgiving-banter mode.
“Listen,” I continued, because while everything genuinely did feel different, the Loss Leader’s implacable optimism was contagious, and what if he was right and my sojourn of hovering would again be short? “I need to ask you this. Point-blank, don’t be offended, but I need to ask. Are you sleeping with Cora?”
“What? No. That’s absurd.”
“Why, then, are you dawdling here?”
“Not dawdling at all.”
“But it’s been a whole week.”
“Getting my head in the right place.”
“Meanwhile you’re worrying my sister sick.”
The Loss Leader lowered his voice, not that it mattered with all the ruckus in the crowd. Action hot and heavy ever since the old man hobbled out.
“If you really want to know, I had a premonition on the flight over.”
“A premonition?”
“Something like a premonition. I fell asleep. I’d been up the whole night before, you know how that works: leaving for the war, throw a party. Plus all the tying up of loose ends in the days leading up to the party. I fell deeply asleep in my seat. When I woke up, I was in a fog, had to shake myself out of the fog. I remember thinking, as I shook myself out, what a familiar experience it was. Being on a flight, exhausted from the night before, the fog, not being able to immediately recall which airport I’d departed from, which airport was our destination. A little slice of time, time extended into a slice of some discernible duration. It takes a slice of time to shake off the fog. Quarter of a second, half a second, three-quarters of a second. On the court you get a sense for seconds and how you break them down. Possibly similar for journalists and shutter speeds? A very accurate sense that you refine by practicing. Fraction-of-a-second drills. I would estimate that it took a second and a quarter to shake off the fog. Five-quarters of a second.”
“You shook off the fog and experienced a premonition that you would become a table tennis hustler in one of the great capital cities of the world.”
“No, it wasn’t that.”
“You shook off the fog and were gifted with the hunch that you would be recruited to play in the league that holds its championship games in the Palace of Sport in one of the great capital cities of the world.”
“Palace of Sports. Sports, plural. That would be tempting, actually, if it weren’t for the condition of my knees.”
“You shook off the fog and—”
“Stop. No. I didn’t shake off the fog. I did shake off the fog—what I mean is that the premonition happened before the fog cleared. That’s why I said something like a premonition. A not-entirely-awake premonition. An in-the-fog premonition. But it was vivid. Like when you’ve wrapped your tongue around the name of the airport you’ve departed from, you know it begins with such and such letter, four syllables, ends in a vowel—you’re already there, yet not—the name is vivid, so vivid that the actual name, when it arrives, is practically an afterthought. The box score.”
“Vivid as in not good?”
“I wouldn’t be coming back. It was ugly.”
“But you were on your way to join your unit. Everyone going into combat has some sort of unpleasant premonition, it’s a well-established phenomenon of combat.”
“Of course.”
“Plus, as you said yourself, the experience was familiar. Familiar from where? From your past life of shaking off the fog en route from one great capital city of the world where you’d done your job, notched another loss, to the foregone defeat that awaited you in the next great capital city. The familiar fog was a fog imbued with loss, a fog familiar from shaking it off only to remember the name of the city of your last loss, the city of your next loss. You weren’t yet awake and in the present. The premonition emerged from a fog that belongs to the past, not the here and now. The here and now of win after win. Whatever ugliness there was should be written off. The entire premonition should be written off as a hangover from the past. A residual premonition.”
“Of course. Venue to venue, such is the milieu, as we used to say. The premonition was just a hangover. The past trying to stick its beak into the present. After some reflection, I discounted it.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“Still discounting,” said the Loss Leader.
When the octogenarian at the other end of the table spun the racket in his hand, his hand trembled. The tremor imparted a kind of turbulence to the blur that was the racket, spinning, its blurring opposite faces, red and matte black, perturbed, off the axis that normally runs through the center of the handle of a capably spun racket, lending the spinning the impression of a just-barely controlled, flashing, silvery storm cloud, a whirlwind. Nonetheless, the octogenarian with the tremor managed to release the ball with his other trembling hand so that it bounced to a perfect height at the forehand quadrant of the serving end of the table, the turbulently spinning racket only coming to a stop after the ball had bounced, stopping just in time and at the precise location to carry off a difficult backhand corkscrew serve, executed to perfection.
The two men volleyed, testing each other’s strengths, while the young boy called out advice and exhortations from the staved-in railing meant to protect the shade trees at the table corner of the Platz. “Put him away.” “That’s it, keep him guessing.” The boy cupped his hands around his mouth to lift his voice above the crowd’s roar. “More topspin.” “Make him go to his left.”
My sister’s husband, the kind man she’d been so lucky to find, two tall people who met by chance in an elevator. Mercifully he returned each shot hard, so as to minimize the awkward pause in which the octogenarian’s hand shook, his trembling racket poised. With dignity, the Loss Leader held back from drawing from his repertoire of trick shots.
“Don’t hold back,” shouted the boy at my sister’s husband.
Wasn’t there a famous table-tennis hustle where the action in the crowd rose to such a pitch of frenzy that a spectator collapsed and died at the edges of the crowd and no one noticed? I was as indifferent to my body curled up on the windowsill as that crowd had been to the fatal collapse. At the same time, I had a clear self-awareness of my indifference. My body was in the room, Cora was in the room, I could reconstruct the scent of the hotel shampoo in Cora’s hair; I was indifferent to the scent, but then again, here I was, reconstructing, hovering indifferently yet present in the moment, wishing my sister’s husband well, taking heart from his grace at the table which surely would translate into certitude on the battlefield.
“For an octogenarian, he has some wrist,” I said.
Poor Cora. If this was the end, she could count on the support of my sister and my sister’s husband—a support system easily accessible, practically down the hall. Still, she would have to deal with a body in the room.
How curious it was that the score even mattered. Somehow it did. Somehow, keeping track remained important. The Loss Leader discreetly showed off his aptitude for balancing impressive, effortless athleticism with subtle control over who was winning. Of course. He’d been trained to do exactly that. He outclevered the octogenarian three points in a row, then let himself seem to be outclevered. Without ever falling behind, he held the score close. The octogenarian crept up on the Loss Leader, the Loss Leader pulled ahead.
The octogenarian crept up again, to within a single point.
The young boy stood on tiptoe and called out an idiomatic exhortation that has no exact equivalent in English and is specific to rackets and nets and open-air racket sports played in public squares.
Understandably, the boy was frustrated, as one nuance of table tennis that I’d learned from watching at the window is that it is always better not to be falling behind, than to fail to pull ahead when your expectation is to pull ahead.
“Why are you still here?” said the Loss Leader.
My body on the windowsill wasn’t summoning me to return, was the simple answer. No tug from my body, no signal yet, no out-of-season butterfly fluttering up for a closer look, a lone butterfly in an impossible month for butterflies, an unmistakable signal. Maybe the rules of the game had changed, and for once I would hover until the two opponents met at the net and shook hands—an uninterrupted hovering. Maybe it really was the end: the bottle cap had shifted and I’d quietly bled out, a tranquil end, not even awakening Cora. Or it wasn’t the end, and I would sail up to the windowsill and take care in reentering my body, not wanting to jolt the bottle cap. The prospect of slipping into the warm bed, in my body, appealed to me in a distant, abstract way. Who would want to be without a prospect if it’s not the end?
