The Detour (11 page)

“No. How do you run so fast?”

“It was important, for the security of our cargo.”

Cosimo took his eyes off the road. “Don’t lie to us now. You are some kind of athlete.”

“Well,” I said, looking at my dry, juice-whitened hands in my lap, “maybe years ago.”

It came back to Enzo now. “Mister Keller says he meets you in the summer of the Olympics in Berlin, yes? He sees you there?”

“No, no.” To my own surprise, my face was warming. “I wasn’t a participant in the Olympics. I was a sprinter when I was young, but I was not that talented. What Mr. Keller meant was that he was introduced to me through a friend, another man, an art collector—who saw me only in the audience at Berlin, only briefly. It’s complicated.”

“But how does this other man recognize you? Because you are already a famous athlete?”

“No, Enzo. I was never a famous athlete.”

“Then how does he recognize you?”

“He did not.”

Enzo leaned on one haunch, twisting to face me, his forehead wrinkled with confusion. “But he knows you are an art expert?”

“No. I chose to walk out of the stadium at a moment when everyone was watching to see a high jumper receive his gold medal, far below us.”

Enzo waited for me to explain.

“And my awkward exit attracted too much attention. From everyone, all around. It was an inconvenient time to leave.”

Enzo’s brow smoothed. He granted me a complicit smile. “You are an aggravation. That is why Mr. Keller remembers. Mr. Keller hates aggravations.”

“Actually …” I paused—but why had I begun? Enzo was clueless and unlikely to persevere. But then again, I was sick of the memory, which had not faded for lack of exposure.

Additionally—and this was significant—there seemed to be no risk in telling this story. Germany seemed unreal enough here; Italy would seem even more unreal once I was back home, in less than three days. Nothing I could say or do here would change anything.

“Actually,” I confessed, “people around me were expressing approval of my exit, some of them anyway. A few clapped.”

“
Sono confuso
,” Enzo lamented, still perplexed.

“Well, I should explain: the medalist was a dark-skinned man, a Negro from the United States.”

“Jesse Owens?”

I sighed. “That is the name people associate with the Olympics, but actually, this was a man named Cornelius Johnson. There were a dozen and a half of these dark-skinned fellows in Berlin, and two women also, if I’m not mistaken. Many of them very good, very fast. Many Germans applauded for Owens and for Johnson—excellence is attractive, charismatic. To everyone. It is recognizable in athletics, just as it is in art, which is precisely why the entire world can appreciate a Roman statue, not only Italians. But some of my countrymen were not happy to lose to him, not even happy to see his kind in Berlin—that should not be surprising. When I left, they thought—”

Cosimo spoke up quietly: “That you were a racist, yes?”

“I had never given a thought to racism, nationalism or internationalism, any of that,” I said, puzzling over the memory honestly, and feeling no sting in Cosimo’s question. “I was leaving because of an argument with the person next to me.”

“A woman?” Enzo guessed, nodding to encourage me.

“No.” I took a breath. “My father.”

Enzo looked briefly disappointed, then nodded even more deeply than before, willing to accept this second-best answer.
Of course
. “
Il padre. Il babbo
.”

“My father, who had bought our tickets—very rare and sought-after tickets. We were sitting not far below the most prized seats where some high-ranking government people and special guests were sitting.”

“So, many government officials see you leave.”

“Yes.”

It was all as sharp as yesterday: the apologies as I squeezed past men, the woman standing to let me pass, the low murmur of disapproval, and that strange moment when the pitch changed, when the murmur rose to a higher register, and the crowd—as if a single organism—reappraised the situation, deciding that I was doing something notable, even noble. Two hands, somewhere, clapped—the quivering antennae of a large and unpredictable creature—and faces turned. Then more began to clap, and it became obvious that the applause—not scattered and swift and lighthearted, as the applause for the athletes had been, but slow, methodical, a telegraphic drumbeat of a message—was indeed for me. For my exit. And several—not all, but several—who were not clapping were looking around for their own jackets or purses or programs, preparing to copy what I’d done.

How easy it is to start something. Too easy.

Just before I squeezed out of my row, I looked up to see in the seats above us three faces studying me, one of them nodding in deep, if mistaken, accord. The most famous face, I found out
later, had already left. He had had enough and refused to be present for the presentation of a gold medal to this American Negro. So I was merely adopting the style of the day, without intending to—without even knowing
Der Kunstsammler
had made his own exit before me. I’m sure at least one other man in the seats above me wished he had left before I did, so that he could have trumped my exit and perhaps garnered some reward. How many people left
after
me? I have no idea.

“It was because of the misunderstanding,” I finished explaining, “that I was introduced to my current professional situation. The man who saw me, a friend of Keller’s, also spotted me later, outside the stadium, and then we happened to meet a third time, went to lunch, and had a conversation. There were inquiries about my background, my interests. Not much later, I had a new job.”

Enzo considered, sorting through the details for the only points that mattered. “And you are here, in Italy, because of your job.”

“Yes.”

“So you are here in Italy because of a misunderstanding.”

“Yes.”

“That is not so bad.” Enzo smacked my leg, congratulatory. “That is only Lady Fortune smiling.”

But there is balance in everything that happens, isn’t there? There is symmetry. The thrower leans further forward to balance the weight of the outstretched arm and the heavy disc
behind him. Something bad is attended, we hope, with something good. And with greater certainty, when something good happens, it is followed by something bad—especially when the good was undeserved.

The lake swim had refreshed Cosimo. The promised dinner stop was still an hour or more off. Enzo’s lemons—at last count, seven—had filled and upset his stomach enough that he had lost interest in chatting. Now his expression was pinched, his pursed lips reddened by the acid, the large white seed still plastered to his temple. So there was time, perhaps more time than I would have liked, to remember.

My father was disconcertingly proud of the Olympic track-and-field tickets. This was after Mother had taken to bed, the hard growth in her neck swelling, the doctors long ago sent away. But
Vater
had found a distraction of sorts. First: the pleasure of the hunt, when obtaining tickets seemed impossible. This phase lasted three or four months and involved evening visits to gymnastic clubs, beer halls, and the private homes of old acquaintances.

I had tired long ago of boozy socializing with my father. From the age of twelve, he had tried to make a man of me by dragging me along to the Hofbräuhaus, where we’d endure the intense heat of the long tables crammed with three or four thousand men draining immense tankards. On those interminable evenings, I would sip my own cider and listen as the men discussed the only two subjects they relished—the war that had ended eight years earlier, leaving men like my father wounded and bitter, and the miserable economy that had followed it. Pushed into a sweltering corner, I occasionally sank into slumber, to be
wakened suddenly by the blare of an oompah band starting up, or the stamp of feet and pounding of empty steins as someone stood on a table to give a political speech.

By 1936, though, I’d done my time and had failed to develop any affection for either pilsner or political rhetoric; my father by this point made the rounds alone. One night when he returned home tipsy and empty-handed, Greta confided to me that she no longer believed he was trying to get tickets, only talking about it as a way to stay out of the house, away from the smell of disinfectant and chicken broth. Mother would rarely eat more than a spoonful, but it reminded her of winter days and the thin pancakes her own mother had once made—pancakes cut in narrow strips and arranged into pinwheels at the bottom of a shallow bowl and soaked in broth, which had to be eaten quickly, before the pancakes disintegrated. These were the things we talked about at the end, not about life or love or God or regrets, but only about a winter day’s
Flädlesuppe
.

Vater
must have sensed our disbelief about his intentions to procure the tickets. In the morning he would rail: “The swindler doubled the price on me!”

Did he say “Jew”? Probably not. A few years later he might have. He was one of those people who liked being stylish,
à la mode
. The truth is, he disliked many sorts of people equally.

Finally though, he achieved his goal and could enjoy those three weeks when he already had the tickets and could spend every day leading up to the event boasting to anyone who would listen. I would like to think it made Mother happy, to hear him crowing in the next room. I suppose it was better than
hearing him weep, as he also did, late at night when Mother was tranquilized on morphine and he lay, fully dressed, on the damp sheets next to her, thinking that neither Greta nor I could hear.

But remembering is bad enough. I certainly didn’t want to sympathize with him. He was the kind of man who would soften your heart just in order to grab it more easily, to squeeze it inside his purple fist. As he did the day of the major track-and-field events, during that first week of August. I had begged not to go. Attending a spectacle just four days after a funeral struck me as tasteless. But he had bullied and pouted, until even Greta cornered me, pleading for me to relent. Much better for her to have him off in Berlin for a few days, drinking beer there instead of at home. My sister had much to do—putting the house back into order, writing cards in response to the first round of condolences and yet more letters to far-off acquaintances who were still uninformed, sorting through the bills that neither parent had paid in the last eight or twelve weeks (bills to remain unpaid, given the cost of two train tickets to Berlin, even at the foreign-guest Olympic summer discount price, which
Vater
had obtained by faking the worst French accent I have ever heard in my life). Yes, Greta was right. She deserved a break from him.

The trip to Berlin; the stay overnight at a distant cousin’s flat where
Vater
boasted the entire evening, trying to steer the conversation away from more serious family subjects; the day itself—I’d found all of it exhausting. I’d never enjoyed traveling, and this trip was no exception. And finally, the interminable hours once we’d found our stadium seats.

“That could have been you out there,” he started as soon as we’d made ourselves comfortable.

“Not really, Father.”

“Yes. Of course. If you had done a little more.”

And now we had our
leitmotif
, the melody to which he would return again and again, every time a sprinter broke the tape or cleared a hurdle or climbed to the podium to bask in public acknowledgment of his mastery.

“I was never that fast.”

“When you were fourteen, almost. When you were fifteen, yes. And getting faster every day.”

“Not like these talented fellows.”

“And think, with the best coaching, how much you could have done …”

I ignored him when I could. I stared out at the field, as everyone stared—a hundred thousand pairs of eyes and even more watching—miracle of miracles—by the innovation of television. While all around us people clapped and shouted and shook their little flags, I kept my jaws clenched tight, unable to partake in my countrymen’s revelry and joyful abandon.

“The
opportunities
your generation has. Unimaginable in my time.”

Opportunities, he meant, like the training camp for which I had been wait-listed and then accepted at the last minute, after four athletes had been excluded—three for their non-Aryan roots, one for rumors of homosexual perversion.

“But I did what
I
could,” he said minutes later, as if there’d been no delay. His thoughts were clearly looping and cycling,
around and around, like the runners below us, trying not to see what was in the center of the field, the dark hole of the truth of the funeral service we’d sat through four days earlier. “You, on the other hand …”

He extracted the flask from his jacket pocket, made a silent mock toast to the crowd in front of us, and sipped. The golden liquid clung to the untrimmed whiskers of his mustache. He had thought about cutting it shorter, into the short broom-end style of a certain eminent personage, but Greta had begged him not to, for there were some styles not meant to be imitated.
Vater
, who thought he was always just one step away from some bestowed favor, some bit of luck, some elevation in status, was—Greta and I feared—really just one step away from embarrassing himself, or worse.