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fifth: Karl, Charlie, Milo and Krahm, our skinny backup power forward, outpaced me by at least ten yards. Olaf would probably have beaten me, too, if he hadn’t pulled up lame after twenty paces, holding his hamstring, and trotted the rest of the way with a great show of pain. Afterwards he explained to me that they didn’t pay him enough to make him run horse races. A horse race is just what it felt like. Basketball is a team sport and the nuances of the game leave you room to blame what happens on other people. But that sprint left no such room. I felt afterwards that my flesh had been weighed and valued. If I hoped to make a name for myself in that league I would have to make do with inferior qualities.
    But I had good days, too, when my shots fell and Karl was too lazy to come out and challenge them. And other things on my mind. Sometimes I skipped the banter of the locker room and got cleaned up at home. Then I’d shower in the dark, bowing my head beneath the flow of water. The darkness kept out, from my own thoughts, the stares of other people. I felt the day drain from me; I closed my eyes against the rising heat. Afterwards, drying off, I liked to look out the little bathroom window abovethe sink, at the lights of the complex – which dotted the night air according to one of those intricate changing patterns that seem both human and mathematical. But the truth is, I spent most of that time looking out for one window in particular. The window where the long-haired girl had stood.
    Around half past ten at night, she tended to show her face. Probably it was her bedroom window, and she liked to look at the view a minute before turning in: the horse farm across the road and the land falling away behind me into the darkness of the countryside. She might have seen a few stars. Landshut grew very dark at night. The luminous hum of Munich did not reach it.
    When her hair was down, her silhouette seemed simpler and whiter. I guessed that she wore it up in the day and loosened in the evening, that she slept in a nightdress. Sometimes, though the light was behind her, I could see the details of her day clothes: black cardigans with bright buttons, square-cut blouses in strong primary colors. She was very thin. Her waist seemed no broader than my thumb. The fact that she stood there with the curtains wide open at the same time each night struck me almost as an act of communicated intimacy: we shared a ritual.
    Not that she always looked out. Sometimes I watched her going about the slow quiet business of putting herself to bed. Folding clothes away, applying night creams, combing out her hair. I worked out the faint top edge of a standing mirror against the wall, above the line of thewindowsill. Beside it, a low skyline of bottles and jars and boxes. Her dressing table. Once in a while something or someone called her out of the room: a telephone? a boyfriend? Though she always reentered the stage framed by her bedroom window, after a few minutes, alone again and without a phone in her hand.
    Even at the time the racing of my heart gave away the fact that my interest was not quite wholesome. On the other hand, the desire I felt for the world within those rooms, warmed by her presence, seemed to me also a decent and natural desire – for a normal and less lonely life. And on those few occasions when I saw her unbuttoning her cardigan or throwing her hair over her head to pull up a blouse, I rarely lingered for more than a few seconds before turning away to get dressed for bed myself.

6
    Two weeks before the season began, Bo Hadnot showed up to practice. I can’t say I recognized him. Henkel, for once, was late, and most of the guys had gathered at the far end of the gym to watch Darmstadt fooling around. About ten o’clock in the morning. It seemed a sign, and I muttered this to Olaf as we sat on a bench lacing up our hightops, of what being professionals had done to us. After a month of training, we lay