Round Robin (13 page)

Chapter 13

Robin came as she was. By conscious choice, she didn’t change her clothes, comb her hair or even tuck in her shirttails. Make-up and perfume were out of the question: She didn’t own any. She did brush her teeth, considering fresh breath to be only good hygiene and common courtesy. She arrived exactly when he said dinner would be ready, to avoid any prolonged small talk, and she slapped Manfred’s hand away when he tried to hold her chair for her.

He seemed to take that as a clue, let her seat herself and hustled off to the kitchen to fetch the food. Two place settings, a bottle of red wine, a loaf of sliced French bread and butter were already on the old, small dining room table which she had carted down the basement years ago, and which Manfred had covered with a rose-colored tablecloth.

Robin had been expecting something German in the way of food: schnitzel, noodles, cabbage, whatever. But Manfred arrived with a huge steak, homemade fries and a green salad. He cut the meat in two equal portions at the table and gave half to Robin. He poured her a glass of red, toasted her health and, after giving her his little trademark nod, dug in.

The way he ate helped her to lose her self-consciousness. From his first forkful, she could have been sitting there naked with an orchid between her teeth and he wouldn’t have noticed. It was consistent with what she knew of him, though; this man focused on the job at hand. Relieved of the need to do anything but follow his lead, Robin began to eat, too.

The meal was delicious. The man was as good a cook as he was a baker. That thought made Robin wonder if she should hope that he’d made something for desert. Which, in turn, and with great perversity, made her put her fork down. All this food was a giant fat-and-cholesterol bomb. Her damn doctor’s warning made all those wonderful flavors turn to ash in her mouth. And, if she were honest, she’d have to admit to still feeling uneasy eating the way she liked to eat — gobble, gobble, gobble — in front of someone she hardly knew, and a man at that.

Robin was surprised when Manfred actually looked up from his plate. He saw that she’d stopped eating. He stared at her for a second, took a drink of wine and wiped his lips with his napkin.

“The food is not to your taste? I thought an American meal would please you.”

“It’s delicious,” Robin said.

“But you are not eating.”

“My doctor...” Robin started and then descended into a mutter.

“Bitte?”

“I have to lose weight!”

Manfred looked at her some more, obviously checking that idea against what he saw. Robin tried not to squirm — or blow her top — under the pressure of this blatant appraisal. Manfred ate another forkful of beef, took another drink of wine.

“Why?” he asked as soon as he’d swallowed.

“Don’t you think I’m fat? Just a little?” Robin asked acidly.

“Ja.
So lose fat.” Manfred grabbed a piece of bread and buttered it. “Not weight.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You are big and that is good. But you need to replace your fat with muscle. I could show you. Work you out.”

Robin narrowed her eyes, tried to decide if there was any subtext here.

“Okay, buster, explain that one.”

“I am strength coach. At my school. I make students strong. I can make you strong.”

Oh ... Well, at least now she knew what he did for a living, and she had the idea that he was being his usual straight-arrow helpful self, but she wanted to get one thing absolutely clear.

“You don’t think I’m too big, too round, too heavy, too gross?”

“I like the way you look,” Manfred said, devouring the piece of bread. “You look like me.”

Robin didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Instead of doing either, she ate.

Manfred let her look at the baby picture of his daughter again while he did the dishes. He insisted that he had to do them immediately. The idea of leaving dirty dishes in the sink ... well, that was one weight he couldn’t bear.

When he joined her in the living room, he took care not to join her on the sofa but sat in an overstuffed chair across from her. He’d brought with him from the kitchen a box of chocolates and offered her one. What the hell, Robin thought, no point in holding back after that meal. She took a piece of candy and he put the box on the coffee table in front of her.

“Thank you,” Robin said. She handed the picture back to Manfred. “Your daughter is very beautiful.”

He nodded his head and rubbed a knuckle against an eye that was in danger of forming a tear. Then a look of bemusement crossed his face.

“Warner tells me I must call her Bianca now ... Bianca Krump.”

Robin made sure her face didn’t register any value judgment about this name.

“That is how she knows herself,” Manfred continued, “even though in my heart I have always thought of her with the name she was given at birth, Hannelore Welk.”

Robin nodded politely when he looked up from the picture.

“Do I bore you?”

“What? No ... no, I’m not bored ... It’s just I ...” Robin shrugged, tried to express her feelings with a series of gestures, failed and let her hands fall into her lap. “My social graces ... I really don’t have any anymore. I’d like to know more about you and your daughter.”

Admitting that much was very hard for Robin, telling him the rest was like passing a kidney stone.

“My memory still works. I know if you want to hear about someone else, you’re also supposed to tell them about you. I don’t tell anybody about me. Someone ever got nosy about me, I’d probably tear their arm off and club them with it.”

“I think my arm would not be so easy to remove,” Manfred said matter-of-factly. “You may ask me anything; I will ask you nothing.”

Robin considered. It was an unfair proposition, but unfair in her favor. She took it, though she started innocently enough.

“Have you always been big?”

“Ja.
I don’t know why. My parents were not large, and even though they always told me I ate all the food we had, I remember always being hungry when I was young. So I searched for ways to earn money to buy food even at a very early age. When I was five I invented a game I could play that would make money for me. For a
pffennig,
I would let any child on the street hit me as hard as he wanted, to see if he could hurt me.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Boys had to hit me in the stomach or chest. Girls could hit me in the face, too.”

Robin put a hand over her mouth to hide her grin. Manfred spotted it, anyway.

He went on with a smile, “It became a very popular sport, to see who could be the first to make me cry. Children came from blocks away to take up the challenge. Me, I was happy with all the money I was making and the treats I bought with it.”

“So you found your niche being a punching bag?”

“Ja
... it was a good life while it lasted.”

“Then some big kid came along, made you cry and stole your money.”

“Nein,
a girl who was training to be a gymnast broke her hand on my jaw. When her coach found out, he came to see me. He took me from my parents and put me in a state sports school. This was a great honor, and my parents were happy to have the government pay for my food. After only a year of testing, at age six, the state decided that I would advance the glories of Socialism by becoming a power-lifter.”

“Not a body-builder, huh?” Robin asked slyly.

Manfred grinned.

“I am too pretty already. ”

He told her that he’d gotten into trouble as a teenager. He’d refused to take the “strength-building compounds” that his coaches had given him. He’d been no fool. He’d known they were steroids and were outlawed by his sport’s international governing body. On top of that, he’d seen what the steroids had done to the older boys: the psychoses, the prognathous jaws, the pimpled skin, the shriveled nuts. That had not been for him,
nein danke.

Besides, he’d been good enough to compete and win without the chemicals.

But that hadn’t been the point. He’d committed the grave sin of fighting the system.

“I was the worst thing one of my people could be, a disobedient German.”

On top of that, he’d shown a worrisome taste for Western music, clothes and comic books. He’d been told to conform or face expulsion. He hadn’t given the school authorities the chance. He’d become the first person to voluntarily leave the prestigious sports academy, forsaking the pampered future of the hero-athlete. By this rash deed, he’d identified himself as a thoroughly dangerous sort.

Manfred had returned home to parents who’d been horrified to have him back. They’d been sure they couldn’t afford to feed this teenage monster, and loathed the political risk they took if they gave him shelter. So they’d harped on him to return to the school and do what he was told.

He hadn’t. He’d found a place in an industrial training program. He’d lasted a year and then had been dismissed without explanation. He’d become an apprentice baker for six months before losing that position. He’d spent the next two years bouncing around every vocational training program the state had to offer, and had been allowed to complete none of them.

Robin was intrigued, and now she understood how Manfred had come to possess such an array of skills and talents.

“Did you go back to the academy?” she asked.

“Ja,
but not quite the way the state had hoped.”

“What’s that mean?”

He explained that the GDR’s junior power-lifting team had been on its way to a competition in Italy when the train it had been riding went off the tracks outside of Turin. All of the team had either perished or been crippled.

“That’s horrible.”

Manfred nodded.

“Many obedient young boys met bad ends that day. The ironic thing was that the train had been sabotaged by the Red Brigades. The Communists had killed their own.”

“And then they needed you, and brought you back.”

“I came back on my own terms. No steroids. Music, clothes and comic books of my own choosing.” Manfred grinned ruefully. “They did extract their price, though. Since I was the one drug-free competitor they had, they made me pee for everyone else’s doping tests.”

Robin moved on to a much more personal subject; he’d said she could ask him anything.

“Did you ever love your wife?”

Manfred looked inward, trying to recall, or decide, or both.

“Ulrike was a heptathlete, good but not great. I think she attached herself to me because I was one of the more promising stars of the time. I ... I loved her body.”

“Did it look like mine?” Robin asked, not hiding the sarcasm.

“Nein,”
Manfred shrugged, unruffled. “I was younger then. My idea of women was Betty and Veronica from the comic books or the Playboy playmates.”

Robin sneered.

“When Ulrike got tired of competing — when she was in danger of losing her place on the team — we got married. That way she had continued access to all the special privileges of the athletic community.”

“What went wrong? Between the two of you.”

“Ulrike got pregnant with Hannelore.”

“That was a problem for you?” Robin asked with a sudden edge to her voice.

“For her. For me, too, in the end. I was tiring of Ulrike, there really wasn’t much between us to make a marriage. Sex can take you only so far. I saw a future that was nothing more than an endless argument, but when she told me she was pregnant, I was immediately captivated. I’d never thought of having children, but instantly I wanted that child. I saw an image of myself as a great bear rearing up to protect its cub ... ”

Robin didn’t have any problem seeing that picture.

“ ... But the only reason Ulrike had told me she was pregnant was to complain about the shoddiness of the Russian contraceptives she’d had to use when the chemist had been out of her usual French brand. She intended to abort the baby.”