Preserved: "The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz" by Michele Mari (O.Henry Anthology)

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

-From "To an Athlete Dying Young" by A.E. Housman

Whether a short story or a long novel, fiction should be a zone free from moral judgement. The goal is to show a character as they really are, not to show them as they should be. The moral judgement has to be at least postponed until after the reader has first fully immersed themselves in the character's world and seen things through their eyes. 

But I'm going to skip step one when looking at "The Soccer Balls of Mr. Kurz," written by Michele Mari and translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore. That's because I can't imagine a reader having a hard time empathizing with Bragonzi, the point-of-view character of the story, or with any of the boys at the boarding school he attends. Seeing the world through their eyes is very easy to do. In a sort of Italian version of The Sandlot, the boys' main antagonist in life is a man they've never seen, Mr. Kurz, whose home is over the wall from their soccer field. When a ball goes over the wall, Mr. Kurz refuses to give it back. Just like the imagination of the boys in The Sandlot makes Mr. Mertle and his dog into monsters of legend, so Bragonzi imagines Mr. Kurz as a spider. 

The school and the boys in it are drawn so wonderfully, I can't recommend this story highly enough. I often spend so much effort trying to understand stories that I scarcely notice if I even enjoy them, but "Mr. Kurz" is palpably enjoyable. The loss of each soccer ball is made more poignant by the sense of loneliness each boy has, being sent off as they have been to a boarding school by fathers with more money than affection. 

What makes the story so unexpected is that the teased meeting with the spider Kurz never comes. We don't get a moment in which Bragonzi makes peace with Mr. Kurz and gets back all the balls the boys have lost. Instead, Bragonzi engineers a brave reconnaissance mission at night into the backyard of Mr. Kurz. He gets into a shed, where he finds that Mr. Kurz has been storing all the balls lost over the wall for thirty years in a kind of museum. They are even labelled with the date on which they were launched over the wall. Moreover, there are empty spots on the shelves for more to come.

Looking at these balls, Bragonzi has an epiphany, standing in front of the first ball Mr. Kurz claimed three decades ago: 

...looking at it, and thinking that those who had played with it must have been older than his father by now, he considered how the balls with which an individual plays in his life get lost in thousands of ways, rolling down countless streets, landing in rivers and on rooftops, torn apart by the teeth of dogs or boiled by the sun...he considered how all of the balls touched by those children had thus dissipated, and if he were in their presence and asked them, 'Where are all your soccer balls?' they would shrug, unable to account for the fate of a single one. That ball alone had been snatched from the clutches of destruction; only that ball, from May 8, 1933, went on being a ball...The ball had shot upward, and even before it went over the wall everyone thought, It's lost--goodbye, ball. But no, only in that moment was it saved. And many years later, when those children went down to their graves, that ball would be more alive than them, the last memory of the matches of yesteryear.

He realizes that Mr. Kurz has a chair in his backyard set up to watch the wall and wait for balls to come over, but Bragonzi imagines not only the ball sailing over the wall, but the joy and agony of the game, the boys in the full glory of youth. 

Bragonzi eventually gets the most wonderful soccer ball from his father as a gift, but rather than let it be used in the game, he sneaks out and kicks it into Mr. Kurz's backyard so that the ball never gets a scuff on it and can remain perfect in the shed museum. 

So what do I think of Bragonzi's decision?

Whether you agree with Bragonzi's decision or not, it's easy to relate to it.  Who hasn't looked out on a pristine yard in the winter covered in snow and thought that it would be a shame to trample that perfect smoothness? Yet it's not hard to imagine an argument that Bragonzi is being silly. Trampled snow means someone went out in it and enjoyed it. The story contrasts Mr. Kurz's impulse to preserve things in the moment of perfection with other soccer players who can't wait to scuff up their new balls, in order to make them really theirs. Isn't Bragonzi missing out on the joy of life precisely by trying to avoid the moment of its downfall? Isn't his obsession with the sadness of mortality preventing him from enjoying what moments in life there are to be had? 

I would completely understand that argument, and yet it's hard not to feel that Bragonzi is on to some critical characteristic of human nature here. Why do people so often interrupt the fun they're having in order to take photographs, if not because they want something to remind them later of this moment in time after the moment is gone? I always feel annoyed by photographs, because I want to just simply focus on the moment, but I'm always grateful later to those who insisted on photographs. 

I suspect most people try to strike some balance between enjoying the moment and thinking of the moment in the context of eternity. They'll try to take a reasonable number of pictures, say--enough to remember the event, but not so many that the whole event becomes about memorializing it. Maybe Bragonzi will eventually come to such a compromise position, but in Mr. Kurz's backyard, he is facing the awesome meaning of eternity and death and the fleeting nature of life for the first time. He has no natural defenses to it, you might say. His only possible reaction before the sublime is complete surrender to it. 

If I were Bragonzi's father and found out he'd kicked an expensive soccer ball away on purpose, sure, I might be upset, but as a reader, I think there is value to his discovery. The memento mori is indispensable to a life well lived. No, you don't want to live your entire life keeping soccer balls from getting scuffed and thereby avoiding life, but at the same time, if you don't consider once in a while that all soccer balls end up gone eventually, you might end up playing the game timidly the whole time, never letting yourself be free enough to wind up and really kick, because you're too afraid of what will happen if you send the ball over the fence.