Munich Airport (15 page)

My marriage ended thirteen years ago, and I've only had two relationships since then, both of them short-lived—one at the beginning of that time, and one recently. The one in the beginning was my ex-wife's old friend, whom I saw when I lived with the artist in Nunhead. For a little while after my marriage ended, I kept running into my wife's friends, or our old friends, though it was understood that my wife would keep them and I would move on. I guess I was habitually, or automatically, traveling old paths. The conversations I had with these people were always affectionate, and we were sorrowful that there wasn't anything to do in these situations but naturally grow apart and forget each other. It was strange to be feeling such affection for a life that I'd come to regard with such overpowering contempt. But it seemed that, one by one, I met all those old friends out somewhere, typically in places I had seen them before, and had to have a couple of drinks to say farewell. My wife was saying nothing harmful about me to these people, and I was saying nothing harmful about her to them, either. For my part, I simply couldn't speak of her. I think I just wished she had died. So, just as people had mistakenly considered us a happy couple when we were married because they thought we had such a quiet, confident way of communicating, they mistook our reluctance to speak ill of each other as a sign that things had ended amiably. In fact they had ended as unpleasantly as possible. The only person I ever told about the unpleasantness was the old friend of my wife's, a woman I had never, at least while I was married, got along with, partly because I assumed we had nothing in common. Three or four months after the end of my marriage, I saw her out one night. She was drunk. She was a heavy drinker. I said hello and she started accusing me of ruining her friend's life, of stealing her money, of ending the good days we'd all been enjoying. Now everybody would sober up, so to speak. Now everyone would either break up or have kids. There weren't going to be any more parties. Nobody would ever be happy again. She was completely serious. I said, Steal her money? She said, Oh, never mind. So I took the time to explain very carefully just how wrong things had gone. She kept saying, Stop, you're depressing me even more. But I knew I wasn't going to tell anybody else, so I wanted to get it all out. By the end she was just standing there, by the bar, speechless. We had a few more drinks together and we started kissing and she said, sort of pleased with herself, This is the most evil thing I've ever done. The next morning I woke up in her bed and she was sitting on a chair on the other side of the room looking at me. You've got to go, she said, and you've got to promise to say nothing about this, ever. I said, Don't panic, I'm not telling anybody. She said, But you have to go, my flatmates will be awake soon. I asked, What time is it? It's five-thirty, she said. I got my things and left, but not before I said something that completely surprised both her and me, which was, Ever since I first set eyes on you, I've fantasized about this, I have thought of you every day since we first met. She was bleary-eyed and tired, but what I said woke her and made her face astonished, bewildered, and curiously softened. I said, Please don't remember this always as a mistake. When I left her building and found myself walking down the road I thought, What an odd, totally compelling, and seemingly truthful thing to say. Was I in love? I wondered. Although I'd slept very little, and although I was suffering from a headache and a stomachache from the booze, I was in an ecstatic mood. I felt shot through by a kind of divinity. I almost went to the bar of a hotel and asked for a whiskey, which I would drink over the course of an hour while reminding myself all this was real, it had
happened
, that a few down years had been wiped out by a night. But I had to hurry home to shower and change before work. I got a coffee. The city was awakening. It was summer, so it was already bright. Every time I crossed the street, the volume of pedestrians around me, also crossing, seemed to double. It was invigorating. At Victoria Station, where the announcements blared out in the high empty space above the trains, I was going against the grain so I got jostled and looked at. But it felt like the best morning of my life so I didn't care. I got a train to Nunhead. I looked at the time and realized that if everything went as fast as possible, I'd still arrive at work late. So I decided to relax and try not to think about work. The train from Victoria to Nunhead at seven in the morning is of course completely deserted—going the opposite direction at that time it is miserably congested. So I got a seat in an empty car, by the window, and as we started to move I felt a rapturous, sad relief that I was starting over, from that moment, that I had come to Europe for this reason, to feel as though I had been born without a past, that I had come from nowhere and knew nobody, there was nobody to tell good news or bad news, there was no reason to behave one way or another. The view on either side of the tracks seemed to me so beautifully distant from the place where I was born, which seemed to me, at that moment, destroyed, obliterated, by the power of my desire to never see it again. The woman and I began to see each other. We met all over London, in pubs and restaurants. Places we wouldn't otherwise eat or drink in. But we also went away in order to be fearlessly together and anonymous. We flew to Paris, Lisbon, Riga, and Reykjavik. We drove to Bath and the Lake District. We stayed in nice hotels. I didn't care that the ghost of my old relationship was following so closely, that it slept with us and ate breakfast with us. I didn't care that this was happening so soon. Though we never spoke of a future, I assumed the future was safe. Then one day, about seven or eight months after we'd started seeing each other, as we were walking around London after midnight, I said something to her and she started crying. There were people on the street, but not many, and they stopped to watch her. I tried to get her to stop but she fell to her knees. I tried to lift her and she struck me. What's the matter? I said. She asked me how I could treat her so badly, how I could be so cruel. I thought she was joking. Or I thought maybe she was having a psychotic episode from the drink, maybe somebody had drugged her. I asked, Did someone find out about us? But she was sobbing, and every time I tried to reach for her and lift her up, she struck at my hands. Then all at once she stopped crying and I thought she was going to say something like, Sorry about that, I must be drunk. Instead she said, I won't do it. I said, Do what? She said, I won't belong to your wretchedness. I said, My wretchedness—who says that? Just then, two policemen came by and asked her if everything was okay. She was done crying, she was composed, and she was composed because she was finished with me. She said, Everything is fine. Move along, they said, to both of us, and she said, We're not together. I was dumbfounded by her unexpected mettle and a little annoyed that I would now have to get a taxi to Nunhead. The policemen said, You heard her, move along. So I went a different direction and hailed a taxi. She really was finished with me. It was impressive. I telephoned a few times but she never picked up. I wrote to her. I was distraught. After a few weeks, I waited outside her office and waved her down. I walked over and she gave me a dispassionate smile. I asked her to meet me. I wasn't trying to win her back. I stated this from the outset. I said, Honestly, I'd like to ask for your help. She said, I've got an hour right now. I took her to a nice bar with comfortable brown couches. She had an orange juice. I drank a beer. I said, Please don't mind me saying this but you look great. She said, I haven't had a drink in a month. We spoke of nothing important for ten or fifteen minutes, then she said, What is it you want help with? I asked her to explain what it was about my behavior that caused her to call me wretched. She laughed, but then she saw that I was serious and she stopped laughing. She said, I shouldn't have broken down like I did that night, the crying was just the drink, and probably exhaustion. I should have told you like this, soberly, and somewhere like this. She said, It just became completely clear to me, even though I was drunk. The things you always say, the way you passively undermine everything, the way you dislike everything, yourself most of all, women second to yourself. She paused here to look at me, to see if I'd do or say something to undermine the accusation about women, but I did nothing, I stayed still, I had asked her a question, and if I disagreed or argued, she'd leave. She said, Maybe you just hated your wife so much that you decided to hate all women, or maybe you hated women from the day you started to desire them. I don't know. But that night, our last night, I started to realize that I hated you, except I didn't hate you, or I didn't want to hate you, but you had cast this spell over me. I was sitting next to you, and I realized I couldn't stand you, I was going to have a panic attack, but this was precisely what you wanted, this was why you cast the spell, because somehow it was going to vindicate your hatred of me, which you harbored in order to validate your self-hatred. She leaned forward, grabbed a peanut from a bowl on the table between us, then added, And to escape responsibility for it. When she got up to leave, a little while later, after having tried to explain the same thing a few more times, I thanked her. She said, What will you do now? I told her that maybe I ought to just stay away from people for a while, especially women. She said, That's not the answer, that's just as bad, it won't change anything. I said, Anyway, I appreciate your time. Before she left, she said, Can I trust you won't say anything about us to anybody? I barely heard her, but I nodded—Yes, sure, of course, no, I won't say anything. She left the bar and I watched her through the window. She walked away, then turned a corner, and I thought, God, that was a strange and unreal experience. I ordered another drink—this time a double vodka—and I sat back on the comfortable brown couch and observed everybody else interacting. On one level I felt affection for all of them. I was so happy to see everybody there. I felt so relieved to be in that city, sharing that city with them. But in this affection was a curious despondency, a fatigue and hopelessness that, if I turned my mind's eye directly at it, if I stared right at the source of it, came from a realization that I was terrified, that I was trapped in this one life, that I was within time and this body, that there were no other times and no other bodies.

I liked my solitude. It wasn't total. I had plenty of human contact through work, plenty of meetings, plenty of lunches. I did a great many things on my own, in the evenings. I'd always liked classical music, so I got season tickets to the symphony. I went to the library and read, and to bookstores to hear authors talk. I went to hear lectures on just about everything. I went to the opera. I went to gallery openings. I went to the theater. I went to all kinds of festivals. Once in a while, I asked a woman out. I would go out of my way to seek women with whom I was safely incompatible, and over drinks or dinner I'd try to say things that were winning and untrue. I tried to be a little more cheerful without becoming enthusiastic, or dangerous without becoming shadowy, or dark without becoming despondent, or poignant without becoming piteous, or funny without becoming malicious. In many ways this was purely an extension of my everyday work challenges. And the success of these nights was completely measurable, and the relationships were totally disposable. Sometimes, however, the woman and I were not safely incompatible. We actually got along. I found that I liked her or I suspected that she might like me. On these occasions, I didn't try to say winning things, nor did she. We drank our drinks or ate our dinner, then walked around the city, and all the times it went this way, the woman I was with ended up taking me to a bar she used to frequent long ago, in her twenties. We didn't speak too much—our compatibility was not of the all-the-same-things-annoy-us variety, nor of the we-love-all-the-same-books-or-films variety—we drank a little bit more than we normally would, and we watched people try to communicate, express themselves, and seduce each other. In the bar to which she would take me, we often had to stand, and if we wanted to talk, we'd usually have to shout, and often the woman, who did not smoke, borrowed cigarettes off strangers, and we went out to stand in the cold night, away from the noise, while she smoked. Sometimes we separated in time for the last trains home, and other times we stayed out so late we had to get taxis. But we separated, and I wished her well, and she seemed to understand that we would never see each other again. I went home. I listened to music on my headphones—even if I was in a taxi—I stumbled around the sidewalk, I wondered whether or not to urinate in some bushes, and when I walked inside my door I made myself a gigantic pan of scrambled eggs, mixed with everything I had in the fridge. Sauerkraut, goat cheese, jam, barbecue sauce, whatever meat I had, and any vegetable that did not stink and wasn't moldy.

Trish sits down beside me. She stretches her legs out. She yawns. Then she takes out her sunglasses and puts them on, and now we are both wearing sunglasses. I say, What's your dad like?

My dad?

Yeah, your dad.

Why do you ask?

I don't know, I was just asking.

He's all right.

What does he do?

Does it matter?

Is it a secret?

He's a teacher, in high school.

He's not a history teacher, though?

He teaches algebra. And he's the football coach.

He's a disciplinarian?

You could say that.

Do you visit home much?

I go back to the States a lot, I don't go home that often.

She looks down at the bag I have tied up and left beside my feet, and the magazines I've taken out of it. Her sunglasses are extremely black, glossy, and I can see myself in them, and I can see the history exhibit that surrounds us, like Stonehenge. I stand up. It's a history exhibit about women in aviation, and it's in German, English, and French. It begins with Katharine Wright and Baroness Raymonde de Laroche, and it ends with astronauts, test pilots, and corporate leaders in the aviation and aerospace industries. There are two panels devoted entirely to German women aviators. Hanna Reitsch, I read, was a test pilot for the Luftwaffe and a protégée of Hitler. As one of the few women who broke from traditional roles in Nazi Germany, she flew the first helicopter, the piloted version of the V-1 buzz bomb, and the rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163. She was the first person to demonstrate a helicopter to the public. After that there is of course a panel about aviation and the Holocaust, because you cannot have an exhibit in Germany, it seems, without mentioning the Holocaust. It feels right, even though it sometimes feels unnecessary. There is also a panel that seems disconnected from the story of the exhibit, a single panel with a brief and uninformative history of Munich Airport. I decide I want to know more, so I sit down and open the Internet on my phone. I read what I find out loud to Trish. Munich Airport is just over twenty years old, I say. It's the second-busiest airport in Germany, the seventh-busiest airport in Europe, and the twenty-seventh-busiest airport in the world. Over forty million passengers pass through it per year. Its full name is Flughafen München Franz Josef Strauss. Franz Josef Strauss was the youngest-ever German minister for defense, a minister for finance, his party's chairman, and, for his last ten years in public office, the president of Bavaria. Trish gives me a look that says, Are you really going to continue? So I do not. I simply read it silently. The most interesting things about Strauss, it seems, are that he jailed a newspaper editor under false pretenses for more than a hundred days, and was accused of accepting bribes from Lockheed in return for the purchase of nine hundred F-104G Starfighters. Strauss was a pilot himself, and served as the first chairman of the supervisory board of Airbus. Before this airport was built, flights went out of Munich-Riem Airport, an area that now contains a convention center, lots of apartments, and parks, and is called Messestadt Riem, or Convention City Riem. Munich-Riem was home, in 1945, to possibly the greatest-ever collection of German fighter pilots, the Jagdverband 44. The commander was General Adolf Galland, the former General of Fighter Pilots, who had recently been removed from his staff post by Hermann Göring for relentlessly criticizing the operational policies, strategic doctrine, and tactics mandated by the Luftwaffe High Command. It was hoped by Galland's superiors that his return to combat flying in a front-line command would result in his death in action. He was only wounded. Munich-Riem Airport was the site of the Munich Air Disaster, which resulted in the deaths of eight Manchester United soccer players—their plane crashed while trying to take off from a slushy runway. It was also the site of the Munich Massacre of 1972. In 1982, there was a bomb attack on passengers headed to Israel. The closest concentration camp to Munich was Dachau. The new airport—the one through which we are passing—is less than twenty minutes away from Dachau. Himmler called Dachau the first concentration camp for political prisoners. Strangely, not far from our first hotel in Berlin, there was a park with a water tower in it, and a plaque outside it claimed that it was the site of the first concentration camp for political prisoners. Of course, they would have been on entirely different scales. On my phone, I enlarged pictures of bodies in trucks, dead bodies being placed into crematoria. Pictures of children on their way to death. Images of fat and smiling guards on short vacations in the woods nearby. Late in the afternoon of 29 April 1945, the camp at Dachau was surrendered to the US Army. I read the following passage, written by Brigadier General Henning Linden, which describes the surrender—As we moved down along the west side of the concentration camp and approached the southwest corner, three people approached down the road under a flag of truce. We met these people about seventy-five yards north of the southwest entrance to the camp. These three people were a Swiss Red Cross representative and two SS troopers who said they were the camp commander and assistant camp commander and that they had come into the camp on the night of the twenty-eighth to take over from the regular camp personnel for the purpose of turning the camp over to the advancing Americans. The Swiss Red Cross representative acted as interpreter and stated that there were about a hundred SS guards in the camp who had their arms stacked except for the people in the tower. He said he had given instructions that there would be no shots fired and it would take about fifty men to relieve the guards, as there were forty-two thousand half-crazed prisoners of war in the camp, many of them typhus infected. He asked if I were an officer of the American Army, to which I replied, Yes, I am Assistant Division Commander of the 42nd Division and will accept the surrender of the camp in the name of the Rainbow Division for the American Army.