Munich Airport (16 page)

Then another excerpt from a letter to his parents by American Private First Class Harold Porter, who wrote—The trip south from Öttingen was pleasant enough. We passed through Donauworth and Aichach and as we entered Dachau, the country, with the cottages, rivers, country estates and Alps in the distance, was almost like a tourist resort. But as we came to the center of the city, we met a train with a wrecked engine—about fifty cars long. Every car was loaded with bodies. There must have been thousands of them—all obviously starved to death. This was a shock of the first order, and the odor can best be imagined. But neither the sight nor the odor were anything when compared with what we were still to see. A friend reached the camp two days before I did and was a guard so as soon as I got there I looked him up and he took me to the crematory. Dead SS troopers were scattered around the grounds, but when we reached the furnace house we came upon a huge stack of corpses piled up like kindling, all nude so that their clothes wouldn't be wasted by the burning. There were furnaces for burning six bodies at once and on each side of them was a room twenty feet square crammed to the ceiling with more bodies—one big stinking rotten mess. Their faces purple, their eyes popping, and with a hideous grin on each one. They were nothing but bones & skin. There were both women and children in the stack in addition to the men. While we were inspecting the place, freed prisoners drove up with wagon loads of corpses removed from the compound proper. Watching the unloading was horrible. The bodies squooshed and gurgled as they hit the pile and the odor could almost be seen.

These are the types of notes I tend to keep when I read. I read something, and I realize that I must write it for myself, word for word. I write down my thoughts, too, and I write down the names of places I've been, or things I've seen, but mostly it's just sentences and passages like these. It is the way my mind works. I have to pick things up and examine them in order to remember them, and writing is a way of doing that, of examining a passage in greater depth, of ensuring that a memory lasts. In London, I have maybe five hundred notebooks full of notes like this. I suspect that if a forensic team came in looking for evidence of madness, they would say my notebooks were that evidence. I am sure my father has more notes, perhaps a thousand times more—certainly I learned the behavior from him—but he probably had a workmanlike relation to them, whereas mine have no purpose. Unless that purpose is to produce evidence of madness for anyone who might come looking.

I put the phone away and say to Trish, I entered the raffle for the race car.

What race car? she says.

You didn't see the race car?

I didn't, she says.

I don't believe you, I say.

I look over her shoulder. I pick myself up from the seat slightly and point. That way, I say. There's an actual race car.

What would anyone do with a race car?

I used to race cars, I tell Trish.

Did you? she asks.

No, not really, I only drove fast when I was a teenager, I raced my friends. But I did sign up to win the race car.

She says, What will you do with a race car in London?

I say, It turns out you don't win the race car, you just win some money.

She seems to think this is a better idea. But I say, They charge you twenty euro to sign up. It's a scam.

Why'd you do it?

I don't know. The wait is making me crazy.

Trish sends a message from her phone, then she starts to check e-mails, or the Internet, or whatever. She's just killing time and giving herself something to do. It doesn't take long before her personal phone buzzes—a response. She checks it. She reads the message quickly, or it is a short message, then puts the phone away. Her expression doesn't change. She's composed, or she is very cool. Then she turns to me. You're staring, she says.

What do you mean by
all right
?

She takes off her sunglasses, but I don't take mine off.

I say, When you say your father is
all right
, what do you mean?

I don't know, she says.

Are you close?

I guess.

I talk to my dad once a month. Is that more or less than you and your dad?

She says, I talk to my dad much less than that. I talk to my mom. If my dad answers, he tells me about the dogs, then he gives the phone to my mom, or if there's nothing to say about the dogs, he gives the phone to my mom. I don't know how to talk to him. I have brothers and they don't know how to talk to him.

I say, Miriam and my dad never talked.

Trish stops doing everything she is doing. She stops thinking all the thoughts she is thinking, about work and her relationship and her flight and everything else, and she gives me her full attention, because, I guess, I have finally mentioned Miriam by name. Perhaps she thinks I'm going to reminisce. Instead, I say something she is not expecting. I say, Have you and your husband split up?

She stays very still. She crosses her legs. She smooths out her pants legs.

I yawn.

Yes, she says. Did your dad tell you?

I say, Yes, he told me. Sorry to hear it.

It's fine.

In my situation, I say, it was definitely for the best.

Are you in contact with your ex?

Me? No, never. Why do you ask?

Your dad has mentioned her a lot.

He spoke about her?

He just mentions her, said it was a shame you split up.

He tells me the same thing. He once said to me, You will never be fulfilled until you understand that you must live your life for others, not for yourself.

He said you had a really beautiful wedding.

I say, He told you my wedding was beautiful?

He did.

Well, he wasn't there.

I stand up. My back is sore. My joints are sore. My jaw is sore. There is acute pain that jabs, now and again, in my gut somewhere, and also in what feels like my bladder. I feel constriction in my chest. I have a headache in my eyes. The muscles in my arms and legs won't stretch. But all of this strangely amounts to a feeling of vigor and adventure, of—to put it simply, and also probably falsely—getting thinner. I ask Trish if she needs anything, like a bottle of water, or a magazine. I'm fine, she says. I say, Do you think your husband will go back to the States or stay in Munich?

It's a very good question, she says.

Is he black or white?

He's white.

What does he do?

He's an engineer.

Was he in the military?

Yes.

Was that the career he left in order to come with you to Berlin?

Yes.

Do you think he wanted children?

No, she says.

Did you?

No.

I say, If I could go back in time, back to my marriage, I would want to have children.

Trish shrugs, so I say, Don't worry, I'm not trying to give you advice.

She says, Do you mean that kids would have kept you together?

No, I say, definitely not.

I walk over to a trash can and dump my tied-up bag. I come back and say, I changed my mind, I wouldn't have wanted to have children.

The truth about my ex is that people liked her, she was successful, punctual, liked to read, liked to go out, liked vacations, knew a couple of languages, was good with numbers, was pretty, stayed fit, and was a good driver. I don't think there was anybody who saw us together who thought she was the luckier half. Everybody said to me, You have married up! But it wasn't that simple. Nobody knew my wife in the way I would get to know her. For the last twelve months we were together, every week seemed like rock bottom, every week something happened that made me think we'd reached the very lowest point two people could reach. About a month before I moved out, we found ourselves in the office of a marriage counselor. Outwardly there were still signs that we cared for each other, so perhaps we thought a counselor could help us build upon that care and find a way to be content together. We cooked for each other, we washed each other's clothes, we ran errands for each other, we picked each other up after the last trains had stopped, and we even wrote kind and tender notes to each other at times, but we couldn't bear physical proximity, and every phone call turned into an argument. I got out of the house whenever I could. I ran miles and miles on Saturday and Sunday mornings. In the afternoons, I bought a paper, went to a pub, watched sports—sports I'd never watch, such as soccer, or snooker, or cricket—and had a few beers. It wasn't always necessary—she was out, too, usually, at brunch, or shopping. I worked late most weeknights. So did she. We had dinner around nine. We forced ourselves to eat at the dinner table, across from one another, but when she spoke, my eyes closed, and when I spoke, she spoke over me. We slept in separate beds. I snored, so we explained the separate beds to each other as a consequence of my snoring.

The counselor worked from her home, in a little white room with wooden flooring and a rug and coffee table. My wife and I sat on a white couch. The counselor sat on a sleek chrome chair that had legs like a spider's. The door between the room and the hallway that was part of the rest of her house was very thin, and the sounds of domesticity—two children, a dog, a nanny, a television, and toys, and laughter—loudly rattled through it, as I suspect the sounds of our conversations, and the conversations with other clients, quietly gargled back. The counselor was very tanned, good-looking, South American, with very thick dark hair, and she wore high heels and white pants. She was quite made up. She wore a tan, loose top that nearly fell off her shoulder, and a thin gold necklace. I don't know what made her think it was okay to dress like that as a marriage counselor. It wasn't that she looked attractive. She had every right to look attractive. The problem was that she looked like she was going somewhere more important, that our problems made us a nuisance to her, and it made her interest in us seem entirely false.

We never went back to the counselor. We returned to our house, did not speak, did not touch. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. I walked around the place. We had high ceilings. Big bay windows. My ex came from a wealthy family. Her father was a banker. Her mother was a doctor. I went out to the shared garden behind our apartment. It was late spring, and cloudless, and in late spring our shared garden got the sunlight all afternoon. It was obvious to me that my wife and I, finally, could not go on. I tried to think of ways to keep all this from my father, to go on pretending everything was fine until he died. I sat out there for an hour, wondering if it were possible. It felt absolutely necessary to conceal the separation from him. Up in the apartment, behind one of the windows, my wife was sitting, or pacing around the bedroom. I went upstairs eventually and started getting some things together to go out. I knocked on the bedroom door and entered after she said, What? She was sitting on the bed. I got a new shirt and a light tan jacket. She asked, indignantly, You're going out? I said, I think it's probably best right now to be apart. She said, So it's over. I said, Yes, I think so. She climbed off the bed and went to the kitchen and got some vodka out of the freezer and poured herself a shot. I followed her. Do you want one? she asked. Sure, I said. We sat down across from each other and had a couple of shots each, without talking. Finally she said she might go stay with a friend for the night. I said, Okay. She said, I think I should. I said, If you think you should, I'm sure you're right. I got up and left her there. I went out and sat at a bar and smiled for a few hours. I talked to nobody. I didn't really drink all that much. At eleven, when the pub closed, I went home and found her asleep on the couch, with the television on. She'd had a lot of vodka. I sat and looked at her in the light of the television. I took the bottle and finished, slowly, the little bit left at the bottom.

A year passed, more than a year, and I hadn't told my father. It was obvious that something had happened. I was sure he knew. He telephoned the apartment a few times and was icily told by my wife that I wasn't there, and he never telephoned again. He asked me how she was doing for about two months and instead of catching him up on her life, I said, Good. So he stopped asking about her. I guessed that he was waiting for me to confess. But I wasn't going to. I had just decided never to mention it. If he died, I wouldn't have to tell him. If he didn't, maybe I would one day bring a new wife and some kids home and when he picked me up from the airport and gave me an astonished gasp, I'd say, Oh, we broke up years and years ago. After more than a year, my plan began to seem achievable. I had hardly spoken to my father that year. I figured we were falling out of contact. It was a shame, but it was better, somehow, than admitting that my marriage hadn't lasted. Then one day I telephoned him and he said he was going to book a flight to Scotland and get us rooms at the lodge. It seemed he would wait no longer. I agreed to meet him, because my bigger fear was that he would come to London, and I booked my flight to Glasgow. I almost missed the flight. I sat at the gate while everyone else boarded. All I could think about was my father sitting on his own at dinner, at the same table where he had honeymooned with my mother, and the same table where he had met me and my wife a few years before. And I couldn't decide whether I pitied him or wanted him to suffer. The airline woman kept looking at me when she spoke into the microphone, Final call, this is the absolute final call, the gate is closing. I got up. If she had given me the slightest amount of grief, I would have turned around and gone home, but she welcomed me and wished me a pleasant journey. When I arrived at the hotel, I checked in and left a message for my father. I unpacked and showered. I was getting dressed when my father knocked on the door. I was going to wear a suit for drinks in the lounge. I had my pants and shirt on. I put my jacket on. I wore no shoes or socks, though. I answered the door and my father was standing in a suit as well. He looked a bit tipsy and he immediately took my arms, studied me up and down, and embraced me. He came inside and saw that I was alone. He sat on a chair near the bed. I said, Guess what, I've started my own business. Good for you, he said, is it going well? I started it up about six months ago, I'm optimistic. We went down together to the lounge and he ordered a scotch with water and I ordered a beer. We had about two hours before dinner. It was late autumn so the sun was already down. It was already night at five p.m. I said, I suspect you had your suspicions about my marriage for a long time. He said nothing. I said, It just got very bad, it ended, it wasn't too painful.