Munich Airport (18 page)

The drive back to Berlin from Aachen was long, foggy, and, finally, frozen. The motorway interchanges around Aachen, Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund—everywhere you turn, you find a medium-sized city—were too convoluted for our GPS—it kept telling us, for instance, to exit the motorway right, so we would exit, but we had taken the wrong exit, not far enough right, the exit we wanted was two hundred yards back—so we spent what seemed like hours doing circles. You're driving too fast, said my father, that's why the GPS can't keep up. If we go any slower we'll get hit from behind, I said. About halfway to Berlin, without any explanation, our GPS went blank, and nothing we did could get it working again. After that we made a few daring diversions to avoid traffic jams—through fog, racing to stay with big trucks that seemed to be headed in the direction of Berlin. We'd see traffic gathering, or hear the word
Stau
on the radio, which is the German word for traffic jam, and then a truck or two would exit, and I'd say, Those trucks know something! And my father would say, Follow them! Around midnight or one, within a hundred kilometers of Berlin, all the traffic on the road seemed to vanish. You couldn't see the lines on the road. You hoped that all the cars ahead of you were running rear fog lights, or else you might not see them until you crashed into them. It was quite scary. It was so scary, in fact, that after all the arguing and complaining my father had done until that point, he became utterly silent and still. The fog and foul weather were so bad we couldn't see the big blue motorway signs right above us, and we made a few more wrong turns, which meant we had to exit and find a turnaround, which wasn't always straightforward. These diversions took us down below the motorways, into woods and nearly impenetrable fog, fog that slowed us to a crawl, trying to find the entrance back onto the motorway. We always did. My father kept quiet. Finally we saw a little statue of a bear, the Berlin bear, and then it was just a matter of driving toward the center until we reached a part of town I recognized. We got back to the apartment around two and went straight to bed. All night I slept fitfully and with horrible dreams, suffering sweats and chills, until it was light, and then I got up and closed the curtains—though I still could see a crack of light around the curtains, so I put on my sunglasses, and then I went back to sleep, and I slept dreamlessly, like a drugged sleep—the kind of sleep you cannot move your legs after. It was one in the afternoon when I checked the time. I massaged my thighs. I pointed my toes. My back was stiff. My neck was sore. I drank the pint of water I had remembered to pour myself on the way to bed. I got up, made some coffee, opened up my laptop and started to delete e-mails. The only two e-mails I read were from the aerospace firm. The first was from the director. In it, she expressed her sadness over my loss, and reiterated the offer to take some time. The other e-mail was from Chris, with condolences again, but also with some details about working remotely. She looked forward to getting started whenever I was ready. I must have gained fifteen pounds over the five days we'd been on the road, but it wasn't remarkable in my face, because my beard had filled out. I had changed my appearance. I now wore that black suit jacket everywhere, and it was getting dirtier and more wrinkled by the day, and I wore my shirts unbuttoned quite low—like I'd forgotten what I was doing in the middle of buttoning up my shirt. I think I was trying to look like an old rock star who had come to Germany to recuperate following a nervous breakdown, or to die, or whatever the opposite of a moderately successful marketing consultant was.

It was freezing again, in Berlin. It rained ice. For hours there was just an eerie premonition, an absence of color, then suddenly the sky would fill with wind and a darkening, and ice swarmed out of the darkening, and the wind blew dust and trash and metal and glass at you. The ice swarmed down for ten minutes, twenty at the most, then the calm returned—and the color drained out of the sky. I was listening to a lot of music, twelve-tone music, music of dissonance. I used my father's headphones, which he'd bought on the flight out, and which he didn't use for music—they were, in his mind, only for canceling sound. I stopped trying to look like an old rock star who had gone to Berlin to die or recuperate, I simply became that old rock star. I'm sure the headphones made me look ridiculous, but I felt, at the time, that they didn't make the aged rock star I'd become look ridiculous. I thought they made him look slightly more authentic. I listened to Debussy and Berg and Schoenberg and Webern and Scriabin and Stravinsky and Shostakovich and Boulez and Cage, and the city was like a future city the music had imagined, a city at the end of time, or a city after time. Finally, a city that had not dismissed the dream of this music, but had succumbed to it! I found myself thinking in quotes—quotes about music—I had noted over the years. Adorno had said that new music, by which he meant twelve-tone music, has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world, that all its happiness comes in the perception of misery, all its beauty comes in the rejection of beauty's illusion. Boulez said, We assert for our part that any musician who has not experienced—we do not say understood, but experienced—the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is
USELESS
. Cage said, I am going toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven, ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure, because by doing these things they become transformed, and we become transformed. Stravinsky said, with great despondency, It seems that once the
violent
has been accepted, the
amiable
, in turn, is no longer tolerable. Benjamin said that fascist humanity would experience its own annihilation as the supreme aesthetic pleasure. Schoenberg said, I do not compose principles, I compose music.

Our trip around the Rhineland, and around the Ardennes, and up to Brussels, was marked at its beginning by music—the Philharmonic—and marked toward its end by music, or if music isn't the right word, then the empty trapezoidal box in the glossy white room. In between, in the car, we had listened to a lot of radio. There were pop stations, and there was talk radio we couldn't understand—in German, French, Dutch, and Luxembourgish. There were classical stations, but we kept catching the shows that played film scores, such as the theme from
Superman
, or
Star Wars
, or
The Mission
. No matter what country we were in, the pop stations played the same pop songs, the classical stations played the same film scores, and the talk radio, though we couldn't understand most of the words, talked about the same news, or different news but in the same ways. By the end of the trip, I knew all the pop songs. I knew all the words. So did my father. I was beginning to sing the songs in the shower. There were only, at most, ten of them. And when I went out drinking late—sometimes alone and sometimes with my father—we heard the songs, or songs just like them, in the bars or clubs we found. The funny thing is that I liked them then. I wanted to drive as much as possible, so we could hear them. As soon as I started to get sick of one, I seemed to realize that I liked another much more, and I scanned the radio for it, and played it until I got sick of it. I turned them up at my favorite parts. I drove fast when the music was jubilant, I drove slow when the music was thoughtful.

At the Philharmonic, we had seats to the side of the orchestra, overlooking the violinists and the conductor—we sat to the conductor's right. The double basses were just below us, but out of our sight, unless we leaned forward. There were a few empty seats in the hall, but not many. What a strange and wonderful building it is. It has a pentagon-shaped center, from which rows of seats rise in irregular directions and uneven heights, and the outward flow of this design continues through to the exterior, to the outer structures, which are large, gold, asymmetrical, Expressionist, and which release the acoustic qualities of the interior into the sky. I flipped through the program even though I couldn't read it. Trish sat between me and my father. It occurred to me we probably looked like a couple, Trish and I. So I tried to take on the demeanor of a man with a pretty and successful and voluptuous and interesting wife, who attends the Philharmonic regularly, and sometimes brings his father. The man beside me, an older gentleman with his wife, sat perfectly still. I looked at him as if to say, You see, I am reading the program in German, and I am attending this concert with my lovely wife and my dear father, but the man, who had silver hair, wore a blue suit, and had blue, bloodshot eyes, only glared at me. I gave the program back to Trish, and she closed it and put it on her lap. The man beside me—how can I possibly describe it—I could almost feel his blood slow down, his thoughts begin to vanish. I decided to try to imitate this stillness. But there were too many distractions. Too many people coughing, clearing throats. Too many people flipping through the programs. Too many strange or attractive people to observe. Then the orchestra took their seats, and there was light applause. Everybody stopped reading programs. Everybody stopped whispering. Nobody coughed anymore. For a moment, it was so silent that it sounded as though we were all falling. Then the conductor appeared, and the applause was slightly louder, but still light. The man beside me clapped a few times, but not enthusiastically. First we heard Debussy's
La Mer
. Then Sibelius's Violin Concerto Number One. I knew them both pretty well. They are both distinctive composers. Debussy is the more respected, probably because he was so clearly an innovator, his music so self-evidently revolutionary and so intelligently about
itself
. During his lifetime, Sibelius was dismissed and reviled by progressives. You were not to be taken seriously if you listened to Sibelius. But it turned out, as it tends to turn out, historically, that the reason we cannot forget Sibelius is that he was doing something not only new but outrageously radical, it's just that he was very subtle about it, so nobody noticed. So now he is spoken of among the masters. He has been rehabilitated. Listening to him, and to the Debussy—both pieces are raucous and dynamic—I found myself not only transfixed by the sound of the music but also by the sight of the musicians, and by the hall itself, the audience in its terrifying stillness and restraint. Trish, too, was transfixed—I watched her chest as she breathed through it, and I watched her look upon it. Everything in the room trapped upside down in the dark black drop of her eyes. The lights. The musicians. The embattled, old, wild conductor. A thousand people across from her, quietly breathing. Our applause for both pieces was modest. I made sure I did not begin to clap until after the glaring man beside me clapped, and to stop before he stopped. So I clapped my hands three or four times and put my hands back in my lap. During the intermission, my father asked me, What did you think? Terrific, I said. I happen to know that my father's damn-with-faint-praise word is
terrific
. For example—Bob, the book is just terrific, or, Dick, the steaks were absolutely terrific. Completely, one hundred percent, agree, said my father. In the second half, we heard a short Stravinsky piece I thought was woeful, and was of that permanent flaw in the progressive urge, which is infatuation with the clownish, the preposterously bad, merely because it is change, and it happens to be chic—though I admit, absolutely, that the flaw is necessary, and that the same urge is responsible for Stravinsky's greatness. The final piece was Berg's Lyric Suite. Which I happen to think is one of the great human achievements, one of the strangest and most unforgettable pieces of music ever written. The music after the intermission was not raucous, and a cloud settled over us all, a reminder to return to the calm confusion of our despondency, or be mindful of it. When it was all over, the audience clapped for a long time without heat or passion. It was sustained, but it was not enthusiastic. A good audience always honors fine music by being disappointed in itself. The orchestra cleared and we stood, and I looked at the glaring man again and gave a manly smile. I had clapped so little. I had barely moved. I had not coughed once, nor cleared my throat. He gave me a manly smile back.

On the way home, in a taxi, Trish admitted she much preferred the first half to the second. She didn't like the Stravinsky but she especially didn't like the Berg. My father told her I was a big fan of Berg, and asked me to defend him. It was raining, and there were sounds of thunder. The traffic moved slowly. I turned around and said, Do you go to the Philharmonic a lot?

Trish said, We used to get season tickets, but not this year.

Were they expensive?

Not really, said Trish.

Do you know much, technically, about music?

Nothing.

Then I fear you'd find an explanation of why I like Berg a little exasperating.

I just don't find the music pleasurable.

Berg is a genius, said my father.

I'm sure he is, said Trish, but I cannot like what I don't like.

My father said nothing, but he had lured me in—I wasn't sure if he was interested in what I had to say, or if he wanted to see if I could persuade Trish to reconsider Berg, or if he merely wished to have a little fun at my expense.

First I have to talk about Schoenberg, I said, and twelve-tone music.

Briefly, said my father, and without the technical stuff.

I looked through the rearview mirror to find Trish's eyes looking at mine. I said, Schoenberg found a new direction for music at a time that music was in crisis.

Explain the crisis, said my father.

Well, I only have a general sense of the crisis as Schoenberg perceived it, I am not a musical historian.

We have no interest in disclaimers, said my father, we want to know about the crisis.

The taxi driver drove excruciatingly slowly. He was a young man with a thin beard along his chin line, and he had a diamond earring, and a white zip jacket, and a couple of mobile phones. He seemed like the kind of guy who would drive really fast, and this made the slowness doubly excruciating. He looked at me as if to say, What was the crisis?