Munich Airport

by Greg Baxter

  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 a
sked 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.

  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.