Munich Airport

by Greg Baxter

  Hey hey, I said.

  Hey hey, he said.

  He threw me the key and said, You drive.

  We’re going now?

  Why not?

  Well, how do we get out of Berlin?

  I got a GPS, he said.

  But I’m still drunk from last night.

  We’re fully insured, he said, crash as often as you like.

  But we just got the new apartment.

  It’ll be here when we get back.

  We sat inside. The seats were soft. It had automatic transmission. The steering wheel was thick and soft. There was great leg space. It had cruise control. The dash beamed bright white and red. I pushed my seat back, lowered it, reclined it a bit—all electric—adjusted the mirrors, and turned on the radio. The car was very smooth. Once we got on the autobahn, it pulled a hundred and seventy kilometers an hour without any trouble, without much sound. It just flew, and you barely felt the road. Yes, every once in a while, an S-Class went by us, reminding everybody on the road who the king was, but for the most part we zoomed by everybody without being overly conscious of our speed. We stopped at gas stations for snacks, cheeseburgers, slices of pizza, buns, and so my father could stretch his legs. Our journey took us through the Rhineland, then through the Ardennes, then to Brussels. After Brussels, we went to Aachen. The only part of the trip my father let me know about beforehand was Aachen—because on that first stretch my father talked a lot about Charlemagne. Our trip lasted five days. Five days of warmth and sunshine. But then winter returned, and we arrived back in Berlin in a sleet storm, in a fog that swirled as cars drove through it, in the middle of the night, stinking of all that time in a hot car together, and stinking of the long day’s journey.

  I’d never experienced anything quite like the traffic in Brussels. It seems to be a city absolutely strangled by stupid, overcrowded intersections. And I think our visit coincided with a couple of days of strikes or protests. Every driver there was deranged and homicidal. We waited at a roundabout for thirty minutes, then again, then again, and finally inched along the motorway for an hour before we got to something resembling normal heavy traffic, with low visibility, rain, and fog. When we arrived in Aachen, I was in desperate need of a shower. I had sweated through my shirt and pullover. My pants were uncomfortably sticky. But we thought we had to hurry. We thought we had five minutes. We hurried from our parking spot to the cathedral. And then, to our embarrassment, we couldn’t locate the entrance for a few minutes, until we realized that it was obvious. The entrance was in the West Front, like, said the brochure, a great bulwark intended to protect God’s house against the outer darkness, at the foot of the tower, leading to the central core. Then through to the Octagon, under the magnificent and low-hanging chandelier, Barbarossa’s chandelier, which was built three centuries after Charlemagne’s death. My father sat in a pew under the chandelier to catch his breath. The interior was dark, and in my memory it was green. There was candlelight. Charlemagne’s shrine was way past the altar, behind rope. I said, Is that it? That’s it, he said. It was golden and unexpectedly small. The shrine was elevated, and it rested inside a very modest beam of light that didn’t seem to come from anywhere, so that it gleamed in the same way Christ is gleaming in Piero’s Flagellation. I felt the need to have my father stand beside it. To look into the color and ornament of the tomb that contained Charlemagne’s bones. But he was in no mood to stand and walk around. Every few seconds, he coughed. The coughing caused him intense pain that made him double over. Saliva hung from his lips. His hands were trembling. He wiped his mouth and sat up and looked at me. His eyes were blank. His skin was green. He seemed emaciated. Then he started coughing again, and leaned forward, into his own lap. I knew it was the hurrying that had exhausted him, but another part of me wondered if the place itself did not contain a force capable of destroying him, cell by cell, breaking him apart, scattering him in the air. There were three small groups in the room with us. Each group was guided by its own amateur know-it-all, one of those experts on a thousand unimportant things. The people following these know-it-alls seemed variously intrigued or bored to death. I went around looking at a few things on the walls, waiting for my father to stop coughing. A few minutes later, a new group entered the room, this time led by a younger man—obviously a member of staff. He spoke about the chandelier for a while, with practiced stresses, pauses, and gestures, then the statue of Mary, then about the mosaics of the dome. I followed them at a distance. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but he was pointing out important things, so that when I went to the souvenir shop and bought a book in English, I would know which parts were worthy of attention. When the new group was led behind the rope to Charlemagne’s shrine, I asked if my father and I could come along. He said it was a private tour, and anyway it was in German. I said we had come a long, long way, and we didn’t need to hear him speak, we only needed to get behind the rope, my father was a historian and knew quite a lot about Charlemagne. The man peered over at my father, who was still sitting, but the coughing had subsided. I’m sorry, said the man, but if you want to view the shrine, you will have to return next week. I told him my father’s name, not because I thought the man would recognize it, but because I thought saying his name would make the man think he ought to recognize it. The man politely admitted the name meant nothing to him. He looked at his watch. The people on the tour glared at me nastily, so I begged their pardon and returned to my father. No luck, I said. Hmm, he said. He stood and walked to the altar, turned around and looked up, to the upper level, where Charlemagne’s throne sat, from which he would have observed services. Opposite the throne, at eye level with the throne, was Christ on the cross, staring back at Charlemagne, like a man and his wife. The private tour ended, and the other groups left, and we were alone. I cannot say now why we didn’t simply step over the rope. It was just a little bit of low rope. It was just, I think, a suggestion to stay back.

  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 a
nd 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?