Munich Airport
Page 18
I say, I’ll go back to my dad and give him the clothes. Would you mind getting him something to eat? Something light.
Trish agrees and we separate. When I get to the bathroom, I find a man—a janitor—talking aloud to nobody about the mess he’s had to clean up. He’s angry. Germans talk to themselves more than any other people I’ve ever observed. I think they must feel really helpless. I knock on my father’s stall door and he lets me in. The janitor gives me a threatening look. I stare right at him and say, in English, I swear to God I will make you regret that threatening look. He defiantly sticks out his fat neck. I close the door and my father says, Who the hell is that man outside and what has he been talking about? He is sitting quietly on the commode, wrapped up in his shirt and sweater. Where’s Trish? he asks. I say, Gone to get you something light to eat. Ah, he says. Can you feel your arms and legs now? I ask. I think so, he says. Can you get this stuff on or do you need my help? I ask. I’m sure I can do it myself, he says. But before I can walk out the stall door I see that he cannot even lift himself up, he cannot stand. We look at each other. I’ve got to make this flight, he says. You’ll make it, I say. I kneel down and take the socks and boxers out of the bag. I put his socks on first. He can lift his feet, he can point them. They go halfway up his calves. Nice socks, he says, nice and thick. I’ve got the same ones, I say. Next are the boxers. I put his feet through them. I pull them up around his knees. Then I say, Grab hold of my neck, can you hold on? He puts his arms around my neck, clasps his hands together and says, I think so. One, two, three, I say. I lift, and his thighs and buttocks come off the commode, almost like adhesive tape, but his grasp holds, and I slip the boxers up to his waist. Next I put his T-shirt on. Then his shirt. Then his jeans. The jeans take a lot of effort. I have to get behind and under him to lift him. He has to steady himself by putting his hands on the walls, and I pull his jeans up. They are way too big around the waist. They fall right down. I take out the shoes Trish has bought. I open the stall door so I can kneel down. I say, Trish got three different sizes, hopefully one of them fits. He looks at me quizzically. Did she really? he asks. She really did, I say. He starts to cry a little bit. I put the first pair on and he seems to think they fit fine. Then I put the hooded sweatshirt on him. We walk out together. He puts one arm around me. I hold the hand of that arm, and I also hold the loose waist, so his jeans won’t fall down.
Trish is waiting outside for us—she’s got him a sandwich—and we all go together down the steps to the seats where we were before. The act of walking with me seems to give my father strength, or reminds his muscles how to work, and he makes the last few steps all on his own, though I have to pull his pants up. He sits. His arms move fine. He’s steady once again.
I’m going to get you a belt, I say.
And then we better start moving to the gate, says Trish.
I look at the time to calculate how long we have been here—in this airport—already. My thoughts go back to the shuttle-bus driver, the man dreaming of his wife. I won’t be long, I say, I’ll be ten minutes, twenty at the most.
My father’s father died in the Ardennes Offensive—the Battle of the Bulge—either in Malmedy or St. Vith, and after seeing Mainz and driving on into Belgium, he decided to visit both places. We had come down into the Ardennes from Koblenz, after a very late night. That morning we’d had a huge breakfast in our hotel. It was a continental breakfast, but we were the only two people in the restaurant, and the owner was sitting with us, talking about the history of Koblenz, so we ordered some sausages and bacon, some fried potatoes, and a lot of ketchup. And we needed some beer for the hangover. And the owner decided we all needed some schnapps. We asked for recommendations—points of interest in the area. He said there was nothing more interesting than Koblenz. It was a funny thing. All the people we met along the Rhine kept telling us that the only town worth visiting along the Rhine was their own. We asked, for instance, a guest-house owner in Kaub where we should go next, and he said, Kaub is the most interesting, most beautiful, and most historically rich place along the Upper Middle Rhine. The people we met and drank with had said the same thing in Walluf, in Eltville, in Kiedrich, in Bingen, in Sankt Goar. In actual fact, all these towns and villages were beautiful, and the Rhine was beautiful. We—or I—climbed the steps at Lorelei, and looked out across the famous bend in the river, and the dazzling blondness of the day, the mountainous green valley, the blue skies, and I saw the centuries turn back. I saw the migrating German tribes arriving from the Bavarian gap. Here was where they naturally landed, guided by the mountains and the northern borders of the Roman Empire. They simply had nowhere else to go. They would all gather and live here and overcrowd, here at the Rhine. The next day I could barely walk, because my calves were so sore. The steps took almost thirty minutes to climb. I had run for the first five minutes, and by the time I reached the top I was nearly crawling. I met my father at the Lorelei lookout café—he had driven up—for a glass of sparkling wine.
We toured the castles along the Rhine. My father spoke with some of the curators, or, if the curator was not available, the sales assistant in the souvenir shop. I spent a lot of time touching the stone walls, knocking on wooden doors, climbing towers. I spoke German with waiters and waitresses. I spoke German with other tourists who had come to see the Rhineland, though there were not many at this time of year. We took circuitous drives in the river valley hinterlands, twice crossed the river by ferry for no reason but to get the sense of the place from on the water. From time to time I wished that Miriam had died a month or two later, so we could have seen the Rhineland covered in flowers, the hills bright green, and the bars full of people. In Koblenz, the city at the end of the Middle Rhine, we took a gondola over the water where the Rhine and Mosel meet. It was a gigantic gondola that rose high above the water, and shook gently in the breeze, on its way up to the big fortress on a high rock, then we had some dinner, then we went to a heavy-metal nightclub, the only place in town where there seemed to be people. We got a break from the music on the radio, although, after a couple of hours and a few beers, the music there sounded all alike, too.
Our first stop after Koblenz was the small village of Kesternich, where, said my father, a largely unknown but critically important battle was won by the Americans. The drive from Koblenz to Kesternich crosses flat plains, farmland, long, narrow roads with a single line of trees on either side, not unlike Iowa, I would imagine. I was too tired to drive quickly. I had a headache from the night before. The motorway out of Koblenz had been pretty harrowing, full of massive trucks, heavy traffic moving way too fast, and I decided to settle my nerves afterward by traveling at the speed limit, or five to ten kilometers an hour below it. Cars passed us on the road, and honked at me for driving too slowly, but I just waved and thanked them for their concern. I kept stopping to smoke cigarettes. You okay to drive, son? my father kept asking. You bet, I kept saying. My father explained the importance of Kesternich on the way. The Ardennes Offensive was the last major battle of the war before the battle of Berlin, and victory along the western front was still in the balance. Had Germany been victorious, the war might have continued for some time. The Germans wanted Antwerp. The front stretched a hundred miles, and the northern pivot of the front was supposed to be Kesternich and nearby Simmerath. Seven days of fighting, with many dead and captured, produced a major setback for the Germans. The battle here meant they had to move the northern pivot southward substantially, and gave the Americans a lethal advantage. By the time my father finished telling me all about it, I found myself wanting to get out of the car and approach the town on foot. I don’t know what I expected, but after three days of medieval history—of history that is so grown over, and mostly unrecorded in the first place, that it’s invisible—I suppose I was looking forward to a landmark, a memorial to the fallen dead, and a preserved battlefield. But Kesternich is still in Germany, and it is still a defeated town, a very ashamed and quiet place. There was nothing to see. I could sens
e, on its outskirts, how it might have been—houses separated by large plots of land, sheds scattered about, infantry moving under cover of light snow—but once we got in the middle of it, and there wasn’t much to it, my father said, Oh well. Just on the outskirts of town we came to a massive shopping complex. There were several parking lots and several warehouse stores full of hardware, office supplies, cheap groceries, furniture, electronics, appliances, and so on. I couldn’t—and never did—figure out what population these places were supposed to serve. The only place to eat in all of Kesternich, it seemed, was in this shopping complex, specifically in a dreary, orange-and-brown cafeteria inside the hardware store. It hadn’t been too long since we’d had the huge breakfast, but we decided we should eat again, and though we both had something healthy on our minds, we could find nothing healthy, so we had goulash. Our goulash smelled like cigarette smoke. The boy behind the counter smelled like cigarette smoke, and looked as though he’d been fried in the same grease as the unappetizing, cigarette-smelling French fries. The experience turned my father yellow. I said, You’ve gone yellow. He looked at me and said, You’ve gone yellow yourself. I said, I’m going to eat anyway. The road west out of Kesternich dropped steeply and wondrously, first it descended into thick woods, then it plunged into the Ruhr River gorge, down a switchback path on a cliff face that was perilous not just because it was narrow but because it came abruptly at the end of a hundred or so kilometers of open, rolling farmland. It was thick with woods. I cannot remember if the trees were green or if they were brown, but there were many, and it was dark. It was so dark that, for the first time that whole trip, I took my sunglasses off in the daytime. I stopped at a patch of widened shoulder at a bend to stand, breathe, and get used to the fact that the road wasn’t straight anymore. My father said, Hell, I’ll drive. But he didn’t move. And I would not have let him anyway. At the time I was thinking, You know what, we have to take a night off, we have to go to the movies and fall asleep sober. We reached the bottom, where we came upon the town of Monschau, which was such a beautifully isolated and awesomely charming old-fashioned village—surely it was a fake—that we stopped and had a huge lunch in the sunshine. We sat on the terrace by a bridge that ran across the splashing, narrow Ruhr below, across from the church, and my father explained that the village dated back to the eleventh or twelfth century and was where, approximately—just south of our position—the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge had moved, once Kesternich was out of the picture.
Here, in the north, he said, the Germans placed their best fighting force in the west, the 6th Panzer Army. The fighting ranged from here, at the northern shoulder, to Bastogne in the south, and also Luxembourg. The Germans made the biggest inroads through the center, through the town of St. Vith. And, he said, I believe St. Vith was where my father was killed. Or Malmedy.
You never speak about your father, I said.
I didn’t know him well enough to form an opinion, he said.
You must have some recollection.
Some, he said.
Was he intelligent?
He was a doctor.
Was he kind?
To me? I don’t think he was anything to me. He was violent with my mother.
Violent? Physically violent?
With my mother, yes. Consequently, as a sign of respect to her, I never put much effort into him. I looked him up, but when I thought I was getting close to the answer, I halted, I put away everything and gave it no more thought.
It’s hard to believe, I said.
Is it? Why?
I was in no mood to quarrel. My father was obviously having a strange reaction to his proximity to the deathplace of his father, and I found it annoying because it was so predictable. I said, I just meant that it is not easy to think about her getting beat up by her husband. She seemed like a strong woman, a warrior, she got you all the way to the US. I still don’t know how she accomplished that. Neither you nor she ever spoke of it.