by Greg Baxter
Well, he said, you never asked.
Bullshit, I said. I’m not supposed to have to ask.
He tried to get the waitress’s attention. I wasn’t sure if he had or not, because I was staring at him, waiting for an answer. He waited for a moment, looking at his hands in his lap. Then he said, Mother had a wealthy friend in America, in California. A friend from school had moved there after the war to marry an American soldier, and he was wealthy, he sent money to my mother and two other women to come to California. The others never went. I don’t know what happened to them. I convinced Mother to go. She was very frail and depressed. She was so hopeless that at times it seemed that she would have preferred if I’d taken the money and gone alone. She also hated the idea of leaving Germany, leaving her own mother, heading into the unknown without a husband, even one as brutal as my father, and there were many times she nearly gave up, she often sat on some steps or the side of a road and wouldn’t speak. The journey involved many grueling hours together. There were days I had to shout at her. I struck her once and she struck me back, she beat me severely. So this is probably why we never told you about it.
The waitress came by with the check and he paid, stood, and suggested we get back on the road. He’d put both of us in a gloomy mood. But it was such a nice day that once we got back in the car and found ourselves driving up the high winding roads out of the Ruhr valley, in blazing and redemptive sunshine, we forgot about it all, we forgot about the hardship he and his mother had faced, and we forgot all about the people whose destinies had come through the crucible of that hardship, and my father said, As you may or may not know, St. Vith’s liberation is one of the most famous of all of World War Two, in part because of the prayer General Patton had drawn up, in which he asked the Lord for clear skies to bomb the Germans. Then my father spoke a little bit about the place, and about the fighting there. The word liberation called to mind, for me, girls in skirts and scarves throwing tulips at tanks and jeeps, even though I knew, from my father, that the town had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, so there had been no girls to wear skirts and scarves, nor a single, solitary tulip. I expected several monuments to the Allied soldiers who had died, as well as tasteless living memorials like a souvenir shop with tanks that shoot sparks, and a bar called Uncle Sam’s, where the photographs of all the Americans who had come to visit since were hung on walls, and where every night at closing they played Springsteen. We did find small memorials to those who fought and died in and around St. Vith, and they were tasteful if incongruous with the complete lack of spirituality—lack of ghostliness is perhaps a better way to put it—one felt in St. Vith. But there were no American bars and no souvenir shops. On the way to St. Vith, we had come through Malmedy. Malmedy is set inside the mountains, and the center of the town is full of narrow and winding streets that rise and fall sharply. It is charming, and one can easily imagine the fighting that must have taken place there, building by building, nightmarish, bloody. St. Vith was nothing like Malmedy. St. Vith was unsightly and sterile. It had the character of a satellite suburb, a lot like Kesternich, in fact, or the shopping complex outside Kesternich. My father relished the ordinariness of the place. He was glad it was an anticlimax. The town stretched pointlessly along the artery roads in and out, the way American towns and cities do, for miles and miles. Perhaps it had been more like Malmedy before the war. I never saw any pictures, but a woman working in the tourist office there assured us that the prewar St. Vith looked nothing like the present version. We asked for information about the war, about what the place might have looked like, what it might have been like to fight here, and she said there wasn’t any at the tourist office. It was mostly information on beer, wine, food, hiking, wellness, restaurants, and shopping. She told us to go meet a local historian. His name was Klaus Klauser. She gave us a map with some information, and she marked Klauser’s museum on it. On top of the map, in four languages, it read, St. Vith is worth a trip! The woman spoke German. Everyone in the area spoke German, even though we were in Belgium, and nobody seemed to speak English particularly well. The Museum of History in St. Vith—where Klauser worked, and where he acted as head of the local historical society—had a library of about ten thousand books and something like fifty thousand documents, records, and reports, the woman said. And the current exhibition, she said, was about life under the Nazi occupation of St. Vith. If there was ever going to be a place and time for my father to confirm his father’s place of death, it was that day. The woman told us that Klauser would no doubt love to talk for hours on the subject. He was such a lovely man, such a lovely, lovely man. She became almost watery-eyed, thinking of his loveliness. I said, We’ll go, definitely, and we’ll say hello from you. My father wasn’t sure. Local historians, he said, there’s something creepy about them. Something very creepy. And he was right. We walked to the museum. It was down a hill, past the church, through a vast parking lot, and in a big green field. It was in the old railway station. The walk took five minutes, and my father walked the whole way with his hands in his pockets. Bad idea, he kept saying, this is a bad idea.
I wonder if we looked official and menacing, like inspectors out of Kafka, because the woman at the museum’s front desk almost hyperventilated when I told her we were there to see Klaus Klauser. She didn’t even ask our names. She just turned red, started sweating, and ran to a nearby door and knocked on it. Her reaction was so strange that as she was running from us, I looked at my father and said, That was weird. He shrugged and said, Creepy, creepy places, creepy people. The desk attendant disappeared behind the door. A few seconds later, a team of men appeared. My father sighed. He even rubbed his temples. Herr Klauser? I asked. The man in the middle, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and with clipped-short brown-gray hair, nodded. I told Klauser that the woman at the tourist office had sent us. I apologized for having to speak English, but then I spoke German. I attempted to make a joke about how much the woman there seemed to like him, and either my German made a mess of it, or he, and his entourage, were not amused. If it had just been Klauser, by himself, in an office, my father and I might have sat, relaxed, and simply started talking. But the way we’d been surrounded in this tiny museum, a museum with no visitors, just local historians and administrative staff, created the tense atmosphere of a standoff. They demanded, presumably, to know what it was we wanted, why we had come unannounced, and how it was that we knew to ask for Klauser. Our explanation about the woman at the tourist office, for whatever reason, had been collectively rejected. It was sort of dizzying. The only answer I could give them that was mostly true was that we had come for no reason, we were just passing through, we were just looking for a chat, possibly a coffee or a beer. In my mind, local historians were supposed to be the kind of people who could be relied upon to drop whatever they were doing and go have a beer with visitors. I don’t think my father wanted to know about his father. And I didn’t feel I had the right to ask on his behalf, nor did I want to say, in front of everybody, that my father lost his father, a Nazi officer, most likely, in the battle for this town, especially at a time when the wounds of occupation had been opened by the exhibition. I had no answer for him, so I said, Well, I’m writing a book about the area, a travel book, nothing serious, and I wondered if you could tell me a bit about the fighting here. The men around Klauser dispersed, mumbling. Klauser seemed to be busy. There wasn’t going to be a relaxed chat. My father said, Let’s get out of here. But Klauser said, I may have something for you. He walked us through the door to the library, which doubled as the museum office. There was a large rectangular table where the men around Klauser had sat back down. Behind the table were several dozen shelves, going back a long way, full of books. Klauser disappeared in the shelves for a minute, and we stood over the men at the table, who glowered at us. Then Klauser returned with two huge books. This is all we have in English, he said. Each was a foot tall, or more, and a couple thousand pages long, in tiny type, though with lots of pictures. Have a seat, he said. Take
as long as you like. I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t want to do any actual work, that even if I were here for important research, I’d have preferred him to boil it down for me, as though I was a general or a CEO who doesn’t have time for details. My father sat down because he needed some rest, but then he opened his volume and pretended to look at it. Klauser suggested to everyone else in the room that they get back to the budget meeting they were having. They did. A woman came up to us and said, in perfect English, If you’d like anything copied, please let me know. My father asked, Is there a good place to get pizza around here? The woman started to answer him, but Klauser put his finger to his lips and made the following noise—shhhhhhhhhhhh. My father leaned back. He was acting like a bold child in school. He started making drop drop drop noises by flicking his finger against his cheek. He picked up a pencil and tried to balance it, upright, on the tip of his finger. It kept falling on the table. He was ignored. I flipped through my book, politely. I waited exactly five minutes. Then I asked the woman to copy three pages of the book for me. This turned out to be an ordeal, an ink cartridge had to be replaced, and Klauser had to halt the meeting again to open the supplies cabinet. He was furious with the woman. She was mortified and apologetic to us, and she shouted back at Klauser. As we left, I thanked the men for letting us interrupt their meeting. They smiled and said it was their pleasure, and they hoped we’d found some useful information for the book! Send us all copies! they said. Klauser stood up and shook my hand heartily, as though we had gone for that beer. He had a brochure with him, and he gave it to me. He said, This museum might be more suited to you—the Musée National d’Histoire Militaire, or the National Military History Museum, in Diekirch, Luxembourg. My father walked out of the room. I said, Herr Klauser, my father is also a historian. Or he was.
Yes? Do I know him?
Probably not, I said. I mentioned my father’s name, and Klauser said, I’m afraid it isn’t familiar to me.
His father may have died here, I said.
He glared at me sharply. I’d antagonized him. Perhaps he thought I would ask him to do some work for me. He said, finally, Many people died here.
My father didn’t have the energy to walk back up the steep hill, so he sat on a swing in an empty playground while I retrieved the car. When I picked him up, he said, It’s funny, that guy’s whole career is this little museum, and the local history of this town and surroundings, which wouldn’t even be on the map but for the war, and two people come in and ask him to talk about the one subject he ought to have considerable expertise in—the war—and he has a budget meeting. That’s your local historian in a nutshell, he said. Where to now? I asked. Got me, he said.
What about this museum in Diekirch?
What about it?
They’ve re-created battle scenes in dioramas, look.
I gave the brochure to my father and he said, Oh dear, that looks awful.
And it was. But it wasn’t awful in the way we—or at least I—expected it to be, which was like the basement of a crazed old man who believes he is the veteran of many wars in many centuries, and who wears a helmet and a belt full of live grenades to bed. It was a little like a crazed basement—because it was a private collection before it was a museum—but the exhibits were vast, orderly, and exhaustive. It generated sorrow in me, the way that one pathetic, creepy, artificial diorama after another finally, by sheer repetition, attained a grotesque, or inverted, lifelikeness. I started on the ground floor, and I had no idea how colossal it would be. I was standing in front of a diorama—all were on the scale of one to one—that depicted a scene of German soldiers in a bunker. Two soldiers were working on a radio. One was making coffee. From down a stone-walled spiral staircase beside the diorama, a group of people was coming, speaking English. It was a tour. The tour guide was American. The people in the group were English, a family. The guide, who turned out to be one of the founders, was telling them about the history of the museum. He and two other collectors had joined their collections to create the largest collection of Second World War memorabilia in existence. It’s fascinating, said the English man, earnestly. All we needed, said the founder, was the space, and the Luxembourg government was very keen to give us this one, we love it. I butted in on their conversation. I said, It’s a terrific space. They gave me uncertain looks and moved on. It was my good luck that they came down that staircase, because when I first saw it, I assumed it was for staff only. I hadn’t realized the museum was on multiple levels. It was a strange assumption, seeing as the structure, from the outside, was so obviously large, but I guess I felt that nobody could possibly fill up a structure that size with so many of the same uniforms, weapons, and vehicles. But it was on six levels, two below the ground floor and three above it. And each level was a sprawling series of twists and turns, big rooms and small rooms, scenes of daytime and nighttime, indoors and outdoors, in battle and at rest. Except for the ground floor, the rest of the museum was dimly lit, and there were no windows, which gave you the impression that you shouldn’t be there, that the place was closed. The brochure stated that the dioramas were meant to illustrate the technical and logistic evolutions within the armed forces of the belligerent parties, which I assumed was a bad translation of French, or Luxembourgish, or perhaps just bad English written by a Luxembourger. Furthermore, it stated, the museum intends to maintain high respect and gratitude on a national level for all the soldiers who died for the liberation of Luxembourg, first of all on the American side. Furthermore, as a place of gathering for Allied and German veterans, the museum conceives itself also as a provider and mediator of the reconciliation by its commitment on the European and world stage. The museum is now offering workshops for children, it is a center of education. At the entrance, on a tall standing display, there was a blown-up version of an official letter, in Luxembourgish, with English, French, and German translations running down a column beside the letter, declaring that the Luxembourgish authorities have decreed that this museum serves a public purpose. These words—respect, gratitude, reconciliation, public, education—were exactly what the place was missing. In their place was the superficial thrill of fake engagement, fake learning. In one room there was a sniper on a high telephone pole. Obviously it wasn’t the entire telephone pole. Just the top third or so. I ran into my father in that room. We had separated upon entering, as you do in museums. I found him looking up at the sniper. Hey, I said. Hey, he said. What’s that? I said. A sniper, he said. I looked up. I could not see anything, just a bunch of metal and leaves. And then I saw him. Oh, wow, he’s well hidden, I said. My father said, Do you have the keys, I think I may go for a rest. It’s a very strange museum, isn’t it? I said. It sure is, he said, and I think I’ve had enough.
But we were only on the ground level. He left and I stayed. I found a huge room with a diorama of US soldiers marching behind some jeeps in snow. The walls were black, the light was way down, except for a diffuse, artificial moonlight that made the white coats of the soldiers glow. They were up to their knees in snow. They leaned forward, as though marching into a gale. And all around this massive scene in the middle of the room were smaller dioramas along the walls. One of them seemed to re-create the themes of a manger scene. Another was of men trying to get an armored personnel carrier unstuck from some muddy and snowy terrain. There were men cramped inside the APC, and there were men outside the APC, an officer and some enlisted men, trying to figure out a solution. Every soldier wore an expression. An artist had given them faces. Faces that expressed what it might be like to march in heavy snow with cold feet, or to be thirsty, or to need to go to the bathroom, or feel homesick, or attempt to solve a problem, or be afraid, or feel courageous. Except that each expression was slightly off, so that the man cooking himself some beans in a manger needed to go to the bathroom, and the man trying to solve the problem of the stuck tire was afraid. This made every scene—which was otherwise at a level of detail that was staggering—just incoherent enough to be ghoulish. That was on
the second level, and I thought that snow scene might have been the centerpiece—it was on the cover of the brochure—but then I found another dozen scenes just as grand. I went all the way up to the top and found a scene of soldiers firing howitzers and antiaircraft guns. On my way down, I found many rooms I hadn’t seen on the way up. When I got back down to the ground level—having not yet explored the two levels below—I found a new corridor that took me to a room the size of an aircraft hangar. In it was everything they could not fit into the rest of the museum. It was a little bit like that moment, in science-fiction films, when our hero stumbles through a doorway to discover the scale of the evil alien enterprise, the space where they keep the million or ten million human bodies, et cetera. There were howitzers, tanks, APCs, cargo trucks, jeeps, fire engines, cars, airplanes, bombs, shells, and other ordnance, gas cans, shovels, mortars, helmets, flamethrowers, and more, all crammed together in a space that could have housed a couple of commercial airliners. But there were no dioramas. I left. I was a little embarrassed for having been so enthralled by everything, and when I knocked on the glass of the passenger window to wake my father, a few hours after he had departed, now in the darkness of night—the museum had actually closed—he asked me where I’d been, and I lied and told him I’d gone for a walk around Diekirch. Did you find anything good in that enormity? asked my father, as I got in beside him, started the car, and plugged in the GPS. The evening was warm, and I rolled the windows down to release the smell of stuffiness. I did, actually, I said. There was an interesting letter written by a soldier, they identified a man from a photograph and contacted him, a Roy Lockwood, and he wrote a letter back about his experiences, I said. Roy Lockwood, said my father, slowly, as though he was supposed to know the name. Anyway, I said, it was a good letter. Well, said my father, I’m glad.