Munich Airport (11 page)

Outside the airport, the day is clear, at last. The fog has evaporated. The sun is near its apex, but it is still low in the sky, and through the tinted glass of the terminal its light makes blue dusk. The temperature inside the terminal has gone up, or the temperature inside me has gone up. I have to take off my heavy coat. I simply leave it on the floor and make a mental note of where it is, so I can retrieve it later, though I have no intention of retrieving it. It's a coat I've owned for several years. I wore it the last time I saw Miriam. But I cannot wear it any longer. I cannot even carry it. I take off my suit jacket and sweater, too. My shirt is wet from perspiration. There is nowhere to sit or relax, so I kneel. I just kneel down in the middle of a crowd of people. Then I put on my sunglasses. I don't even stop to worry that people will think I look stupid with sunglasses on. The funny thing is that nobody notices, or nobody cares. I bought this pair of sunglasses the day I arrived in Berlin, or the day after. I also started growing a beard the day I arrived in Berlin. It got pretty long. It had some gray in it, which surprised me. I thought about keeping it, growing it for a few months. But I shaved the beard two days ago. The sunglasses are a pair of tortoiseshell Ray-Ban Wayfarers. I have not owned a pair of sunglasses that cost more than ten pounds since I moved to London. If it was sunny, I either squinted or went and got a cheap pair at a gas station or the checkout aisle at a supermarket. The Wayfarers cost me two hundred euro. When I saw my father later that day he said, Are those new? I said, I think these are the best sunglasses I've ever owned. He said—with a little amusement, because I suppose there's nothing quite so ordinary as ordinary Wayfarers—I'm glad I was here to see them. I said, I think they make me look like Huey Lewis. Who? he said. During our trip around the Rhineland, I wore them every day. It seems to me, sometimes, that I wore them to sleep, wore them at breakfast, wore them in the shower.

Right beside me—I am kneeling down, it turns out, at the Copenhagen gate—are a handsome couple, and they are wearing sunglasses. The woman is pretty and has long arms and legs, and I smile at her. But she is not looking at me. She is looking at her phone. The man is large and muscular, though he wears very dainty, white, woven-leather shoes, and shiny white pants. He is shaved bald, probably a little younger than me, and he has a strong chin. He is, or seems to be, checking his fingernails. Admiring his fingernails, or the perfection of his fingers. My, my, he thinks, in whatever language he thinks, what fingers I have, women love these fingers. The woman is tanned and also muscular, fortyish. I have never seen listlessness like her listlessness. She is sending somebody a message. She is not the kind of person who uses her phone for anything other than text messages, or sending photographs—she does not even use it for telephone calls. She has an expensive smartphone, but if somebody ever said, Please check your phone for the weather, or asked how to spell something, she would have to text the question to somebody who would look it up for her. She wears tight, dark-blue jeans and a black top that reveals one shoulder and hangs loosely from the other shoulder, and little black shoes. Her hair is in a ponytail. Her sunglasses are large and green-black, and momentarily she seems to notice that I am observing her. The green-black lenses of her glasses fix upon me for a moment, then release. The man says something to her, perhaps he has finally grown tired of silently admiring his hands and has decided to tell her how much women adore his hands. She looks at him when he speaks, or almost at him, but she makes no expression. And when he is finished speaking, she returns to her phone. On the other end of these texts, I imagine an equally listless woman chronicling an equally unbearable lull in some other place. But this conversation started years ago and will never end, and it has nothing to do with airports or delays. One could be at the Met, listening to
The Magic Flute
, while the other might be sitting in the Musée de l'Orangerie, surrounded by Monet's
Water Lilies
, and they would be writing to each other of the unbearable quality of these scenes, the noises and these images, and these people. They never encountered a plate of food, no matter how ingenious or expensive or tasty, that they smiled at. They never drank a glass of wine that tasted nice. They never saw a landscape worth a photograph. They take photographs of things like fat people, or handbags, and send them to each other. Instinctively they know that personalities are signs of weakness, or symptoms of self-deceit. A man with a personality is a coward. A woman with a personality is insane. Nobody has more personality than a fat, stupid, cowardly man, or a fat, stupid, insane woman. I would like to get a week with a woman like this woman, not to love or be loved, or for conversation, but to be near her in restaurants, to return her plates of food for being imperfect, to return her drinks for being insults. And to lie beside her in hotel beds while she watches television.

I get a text from Trish that asks if I am on my way. I send one back—I am, but it will be a few more minutes. The terminal, because the weather has finally improved, and because flights are starting to depart, has reached the edge of apoplexy. I stand. I put my suit jacket back on. My teeth ache. My head aches. My eyes ache. And all these aches seem distantly related to the problem of what to do with my sweater, and the consequences of leaving it behind and the burden of taking it with me. Will someone notice that I'm leaving coats and sweaters behind, and will this cause a security problem? Will I get the chills and want my sweater back? Will I regret leaving my nice coat, or have I begun to regret it already? I am sinking and my heart starts to palpitate. I throw the sweater partially underneath the seat of the man in the white, woven-leather shoes, and this makes me feel better. Ahead of me, between where I am and the airport plaza, and beyond, presumably where Trish and my father are, are thousands of people. It has the feel of a great, collective departure, the kind you might imagine at a train station, just before the war. I start to move. I stop at a café and ask for a bread roll, no butter, no jam, just some bread, and this causes some confusion until I tell them the bread is for my son, that he won't eat anything but bread. They give it to me in a napkin. I take a bite immediately. Then I walk to a high table by the counter where some people are already sitting and put my elbows on it, lean over, and eat some more, taking tiny bites. The first few bites make me nauseous, but as they settle in my stomach I feel a little improvement. I put the rest of the bread down beside the people I've annoyed by claiming a space in their privacy, and I place a euro on the counter by the cash register, since I can see that the staff are disgusted with me for lying about my son. Lines have formed at the mouth of every gate, and each line stretches for fifty yards or more, and you cannot pass through them, or you can, but you must first explain that your gate is elsewhere, that you are merely passing through. Even then, they give you looks that say, I'm stuck, I can't move, why have you picked me to irritate? You take the inch they give you, and you try to make sure your rolling case knocks their case over, or runs over their toes, or knocks their child over, so that you can give them a look that says, See what you made me do by pretending you could not move? They close the space while you are still in it, you get squeezed out. It is all completely automatic and emotionless. You never look back. Gate after gate, this repeats. It is as though the people who have rushed into position—who will refuse, once boarding begins, to accept that the passengers behind them in the line, who are in rows fifteen through thirty, for instance, have priority—believe that Copenhagen, Budapest, Vienna, Madrid, Kiev, Amman, Helsinki, and Tel Aviv are not hundreds or thousands of miles away but just on the other side of the gates, just down the jetway.

On the departures board, beside our flight, it reads Please Wait.

When I flew home for my mother's funeral, my father picked me up from the airport. I had hoped Miriam would come along, but it was just my father. He was standing at arrivals in a white polo shirt and tan shorts, and sockless in a pair of dark-brown penny loafers. He looked like a man who had spent a day grieving on his own, privately, variously doing things around the house, suddenly weeping into his hands, then continuing, looking out the window, thinking he had better mow the lawn, then sitting on the couch for a long time holding something that reminded him of her, then getting up and going through the mail, and so on. When I saw Miriam, we hugged. I asked her how she was and she said, I'm good, how are you? I admitted I was a bit shocked. I had been home just a few days before. My mother's condition had gotten very bad, and I'd come home with the expectation that she would be dead within days. I sat beside her in the hospice. I watched the television in her room. I read books beside her. I held her hand. Miriam was there as well. My mother was mostly unconscious or, when conscious, very groggy, so we couldn't really converse with her. She was very pale and drawn, pink around the eyes and nostrils. If Miriam's starvation had been an attempt to re-create my mother's death—which was improbable, but was at least more plausible than recreating, for my father's sake, the death of Charlemagne—then she had failed, because my mother, though drawn and sickly, did not look horrifying, as Miriam had looked in the morgue. While we sat around her bed, we told her she looked well. She'd received many cards, and we read them aloud to her. Miriam told her that she planned to skip her final year of college and leave home, go traveling, and my mother, who didn't seem alert enough to hear her—and to the astonishment of her doctors—made a recovery. A day later, we were all in her room, speaking with her, she was smiling and her eyes were clear. I offered to quit my job and come home to be with her, but my mother refused to let me. She said, For God's sake don't come back here, you live in London now. So I returned to London, went back to work, and that very day, the Monday I walked back into the office, she died. I got a call from my father. He was calm but obviously very tired. I asked if she had died peacefully. He said, Well, she died. I walked into my boss's office, sat down in the chair across from his desk and said, without any sadness but also without levity, You're not going to believe this. This was back in the days when airlines gave real hardship discounts for deaths in the immediate family, and they put me on a plane for almost nothing.

My mother's funeral was very large. Hundreds of people came. Mostly women whom my mother knew through her charity, or who were connected to the charity, or had benefited from her charity. The women my mother knew had arranged the house as a giant funeral hall, and Miriam and I sat on chairs against the wall. I don't think we were trying to look pitiful, but we probably looked pitiful. Miriam was talking about moving to Berlin. She wore her hair very short. A lot of people stood over us and counseled us. A lot of people put their hands on us. We looked up and smiled at them. I suspect the house will be arranged, for Miriam's funeral, in a similar fashion—arranged by the same women who arranged the house for my mother's funeral—and I will sit down as I sat then, and be counseled, but now I am probably too unfamiliar for anyone to touch, or people will refuse to touch me because I look like bad luck.

After my mother's funeral, in the evening, our father went for a swim and we watched him from the poolside, sitting in white plastic chairs. It was warm and muggy. Everyone had gone. The last people who left had cleaned everything, arranged the house back the way it was, and promised to return the next day to clean it some more. My father told them there wasn't any way to make the place cleaner, so it wasn't necessary. Everything had been returned to its place with a spooky exactitude, and I went around the house wishing they had left it as a funeral parlor, or a mess, because the house needed to be changed, and we needed to be the ones who changed it. But there was nothing to do, nothing at all, so my father went swimming. He'd been struggling with his big book, the book for which his publisher had already waited years, and he'd abandoned it, he said, because on top of all his other duties he was tending to my mother, and now he felt the book was pointless. The day of my mother's funeral had been a strange one for my father, because all day my mother's friends and colleagues had been forgiving him. Not explicitly, but by their affection and kindness they forgave all of his sins—his self-deceit, his tyranny, his absence, his selfishness, his mediocrity. He was cleansed, and he swam around the pool that night, in front of me and Miriam, with a pacific look on his face, and a pacific way of speaking to us, that you often associate with people who have found a religion. The water was lit by a blue-white light in the deep end. As my father moved and swam around in it, the waves he made contained tiny lines of light along their apexes, and, underneath him, refracted light moved in large white tectonic plates along the white bottom of the pool. We watched him swim for an hour. He did almost all the talking, which was strange, because he was never very talkative with us. Our mother had been the talker, but from this moment onward he would accept the role in her absence. We let him talk and talk and talk, and we couldn't leave, I think, until we witnessed him talk his way out of the reassurances he'd received that our mother had been happy, that she had accepted his absences because it was part and parcel of his eminence, the eminence they assured him was real, and that even though things had not gone as he'd planned, he had two fine children who had what he had never had, a community, a home, a place, belonging, and so on. We had to be certain he'd rejected their forgiveness, we had to wait until he felt replenished with shame and truth. My father once wrote, in a review of a book about the Holocaust, that shame, not curiosity, is what drives the historian. The historian of tragic events, especially, he wrote, must cultivate guilt, must find infinite ways to implicate himself in every injustice and atrocity that has ever transpired, and be unworthy of all the heroism and courage that has resisted injustice. And then he must strap his shame down, paralyze it, let it speak but not let it gesticulate. He stated, in his review, that the author of the book had cultivated guilt, felt unworthy of heroism, and was on his way to an illuminating and important history book, but he forgot to strap his shame down, and he had therefore produced a book of gesticulations, a rather
stylish
book. The result was arrogance—sentimentality, flourish, lyricism, hyperbole, opinion—all symptoms of arrogance. In histories of suffering, style is unconscionable. The review was published in the
New York Review of Books
, and I thought it was a good piece—I called and told him so, and I was so proud to see him being so tough and high-minded—and I have, in ways that I have yet to fully unravel or even begin to articulate, tried to translate that way of thinking into my own work. Our house was dark. The clouds had soft light in them, a reflection of the town and some refineries. After an hour, Miriam mentioned that she'd felt a little sickened by the way some of mother's friends kept going on about Christ, about her salvation, about her eternal peace, and about what a strong faith she had. I know, I said, it was hard to take. Miriam said, Mom would have found it sickening, too. My father said, Your mother would not have wanted her friends to say those things to you, and so far as I know, none of them had any idea about the nature of her faith, because she was so private about it, but you should know something, something that will surprise you. He stopped talking for a moment and made little splashes with his cupped hands. We waited and he decided to tell us. He said, Your mother found Christ before she died. I said, That can't be true. He said, It is true, it's the truth. Miriam said, She probably just told you that. I said, She was weakened and afraid. My father said, No, not because she was afraid—and here he sank down, half-reclined upon the water's buoyancy, so that his face was looking upward, up at the clouds, and his head was submerged so that the waterline covered his ears, so that his voice, to him, would be slightly disembodied by the weight of the water—but because Christ appeared to her in a vision and He spoke. My father stood up slightly. He seemed not to believe he had said what he said. His head and shoulders were out of the water. What did He say? I asked. My father said, You know, just the typical religious stuff, I guess, she actually never told me, she just said that He was suffering, and He took her pain away. My father looked up, saw our puzzled disappointment, and lowered his head, and we knew for sure that he didn't feel forgiven anymore.