Munich Airport (12 page)

When he got out of the pool, dried himself off, and went to bed, Miriam and I went for a drive to my mother's family's camp, a big cabin about an hour north of the house, on a river that everybody calls a lake, because it is so wide. We took my father's truck and arrived around midnight. We went inside and got a bottle of something from the drinks cabinet and went out to the boat that was floating in the dock and drank so much that neither of us could drive back, so we stayed out all night. I felt jetlagged and very drunk. The night was full of mosquitoes, the air smelled of rotten fish and creosote, and I thought it was a shame my sister wasn't beautiful. I wanted a beautiful sister. The water was a little choppy, even behind the break. And the boat made thumping sounds as it rocked from side to side. I was wearing a black suit and Miriam was in a long-sleeve black dress. The seats on the boat made our clothes dusty. I put my arm around Miriam, in an attempt to be brotherly, but I stood up ten seconds later and went inside the house for something else to drink, and to go to the bathroom. I stumbled up the jetty. I went inside and found some warm beers and opened a drawer to get a bottle opener and saw a bunch of half-rusted knives. I brought one knife outside with me, a knife for gutting fish. Miriam was half-asleep when I returned, but the sight of the knife woke her up. I could see she was frightened. I sat down across from her and held the knife to my own throat. I kept it there a long time, and pressed it hard into my skin, just under my jaw at the ear. She waited. I don't remember if, at any time while I held the knife there, I truly examined the possibility of cutting my own throat, but I said something like, I am this close to knowing what awaits us, I am so close to actual proof, can you imagine it? She stopped being frightened and said that if the world were ending in an hour, if everybody knew the end was coming, there wouldn't be a context to place my sincerity. For a moment, I thought it would be interesting to see what she would say about sincerity if I held the knife to her throat, but I threw it in the water instead, drank from my beer, lay back, and said, Yes, it would be strange, all right. Miriam climbed beside me on the cushion and said that she would give me a tearful good-bye anyway, even if the end was coming. We slept. I awoke to something strange and wonderful—I can still hardly believe it. We were moving. We were moving across the lake, the engine was whizzing and the boat was rising and falling. I couldn't understand how I hadn't woken up sooner. There was a bright orange morning light all over the sky, and a solid, warm, humid breeze. I was lying on my back at the front of the boat, looking aft, and Miriam, now only in her underwear, was driving the boat, sitting at the wheel and motoring upstream. There was a great stench of water. The sun was just above the horizon, above the trees that lined the shore in every direction. It was already hot. It was already semi-unbearable. I took my suit off, then my shirt and socks, then my watch. I undressed down to my boxer shorts. Then it felt fine. Miriam stopped the boat and dropped the anchor, and we swam for a little while in the brown and opaque water, water that could have been seven or fifty feet deep. When we climbed back in and sat down to dry ourselves in the sunlight, Miriam said, I dislike everything about this place. I dislike the heat. I dislike the smell. I dislike the food. I dislike the mosquitoes. I dislike the people. I dislike the way people talk. I dislike the way I talk. I dislike what people think. I dislike what they buy. I dislike the way they drive. I dislike what they believe. A few minutes later, I said, Do you think I'd like Berlin? She was lying down with her eyes closed, yawning a lot. I poked her. She said, Don't you like London? I do, I said, but I only want to stay there for a few more years, I don't want to be in London all my life, plus if I lived in Berlin, and you moved there, we'd be in the same city. She yawned and said, That might be nice, yes. Then she dozed off. I got behind the wheel and drove back to the camp. Miriam lay still the whole way, with her eyes closed. I do not know if I stared at her that morning, but now, in my memory, I stare at her. She was slender and a little bit muscular, with a muscular stomach. She was pale. She had small breasts and a slightly protruding breastbone. She had long fingers, bony elbows, and arched feet. She needed to gain weight. Her sleeping body trembled on the cushion while the boat surfed the choppy water, and convulsed when we hit a big wave—the river was starting to fill with other boats, water-skiers, jet skis, pontoon boats, and so on. And in the airport, now, I look up and down the columns of cities, trying to figure out a pattern for the cancellations, and the unintended side effect of this is that I keep imagining myself asking Miriam if I'd like these cities, too. Do you think I'd like Warsaw? Do you think I'd like Bucharest? Do you think I'd like Oslo? Do you think I'd like Prague? Do you think I'd like Abu Dhabi? Do you think I'd like Kiev? Do you think I'd like Paris? Do you think I'd like Barcelona? Do you think I'd like Rome? Do you think I'd like Cairo? Do you think I'd like Athens? Do you think I'd like Lilongwe? Do you think I'd like Moscow? Do you think I'd like Riga? Do you think I'd like Istanbul? Do you think I'd like Dar es Salaam? Do you think I'd like Amsterdam? And the territory of my disappointment grows, like the outer boundaries of an empire on a map.

I docked the boat, we put away our empty bottles, and we drove my father's truck slowly back home, in heat that was abominable, and which I sometimes think I can actually feel in my memory. When we got home, Miriam slept a little more, then spent the afternoon and evening putting all her keepsakes from childhood in boxes and carrying her boxes to the street. My father and I observed this and said nothing. She left the next day. She went to visit a friend in Arizona. I think she lived in Arizona for six months. I don't know where she went after Arizona. Maybe straight to Berlin. Maybe somewhere else first. It would be several years before I saw her again. We let the garbagemen load her stuff into a truck and haul it away. Right up until the moment they did so, I believed that I, or my father and I, would run out to the street and rescue everything. But as soon as they left with the boxes, I immediately started packing my own things in boxes, and eventually I took them out to the street. I stayed there for two more weeks. My father left after three or four days, back to California to catch up on a year's worth of falling behind, or simply to be busy with small, achievable tasks. The grieving I'd planned for never took place. And I was in the house on my own. None of my friends from childhood remained, except those I didn't want to see ever again. The people I might have liked to meet had moved to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, for work. So I went to bars on my own, said nothing to anybody, had a single drink and departed. I jogged. I drove around, aimlessly. I watched a lot of television. Most of those people who left for bigger cities eventually started coming back to raise children, and on subsequent trips home I ran into them and caught up. They had changed. They had become people I didn't have anything to say to. They often asked about Miriam, and though I never said it, I often felt like telling them that Miriam was the only one who had the courage not to come back, not to wonder what life would have been like if she'd stayed. Some of these people have children in high school now, children who drive cars. They returned from New York, from Chicago and Los Angeles, for quality of life, for values—Southern values, values of the suburbs and small towns—big lawns, big houses, interstates, a slower pace, parking lots, large dogs, family, mellifluous accents, polite neighbors, a refuge from variety and risk, and a shared contempt for impiety, for which the great cities were citadels.

My father had decided that cycling in cold or wet weather at my age was proof that I was breaking down, and the way he dealt with this was to say to me, over and over again, Are you crazy? Take the underground! They come every three minutes! But I didn't want to take the underground. I did not want to take any public transportation. I did, at times, watch people go in and out of underground stations. I stood at the top and watched foot traffic. It wasn't that I thought it was especially compelling to watch Berliners, it was how few of them there always were. Even at its most frenetic, Berlin always struck me as quiet, slow, and unmotivated. It seemed half-vaporized. Unless there was construction, I never saw a traffic jam. I never once witnessed a wave of people on their way to, or on their way home from, work. My father said he always got a free seat, or at least a healthy bit of space to stand, in the underground. I asked Trish why this was so. I knew Berlin had high unemployment, but even a city with high unemployment ought to have human congestion at nine a.m. and five p.m., if it has four or five million inhabitants. We were sitting in a café near our hotel when I asked this, coincidentally it was about nine in the morning and the streets were empty, except for a few fathers taking children to kindergarten on bicycles, heavily bundled up, skidding around the corner of a slippery and cold street. Maybe, now and again, someone rode by with a satchel that suggested a day of work lay ahead of them. The question made Trish unhappy. She hadn't spoken much about her husband. I suppose I had begun to think that she didn't much care for him, or that she didn't mind that he had gone. Her husband hated Berlin, she said. He really hated it. He hadn't ever been unemployed, she said, and for two years here he couldn't find work. He'd quit his career to come with her. There was no other way to stay together. And there simply were no jobs for him in Berlin. He took German lessons, but they were expensive, and after a while he refused to spend money if he was not making any, even though Trish got a spousal allowance and money wasn't a problem, and even though the State Department contributed to the costs of lessons for spouses. He never met anybody and didn't go out, and slowly he started going a little crazy. We would, later that day, or perhaps it was the next day, go visit Trish's place. It was up on a hill, on the top floor of a renovated old building—a converted and completely modernized attic that was large and airy—and it had a glass wall on the south side, so you could see all of the city. It felt vast. It had sloped white ceilings, full of skylights. The place was full of light. And it was mostly empty. It had three bedrooms, so the husband had an office. My father and Trish went to the kitchen, where she showed him her small wine collection. I went inside the husband's office. Beside his desk was a large window looking west, over a small street and another tall building, though the building across the street didn't have a penthouse conversion, nor did any of the others I could see from that window. This must have added, I felt, to his sense of disconnection—his palace overlooking the exotic-ordinary. Mostly, I could tell, he spent his time in the office to teach himself German and apply for jobs, or grow tired of the fact that no jobs existed for him in Berlin, or simply sorrow over the decision to move there with her. For two whole years, she said—back at the café, before we visited her apartment—he was unemployed, and this made him really depressed. She was about to say something else, but she stopped herself. She looked up and saw, presumably, the two of us listening very intently to her and realized that telling my father all this was one thing but telling me was something else entirely. Trish had a big sitting room, a dining room, plus a room that was about the size of the sitting room and dining room combined, and in it was a rented piano. When I saw that piano, I immediately beheld the husband's madness, and I sat there, upon the bench, as he must have sat, and I played one low note over and over and over until Trish and my father came into the room with glasses of wine and my father asked, What are you doing? The room was big enough for a nicely sized cocktail party. I suspected that if there had been any, Trish's husband spent them all either on the terrace, smoking cigarettes, if he smoked, or down the street at a bar, reading a book or a magazine. I like to think I'd be the kind of person who, in a situation like that of Trish's husband, would learn how to play the piano, go for walks in snowy parks, or, in summer, swim in outdoor pools, put a towel down in the grass, and read
The Iliad
. But who knows. Anyway, the husband has found work in Munich. He now lives in a small apartment, and Trish has been spending most weekends there. In Munich, I assume, everyone goes to work at nine, the streets are filled with commuters, there is a common purpose.

I've never met anybody more knowledgeable about the world right now, politically, culturally, and economically, than Trish. It's not because she has to know it all for her job. It's because she wants to know it, because she wants a better job. Right now her work life is mostly administrative, office management, mundane consular work, visas, lost passports—drudgery, for someone of her intellect. There are also criminal cases, deaths, asylum seekers, receiving American VIPs at the airport, and sometimes they can be interesting. But she wants to be doing the very difficult work of diplomacy, she wants to be involved in crises, and take phone calls in the night, possibly work with spies, or become one. So, in addition to her administrative duties, she makes sure she is up to date and knowledgeable about everything presently happening in the world. Every morning she either writes up or reads a summary of all US-related news in the German papers, then she reads a summary of all US-related news in French papers, British papers, Chinese media, Russian media, then a summary of all news relating to the US internationally, in every jurisdiction, then a summary of all the major news stories around the globe—these are all internal reports that are available to State Department staff and other foreign services. At lunch, she watches news online. Now that her husband is in Munich, she volunteers her free weekday evenings to work cultural and diplomatic events—dinners, meetings, briefings—in order to make contacts. And she meets and talks to people who are up to date and knowledgeable about the world. She knows everything about everything, so long as it has just happened, is happening, or will happen within a month or two. There is not a single timely topic of discussion that she cannot speak of thoroughly. It is truly intimidating. The only way to surprise her, or tell her something she doesn't already know, is to talk about something trivial or useless, like a story about billionaires who want to travel to the moon. She is not all that interested in the history of places that are not important to her, but if she can be convinced that information will deepen her understanding of current events, she will learn. She knew hardly anything about pre-twentieth-century European history, but when she and my father talked, she listened attentively, and while we were away, she got my father's history of the Middle Ages overnighted to her from the US and read it in a few days. I overheard them discussing it at times during that last week. I could tell my father was grateful.