Munich Airport (23 page)

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.

The Roy Lockwood diorama was on one of the underground floors. The scene itself wasn't extraordinary, or different from anything else—two soldiers in a foxhole. One was resting, the other manned a machine gun. The resting soldier was Roy Lockwood. In front of the scene was a lectern displaying a typed letter, with handwritten corrections, behind some glass. A white light that shined down on that letter was so dim that it did not upset the blue darkness of the scene. Beside the letter was a photograph. It was the scene the diorama had reproduced. The scene, like a lot of others in the museum, had been re-created from a photograph. That was the last room I visited, and I nearly turned around at that moment, but I read the letter instead. After I read it, I read it again. I read it many times. Then I took a photo of it with my phone, and later on that evening, before dinner, I transcribed the letter into my notebook. Roy Lockwood, on 14 November 1982, responds to a letter he has received asking about the photograph, and about his experiences in the fighting here. Please excuse my delay in answering your 3 August 1982 letter, he writes. In the army unit I served with, please be advised it was Company G 320th Infantry Division, 35th Division, 3rd Army. I was the one sitting to the left of the machine gun.

The letter is only one page long, but he explains that in that picture, his friend Jack McFarland had taken over manning the thirty-caliber gun after a German counterattack. Jack McFarland had passed away in the spring of 1982, which made Lockwood the last remaining member of his machine-gun crew, of which there had been six.

As to the towns we were near at the time, I don't remember, he writes, as for over thirty days we were constantly out in the fierce freezing weather, without the opportunity to even be in a house or a barn and we were also occupied with the constant front-line attacks and counterattacks. As to my memories of the Battle of the Bulge, we were in fierce combat with the Germans and were fighting for our lives. The artillery shellings were unbearable, both the German and our own artillery which landed short. Mostly it was brutal and nerve-wracking going. It was labeled by the men who were there as a White Christmas and New Year's in a White Hell.

Lockwood explains, after that, how on New Year's Eve, men made toasts to their own death. Eat, drink, and be merry, boys, tomorrow maybe we're dead! And many of them were! he writes. They fought in close quarters, and in the bloody hours of slugging it out, men won each other's praise for skill and guts!

He writes, This terrible period in which foxholes were walled with ice, water froze in canteens, and medics carried blood plasma under their arms to keep it warm, was not without its beauty! Shimmering crystalline snow clung delicately on branches and bushes and communication-line wires, as if placed there by the hands of God! On the few brilliantly sunny days the sky was bluer than the oceans. Like invisible needles pulling fussy white threads through the blue skies, fighter escorts trailed vapor at an arctic height. Then came the bombers in wedge formations, glinting in the bright blue firmament like tiny crosses of mother-of-pearl. This gave us some indication the bombing of Germany would soon end the terrible war!

Thirty-eight years had passed between the night in that foxhole and the composition of Lockwood's letter, and more than thirty years since the composition of that letter and my visit to the museum. In closing, he writes, please extend my many good wishes and regards to the wonderful people of Luxembourg who greeted us so friendly during those trying times. Sincerely yours, Roy W. Lockwood.

We stayed in the city of Luxembourg that evening. It was not far from Diekirch, and we'd sort of been chased out of Diekirch by an SUV I'd cut off. The SUV seemed to be following us, waiting for me to stop in order to have a word with me, so I just never stopped. My father didn't know what had happened. He just kept asking, Why are you driving so erratically? In Luxembourg city, we went out for dinner in a restaurant near our hotel. I asked my father if we ought to go to Aachen the next morning, see Charlemagne, then head back to Berlin. I was starting to feel immensely run down. Although I found myself wanting to eat all the time, I'd stopped tasting my food. He thought about it. Why don't we go to one last nice restaurant, something we'll remember, a place with a couple of Michelin stars? he asked. Paris is probably too far, at least in terms of getting back to Berlin, I said. I was thinking of Brussels, he said. Sure, I said. Good, he said, we'll get a five-star hotel, live like kings for a night. You know, I said, that Brussels is actually a shithole? He said, I hear it's quite dull, but we're in Luxembourg—what could be duller than a night in Luxembourg? We had a few glasses of wine each over dinner, and suddenly I couldn't help myself—I read out Lockwood's letter to my father from my notes. He listened attentively. He asked me to read it a second time. Then he got a little sad halfway through and asked me to stop. We sat in silence for a little while longer. We were in a white restaurant, with white tablecloths and waiters in white aprons and dark-burgundy cravats. It was half-full. I ate pork belly. My father ate vegetarian risotto. And when we were finished with our main courses, we each had some grappa, then we had some dessert—I got the crème brûlée and my father got a dark chocolate cake with strawberry sauce. I could barely move from overeating. My father was winded, he had to take deep breaths between bites. I said, Debussy's
La Mer
isn't realism, and that's why it succeeds. My father had to gulp down a few breaths of air in order to ask, How do you mean? I said, I mean it clearly isn't representational, it is clearly abstract, it's not about the sea. What's it about? he asked. Music, obviously, I said, and other artistic representations of the sea. Surely it's also about the sea, he said. I said, You're missing the point. He said, I think you're overthinking.