Munich Airport (30 page)
Authors: Greg Baxter
Between the time I met Miriam in Cologne and my affair with the archaeologist, I traveled to the lodge in Scotland alone. It was the hottest summer in England for a hundred years or something. London was miserable. Everything stank. Even Bedford Square stank. So I called up the lodge and said I wanted a room for a night, as soon as possible. They said they had nothing left for the summer, unless I could book for a minimum of three nights. I told them my father's name, I explained he had come regularly, that he had honeymooned there, visited a few times with my mother, then with us. The woman at reception didn't know what I was talking about, but the owner, to whom I finally spoke, remembered, and she offered me a suite, their best room, on the Sunday of the week I telephoned, but they would have to charge full price for it. What's full price? It's four hundred and fifty pounds, she said, plus an extra twenty pounds for breakfast. I flew from London to Edinburgh on the Sunday morning and rented a car. I drove north, in the direction of Perth, but not along the motorway, then east. Actually Glasgow was the more convenient airport, but I'd come through Glasgow on the previous two occasions, and I wanted something different. The air got cooler, but it wasn't quite chillyâpeople in the towns I drove through wore shorts and flip-flops. I stopped at some places along the way, to get food or stop at fruit stands or ice-cream stands. It was June, so the sun stayed high in the sky all day. I drove with the windows down. As the roads got smaller and the views from the roadsides became more and more magnificent and fearsome, I pulled over and stood. When I finally made it to the lodge, I found the parking lot completely full. I checked in. I was shown to my room. I confirmed my dinner reservation. I'd hoped to get a booth table all to myselfâthe regular table, which my father always made sure to reserve weeks in advanceâbut there was no hope. I would get a little table by the window. That'll be fine, I said. I showered and put on a suit and went down to the lounge for a few drinks and to read the papers. The lounge was packed. People had been out on the water all day, or cycling around, or hillwalking, and they were having refreshments and talking about the unbelievably warm conditions. The vast majority of them were retired. The vast majority were English. Many of them must have been there for days, because they spoke to each other like old chums. One of them asked to take a look at a paper I had finished with, and I said, You bet, be my guest. They were overjoyed, it turned out, to have an American there, and they would not believe I was just an ordinary foreigner living in London, trying to get away from the heat. I was wearing a nice blue suit and a white shirt. When they found outâthey asked and I told themâwhat room I was staying in, and that I was alone, they concluded that I must be in entertainment, I looked like I belonged in entertainment. Eventually they rounded themselves up after a few drinks to go upstairs and prepare for dinner. I went outside for some fresh air. It was evening, though still bright, and finally starting to cool. I walked along the jetty where some boats were tied. Little wooden fishing boats with oars. They were very clean and dry. A man came toward me. He worked for the hotel. He came up beside me and we stood and looked around at the water and the mountains behind them. I said, I don't remember there ever being boats here. He said they'd always been there, but usually it was too cold and the conditions were too dangerous to let people out on them. But that evening it was calm, it was warm and windless, and the lake was flat. I said, I'd like to take a boat out for a few minutes before dinner starts. He checked his watch and asked what time I was eating. Eight o'clock, I said. Then you have time, he said. Does it cost any money? I asked. He said it was free. We stood for a few seconds longer and I said, So I can pick any one I like? Of course, he saidâhe was putting them away for the night but he didn't mind me being out until eight on such a nice, bright evening. I hopped into one and he untied me, threw me the line, and wished me a pleasant, if brief, boat trip. I rowed out a hundred meters, two hundred meters. The lake wound around a jutting stretch of land in the distance, and I thought I'd row there, take a look at the rest of the lake, then turn around and go back and get dinner. As I rowed, I began to feel a romantic attachment to the view around that corner, even though I had no idea what it would be like, apart from the safe assumption that it would be a lot like the view I had already. I began to visualize the scenery beyond the gap and it seemed to me as though music was beginning to make noises at the mountaintops, in the trees, or as though the music I heard had metamorphosed into trees and mountaintops. I started to feel that I had to see the view around that corner, it was imperative, that I would never know myself unless I set eyes upon the rest of the lake. It did not take very long to realize that the proximity of the gap was an illusion. I kept rowing and rowing, but I never seemed to get closer to it. So I stopped where I was and floated for a while in the still, black glassiness of the water. The man gathering the boats for the evening was making very little noise. He looked at me when I looked at him, but neither of us waved, and he looked away. I couldn't smell anything except the water and timber of the boat. I leaned over and put my hand in the water. The water was freezing. I leaned a little farther and put both hands in. I picked them out and felt the texture of the water between my fingers, on my palms and on the backs of my hands. I sat like that for a while, slumped over the edge of the boat, looking at my hands, dipping them in the water and watching the water drop off them. When I looked up, I saw that the first dinner guests of the evening had assembled outside the restaurant, on the shore, to see what I was doing. I couldn't imagine what conclusions they had come to. When I sat back up and grabbed the oars and starting rowing again, they waved, and they waved.
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Thomas Lovegrove and Adam Butler, aka Vert.
For material on the Rhineland and Charlemagne, the author is indebted to Robert Bartlett's
The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950â1350
. The quotations from composers were encountered in Alex Ross's
The Rest Is Noise
.
Greg Baxter is the author of two previous highly acclaimed books,Â
The Apartment
and
A Preparation for Death
. Originally from Texas, he has lived in Europe for almost two decades. He currently lives in Berlin with his wife and two children.
1. How much of MUNICH AIRPORT was drawn from your own experience as an American expatriate?
It is probably accurate to say that nothing in the book is disconnected from my experiences as an expatriateâthough at the same time I never define myself that way. I never say, I'm an American expat, and I suspect the modern world has made the term obsolete: It feels like a word that belongs to history. In my mind, I just ended up in Europe somehow, and for some reason I'm still here. The narrator's experiences, I hope, reflect this accidentalness as well.
2. What was your process of writing the novel?
I write longhand, in squared Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks (145mm x 210mm). Depending on how quickly the book is moving for me, I'll write between one and ten pages in the notebook, and then transcribe those pages into my desktop computer, and in this way I have an intensive edit built into the first typed draft: Often what I type has very little to do with what I've written in my notebook.
I wrote the book over a period of one year, from early autumn to the end of summer. During that time, I read many books about European history, studied music theory, and sought inspiration from walking around Berlin listening to dodecaphonic music on my headphones.
3. In your last novel,
The Apartment
, you left the narrator and the setting unnamed. In MUNICH AIRPORT, two of the principal charactersâthe narrator and his fatherâare unnamed, but the novel's geography is very real and specific; the characters are always in named places. What were the reasons behind your decisions to name or not name characters and places?
Well, the airport is called Munich Airport, but the building they are in is not Munich Airport. It is an amalgamation of airports, plus part imaginary. I'd had a couple of very long layovers in Munich Airportâthe first of which I spent in a wheelchair and the second of which I was on crutchesâin the months preceding the point at which I began writing the book. I wanted to write a book called
Munich Airport
as a resultâto redeem the hours I'd spent thereâbut I needed some freedom in the matter of movement, and I could not really remember how the airport looked, anyway. Generally, I cannot say why I name places and don't name others, make some places up or apply extreme accuracy to others. I don't know why I name some people and don't name others.
4. Do you find that international families such as the one in  MUNICH AIRPORT are becoming increasingly common? Does the physical distance between the members of such a family place a strain on their relationships?
I never consciously set out to say anything about families, international or otherwise, when I wrote this book, nor did I ever imagine that the theme of
family
would rise so high on the list of things this book is, to others, so obviously about. But I am aware of the general phenomenon whereby the book a novelist writes is not the same thing as the book the readership reads. I embrace this, of course. But I do not think physical distance is the problemâand maybe it's one of the reasons why I portray, near the end, the man named Hans in the small German town of Walluf, estranged from his family, who no doubt lives less than a minute's walk from him.
5. The structure of the novel is interesting in that while much of the story is narrated through flashbacks, the present action takes place entirely at the airport. Why did you choose to tell the story in this manner instead of taking a more linear approach?
I just wanted to continue the approach I'd found so personally suitable in
The Apartment
. I'm drawn to unconventional fiction, and I'm very fond of the essay. I sense that I have mixed my affections and influences into something I'm increasingly comfortable withâa digressive and free narrative that relies very little on the outcome of the plot, because almost all the action has already taken place and is, more or less, known to the reader, and instead relies heavily on how strange I can make that known outcome finally seem to the reader. On another level, I don't want to write books that can be turned into films.
It's odd to hear the word
flashback
applied to this book, because I don't have much sympathy for books that make heavy use of flashback, and I never think of the word when, as I write, a narrator's thoughts digress to the past. I think of flashbacks as clumsy devices when used in conventional, linear narrativesâthey arrive predictably, they act predictably, they almost always serve to explain or simplify motive in characters. But most important, they do not make linear narrative
nonlinear
: They just pause the flow. I discard, in myself, expectations of linear narrative from the outset.
6. The novel displays a strong interest in the history of the Rhineland. What motivated this interest?
Europe's real birthplace is the Rhineland, it has been argued: The tribes migrating across the prehistoric Eurasian steppes, once they passed the Black Sea shore, had only two directions to take, two mountain passes: southward to the imperial frontier, or northward, the path of least resistance, to the Rhine. They mostly took the latter, and gradually crowded the Rhineland with the people who would become the nationalities of power and wealth in Europe today. I read about this in Norman Davies's finely written history of Europe, and the preoccupation with this part of the world in the novel is an attempt to convey my fascination with this story. During composition, I drove the very routeâand visited the very same placesâthat the father and son in
Munich Airport
visit.
7. Do you see a special connection in the novel between history and memory?
I don't think I have anything new to say about either history or memory; however, I do think that a marketing executive, a historian, and a diplomat all have very different and especial relationships to time (in a context where all are present in a single narrative), and these relationships seemed important once the book got moving.
8. The topic of music also comes up a few times in the novel, especially music that is unconventional or experimental. What guided this concern, and how do you see it working within the scope of the novel?
Some years ago, I heard my first piece of music by the composer Alban Berg. Until then, music had never felt particularly important to me. Ever since, I've become a student of Berg's, after a fashion, and in the sum of music's total importance to the bookâmeasured in a variety of waysâis a hidden thesis submitted for Berg's consideration.
9. Which authors or novels would you name as your literary forebears? Which of them influenced the writing of  MUNICH AIRPORT most strongly?
I read a lot of books in translation; probably in excess of 90 percent of all the literature I read (novels and essays) are books in translation. The list of individual authors most important to me come almost exclusively from these books, with notable exceptions. I don't dare claim my favorites as influences, however, for fear of drowning in their wakes.
10. What drew you to write about the theme of hunger, which is so persistent in this novel? How do you understand Miriam's desire to starve herself?
I don't understand Miriam's choice to starve to death any differently than the narrator understands it, which is to say I do not understand it at all. It's really only possible, I think, to talk productively about the reasons for the narrator's devotion to the mystery of the method of his sister's death.
