Munich

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2002 by Wickersham, Joan

His father was dying, of a cancer whose name he didn't understand when his stepmother said it; as soon as she said it, he forgot it. His vocabulary, in German, was still largely that of a nine-year-old, to which had been added a set of fluent phrases and terms needed to do business. Nothing in his German experience had taught him words that applied to sick old men.

Would he have made a special trip from America,just to see his father? Luckily, he didn't have to decide; he had to go to Germany for a board meeting that spring; it would be fairly easy to take the train to Munich for a day. Not even a day, an afternoon. The morning spent on the train, then a taxi through the city, arrive after lunch. Visit visit visit, accept a cup of tea or coffee, decline if they offer dinner, another train to catch.

He called Kurt before he left the States, to tell him he was going to see their father. Did Kurt have any message he wanted to send?

"Are you crazy?" Kurt said.

"He's an old man."

"So?"

"Agathe says he only has a few months to live."

Kurt was silent; then he let out a long, gusty sigh that sounded just like their father's old sighs. "Well, best of luck."

"That's what you want me to tell him?"

"Not him. You."

"So you don't have a message, then?" Stubborn, prosaic: this was the way to deal with melodrama. Ignore it, become willfully dull.

Another sigh from Kurt. "If I think of one, I'll call him myself."

All cities are beautiful at the end of April. But Munich, that day, seemed to have a special, startling loveliness. (He'd never been there before: imagined it gray, steely, Gothic, like falling down inside a church organ.) Soft sunny air, blowing fresh and cool through the half-opened window of the taxi. Beds of red tulips,jaunty and alert. Streets of houses in light, Italianate colors -cream, yellow, pumpkin. Tall old trees, their outspread limbs just beginning to soften beneath a tracery of pale green blossom.

The taxi dropped him in front of a dark red building that looked as if it had been made by a child grimly determined to use every single block in the toy chest. It bulged with towers, arches, bays-and yet it had about it no sense of fun, or fancy. It was serious and very German. Inside it was dark, too. He stood in the small lobby for a few moments before his eyes picked out the staircase wrapping around a small elevator in an iron cage. Riding the elevator seemed too passive, too helpless; he walked up to the second floor.

Agathe, his stepmother, hugged him, and kissed him on both cheeks, and squeezed his hands. Her blue eyes shone at him; her downy cheeks were pink; she smelled of some soft cologne that made him nostalgic, though he didn't know for what or whom. She took his arm and pulled him down the dim hallway toward a room full of light at the end. There was an archway, and there was his father coming toward him, walking with a cane.

The first two things his father said were: "Boris!" and "You're looking well, and I'm not."

Both would ordinarily have irritated him. His father would never call him "Bill," and having to remind him of it, or argue about it, made it seem as if the affectation lay in his own insistence that he be addressed this way, rather than in his father's refusal to adopt a name change the rest of the world had long ago accepted and forgotten. And his father was incapable of making a remark or having a conversation that was not primarily about himself. But so what. These first utterances, so predictable, seemed almost amusing; he had come to this visit so well armored, so overprepared to defend himself in case of a major attack, that these greetings merely bounced off his breastplate and fell softly, harmlessly, to the floor.

His father looked old. He'd looked old for years, had been completely bald since his mid-forties-but he'd always had a kind of fierceness in his face, with its bold black eyes and eyebrows, its audaciously large, bony nose. Now the eyebrows were white, and the real bones of the face had emerged; the forehead bulged, the cheekbones jutted, and between them the dark dull eyes were sunken, like the eye cavities of a skeleton. The walk, too, was brittle and shrunken; there was an uneasy sense, watching him, of bone grinding on bone. Each step seemed painful, a wince.

There was a picture, done a long time ago, lost now, or hidden in a pile of papers in a drawer: a silhouette of his father dancing. Perhaps he was doing a part out of the Arabian Nights: the head was turbaned, the lines of the limbs were loose, flowing, Eastern-- costumed. One arm was across the chest, its palm out, pushing the air; and one leg was lifted across the other, ready to leap and caper. Just a black shape on white paper, but tilted and witty and fluid, full of energy and elegance.

"No, no, Father, you're looking fine," bending to kiss his father on both papery cheeks. "How are you feeling?"

"Hungry. Agathe has done a wonderful meal, and we were very good and waited for you to get here." The voice was the same as ever: booming, theatrical, heavily (almost comically) Russian-- accented.