We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

“Huh?” CJ replied.

  “What are you talking about?” Leah asked anxiously. I explained the static electricity situation in the station. Sophie then connected the dots of the conversation more explicitly for CJ. Unfortunately, he just dug deeper, mostly because he had no exposure to the topic. “If my girlfriend has given consent, I don’t need to ask one minute later,” he said, prompting Sophie to launch into another lecture about the nature of consent. I, too, was alarmed by CJ’s insouciant attitude. I work on a college campus, where these kinds of situations routinely derail young lives. CJ added, “I assume someone would tell me to stop.”

  “That is not how it works!” I said. The conversation wandered back and forth between sex and shocking people with static electricity, leaving CJ confused. He began to cry. “Would someone please tell me if we are talking about sex or shocking people?” he said with tears running down his face. It was at about this time that I noticed a sign in our train car declaring that it was reserved for women traveling with young children.

  Leah, who is nonconfrontational and generally protective of CJ, urged us not to have this discussion in public, especially on a train car that I was not supposed to be on. We got off the train and walked to a quiet place in the station. I told CJ to forget about shocking people with static electricity and focus on what we were trying to teach him about sexual consent. Sophie presented him with a series of scenarios, asking in each case whether it would be acceptable to proceed with sex or not (e.g., “You are really drunk, and she’s really drunk . . .”). CJ figured out the pattern and, in good humor, began saying, “No,” as soon as Sophie started speaking. “You’ve been dating—”

  “No!”

  “Very good,” Sophie said. “Now suppose there is—”

  “No!”

  “What if—”

  “No!”

  Once there was more levity in the conversation, I offered my own scenario: “A supermodel comes up to you on the beach and says, ‘CJ, I think you’re really hot and I want to have sex with you but only if my supermodel friends can join in.’”

  CJ thought for a while and looked around cautiously. “Yes?” he answered. Right answer, we assured him.

  “I wouldn’t get too excited about that possibility,” Sophie offered.

  “Okay, next scenario,” I said. “You are in Emirates first class with your own cabin.” CJ has a fascination with the first-class cabins on Emirates, so I knew this hypothetical situation would grab his attention. “A hot woman comes up from the back of the plane and says, ‘I’d really like to have sex with you in your private cabin.’”

  “Yes!” CJ yelled with great enthusiasm.

  “Wrong!” I admonished. “Passengers from coach are not allowed in first class!”

  With that, we went to the mall.

  Dubai is like the love child of Saudi Arabia and Las Vegas: a gleaming city-state in the desert where many things are new, shiny, and bizarrely large; but also an absolute monarchy in which Islam is the official state religion and one can be deported for kissing in public. Dubai is home to the tallest building in the world, the architecturally impressive Burj Khalifa, and also some of the world’s largest shopping malls. The Dubai Mall, for example, is so big that we walked five miles without finding one end or the other. The Mall of the Emirates has an indoor ski hill. The phrase “shopping mecca” takes on a more literal meaning in these places; many of the female shoppers are in full burkas.

  We explored by walking and eating—our preferred mode of travel—only now it was indoors. In one of the megamalls, I wandered into an enormous bookstore and encountered two noteworthy things. First, there was a large poster advertising a new book of poetry by Dubai’s Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum. I am no judge of poetry, nor can I read Arabic. The crown prince may write some lovely verses. On the other hand, I found it amusing that the leader of an autocratic monarchy had become a poet. It would be like Kim Jong Un deciding to write short stories. Of course the bookstores will display his work prominently. How do the critics describe the writing of an autocrat with unfettered power to imprison or expel them? “The Crown Prince has done it yet again, another work with which I can find no fault . . .”

  Second, I found a different title in a far corner: Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science. This was my first book (now available in a third edition!), and I was pleasantly surprised to find it in Dubai, even if it was less prominently displayed than the crown prince’s poetry. When Leah and I traveled the world after college, I desperately wanted to be a writer. A quarter century later, I took a moment to appreciate that my 1988–89 self would have been thrilled to know that I would one day have a book for sale at the Dubai Mall.

  CJ loved Dubai’s clean efficiency, especially having just come from India. I saw things differently. India is a huge, fractious, relatively poor country with no extraordinary mineral wealth. Dubai is a tiny autocracy that has grown rich on oil, grants citizenship to a select few, and hires immigrant labor for whatever else is needed. Dubai is richer and more orderly, but India is arguably the more impressive society for having built the world’s biggest democracy from a remarkably diverse population —twenty-two official languages. Still, we were happy to be in “malaria pill countdown.” (We had to take the pills for seven days after leaving the last malarial country.) I found myself fantasizing about wearing nice clothes. Perhaps it was all the designer stores, or maybe it was eight months with the same two pairs of pants. In any event, I was growing excited about putting on nice wool trousers and a sweater.

  Leah had booked the cheapest tickets from Mumbai to Tbilisi, Georgia. Dubai was a free stop along the way. After a few days there, we continued on to Berlin. Our flight left from the old Dubai airport, not the shiny new one. To clarify, Dubai has one of the largest and most impressive airports in the world—a gigantic shopping mall with airline gates. Dubai also has an older airport, which is the infrastructure equivalent of a crappy car that you keep for the kids after you buy a new one. We learned this only after we arrived at the new airport and could not find our flight on the departure board. Leah showed our tickets to a man at the information booth. “I’ve never heard of that airline,” he said. “It must leave from the other airport.” We hired a taxi to take us to the old airport, which looks more like a government warehouse for surplus crops than it does a shopping mall, though I did see one kiosk with a guy selling nuts. Our flight departed at 4:20 a.m. The plane boarding at the gate next to ours was headed to Kabul, Afghanistan. To circle back to the beginning of this paragraph, the flight was cheap.

  Later that morning, we were in Berlin, a beautiful city made more so by spring flowers and blooming trees. We were delighted to be able to walk around comfortably in fleeces and jackets. Sophie, who is fivefoot-ten, was pleased to be back in a place with other tall people. “I don’t feel like a freak show anymore,” she explained. We enjoyed sausages and beer and kebabs. The German drinking age is sixteen, so even Sophie could order a beer.

  CJ and I bought tickets to see a professional soccer game: Union Berlin versus SV Sandhausen. The stadium where the Union team plays is in a part of the country that was formerly East Germany. There are still significant economic and cultural differences between the old East and West, and we were headed into the heart of the old East. By coincidence, one of my Dartmouth faculty colleagues was in Berlin for the year. When we explained our soccer plans to him, he said, “There are some people who wouldn’t go there because of the nationalism on display.” And then he added with almost comic understatement, “Germany has a complicated relationship with nationalism.”

  CJ and I took the subway out of Berlin and transferred to a commuter train that dropped us within walking distance of the stadium. The football (soccer) crowd was distinctly different from the German population at large. For example, the German population has women; the football crowd did not, or at least none that I saw. Our train was full of groups of young men smoking and drinking large bottles of beer. If there are ope
n container laws on the German trains, they were not enforced on this route. We got off the train in a leafy neighborhood and followed the crowd. As the stadium came into view, we encountered a large group of men peeing in the bushes at the edge of an open field. This was not four guys bashfully relieving themselves. There were thirty men lined up in a row urinating in the bushes—a combination of German organization and third world sanitation.

  Security officials searched us on the way into the stadium—not the cursory pat-down one gets at a U.S. sporting event, but a full-blown body frisk after we went through the metal detectors. I grew up going to Chicago sporting events, including the Bears-Packers games. Those events seemed like dance recitals compared to the vibe we were getting. There were no assigned seats on our side of the stadium. Because there were no seats. Our entire section was for standing; every inch was packed. Just before game time, CJ and I sidled up to a spot at the back of the viewing area. The crowd was similar to what we had seen on the train: mostly young, white men who were, as my dad might say, “a little rough-looking.” I still had not seen any women. The spectators were decked out in Union paraphernalia. If there were any fans for the opposing team, they were wisely keeping a low profile.

  As the game began, the stadium erupted in song: nearly the entire crowd chanting in a language we could not understand and raising their arms in unison. CJ would later say, “I felt a Hitler vibe. I have to admit.” We were not able to see much of the football because of the tall men standing in front of us. As we strained to see, several young guys invited CJ to stand in front of them, giving him a nice view. CJ looks German enough, but once he opened his mouth it was clear we were not local. The guys around him began eagerly explaining the finer points of Union football.

  A new cheer reverberated throughout the stadium: “Onion, Onion, Onion . . .” CJ and I exchanged a puzzled glance. “Cheer for Onion,” one of the men encouraged us—at which point CJ and I realized that Union is pronounced with a soft U in German. The Union fans offered an interesting lesson into sports psychology, and perhaps life more generally. When the opposing team scored a goal, they did nothing. No reaction from anywhere in the stadium. No jeering, no cries of disappointment. At first this left CJ and me confused. “Didn’t the other team score?” I asked.

  “I think so,” CJ said. “The referee just pulled the ball out of the net.”

  “Why is there no reaction?” I wondered, looking around at the fans as they universally refused to acknowledge the goal, the sports equivalent of shunning. It was devastatingly effective: Do not give your opponent the satisfaction of seeing you react.

  When our new football friends were not busy doing scary chants with the crowd, they were remarkably kind to us. One of them bought CJ a mineral water in a Union collectors cup and also a Union pin that he proudly affixed to CJ’s Patagonia pullover. I tried to reciprocate by buying beers for the two men nearest to us (along with one for myself). When I returned from the concession stand with three beers, one of the guys told me that he did not drink. I was left with an extra beer, my third of the night. All told, CJ and I returned home with six Union collectors cups. The game ended around eight-thirty and it was still light out—part of the joy of being in the northern hemisphere in spring. We bade farewell to our fellow fans. “Did you have fun?” one of them asked eagerly.

  “It was wonderful,” I said honestly.

  “Thank you so much,” CJ added.

  We took our last malaria pills on May Day, which we spent exploring an area of the city where East and West Berlin had formerly been divided. Part of the Berlin Wall remains intact, along with a guard post and a stretch of “no-man’s-land” where some of those trying to escape from the East had been gunned down. The last time I had been in Berlin was in 1986, when the Berlin Wall was still standing. On that visit, I crossed from West Berlin to East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie. Now, barely a generation later, what’s left standing of the wall is testimony to that period of Orwellian repression—but also a reminder that the people ultimately rose up and tore it down.

  My Dartmouth colleague Michael adores Berlin: the music, the parks, the food, the public transit. He eagerly sought out an opportunity to spend a year there on sabbatical. The fact that he is Jewish adds a layer of complexity to his relationship with the nation. He remarked to me at one point that the math on “good Germans” does not work. What he meant was that many German families have been told that their grandparents were not supportive of the Nazis. Michael’s point is that there could not have been that many good Germans, or the bad ones would not have prevailed. The Jewish Museum in Berlin is a reminder of this. The Holocaust is only one piece of the museum’s much larger story. The most powerful exhibit is on the history of anti-Semitism, which has ebbed and flowed for centuries. There were waves of persecutions and massacres during the Black Death in Europe, for example, as Jews were blamed for the plague. The lesson is clear: when the going gets tough, humans find scapegoats.

  For East Germany, the horrors of World War II were followed by the tyranny of the Communist regime. Berlin’s Stasi Museum documents how the East German secret police propped up the government through intimidation, arrests, blackmail, and legions of informers. The museum is located in the old Stasi headquarters in East Berlin, where there are rooms documenting the Stasi’s nefarious tools and techniques—everything from steaming open envelopes to recruiting informers. The most foreboding exhibit is the building itself: a squat, nondescript warren of offices in which people went to work every day doing the tasks necessary to hold a totalitarian state together. I assume George Orwell had not seen the Stasi headquarters when he wrote 1984, but the bureaucratic apparatus he describes is eerily similar to what the East Germans managed to assemble in this ominously ugly gray building.

  Our time in Berlin inspired us to rent several films that put a finer point on the history lurking around us. Bridge of Spies, the Tom Hanks film about the prisoner swap for U2 pilot Gary Powers, offered a snapshot of East and West Berlin at the height of the Cold War. The Lives of Others, a haunting German film about Stasi surveillance, reinforced what we had seen at the Stasi Museum. Meanwhile, the formal homeschooling requirements—the stuff the state of New Hampshire was keen on—were not going as well. At one point, Leah gave CJ a tough geometry problem in our Berlin hotel room. He collapsed to the floor, where he began crying and saying repeatedly that he wanted to be a taco.

  This was a moment for Sophie to shine by comparison, but she whiffed it. She had a discussion-based assessment (DBA) scheduled with one of her instructors for eleven o’clock that night (a saner hour for the teacher back in New Hampshire). The DBAs use special software that requires fast Internet. As eleven o’clock approached, the Wi-Fi in our hotel room was too weak to launch the software. Sophie panicked. “I have to cancel,” she said.

  “You are not canceling,” I told her.

  “There’s nothing we can do!” she insisted. “The software won’t work.”

  “Get your laptop and follow me,” I ordered. With Sophie clutching her computer, we ran out of the room, down the stairs, out of the hotel, and into the underground train station on the corner. Berlin’s underground train stations have excellent public Wi-Fi. Sophie opened up her computer. The Internet in the Adenauerplatz underground station was better than in our hotel, but still not good enough to launch the DBA software. “It’s not going to work,” Sophie proclaimed.

  “Send your teacher an e-mail and ask if you can do it by phone,” I instructed.

  “It has to be by video,” she protested.

  “Just do it,” I said. The teacher responded to the e-mail immediately and agreed to do the assessment by phone. I handed Sophie my iPhone and sat on a nearby bench as she and her teacher had the requisite discussion. They paused periodically as the noise from an arriving train made it impossible to carry on a conversation.

  When we got back to the room, both Sophie and I were in lousy moods. This led to a massive VLACS argument—the first in
a long time. Sophie began angling to finish her VLACS work at home over the summer. That was a nonstarter. The last thing I wanted was the VLACS nightmare bleeding into our return. Also, it seemed reasonable to expect Sophie to finish her academic work during the academic year. The argument devolved into the same discussion we had been having for eight months: Should we set deadlines for Sophie or let her manage the process on her own? After going around and around, we came to a compromise. The VLACS work had to be done by the day we returned to Hanover. In exchange, we would scrap the interim deadlines. “No lame-ass excuses,” I pronounced. “Done means done: all work submitted in a readable format in all classes.”

  On a more positive homeschooling note, Leah asked CJ to explain the arc of U.S. history from World War I to Vietnam. I was impressed by his understanding of the interconnections—how World War I made Americans wary of another European war, for example, and how the Cold War created the fear of communism that motivated U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He was clearly learning things—when he was not crying in the fetal position.

  We traveled by bus to Munich, where we stayed in a cheap hotel in a neighborhood that had a large concentration of Arab immigrants. Many of the signs up and down the street were in Arabic. There were excellent Middle Eastern restaurants, which made for good, cheap food. We soon encountered the immigration backlash, too. As we walked along the main pedestrian thoroughfare on our first day, we came upon an anti-Muslim demonstration. The speeches and signs were in German; it was hard to discern the specifics of the protest, yet easy to get the gist of it. The speakers appeared unhinged as they yelled into microphones. In an odd way, the demonstration was positive testimony to the country Germany has become. The crowd was small; most pedestrians passed without taking notice. The police were dutifully protecting the demonstrators, who seemed more pathetic than anything else.

  I found a small museum with an exhibit on the work of Peter Lindbergh, a German photographer who took many of the iconic fashion photos of the 1980s and 1990s. These are striking black-and-white images of Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, and others who became the first “supermodels,” in part because of Lindbergh’s work. (If you grew up during that era, you know the photos I’m describing.) I appreciated the artistry of Lindbergh’s photography. Remember, I was nurturing my inner artist at this point. My novel was at 350 pages. I gave it to Leah that night and asked her to read the first 200 pages. “Ignore everything after that,” I said. “It’s still a work in progress.”