We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  The next morning I asked anxiously: “What do you think?”

  “It’s good,” she said before rattling off a handful of plot points that did not make sense.

  “That’s all in the last hundred pages!” I protested. “You weren’t supposed to read that far.”

  “I couldn’t stop,” she said.

  CJ persuaded me to take him to BMW World, a sprawling complex with a production facility, a museum, and a multilevel showroom. After CJ ogled every new model of BMW car and motorcycle on display, we walked across the street to the Olympic Village from the 1972 Munich summer games. These were the first Olympics held in Germany since Hitler had presided over the 1936 summer games in Berlin. The Munich Olympics were supposed to be part of West Germany’s post–World War II rebirth—a powerful statement of global reconciliation. Instead, they devolved into tragedy when Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization, kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches. CJ set out to see fancy cars but ended up getting another dose of history.

  After we walked through the Olympic Village, CJ wanted to go back to the BMW museum. I had had my fill of cars. “Do know where our hotel is?” I asked. He assured me that he did.

  “Here,” I said, handing him a ten-euro note. “Take the subway home when you’re done at the museum.” CJ arrived at our hotel that evening with Mexican food that he bought in the train station with his change from the subway ticket.

  We watched The Sound of Music on the train to Salzburg while passing through small Bavarian towns: green meadows, charming chalets, and steep snow-covered peaks. CJ kept remarking on the views, describing everything as “crisp and clean.” Salzburg is a lovely city, but we arrived during a long stretch of spring rain. We used the rain delay and the solid Wi-Fi to begin coordinating our “reentry.” We sent e-mails to the families who had been taking care of our two dogs, both of which were doing well. Sophie registered to take the SAT. I suggested to Leah that we use some of my fun money to go out for a proper Austrian meal. “You don’t have any fun money left,” Leah said.

  “That’s your view,” I said, drawing approving laughter from CJ and Sophie.

  “I have the spreadsheet,” Leah replied.

  “Katrina has fun money left!” I said. “Maybe she’ll give me some of hers.” Katrina, who is a notorious penny pincher, still had more than half of her fun money left with only weeks remaining in the trip. The fun money policy was, “Use it or lose it.” I texted her in Sri Lanka: “Will you transfer $50 of your fun money to me so I can go out to dinner with Mom?”

  The reply came back immediately: “No.”

  I pressed: “Why not?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not going to use it.”

  “No. Stop asking.”

  “How is Sri Lanka?”

  “No.”

  Leah and I went out to dinner anyway. We were getting looser with the budget now that we had so little time left. One dinner out in Austria was not going to make much difference in the overall spending. Also, asparagus was in season: asparagus soup, sautéed asparagus, asparagus baked with cheese. The true joy of the meal, however, came when we returned to the apartment. Sophie had finished her criminal justice VLACS course. One down, two to go.

  The train rides between European cities are short, easy, and beautiful. After a few hours, we were in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a city that looks like it was designed by a model train enthusiast: pastel buildings arrayed along a canal; stone bridges; cobblestone paths; outdoor cafés; and, of course, a castle perched on a bluff. We could feel the transition from Northern Europe to Southern Europe: less beer and sausage, more wine and gelato. I wandered off with my camera, both to enjoy some alone time and to capture the charm of the city. As I was shooting across the canal, three people walked in front of a vibrant mural covering the entire side of a building. The walkers, evenly spaced and striding with purpose, gave the picture a sense of motion. The mural behind them offered a burst of color. The canal in the foreground was the essence of Ljubljana.

  I snapped away until the three people had passed out of the frame. I looked at the small display on the back of my camera and was pleased to see that I had captured the image I wanted: the beauty of the canal, the jarring colors of the mural, and the three people, evenly spaced, walking with purpose. Then I looked more closely. Was I imagining it? I enlarged the photo: The “walkers” in the picture were Leah, Sophie, and CJ.

  I worked in the mornings at a café that offered free fresh bread with butter, jam, and honey to anyone who ordered coffee. The honey was a local delicacy. I worked outside, where tables had been set up along the pedestrian walkway. One morning Leah arrived after I had been working for an hour. She was eager to sample the bread and honey that I had been raving about. “Before you sit down, take a picture,” I implored. She took an “action shot” of me writing at a European café. Maybe it wasn’t Hemingway in Paris, but I was on the continuum.

  Even in Europe, our wandering offered up quirky experiences—because there are always quirky experiences. Leah guided us on a hike through a large public park. We became terribly lost and ended up at an art house cinema that was showing the film Liberation Day. This is a documentary—I’m not making this up—about a Slovenian cult band called Laibach that was invited to North Korea to perform songs from The Sound of Music. A camera crew accompanied them on the trip, which, needless to say, did not go exactly as planned.

  In Vienna, we rented an Airbnb apartment in an old building with plaster walls and stone steps. There was a small bronze plaque on the sidewalk in front of our building commemorating a family who had been sent to Auschwitz. These small markers are called Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones.” We had seen them in German cities as well. The specificity of the plaques—names, places, and dates—forces one to confront the Nazi horror in all the places it touched. Every time we went through the large wooden front door to our apartment building, we were reminded that the Nazis had hauled away the Hofling family—Kurt, Genendia, and Renée—from this lovely building on June 15, 1942.

  I was writing frantically in the hope of finishing the novel before the end of the trip. One morning I was working in the Vienna apartment in my pajamas, which consisted of a pair of blue shorts I had bought in Bolivia and a bright yellow T-shirt. I had not shaved in some time; my Indian haircut was not growing out well. Then I spilled coffee down the front of my shirt. CJ walked out of his bedroom, took one look at me, and said, “Dad, you look like a homeless guy.” I took his observation as a badge of honor. I felt like a novelist. Also, we were close enough to the end of the trip that I had already booked a haircut in Hanover, New Hampshire.

  I changed out of my pajamas and moved to a café across the street from our apartment, where I was within hours of finishing the novel when my computer’s battery gave out. The rest of the family joined me for a walk on the pedestrian mall, but my mind was on the book. After lunch, with the computer recharged, I returned to the café, ordered a cupcake and a double Americano, and set to finishing it. Which I did: 441 pages, including the epilogue. Whether it was terrible or not, I had a finished novel.

  Our most significant family adventure in Vienna took place without leaving our apartment: the Myers-Briggs moment. Sophie was theoretically studying for the SATs, but somehow during her intense preparation she came across several websites related to the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. Myers-Briggs uses a series of questions to sort people into one of sixteen personality types. For example, each of us is an introvert or an extrovert. As the makers of the tool describe it: “Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?” Other questions probe how individuals make decisions, what kind of structure they prefer, and so on.

  Leah and I had taken the assessment years earlier. I am an INTP: Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving. Leah is the opposite of me on every dimension, ESFJ: Extroverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judging.* We had learned long ago to manage this difference. She loves p
lanning; I like going to the café alone in the morning to write. Katrina had done Myers-Briggs in school, and we knew her personality type, too. CJ and Sophie did the assessment online in the Vienna apartment.

  The results brought our family into sharper relief. When Meyers-Briggs arrays the sixteen personality types in a matrix with similar types clustered near each other, Katrina and CJ and are at opposite ends of the diagram. Leah is adjacent to CJ, and I’m adjacent to Katrina—which is pretty much how that first Complete Family Meltdown felt on the banks of Lake Titicaca in Peru.

  We read aloud our personality descriptions, including strengths and weaknesses. Sophie’s profile describes her type as “not good with deadlines or long-term planning.”

  “Now, there’s a shocker!” CJ yelled when he heard the description—which is exactly the kind of thing his personality type would do. It turns out that CJ the Eco Warrior is an ESTJ, a type who tend to be “great believers in doing what they believe is right and socially acceptable.”

  “You’re Saddam Hussein!” Sophie gleefully told CJ. She was now on a different website, admittedly less scientific, that maps one’s Myers-Briggs personality type to famous people who supposedly share the type. CJ’s personality type also matched George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson. Leah is Dwight Eisenhower, the guy who managed to pull off D-Day. Their type is described as typically “warm-hearted, talkative, popular, conscientious, born cooperators.” They are people who “need harmony and may be good at creating it.”

  I am Albert Einstein. My type, “the thinker,” is described as “not interested in practical, day-to-day activities.”

  “Remember Robben Island?” Sophie shrieked. One of my few logistical responsibilities during the trip had been to buy tickets for the museum on Robben Island in Cape Town. This was where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for nearly thirty years. When we arrived at the front of the ferry line and presented our tickets, the friendly gentleman said, “These tickets are for tomorrow, sir.”

  Might it have been helpful if we had done this assessment before we left on the trip? Perhaps, though I am not sure the results would have resonated as strongly.

  We flew to Tbilisi, Georgia, and awaited the return of the prodigal daughter. Tbilisi is a place where cultures have intersected for centuries: Ottoman, European, Russian. The architecture, food, and dress reflect this melding. A person plopped on a main street in Tbilisi for the first time would recognize much while still struggling to identify the country: Ottoman architecture, but it’s not Turkey; bustling and developed, but it’s not Western Europe; vestiges of the USSR, including massively wide streets, but it’s not Russia. It is the Republic of Georgia.

  We rented an Airbnb apartment one might describe as “post-Communist chic.” The outside of the building was so dilapidated that it looked condemned. There was a large crack running the length of the brick exterior. The inside was reasonably nice, with a big common room, a functional kitchen, and four bedrooms. The father of the unit’s owner gave us a tour of the apartment. He was about eighty years old and took great pride in his Airbnb greeting responsibilities. In the kitchen, he turned on the faucet to show us how it worked (which was pretty much like every other faucet I had ever used). “Water,” he said.

  “Yes,” we agreed.

  He pointed out a shoehorn hanging on the back of the front door. “You can use that,” he said.

  “Excellent,” I said, making an effort to admire the shoehorn. He pointed to a patio outside the kitchen and told us we could smoke there. “We don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Okay, okay,” he acknowledged.

  The man was so sweet and proud that we did not dare cut his tour short. He turned on the faucet in each bathroom. They all worked just like the one in the kitchen. He took us through all four bedrooms and then pointed to another outdoor space. “You can smoke there, too,” he said.

  “We still don’t smoke,” I said.

  “You will be okay?” he asked solicitously at the end of the tour.

  “We feel very prepared now,” Leah answered earnestly. “Thank you.”

  The next day, Katrina and Kati arrived at the apartment by taxi. Katrina looked healthy. Her ulcers had healed, leaving only two round scars. She and Kati proudly described their travels in Nepal and India and Sri Lanka: “We needed to take three buses to get from Kathmandu to Gorakhpur, but then the bus broke down . . . We crossed the border on foot into India . . . All the rail tickets were sold out and we didn’t have any Indian rupees . . . The power went out, so none of the ATMs would work . . . This guy who worked at the rail station took us to a shopping mall that had a generator so that we could get money . . . And then it was a seventeen-hour train ride to Delhi.” They took turns exuberantly describing their adventures and travails.

  “You’re lucky that you didn’t have any side effects from the treatment,” Leah said.

  Kati gave Leah a puzzled look. “What?” she said. “Katrina was sick all the time.” Apparently Katrina’s leishmaniasis treatment had not been as uneventful as she had been reporting to us. The medicine was highly caustic, and Katrina had spent a lot of time in Europe throwing up.

  “It was fine,” Katrina said.

  We explored Tbilisi, enjoying wonderful food and cheap wine. (Georgia is the region where wine was first produced.) Nearly every street had a small bakery selling fresh bread, often still warm from the oven. We would stop, buy several of the flat loaves, and then walk and eat. One of my favorite photos of the trip captured CJ, Sophie, Leah, Katrina, and Kati all walking, smiling, and eating handfuls of bread.

  Kati, the architect of the plan to have Katrina treated in Munich, was a hero to our family. Over a dinner of eggplant, kebabs, trout, and a pot of beans, we proposed inducting her into the family as an honorary member. We decided that this would require a test on Wheelan family history—a subject Katrina had prepped her well on during their long train, plane, and bus rides.

  I began the questions. “What was the Wheelan family business for four generations?” I asked.

  Kati thought for a moment and then exclaimed, “Funeral directors!”

  “That is correct,” I said. “Leah’s grandfather’s brothers were all killed in what conflict?”

  “The Armenian genocide,” Kati answered. “But he was okay because he was studying in Ohio. No, Iowa! Iowa!”

  “Yes, that is correct. When CJ was born, he weighed—”

  “Really?” CJ interjected. “Does everyone need to know this?”

  “It’s multiple choice,” I said. “He was just over eight pounds, nine pounds, ten pounds, or eleven pounds.”

  “I know he was huge,” Kati said. “I’m going to go with eleven pounds.”

  “That’s right!” I said. Seven questions later, Kati was pronounced an official member of the Wheelan family.

  As our final adventure of the trip, Katrina suggested a trip to the town of Kazbegi in the heart of the Caucasus Mountains. We hired a taxi for the three-hour drive over a mountain pass. The surrounding mountains were still capped with snow. Herds of goats and cows periodically clogged the road. Our driver raced along, livestock and a light rain notwithstanding. He crossed himself every time we passed a church and then touched an idol hanging from the rearview mirror. The rain turned to hail, which did not bring any reduction in speed. We rounded a corner while the driver was looking at his phone and suddenly came upon a herd of cows crossing the road. I screamed, “Cows! Cows! Cows!” The accident was averted.

  Kazbegi is a beautiful town surrounded on all sides by mountains. The Gergeti Monastery is perched atop one of those mountains; that was our goal for a hike, if the weather cleared. The first morning brought more rain, which was not altogether unpleasant, as we used the indoor time to work and relax. We were staying in a small hostel with a cramped but cozy kitchen that doubled as a common area. Sophie worked on VLACS—I think. I wasn’t allowed to ask. CJ was finishing his research paper, which was due to me in less than a week. “Writing is hard,” he whined
. “It’s so hard.”

  “Really?” I replied facetiously.

  Leah and I took a walk to escape CJ’s histrionics. We strolled along a dirt path with forest on either side. The spring flowers were popping through the green forest floor; the snowmelt created small, glistening creeks. If I were a watercolor painter, I would have set up my easel and spent the day trying to capture the colors and textures of spring. Mist and fog obscured the mountains but gave everything else we encountered an otherworldly feel. We turned up a lane with rolling fields on either side demarcated by rickety barbed wire. Near the end of the walk, we stopped outside a small grassy field to watch a foal nursing from its mother. I would have tried to paint that, too.

  The weather cleared the next morning, giving us a perfect day for a hike up to the monastery. The walk was relatively short; much of it was on a road that led from town into the mountains. The view was beautiful in both directions: looking up at the monastery with snowcovered peaks beyond, and also looking down at the town in the valley below. When we arrived at the monastery, Katrina, Sophie, Leah, and Kati donned headscarves so they could explore inside. (Women visiting Christian Orthodox churches in Georgia are expected to cover their hair.) I rested outside, basking in the sun and the satisfaction of our final mountain climb.

  If anything, our driver was more insane on the way back to Tbilisi. The police stopped our car twice. I was delighted to see the flashing lights. I assumed any intervention by law enforcement would moderate our driver’s speed. I was wrong: Both times he got out of the car, walked back to the officer, kissed him on both cheeks, and exchanged friendly words. When our driver returned to the car, we drove off at the same ridiculous speed. Any lessons he learned were the wrong ones.