Found Conversation No. 1

by Karl

In the fall of 1989 I sat in Indiana and watched on the pages of the New York Times as Moscow's satellites in Eastern Europe broke away one after another, each one seeming to take less time than the one before, each upheaval surprisingly peaceful until the bloody spectacle that ended the mad reign of the Ceaușescus in Romania.

Partly inspired by that story, partly wanting to get away from my own country which seemed to view the Gulf War as a made-for-TV movie, partly as a crucial piece of my own warped plan to get out of music and into economics (it's true, and it worked, but that's another story), I ran off to Czechoslovakia for 1991-92, and Czech language and culture and history became an adopted part of my own cultural heritage. It's because of that stay that Kate and the boys and I are here this year rather than in some other foreign country, or maybe we'd still be at home.

And so it is that we happen to be here, in the World That 1989 Built, when a wave of protest is sweeping through the Arab world, toppling or shaking dictators who've been in power for 30 or 40 years. And commentators around the world note the resemblance -- the more glib call it "the Arab 1989," while the sober ones ask to what extent the comparison might or might not hold. There's the phenomenon of repressive regimes that seem stable until they are suddenly swallowed up in a wave of discontent. There's the incredible hope of new possibilities, though there seems to be more fear in the current case -- at least among outsiders -- that promising beginnings could head off in a terrible direction.

And this is when we meet The Guy in the Restaurant.

We went to Dresden for a short visit while the boys' school was on break, and at the end of a day wandering around taking in the rebuilt splendors of "Florence on the Elbe" (as well as a romp on a spectacular playground structure), we stop in at a restaurant across the street from our hotel. Its owners are from somewhere in the Middle East, and it serves both döner kebab and pizza -- something for everyone, in our family's case. Inside the TV is playing Al-Jazeera in Arabic. The crawl along the bottom of the screen is in Arabic. The right-hand side of the screen shows Qaddafi giving a speech, and it's clearly being left in the original language. The left-hand side shows a tape loop of street protests and burnt buildings and bloody protesters and a defaced poster of Qaddafi and people throwing shoes at a TV image of some hated person appearing projected above them on a wall.

It's interesting watching Qaddafi without being able to understand a word he says. He comes across as deranged. In his body language, in the flow of words punctuated by eruptions, the eruptions tailing off into a search for the right thing to say to make everything better, you can almost see what he's feeling. "I can't believe you don't love me anymore, after all I've done for you. You can't leave me. You'll be sorry." He just looks like a guy for whom it's all about him.

A group of four men comes into the shop, clearly on friendly terms with the owners. One of them turns to watch the TV and his scorn for Qaddafi is obvious. I don't remember how our conversation started -- maybe he said something for the general consumption of those around him, which included me; maybe the opening was my comment that "he doesn't look sane."

"No, he's crazy! You see that green book he's citing from? That's his book, he wrote it, it has his rules for how people are supposed to live. When there's a parade, everybody has to carry a copy of the green book. Democracy -- we all want democracy! Qaddafi says, What is democracy? He says it comes from Arabic, that 'dem' means 'stay' and 'krasy' means 'chair,' so 'democracy' means you should stay in your chair forever."

I had the sense his German wasn't perfect, and my German is a lot worse than his, so I know I didn't get 100% of our conversation, but this particular bit involved simple words, and the guy was also good with hand gestures, so I'm reasonably confident I got this part right.

He asked where we were from and I said, "New York, but not the city." He switched to English, which was harder for him than German, though it was easier for me to understand. He had a brother who taught at a university in New York City. "Which university?" He didn't know. He said something having to do with animals and medicine. I'm not sure whether the brother teaches at a veterinary school or is a doctor who has too many pets. And this was in English -- like I said, I'm an unreliable narrator of what passed between us.

Kate and Ben had come over by now, and I asked the man where he was from. "Palestine," and his voice and face glowed with as much love as anyone has ever had for his country.

"Where's that?" asked Ben, and I answered that it was next to Israel. I don't know if the man heard my answer but he smiled at Ben and held up a finger to say, 'Hold on, I'll explain,' happy to have a young audience to educate. He unzipped his jacked a bit ... wait, not there ... then he reached inside his shirt to pull up an object hung from a chain around his neck, the way many Christians wear a cross. The object is about two inches long and its colors are the Palestinian flag. Its outline is Palestine. Or rather, Israel and Palestine if you accept the two-state solution. Or Israel, if you're a hard-core believer in that country's right to everything you say God once promised the Jews.

He points to the different borders: Syria, Jordan, Mediterranean, Egypt, Red Sea, Dead Sea. There's no Israel. It has been wiped off his map. Though to be fair, one would need magic to make a pendant out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

I feel uncomfortable in my subsequent silence, but it somehow doesn't seem like the setting to get into a debate on the reciprocal grievances of Mideast politics. He says something about Arafat, it seems to be a positive remark, but I'm not sure, and then it's pretty clear that it was positive, in contrast to his attitude toward Hamas, which is unmistakably negative, though I didn't catch his reason for not liking them -- did he say something about terrorists?

As you walk around the rebuilt old part of Dresden, you get repeated reminders of what happened here. There's the piece of the dome of the Frauenkirche, placed on the pavement next to the stunningly rebuilt church. Inside the Church of the Court next to the palace, there are pictures showing the burnt walls with most of the roof gone. In the Church of the Holy Cross, the structure has been rebuilt but the wall surfaces of the sanctuary have been left in a rough gray plaster instead of their prewar decor, as a ghostly reminder of what can happen in war. In the Court Church there's a new altar with the dates January 30, 1933, and February 13, 1945, acknowledging that the horror reigned on Dresden in the firebombing at the end of the war had its roots in Hitler taking power.

In the end, the war that Hitler started left a hole in the middle of Europe and opened the door for the Russian domination of the eastern part of the continent, the domination that was finally thrown off in 1989 with parts of the Soviet Union itself slipping the leash in 1991. For 40-plus years there was not just irrationality, but an active hostility to rationality, supporting the weight of its own futility on the bodies of those it found the need to destroy, the souls of those it had to muzzle lest they point out the obvious stupidities of the system.

In the course of a year it was gone and the former satellites were left to find their way to some sort of normal life. In the more western ones that has gone fairly well. There are things you might wish were different, but all in all life is pretty good. Further east they carry a heavier historical burden and they've had a harder time. In Ukraine, the new president is locking up the opposition under the plausible pretext of fighting corruption. Yugoslavia famously tore itself into a series of mini-countries in a fratricidal war that brought genocide back to Europe, where people assumed that Hitler had sufficiently inoculated the population against such madness.

I hope the man in the restaurant gets some of what he wants: an end to self-serving dictators, a chance not to feel ashamed of the incompetent clowns running one's country. But there's the wild card of what happens if popular sentiment favors more active hostility to Israel and new governments try to satisfy that hostility. Even without the Israeli question, it's going to be tricky economically and politically to make things come out decently.

Dresden has its reminders of what happens when we don't get that right.