Field Notes from a Pandemic Read online

  At the palace garden, all Risako and I could do was walk along the hedges and shrubs, which looked shabbier by the day. We couldn’t go inside the museum itself, for it had been closed as well. They say much of it was personally designed by Margrave Frederick’s wife, Princess Wilhelmine of Prussia, who accepted the marriage only after being strong-armed by her father the king, also a Frederick. But I would never know.

  One day, it snowed in spring, ice crystals faintly falling upon the yellow-brown sandstone, on the red-tile roofs and the hard streets paved with mountain rock, and on the black-metal statue of Jean Paul, and the rushing Red Main River, and all that is Bayreuth. Despite the drastically different history, smaller scale of the town, and the different language of the citizens, it reminded me vividly of Beijing, of the night I walked between the snowflakes.

  But that’s where the similarities ended. While the crisis had hit a rising China, it had landed on an increasingly unstable, downward-trending Europe. Plagued as it already was by the British exit from the European Union, an out-of-control refugee crisis, rising political polarization and populism, and an annual economic growth hovering around 2 per cent in its best years, Europe had its guard down when COVID-19 came knocking. Despite the common market, national leaders hoarded and scrambled for medical supplies. Italy, whose infections soon outstripped China’s, complained it had been abandoned. “European solidarity does not exist,” Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić told his country. Serbia’s not in the EU, but its joining the bloc had been in the works for more than ten years. Continental unity is nothing more than “a fairy tale,” Vučić said. For Europe, the pandemic was cinderblocks on already sinking feet.

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  Risako’s parents back home started worrying about her, the only girl in a brood of boys. So did her university in Japan (she was in Bayreuth for a year of study abroad). Like Canada, pretty much every other country in the world was calling in its citizenry before the doors potentially slammed shut. Risako’s dormitory mate, a tall Swede called Ludvig who was about double her size, was going back to his home country, but Risako herself did not seem overly concerned. She half-joked to me that Asian people probably have a higher tolerance to the virus since we’re from where it originated. She had a whole other semester of school in Bayreuth to attend, and she really could not have been in a more perfect place as a student of Germanic studies. (Long before Wagner, long before the town became a centre of Nazi ideology, its rulers, Frederick and Wilhelmine, built the town into what was then an intellectual hub of Western Europe, almost like a modern-day Cambridge.) In the end, Risako resolved to stay. She was happy in Bayreuth, and who could blame her?

  On the other hand, Elias resolved to stay away. He was, in fact, caught in COVID-19 lockdown mid-travel, and much like me, his plans were far from straightforward. Elias had gone from Bayreuth to Canada, but between the two he made a stopover in Finland, where his grandparents and father live and where he had once gone to school — a home base he visits often. Elias’s return route, from Canada to Bayreuth, was again to be via Finland, where he had planned to stay for a little while. But now, with COVID-19, he had to be isolated for two weeks when he got back to Finland. Like the rest of the world, borders had gone up across Europe, with most countries effectively banning non-residents. Being a student at the local university, Elias could still get into Bayreuth, but he was anticipating potentially more lockdowns and further worsening of the virus situation. I had told Elias about all the disruptions to my travel plans, but that I eventually sorted everything out and had a ticket back to Canada, to which he responded, “For now.” Instead of returning to Germany, Elias opted to just remain indefinitely in his Nordic land.

  Elias’s university was moving to online classes anyway, and unlike me, he never had much affinity for Germany. Sometimes, the whole country frustrated him, starting with the Munich Airport, where he once got lost. To Elias, Germany was a land of many unusual rules, which it expected foreigners to just instinctively know. To top it off, Elias looks like a German — like someone for whom there is an even bigger expectation to know how everything works. Unfortunately, Elias’s Finnish furlough effectively meant that after all this, he and I would miss each other. I was saddened by that. I would have loved to have seen him.

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  The backdrop to Elias’s exile, the unprecedented travel restrictions in the Schengen no-border zone, represented a paralysation of movement, an immobility that ran counter to the free passage of people and goods that is one of the hallmarks of the EU. Elias hadn’t bought any tickets in advance for the Finland–Germany leg of his trip he eventually cancelled because he figured he was fine to just buy them closer to the day of travel. Continental flights were like taking the bus. On the ground, millions of Europeans commute to work across borders every day. People can live in Zgorzelec but work in Görlitz, or Lafelt–Maastricht, or Bratislava–Vienna. The Greater Luxemburg region includes three other countries. I have an uncle in Switzerland, and when I was at his place last, we casually popped over to Germany for dinner. Between twenty-six continental countries, there were no immigration barriers, even when flying; officials could conduct only security checks. But now, the uniquely continental free-movement bloc, emblematic of all that is Europe, was shut tight with little notice. Just like that.

  No doubt, people working in other countries or with good reason to travel could still do so, and the lockdown of the Schengen zone, no matter how long, will eventually lift. But the basic premise, that travel should be free unless there is justification to the contrary, had now been reversed. And the simple fact that it had happened — not impossible, but definitely unthinkable in the past — established the closing of borders as something that could happen again. Beyond the continent, the meaning of this closure is largely symbolic, but symbols matter. This is a part of a bigger issue, a greater upheaval in Europe and greater change in the world still to be wreaked by the pandemic. Symbols are, after all, manifestations of the arc of history, or as German historian Oswald Spengler referred to them, the “emblematical impression of the Cosmos upon us.”

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  Nostalgia runs deep in Bayreuth, immeasurable and bottomless, beyond its pride in the composer Richard Wagner and the opera house he built 150 years ago. Its well-preserved architecture, for which Margravine Wilhelmine was almost singlehandedly responsible, emphasizes grandeur. Domes were common in its Rococo style, with interiors painted with angels and sculpted sunbeams. Stairways were prominent, grand, and used for dramatic effect. Visitors looked to the ceilings and saw the heavens. Walking around town, if you suspend disbelief for a moment, it’s almost as if you’re back 300 years ago, in the intellectual hub of the Holy Roman Empire. But of course, Wilhelmine’s largesse in building Bayreuth had nearly bankrupted the local government. And by that time, the Holy Roman Empire, in the famous words of the French philosopher Voltaire, who visited Bayreuth sometimes, was “in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire” — only a failed attempt to relive glory from classical antiquity. In a way, the illustrious past Bayreuth evokes is a bit hollow, itself an attempt to evoke an even more distant past. Everything about it exuded a painful longing, tragically to be unfulfilled. Sometimes, the sweetness of nostalgia is only in its unattainable taste.

  “Is that Wagner?” I would ask Risako every time we’d see a statue or bust. We had a joke between us, in which I would ask her random questions about the town, like how old this or that building was, or what the significance was behind the big dinosaur statue downtown, and when she’d inevitably draw a blank on it, I’d say: “You’re supposed to know this. Isn’t this what you study?”

  Somehow, in this Wagnerian town, it was never Wagner, with his chin-strap neckbeard like a pulled-down face mask. Alas, the Bayreuth Festival honouring Wagner, which began in 1876 and is organized by the composer’s descendants, had been cancelled for 2020 due t
o the pandemic.

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  I learned from Risako that Ludvig, who had deposited his stuff at the apartment where I was staying while he went back to Sweden, had contracted COVID-19. He was infected by someone in his family upon returning home, but I didn’t know that at first. At the time, every time I looked at Ludvig’s cardboard boxes, thin mattress, ironing board, leather messenger bag, and his poster of the nineteenth-century German painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich, a pale and tendril-like thought gripped me: could I have caught the plague? From boxes? A mattress?

  I began to grow sad in Bayreuth as the days went by, amid the pandemic and lockdown. I felt that sad was the most appropriate feeling, really, though that thought just made me even sadder. Sadness, to me, is not the strongest sentiment among the negative emotions, but it does feel like it’s the most final. Anxiety is uncertainty about future events. Fear is aversion to harm. Anger is reaction to provocation. Every one of these prompts further action. But sadness — pure, saturated sadness, and nothing else — is felt only when you know there is no solution to the situation. Sadness sparks no onward effect. It is anxiety realized. It is fear met, unfruitfully. It is anger drained and spent. Sadness begets only acceptance. It means finality, that what was in the past, what was lost, will never again be regained.

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  One Wednesday, I cracked open a beer and sat to watch a rare event: German chancellor Angela Merkel addressing her nation on television. She normally gave such speeches only on New Year’s Day.

  I had a Kaiserkrone lager, a six-pack of which sold for a little over one euro. German bottles are also bigger, a full pint instead of twelve ounces, perfect for watching a political speech during a pandemic. And Merkel did not disappoint. Having been chancellor for nearly fifteen years, the former scientist (with a doctorate in quantum chemistry) was the longest-serving head of government in the European Union. Merkel was straightforward, empathic, and transparent, a leader and a stateswoman. “This is serious,” she said of the virus. “Take it seriously.” One blemish on Merkel’s speech, I thought, was her focus on her own people.

  That inwardness might have been expected from the leader of, say, Estonia, but Germany is the EU’s biggest economy, and Merkel had long been the de facto leader of the bloc, and as such, other countries looked to her for guidance. Yet her speech made no mention of the continent’s common struggle. Europe was not mentioned even once. In fact, when the camera was zoomed in, which was most of the time, the EU flag to the far left of Merkel disappeared. Even when it was on screen, the flag was never fully in frame. Days later, it was Germany’s president, a largely ceremonial leader, who called for continental solidarity.

  Even then, with most European leaders gazing inward at their public-health and economic crises, just like Merkel, I wondered who even had the attention span to listen. They did heed the German president’s words eventually, with various forms of aid flowing from the less to the more affected countries, but the trickle of solidarity was slow, and COVID-19’s spread was anything but. France and Germany’s proposed 500-billion-euro recovery fund came nearly three months after the first lockdowns in Italy. I couldn’t help but think that the onslaught of the virus across the continent could have been a time to shine for the Union, a chance to flex its collaborative muscles after Brexit, after the rise of populism in some of its states, and to demonstrate to the world what unity and co-operation looks like. For all its myriad faults, the EU had had a purpose as a force for stability, a bulwark against disturbance and a champion of multilateralism. The EU had been an anchor for the so-called liberal international order — the alliances, institutions and rules-based system dominated by Western democracies and their values — the framework for global engagement and the very structure under which we all live. European chaos in the face of the virus, the lack of a coherent collective response, the competition for medical equipment, and the hesitation of the steadier countries to help carry the devastated, is both a symptom and a cause — both symbol and constituent factor — of the unravelling of that order.

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  Since the end of the Second World War, there has existed a web of bilateral agreements, military alliances and trade pacts, and international bodies such as the United Nations, the World Court, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and, yes, the World Health Organization. This structure is loose and subjectively defined, but generally observers have dubbed it the “liberal international order,” the small-l “liberal” referring not to the traditional political left, but its dictionary definition of openness. It is based on fair play and adherence to equally and consistently applied rules, upheld by Western democracies and their armies who do not always adhere to those rules. That order had sprouted out of the ravages of war, when the newly risen United States built up the battered Europe through its Marshall Plan aid and planted military bases around the world that stand to this day.

  The twenty-first century, however, with its waves of conflicts and crises, discord and political extremes, had been deleterious to Europe. Meanwhile, since 2017, the United States under President Donald Trump had turned increasingly inward and hostile toward international partners and obligations, bending toward ataxia and abdicating its traditional world-leadership role. “International relationships that had seemed immutable for 70 years are being called into question,” Canada’s then–foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland told Parliament in 2017. “From Europe, to Asia, to our own North American home, long-standing pacts…are being tested.” Those long-standing pacts and immutable relationships — that system and structure — are deeply flawed, to be sure. The West-led order, backed by military dominance, is not unlike the empires of old. But it also granted stability and a framework for international engagement that had brought the world closer and more tightly integrated. For those willing to embrace it, such as Canada, the empire had, according to Freeland, “formed the bedrock of our security and prosperity.”

  Now, as that bedrock weakens, as those upholding the empire no longer do so as steadfastly, challengers to the world order have grown more assertive. China aggressively pursued territorial claims in Asia and waged a wide control-and-influence campaign in Africa. Russian rifles rode high into the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Observers also pointed to an escalating intelligence war, not seen since the Cold War. Long before the pandemic, the path of the international order as we knew it had already been unsteady. Pungent-sweet and high-octane as it may be, the virus was only an accelerant for a world stage that, for years, had already been on fire.

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  When he eventually arrived in Finland from Canada, Elias sent me a picture of himself with the wildest, bushiest bushman red beard I have ever seen on him or anyone else. Finland, as it turned out, was the perfect place to be during a pandemic. It is remote, relatively under-populated, stable, and has consistently ranked at the top of the World Happiness Report (yes, there is such a thing). And Elias managed to find a cabin by a lake that was so remote, there is literally only one result when you Google its name. There, Elias spent his time fishing and farming in the woods of southeastern Finland, far from major cities, near ancestral lands and stony, moss-ridden ruins of old churches, at least one of which dated back to the fifteenth century. While Elias had family nearby, he lived mostly alone. Oftentimes, there was nothing else moving but the water, the birds above, and the sun and moonlight dancing on the lake’s surface. Elias was far from the chaos of the world. “I don’t know what it is, but something about sitting here in the beauty, abundance, and depth of nature makes me suspicious of the very concept of progression, ambition, and ego itself. I need one fish and some plants each day, firewood and a roof. That’s it,” he told me. “If everyone saw the world and life like this, there would be no need for countries, politics, or armies…. If humans were peaceful, nurturing, cuddly monkeys t
hat had no predators and that attempted no empires.”

  There’s a Chinese saying, though, that when the tiger abdicates the mountain, the monkey reigns. Not so far from Elias’s forest seclusion, the world amid COVID-19 was going in a completely different direction from the one he sought. In crises, there are those who delve inward, who seek seclusion and removal. But there are also those who look outward at all the chaos around them and see opportunity. As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius writes, “What stands in the way becomes the way.”

  When the United States announced in April 2020 that it was going to cut funding to the 194-member World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the pandemic, China stepped right in, increasing its contribution by $50 million. China sent its European Union ambassador to a global meeting to fund a vaccine, while the United States declined to participate. China did not make a financial contribution to that $8-billion effort, and its gift to the WHO was far from the $400 million the United States gave in 2019. But the optics of those moves were enough. China was more than happy to be seen stepping up its support of an international organization while the U.S. was stepping down. And those moves were only the beginning.

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  Hong Kong, the former British colony and current global financial hub, is supposed to be governed differently from mainland China, with more freedoms and different, more liberal laws. In 2019, protests involving millions of people broke out, sparked by Beijing’s attempt to alter that status quo, extending further control by introducing extradition laws so that errant residents could be prosecuted under mainland justice. The movement intensified on the seventieth anniversary of Communist rule in China, and the first Hong Kong protestor to take a bullet during these widespread protests was shot that October 1 of 2019. With the world watching, the broken storefronts, fistfights, and mass arrests put Beijing in a bind. The protestors were able to squeeze concessions from the authorities, to the point that Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam contemplated resignation.