Photo by Masood Aslami.
At the Dialog Museum, the idea is to experience “an incomparable role reversal, training the senses and empathy and making inclusion a direct experience.” When you enter the main exhibit, they hand you a white cane. Then you walk through a series of pitch-black areas, led by a guide who is blind or visually impaired.
We follow our docent, Ben, through the first dark exhibit space. “This is a park,” he announces. As if he’s called them forth, we hear birdsong and leaves rustling in the breeze. I only realize I’m walking with my free hand outstretched when I suddenly feel a tree’s bark, or a realistic copy of it. The deep grooves of an oak. Then we pass through a doorway into the second area. Ben tells us we’re heading into an apartment. My cane bumps into something. I feel the sofa with my free hand. Three steps beyond this are kitchen cabinets and a stovetop—thankfully not on. The sounds of a soccer match broadcast on radio or TV comes from the other side of the room.
In the next space, Ben gently admonishes me to go back up on the curb. I’ve stepped into a street, disoriented by the noise of traffic all around.
“You should be able to feel the edge of the curb with your cane,” he says.
Now I do, although it’s subtle. The sidewalk slopes down to the level of the street. I hurry back to safety, only crossing once I hear the mechanical chirps of the pedestrian crossing sign.
Ben always knows where the five people in our group are, even if we ourselves have no idea. “If you take a half step back, you’ll feel the metro seat,” he says over the clacking and vibrating of the simulated subway car.
*
“I hope they find a cure for blindness soon,” my fifteen-year-old son says. He and I are now sitting on the edge of the giant fountain in the Opernplatz square. “I hate to think of Ben being blind forever.”
“I’m not sure he’d want to be ‘cured.’ He’s been blind as long as he can remember. It’s a part of who he is.”
“But it’s so painful to think he will never see any of this.” My son gestures across the square. The evening sky has turned deep blue, the sun sets through the plane trees at one end. On our right, a dozen salsa dancers are practicing their moves, the men in black, the women in dark-crimson skirts. Behind them rises Frankfurt’s majestic opera house, the three staunch columns at the bottom, a bronze pegasus crowning the rooftop.
I imagine Ben sitting here. The last rays of the sun on his cheek. The cool of the fountain’s water behind him. He wouldn’t be able to see the dancers, of course, but would hear the music and—because the boombox isn’t loud—the swirl and shifts of the fabric. Beyond that, the silent grandeur of the opera house façade simply wouldn’t exist.
Or would it? Ben told us he has lived in Frankfurt “all of my 39 years on the planet.” Might he have run his hand over a model of the opera house at least once? He wouldn’t know the impressive size of the building, and yet, he could have felt in detail the classical scenes that the two friezes depict. The lower one has Zeus and Poseidon on either side of the imperial eagle seal, and above that, a scene of bathing nymphs. Would he know which myths each one referenced? If he were able to ‘read’ the inscription by tracing its letters—“Dem Wahren Schoenen Guten”—he would immediately understand it. I can’t, and so have to look it up on my phone: “To the true, the beautiful, the good.”
My son’s focus has shifted to a cluster of rental electric scooters near one edge of the square. The last couple of days, he’s been after me to let him ride one.
“Please,” he says. “I’ll stay close.”
Within minutes, he’s zipping around the giant fountain, behind the opera house, into the nearby park.
Ben shared with us at the end of the tour that he had lost his sight when he was a year-and-a-half old, and has no memory of being able to see, or of colors. Underneath my son’s question of what Ben might be ‘missing’ lies the larger point that Ben doesn’t know what he is supposedly missing. And the opposite is equally true—on the tour, the carefully simulated experience of blindness was nonetheless informed by our sighted memories of parks, apartments, busy intersections. In the dark, I saw mottled shades of black. Was I picking up the tiniest photons of light, or were my eyes playing tricks on me?
It’s been two minutes and my son has yet to reappear. I’m just standing up from the fountain to go look for him when he comes around the opera house. He’s not giving the electric scooter full throttle. He has scratches on his legs.
He pulls up slowly. “I had to swerve to not hit an old woman.”
“Oh?”
“So I hit a bush.”
I get him to take his socks off and we wash the small cuts with water from the fountain. He has inherited his maternal grandfather’s hairy legs and I’m amazed at how coarse and full it is under my hands. None of the cuts feels deep but the red lines will decorate his shins for a while.
*
At night in the hotel, I can’t sleep. The dark of the room is not quite impenetrable—I can make out the shape of my son and hear his deep breathing on the next bed.
The low light reminds me of the room we were first led into at the museum, where the ticket seller handed out rubber-tipped canes. We were never to lift them more than an inch off the ground. And we could always ask to exit if we were panicking.
“It happens, you know, people do panic,” she said. “It’s okay if it happens to you, just let your guide know and we’ll take you back into the light.” The group then passed through a curtain and Ben introduced himself.
Sitting up in bed, I realize we never actually saw Ben. He was just a disembodied voice coaxing us along. We never touched—even when I stepped off the curb and supposedly into traffic, he said, “You might want to get out of that active roadway.”
The tour ended in the ‘dark bar,’ a place you could order a drink, sit at a table, and talk. Ben demonstrated how he could press a button on his watch and it would whisper the time. How, I asked, could he tell where each of our heads were so we could hear the watch?
“I can sense nearby objects by the way the air moves. On a street, for instance, I know which side is a building and if cars are parked along the curb.”
“Because your other senses are heightened,” my son said.
“No, that’s a common misconception. My other senses are the same as yours, but the signals from them going to my brain aren’t competing for attention with signals from my eyes.”
Now, as I lie in bed, there’s just enough ambient light around the edge of the heavy curtains that the room is awash in an amorphous, greyish black.
* * *